« Slowly down the pipe | Main | Happy Birthday... »
October 05, 2004
Protecting the Innocent
Politech has recently been spurred back to life, presumably by the return of Declans PowerBook. A recent posting talked about an effort in Ohio to remove the date of birth and address from the drivers license, under the guise of protecting domestic violence/stalking victims from being discovered via voting registration records.
While I like the general premise for the change (protecting victims of location based crimes), and I like the idea of being able to control what information is on a drivers license, I find this route of implementation to be rather ass backwards.
Having worked in a small town precinct on election day, the address of a potential voter often comes into play. It's easy to dismiss such a detail in an area where precincts are clearly defined, but let's use my hometown for an example where my house lies directly on the border line between two counties. This is clearly evident come every winter when snow plows from each county will approach and not clear the snow located directly in front of our house. But if you want to be more technical we have 4 addresses two from each county. Yes, 4 postal addresses for a single house not subdivided into multiple dwellings. Depending upon which address is used at registration time, I may or may not be able to vote in precinct A, but since all the voter ID cards look the same there is no reason to believe I can't just walk into a precinct and vote.
The simple solution of course is, change the voter registration cards to indicate which precinct you can or cannot vote in. Okay, but now you've essentially invalidated the reasoning behind the initial cause of this legislation, protecting the identity of a location based crime victim. How? Well you've limited the search radius for a potential repeat offender to locate their victim. How does that help? Any potential assailant will only need to wait at said precinct for their victim to arrive, follow them home, and continue about their way for another time.
The part about this that really throws me off though is accountability. By removing the addresses from the voter registration record, you can no longer verify that a voter was a legitimate voter. There is no way to identify the difference between John Smith next door and John Smith who died in 1870 and rests at gravestone D-14-3 at 100 Grassy Knoll St. By removing accountability, we now remove the ability of the American public to ensure/prove that their election process was {in}correct at any point in time, which in turn is a dramatic shift in power for the democratic process from the general public to those who try to rig an election.
This is bad.
I'd urge those in Ohio to vote against this legislation.
Posted by Dan at October 5, 2004 01:22 AM