Voting irregularities are a big concern these days, be they hanging chads, "missing" ballots or electronic voting snafus. Strangely though, one of the most obvious potential problems gets comparatively little attention: voter misrepresentation.
When you show up at a local polling station, you endure a standard look-up ritual: state your street name, street number, last name and first name. Then you receive your ballot. When you’re done voting, you repeat the process before feeding your ballot into the machine. Street name Street number. Last name. First name.
Never do you have to prove that you are that person.
You could go to another polling place and do it all again. Heck, you might even be able to come back to this one later.
According to the “Election Day Legal Summary” booklet put out by the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, an election official may ask a voter for identification, and “The requests must not discriminate in any way and may therefore be: entirely random, consistent, or based on reasonable suspicion.”
I have been voting for a long time, and I have never seen this happen.
Doesn’t this situation seem ripe for abuse? Combine chronically low voter turnout with easy access to the town’s street lists, (never mind the Internet) allowing the fraudulent voter to choose gender and age-appropriate identities, and – Bingo! In a college town like this, imagine concentrating on college students who graduated the previous spring. Hundreds – probably thousands – of kids, still on the voting lists and very unlikely to vote here again. Pretty tempting prospect. It’s a wonder this isn’t being exploited as a big racket already. Or is it?
Surely we aren’t counting on the volunteer poll workers to “know” all the voters. If as the scam artist, you claim to be someone that person happens to know, you’re bumming. But how likely is that? And if you’re out to really con the election, it’s probably worth that small risk.
This creates two big problems. First is the obvious problem of “stuffing” the ballot box by pumping up turnout with false voters and their phony votes. Second, and maybe worse, is what happens if the real John Doe shows up at the poll after the fake John Doe has already voted in his name? Now he is deprived of his own rightful vote because of a gaping loophole in the system.
There must be some rationale as to why we don’t need to show identification, though I’m hard put to come up with any. Perhaps it is considered another barrier to voting, hence turning off more voters. Maybe. But is that as bad as the potential abuses of such a loose system?
-- Stephanie O’Keeffe
