8/25/13

Voter Photo I.D. Cards- The Better Security Upgrade for Democracy

Digital photography produces near zero-cost pictures hence using digital photographs and face recognition systems at voting booths would be a way for easy, security verification of individual identity. State election officials when registering a voter could make a free photo voter I.D. for a voter that he or she could present on voting day to election officials. The election system could also make a face scan with a camera to verify the voter's picture stored in the election files before stepping into the voting booth. With such simple, low, low cost technology available to confirm and secure voter photo identity it makes little sense to fail to defend the integrity of voting as the prerogative of citizens. A photo on a voter I.D. card is no more harmful than a photo on a driver's license.

Adequate voter I.D. to defend against voter fraud is not an effort to restrict voter rights or turn back the clock to Jim Crow days before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Some uncreative politicians doomed to repeat the past might wish to persuade voters that having voter photo I.D. or photo I.D. on a driver's license is an effort by segregationists to send blacks back to the plantation. I think that's not so. The reasons that some black politicians can't get beyond half-century old ways of thinking are probably the same reason some white politicians keep coming up with ancient non-renewable, unsustainable economic policy for the U.S.A. (they just aren't the brightest bulbs illuminating creative darkness.)

If M.L.K. had been speaking at the commemorative half century observance of the 1963 march on Washington D.C. he would likely have expressed an optimistic paradigm for reforming and restoring the U.S. economy such that full employment would result. He would have been unlikely to dwell on amorphous allegations of racial discrimination.



There was no ambiguity about the Jim Crow south's racial discriminations. Politicians didn't need to cook up baloney incidents or find a George Zimmerman to try to lynch for defending his life. When Rosa Parks moved to the front of the bus it wasn't an action against a vague or imagined segregation policy. M.L.K. took issue with the meaty substance of political issues of his day with optimism and an interest of the rights of mankind. In today's egression toward the developing Plutonomy with concentrated wealth for the top .1% and 30% of Harvard grads in the financial and banking services seeking to extract money rather than create new ecologically sustainable economic policy good for all much of the focus on dubious racial oppression in the U.S.A. is a detraction from making the economy of all people rise with a new tide of ecospherically intelligent economic values.

The value of the right to vote is meaningful only when voter fraud is not a substantial percent of the votes cast. Defending the value of citizenship and the right of a citizen to vote on important issues such as political leadership requires adequate, contemporary photo voter I.D. The economic future of the poor and middle class are not necessarily bright in the intermediate range future of the U.S.A. The concentration of wealth in the hands of the top .1% comprised increasingly of bankers, financial sector workers and Wall Street C.E.O.s has morphed toward an extraction, rent-collecting class of clever skimmers, takeovers and makeovers artists instead of creative materials production. 

With the rise of the middle class in China and India and the BRIC nations the global plutocrats tend to view the former powerful and in decline U.S. middle class and of course the poor as of middling meaning. With politicians bought and paid for by the media owning Plutonomy the me-generation of middle class sycophants afraid to reform capitalism only support more deregulation of finance that serves to redistribute wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. M.L.K. would not have been fooled by these events and would not have been a yard barking at who do's long gone.

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