23 January 2008

No ID, No Vote... No Problem.

So there's an MSNBC article about how hard it is to be a non-ID'd voter in Indiana. Waah. What sob stories do they trot out?
There's the poor, 32-year-old mother of seven who says it would cost her at least $50 to vote in person. There's also the 92-year-old woman who's voted for decades in the same polling place, but now can't vote there because she let her driver's license expire when her eyesight began to fail.
This is really ridiculous. Don't campaigns (or rather, parties) get vans out to "get out the vote?" I'd think the mother of seven - who obviously finds time to manage her house & get her kids to school & soccer practice but somehow can't find time to research what it would take to vote - would be able to manage to give the 92-year-old woman a ride to the nearest licensing office, BECAUSE:

Per Indiana's publicly available website:
Indiana residents of any age may obtain an identification card from any license branch in any county. To obtain a free identification card for voting purposes, you must visit a license branch with sufficient documentation and state that you need a free identification card for voting purposes.
Yes, that sounds completely inhumane...

(And yes, there's more to the two stories mentioned above, but it's still a slew of very fixable problems, if they care to fix them...)

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