"We could skip registration, increase voting, and prevent fraud at the same time. Every American citizen has a social security number. We could put that number on driver's licenses and ID cards. Poll workers could take voters' social security numbers when they vote. A computer could scan the votes to verify that each social security number voted only once. It's simple. Too simple."
Article:
American Apartheid
Planet Obispo © 1994
by Jeff McMahon
Millions of black South Africans stood in lines a mile long to vote for the first time in history. The images zipped around the world and struck my retinas, and I thought of George Washington.
He's probably dead today, but George Washington was spry when I met him six years ago. He was 98 years old, black, and he had never voted.
I was 24 years old, white, and brimming with more verve than I could fit into the Merced Sun-Star, the daily newspaper I worked for at the time. So I spent my weekends in South Merced, the ghetto, filling out voter registration forms. It was a way to meet people, exercise my fanaticism about voting, and find Merced's untold stories.
As I filled out George Washington's form, I asked him why he'd never registered before.
"No one ever offered," he said.
I knew then that George was a newcomer to Merced, because another elderly man I registered had said to me, "One of you guys came around here right after the war."
"Vietnam?" I asked.
"World War II."
A few years later the League of Women Voters invited me to a forum at the library in San Luis Obispo. Its goal was to get more people to vote.
We broke into discussion groups. Mine included an arch-liberal county supervisor and an arch-conservative North County newspaper publisher. We volleyed ideas about getting more people to vote. I was stoked. I knew about this subject, had opinions about it, and finally had someone to talk to.
"Eliminate voter registration," I said.
Their eyes said a silent "What?"
"Eliminate voter registration. Make it so people can just go to the polls and vote. It's too complicated now. People don't know the rules. They forget to register 30 days ahead of the election. And it's all unnecessary. Just let them go to the polls on election day and vote."
I might as well have advocated free love.
"We can't do that," the conservative publisher said.
"There will be fraud," the liberal supervisor said.
"There's nothing stopping fraud now," I said.
It's true. People think voter registration prevents fraud. It doesn't. Nothing keeps anyone from registering under 20 names and voting 20 times. I have never once been asked for identification to register or to vote. The only thing voter registration prevents is voting.
We could skip registration, increase voting, and prevent fraud at the same time. Every American citizen has a social security number. We could put that number on driver's licenses and ID cards. Poll workers could take voters' social security numbers when they vote. A computer could scan the votes to verify that each social security number voted only once. It's simple. Too simple.
There may be a great argument against this idea, but I haven't heard it yet. The discussion group didn't like it. They suggested giving people buttons or lollipops when they vote, dropping registration forms at businesses, and getting newspapers, radio, and television stations to spread news about how to register.
I slouched. It's been tried. It's failed.
The League recruited a spectrum of citizens for its forum, but it missed one vital groupópeople who don't vote. I realized the people in the discussion group don't know people who don't vote. And people who don't vote don't know people who sit in discussion groups.
America has many cultures. One culture controls the post office, the county building, the daily newspaper, and the polling place. I'm not talking about race either. The mainstream culture may be largely white, but it includes other colors. People who don't vote include racial minorities, but also poor people, young people, and just about everyone else whose views have never echoed from a politician's mouth.
The mainstream culture has never spoken to the cultures that don't vote. If it did, it would probably just hand out another incomprehensible government form.
I developed my radical notions about voting, apparently, because I talked to people who don't vote. Then I, too, became incomprehensible to the people in discussion groups.
"All they have to do is go to the post office," the liberal supervisor said.
The fellow who hadn't registered since World War II didn't know to go to the post office or the county building to register. Neither did George Washington. And they weren't stupid. They were just different.
They didn't walk the halls of government buildings, and they didn't read the daily newspaper. They didn't know how to vote, and they weren't interested in wrestling the bureaucracy to find out. Those of us who ply the bureaucracy daily think it's a simple thing. It's not. For millions of Americans, the government is a thing to avoid.
Forms, registration deadlines, and consolidated precincts discourage people from voting. The question is, does the government and the culture that steers it discourage voting on purpose? I suspect it's largely ignorance of the way other people live. But it also works for them. It wins elections. It allows one culture to dominate the government, while projecting the image of the world's most free and honest elections. Some wily groups, like the Republican Party, have figured this out.
"I'm a Republican, and I really don't want more people to vote," the conservative publisher said during the League forum. People laughed, but he had spoken the only truth I heard there.
When I registered people in South Mercedóblack, white, Latino, and Laotianóalmost 80 percent signed up as Democrats. The next largest group picked "decline to state." Republicans fared best among the communist-fleeing Laotians, but overall they remained as scarce as Independents and Libertarians. I figured out quickly why Republicans oppose easy voting.
Later that year the Grand Old Party posted armed guards at Orange County polling places. The guards would prevent fraud, the party said. Imagine yourself a farmworker in Orange County, a new citizen more accustomed to the bloody elections of Guatemala or El Salvador, who goes to vote for the first time and sees a uniform and a gun.
Meanwhile, the sun rains down on black South Africans standing in line five hours to vote, bombs exploding around them. I think of George Washingtonóa wise and well-spoken black man, alive in America since 1890, named after the "father of our country"ówho had never voted.
It's not that we don't have apartheid in America. It's just that our apartheid is subtle.
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