Texas Secretary of State to Election Officials: Accept Noncitizen Driver's License as Valid ID to Vote

AP Photo/Adam Bettcher

You would not expect this to be allowed in Texas, but the Texas Secretary of State's Elections officials have instructed local precincts to accept driver's licenses issued to noncitizens as valid IDs for voting. 

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Obviously, you can't trust a single video describing a phone call to prove that this is a statewide policy, but the policy is spelled out in an advisory from the Secretary of State's office. The policy is actual. 

The whole point of voter ID is to prevent ineligible voters from casting ballots and having a policy that ignores the validity of the ID makes it worthless. 

It's true that the Secretary of State requires officials to inform people that noncitizens are not allowed to vote and that there are potential penalties, but making something illegal is hardly an effective prevention tool. We have prisons full of people who commit crimes despite knowing the risks, and the real risks from illegally voting have historically been small to nonexistent. 

I can't say why the Secretary of State has chosen to implement this policy. However, it is easy to speculate: it is just conceivable that somebody was issued a restricted driver's license and subsequently became a citizen and failed to update their identification. However, these licenses have a very limited term of validity, with a maximum of one year. 

There is no doubt that if even one such case existed, the left would go insane, so rather than requiring valid identification, the requirement is dropped in favor of informing people of the law. 

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Sorry, that's stupid. New citizens should follow the law and update their ID if they want to vote. This policy leaves a hole in the system as big as the gaps in the border wall. 

If it were the case that everybody wanted to quell concerns about ballot integrity, doing so would be simple: valid ID, paper ballots, shorter periods of voting, and hand counting. That is how most countries in the world do it, and their elections run much more smoothly and quickly than ours. France gets results within hours, and nobody wonders about the fairness of the process. 

Here, the opposite is true: lots of people worry about fairness, yet any suggestions made to ensure ballot integrity are fought tooth and nail, and a smear campaign is run against them. It is as if the opponents of voter ID and paper ballots either don't care to reassure us--which harms democracy--or they want to make it simple to cheat, which undermines our democratic process. 

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It boggles the mind that anybody trusts our elections completely for many reasons. The incentive to cheat is enormous--controlling the laws, regulations, and trillions of dollars of spending is a mighty incentive to cheat. People have killed for much less, so the idea that nobody votes illegally or organizes efforts to do so is ridiculous. 

If Democrats cared about reassuring voters the process is fair, they should join Republicans and Independents in creating a system that makes it difficult instead of designing a system that makes it incredibly easy. 

They fight mightily to make the system insecure. Is it any wonder that lots of people question election results?

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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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