Voter ID bill in committee today

Posted on March 28, 2007 by Charles Kuffner

It’s probably too late to do anything about it, and the committee agenda is somewhat suspiciously free of any mention of it, but I’m told that two voter ID bills, HBs 218 and 626 are up for a committee vote today. According to BOR, there’s three votes for, three votes against, and one vote apparently undecided on each of these. The holdout is Republican freshman Rep. Kirk English of Grand Prairie. If you want to give him a call and tell him to just say No, BOR has the contact info. If you need to be reminded why these bills are bad, just remember the case of Royal Masset’s mother. We’ll see what happens in committee.

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One Response to Voter ID bill in committee today

  1. Rorschach says:
    March 28, 2007 at 4:48 pm

    Kuff, If her mother is a complete invalid, is she competent to vote to begin with?

    There are always going to be a small number of people who are disenfranchised for one reason or another. Just last election cycle, I had probably a dozen people in my precinct who, because they had failed to vote in two consecutive federal election cycles, or had moved and not registered in their new precinct or whatever were purged from the voter registration rolls. The clerk’s office has to have some way of cleaning out bad data. People move, people die, people are convicted of felonies, people leave the country, and sadly, people who are in the country illegally and do not have a legal right to vote, do so. I have had people admitting to not be the person on the registration card want to vote for their mother or sister. As precinct judge, I cannot allow that to happen. But as the law stands right now, all you have to do is check the box that says they swear they are a legal citizen and have the legal right to vote and they are in. the procedure to do this is not even all that hard. first, take your Matricula Consular card, which does not require much in the way of verifiable documentation to get, go to a state that accepts the matricula card as proof of identity (I think New Mexico is one, I’m not sure off the top of my head) and get a state ID card from that state. take that ID to the DPS office and get a TXID or TXDL with it. Check the box that you’d like to be a registered voter too and away you go. At that point, the voter ID card then can be passed off to anyone they like because if the card is presented at the polling location, we, the poll workers, are not allowed to even ASK for Photo ID to prove the person in possession of the card is actually the person named on the card. The ID card could be for their dead aunt Mary for all we know and as long as they didn’t do or say something stupid to give themselves away, they could vote that card to their heart’s content. Heck they could even be a guy and claim they are FTM transsexual and we could not do or say anything to stop it. Now, is this a huge problem? your guess is as good as mine since there is no way to determine that (which is the whole point of the exercise). Do I think it could be? Yes it is entirely possible this is a big problem, it is entirely possible it isn’t either but until we have some basic audit trials to determine that, we’ll never know. Since our electoral process is the very foundation of our government, we owe it to everyone to make the process as legitimate as possible. The process is currently broken. Our country’s borders are also functionally non-existant. Until we solve these problems, we have no way to prove whether our elections are valid or not. This country’s very sovereignty is at issue. And that is neither a democrat nor a republican issue.

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