Even if we take your article at face value, I don’t think it actually proves your point that voter ID should be required at the polls.
The “illegals” your article talks about were registered to vote. Presumably this gives them some kind of credential or puts them on a list that makes them able to go to a poll and cast a ballot. Having a picture to compare with this credentialing at the poll strikes me as much ado after the horse has left the barn. Rather, we should be worrying about the registration process itself in those districts. Seems to me there’s a problem with registration procedures, not in an after the fact comparison of in-hand ID (which may or may not be valid) to a fraudulent registration.
Is this any more toothy than the Acorn “scandal” of paying people to collect registrations and getting stuck with the bogus forms turned in?
As for the registrants, I can see them being pissed if they wanted to vote in the Democratic (or other) primary but were barred from doing so because they are on the Republican roles, but that seems an awfully tenuous harm.
Can someone tell me a story of the motivation behind this? To make it seem as if the county weighed much more Republican? I could see if it were to collect names for Republican mailers, but that could have been done without the chicanery. I don’t get it.
How about the appropriate prosecutorial office investigating and filing charges if warranted. Voter fraud occurs frequently, such as throwing 20,000 people off the voter roles in Florida in 2000 because they had similar names to convicted felons? I’m all for prosecuting all voter fraud.
But what the hell were they thinking? What benefit was there to expending energy to falsely register people as Republicans? Would their ballots be tossed out later if their registrations were proven unlawfully obtained? Who the hell spent money on this campaign and why?
The irony is that the Republicans have inadvertently expanded the leftist wing of their party by adding people who would normally be Democrats or other. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if this tips the balance for more moderate GOP candidates?
I don’t think I got a voter ID card when I registered in New York. When I was in New Mexico, I first got the little paper card that told you all the various districts you were voting in. Several years later, the Bernalillo County clerk (I believe this was done only at the one county) sent out a whole bunch of updated plastic cards. Nice to look at, more durable than the paper ones, but totally unneeded for actual voting.
And I’ve never understood the “you must have a reason to request an absentee ballot” thing. Why isn’t “I don’t feel like going to the polling place” good enough? Of course, I got used to a state with on-demand absentee voting and early voting. So the level of outrage I have that someone made a false claim to obtain an absentee voting form and then used said form, assuming he did not vote twice, is minimal.