Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
i find this insane - only a citizen should be allowed to vote and you should have to prove it, this is 2013, there should be a database of every eligible voter/citizen in the country, when a person shows up and proves he's a citizen and votes, mark them down as having voted.
what the hell, it's in the Constitution isn't it, guaranteeing every citizen the right to vote - it doesn't say 'resident'.
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No, that shouldn't be 2013 - it looks like 1984 to me.
A master roster of citizens? That's one of the things Americans have been resisting and fighting since the beginning. But it's a losing battle. Though there is no federal law requiring registration with Social Security, it's damn well impossible to survive without it. But we're not quite there yet, and I'd not consider it progress to establish a master list of citizens in the hands of the government.
In former times, when I was a small child in Milwaukee, just before every election, a list of all the voters in the precinct was posted on lamposts on every block so that good voters could inform the election clerks about the death of registered voters, the possibility that noncitizens had registered to vote, etc. It worked pretty well in keeping elections honest in that squeaky-clean city and state. Nowadays, they keep the voter list restricted, at least in Illinois, and the public has no chance to help purge the voter list. They claim that's associated with privacy. But that roster is free to the Republican and Democrat committeemen. Funny how "privacy" can be trotted out when it's convenient to the pols and connected powers and ignored when it does not suit their purposes.
Should voting be restricted to citizens? Maybe, but in US history, it's gone back and forth. In Wisconsin, non US citizen residents were permitted to vote and hold public office till 1908. That's how the German Socialists took over Milwaukee City Hall from the Irish - and according to Wikipedia, 40 states permitted noncitizens to vote until an anti-immigration backlash in the first decades of the 20th Century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_o..._United_States That article notes a US Supreme Court opinion noting that citizenship was not necessarily required to vote, a decision from the 1870s. For sure, at least some of the people reading this post had ancestors who voted in US elections before they were US citizens. They did so legally and it should be noted that this was the greatest era of growth in the American economy.