Voter fraud's a piece of cake

Here's a conversation Don Danz had at his polling place last Tuesday:

Me: Hi. (smiling)

Poll Worker 1: Last name? (smiling)

Me: Danz...Don Danz. (now with dead serious expression and tone) But, I'm not really him. And, you can't do anything about it because you can't ask for my ID. (I sign my name…or at least my alias for that precinct)

Poll Worker 2: We don’t care. (hands me my ballots)

Poll Worker 3: The state of Oklahoma doesn't care. (everyone exchanges knowing smiles and small chuckles as it's obvious I'm making a point with which the workers agree)

Me: (after having voted) We'll I'm off to go vote in a few more precincts.

Poll Worker 2: Good luck.

Oklahoma has no way to prevent voter fraud and no practical way to detect it if it occurs. Requiring photo ID to vote would not be foolproof, but it would prevent someone walking in and voting under someone else's name. Republican legislators have tried to pass such a requirement, but the Democrats have always blocked it, claiming it would intimidate minority and elderly voters. Don says that's hogwash:

This is not only untrue but, also, incredibly insulting to blacks and the elderly. I guess blacks and old people don’t use checks or credit cards either because they are too scared someone will want to see some ID. What a load of crap.

The only real reason to oppose checking identification is that in some places Democrats rely on widespread voter fraud in order to be elected. There simply is no other reason to oppose mandatory photo identification before voting.

Oklahoma election officials are justly proud of our optical ballot readers, which gives us the ability to obtain quick and accurate results while still having a paper record of each vote, preserving the option of a manual count. But a ballot reader is like any other computer -- Garbage In, Garbage Out -- and it can't detect a ballot cast fraudulently. We've had too many close elections that could have been swayed by even a tiny amount of fraud: House District 78 in 2004 was decided by less than 30 votes; the 2002 Governor's race was decided by less than three votes per precinct.

In a voting system that is truly one person, one vote, only an eligible voter would cast a ballot, each voter would vote only once and would vote only in the district in which he currently lives. Oklahoma has no requirement to ensure that any of those conditions are met. For the sake of democracy, it's time we fixed that.