BCT Editorial – 5/16/08

This page was last updated on May 18, 2008.

Above politics; Editorial; Beaver County Times; May 16, 2008.

The editorial subtitle is “Before enacting a photo ID law for voters, let’s find out how extensive the problem is.” Not surprisingly, you won’t find a similar sentiment from the Times when it comes to things like manmade global warming.

Have you noticed that when the Times believes it’s swimming against the tide, it pulls out the “it should be above politics” BS? Two other examples from this year are “Starting point” and “Power play.”

The subtitle says, “let’s find out how extensive the problem is.” There are at least two problems with this.

First, the Times appears to want us to have a problem before we do anything about it. In other words, let’s let the horse out of the corral before we do anything about the gate. The idea that potentially showing a photo ID only once in your voting lifetime is sufficient makes no sense. Using that logic, we also shouldn’t need photo ID for anything beyond the first time we do something. According to the editorial, simply relying on a signature should be enough. Yeah, let’s get rid of those bad pictures on driver licenses.

Second, how many more cases of voter registration fraud by groups like ACORN do we need? Just about every election season we hear/read news stories about these groups registering nonexistent voters. If you’re not going to use those fraudulent registrations, why generate them?

What’s conspicuous by its absence? Any mention of how many people would actually be affected by this requirement. I’m certainly no expert on this topic, but how many people who vote don’t have what would be considered a valid photo ID?

Finally, while those on the right tend to be in favor of better voter ID, it’s not solely the right. Proving again a stopped clock can be right twice a day, even leftist darling Jimmy Carter supports photo ID for voting. Whoops, maybe that’s a reason to oppose it. <g>