"May I see some proof of age, please."
"Sure. Check out these liver spots."
Voting, it seems to me, should at least be as tough as getting a library card or buying beer. Even so, Stephen Harper's governing Conservatives are under sustained fire for tightening the rules around voting to about the same level. Most of that fire is coming from the Harper haters, who reflexively denounce everything he does. Now they are twisting themselves into human pretzels to condemn the most basic electoral security.
Voting is so important, they say, that people should be able to cast a ballot without presenting identification of any kind. It's good enough, they say, to have would-be voters vouched for at the polls by someone who does have identification.
Vouching wouldn't pass muster at the off-sale counter, but for voting it's fine? This doesn't make sense. If voting is so important,
we should make it at least as secure as off-sale, shouldn't we? Critics say the dastardly Harper Conservatives are practicing selective voter suppression. Their real purpose, supposedly, is to disenfranchise undocumented voters who mostly don't vote Conservative. Sure. And the public libraries are in on it too, insisting as they do on identification before they trust you with a book.
Of course, borrowing library books is a privilege while voting is a right. But it isn't a universal right. There are strict eligibility requirements relating to age, citizenship, residency, and so on. I just don't think it is too much to ask of voters to establish their eligibility with something more substantial than someone else's sayso.
This is exactly the kind of thing that police tell us to watch out for to protect ourselves against consumer fraud. Why would we accept a lower standard for elections? Some are predicting court challenges over the abolition of vouching. It will be interesting to see if someone can file a court action without any kind of identification.
The degree to which vouching interferes with electoral integrity is not clear. There were 50,000 "irregularities" reported in the last election, but most of these, according to officials, were clerical deficiencies. Of actual fraud, there were only "a handful" of cases, we are told. Maybe so, but an honour system for voting is a standing invitation to fraud. One of the electoral fraud cases that was successfully prosecuted was that of a guy who voted at three Toronto polling stations to expose the slack registration procedures. If he hadn't written a magazine article about it, no one would have known. That says all you need to know about enforcement.
Maybe that's why other countries are more careful. Voters in American federal elections, for instance, must register in advance of elections to vote. To register, they must show identification. There is no provision for vouching. So far as I can determine, no other democracy in the world makes any provision for vouching in national elections. Voting is too important for that, they would say. But when the Harper Conservatives say the same thing, they are denounced as self-serving villains and enemies of democracy.
Proposed regulations would require voters to show one piece of government issued, photo identification or two pieces of approved, non-photo ID. These can include a treaty card, a health card, a student card, a hunting license, a social security card, a bus pass, a letter of residency from a shelter, a government cheque stub, even a library card, when no other agency in the world besides a library would accept a library card as proof of identification. This is not exactly indicative of excessive restriction.
By the standard of other transactions in a modern society, voting still will be pretty easy. The problem is that not voting always will be easier.
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