Nadene Goldfoot
When a country is small and manageable, and you know each other and their faults, you can hold an election easily, one vote per person. The United States had an official resident population of 331,449,281 on April 1, 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This figure includes the 50 states and the District of Columbia but excludes the population of five unincorporated U.S. territories as well as several minor island possessions.
James Baker III
Those Commissioners involved were former President Jimmy Carter who was president from 1977 to 1981-a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker III-a Republican who worked under President GHW Bush from 1989 to 1993. Other Democrats on the committee were Tom Daschle and Lee Hamilton.
A recent Rasmussen survey found that 80% of Americans support a voter ID requirement. Why is it that Democratic leaders across the board oppose such measures in the strongest terms?
Jimmy Carter came out last year to disavow his own Commission's work! Has he forgotten so quickly that he was a leader of this commission? After all, he was born in 1924, which made him 96 last year. I guess he certainly could have forgotten! He was a young 81 when on the commission.
President Biden spoke recently in Philadelphia, condemning the idea of voter IDs. "There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today--an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are--who we are as Americans. He went on and on to suggest that requiring voter IDs would mean returning people to slavery. What the connection to that is behooves me! This is opposing election integrity reform and is typical of condemning it as a means of voter suppression. His words are not motivated by a concern for democracy, but by partisan interests. It just wasn't flying with the Democrats!
This is an eye-opener. The Democrats have been pushing to adopt the bill titled H.R.1. It would prohibit states from requiring voter ID and require states to allow permanent mail-in voting, like Oregon's method. Here I am, writing about how voting has been tampered with including mail-in like I love, and yet I see how it can be so problematic and causing screw-ups. Darn! It would be fine if there weren't so many people who break rules and laws. None of the countries of the world have enough honest people at the helm. The big problem in mail-in is that ballots have been simply mailed out to everyone! With loose absentee voting rules, a country is making itself vulnerable to voter fraud, and Oregon and other similar states are almost begging for voter fraud.
The Carter-Baker Commission had researched the problem and found that widespread absentee voting made voter fraud more likely. Voter files contain ineligible, duplicate, fictional, and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited using absentee ballots to commit fraud. Citizens who vote absentee are more susceptible to pressure and intimidation. Vote-buying schemes were far easier when citizens voted by mail.
This is sad because all of Oregon votes by mail. I have voted by mail and I love it, but I also believe that presenting a picture ID is the best idea since popcorn was invented. Oregon was the pioneer in Voting By Mail. Yikes.
Ballots sent in by mail can go uncounted. Uncounted Votes In Colorado: Diverse Areas And Younger Voters More Likely To Have Ballots Rejected. It was Reynaldo Hernandez’s first election. The 18-year-old was finally old enough to vote, and he proudly sent back his mail ballot in this year’s June primary. It was rejected — one of 25,263 that went uncounted in June by Colorado elections officials. That’s about 1.6 percent of the total votes cast.
I don't want our voting process to be taken advantage of by people who will make our country less than it has become. As a teacher of 22 years, I have been darn proud of our country, and was happy to teach G-d Bless America and our history to our children. We've had ideals and had been living up to them.
Now I find that the US is way behind the pack in not requiring voter ID and in fact, is against it. Of the 47 countries in Europe today, 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote. The odd man out is the United Kingdom, who is out anyway. Northern Ireland and many localities require voter ID, however, but the requirement is not nation-wide in the UK. The British Parliament is considering a nationwide requirement, so soon all 47 European countries will likely have adopted this common-sense policy.
1) Showing their driver's licence or any other card issued by a Canadian government (federal, provincial/territorial or local) with their photo, name and current address.
2) Showing two pieces of identification that both have their name and at least one with a current address, for example a bank statement and voter card, or a utility bill and student ID. (A full list is available at elections.ca)
Canada requires a photo ID to vote. If a voter shows up at the polls without an ID, he is allowed to vote only if he declares who he is in writing and if there is someone working at the polling station who can personally verify his identity.
Mexico has had a long history of election fraud. They recently instituted strict reforms. Voters must present a biometric ID--an ID with not only a photo, but also a thumb print. Voters then have indelible ink applied to their thumbs, preventing them from voting more than once. An absentee voting is prohibited, even for people living outside the country. The % of people voting rose from 59% before the reforms to 68% after. It turned out that Mexicans were more, not less, likely to vote when they had confidence that their votes mattered.
Sweden's voting
33 of the 47 European countries--including France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, don't allow absentee voting for citizens living in their country.
Another 10 European countries, including England, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain, allow absentee voting, but require voters to show up in person and present a photo ID to pick up their ballots. it isn't like in the US where a person can say he's going to be out of town and have a ballot mailed to him.
Police asked to investigate more than 50 allegations of electoral fraud
England using to have absentee voting rules similar to ours in the US, but in 2004, in the city of Birmingham, officials uncovered a massive voting fraud scheme in the city council races. The 6 winning Labor candidates had fraudulently acquired about 40,000 absentee votes, mainly from Muslim areas of the city. As a result, England ended the practice of mailing out absentee ballots and required voters to pick up their ballots in person with a photo ID.
France also had simple voting rules up until 1975. They uncovered massive voting fraud on the island of Corsica, where hundreds of thousands of dead people were found to be voting and even larger-scale vote buying operations were occurring. France banned absentee voting altogether. France learned that the use of absentee ballots led to the practice of allowing 3rd parties to know how people voted and paid them for voting a certain way.
The USA is now proliferating this act in the form of "ballot harvesting", the increasingly common practice where party functionaries distribute and collect ballots.
The conduct of elections has changed in many ways over the past 200 years. The extent of these changes is nicely illustrated by a comparison of today's voting practices with those illustrated in George Caleb Bingham's painting, The County Election . In addition to being a noteworthy artist, Bingham was a successful politician; this painting shows a polling place on the steps of the courthouse in Saline County, Missouri, in 1846.
In this painting, we see the judge (top center) administering an oath to a voter. The voter (in red) is swearing, with his hand on the bible, that he is entitled to vote and has not already done so. There was no system of voter registration, so this oath and the possibility that the judge or someone else in the vicinity of the polls might recognize him if he came back was all that prevented a voter from voting again and again.
There was no right to a secret ballot; having been sworn in, the voter simply called out his choices to the election clerks who sit on the porch behind the judge tallying the vote. Each clerk has a pollbook in which he writes the voter's name and records his votes; multiple pollbooks were a common defense against clerical error. There are several people in the painting holding paper tickets in their hands. We know that these were not paper ballots because Missouri continued to use voice voting until 1863. In a general election, however, many voters might have wanted to bring their own notes to the polling place.
The USA did not always have secret ballots. It wasn't until 1880 that the 1st state adopted the secret ballot and the last state to adopt it was South Carolina in 1930.
When secret ballots were adopted, the % of people voting fell by about 12%. Why was that?
Before, lots of people would get paid for voting. In those days, people voted by placing pieces of colored paper in the ballot box, with different colors representing different parties. Party officials would be present to observe what color paper each voter put in the box, and depending on the color, the voter would often get paid. Secret ballots put an end to this practice.
Election updates: Reaction starting to trickle in after Wisconsin votes blue in presidential election
Resource:
Is ensuring Election Integrity Anti-Democratic? by John R. Lott, Jr, President of Crime Prevention Research Center, PhD from UCLA, taught at U of Chicago, Wharton School of Penn., Stanford, Yale, Rice U.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3666259
https://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/state/democracy/pages/israeli%20democracy%20-%20how%20does%20it%20work.aspx#:~:text=The%20President%20of%20the%20State%20is%20elected%20by%20the%20Knesset,one%20term%20of%20seven%20years.
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