I wasn’t the biggest fan of the late former President Jimmy Carter. But his plan for voter ID has my vote.
I refer to the idea he defended in 2005, viewable in a video clip that’s been making the rounds lately.
The clip is from a C-SPAN broadcast of a hearing about federal election reform focusing on the Carter-Baker Commission Final Report. This report was the product of years of investigating how to fix problems in the U.S. election system highlighted by the nerve-racking Bush-Gore presidential contest in 2000.
In addition to voter ID, the report advocates other efforts to combat fraud, including auditable paper backups of electronic votes.
In the clip, Carter says that we should “have some form of photo ID required, photo ID. . . . [It would include] some very careful constraints to prevent abuse. For instance, these photo ID cards will be free.
“There’ll be a wide distribution of them. The states will be required to go around the state to issue these photo ID cards to as many people as possible, which would be a good system just for recruiting new voters. This will be very important. And so this will be, I think, a move forward in getting more people to vote. It will not restrict people from voting. It’ll be uniformly applied throughout the country. And it will be nondiscriminatory.”
Too bad Carter didn’t live to see universal implementation of the ID requirement that he proposed. It’s something we desperately need.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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