I keep in touch with a wide range of people on Facebook. Some of them are good friends in real life, but (alas) not political compadres. What really bothers me is when otherwise intelligent people support a Facebook meme without really thinking it through and thinking about the effect of the idea on real people. The meme above is a perfect example. It is completely misleading and meant to solve a problem that does not exist. The real effect of such a policy is quite different.
There Is No Voter Fraud
I have worked every federal and B. C. provincial election in the last 15 years. Some years I’m the guy in charge of vetting the voters with shaky I.D. And I can assure you, it is very difficult to create voter fraud. Anyone who actually voted recently has experienced the precautions. Try voting without the proper I.D. and see what happens. Oh, sure, you could get away with one or two people. But a widespread attempt would be caught down the line in the counting process when things didn’t balance right. As far as fraud on a large enough scale to change the outcome of an election? You need the resources of a major political party to do that.
So Why the Big Fuss?
It seems that the federal Conservatives, like the Republicans in the U. S., think they can make gains in the election by denying the vote to certain sections of the population. Steven Harper’s government did this most recently by stopping people from using the voting announcement (that all voters received at their legal address) for proof of address. Who are the people that have trouble proving their address? Renters and transients, basically the poor. Who have no reason to love the Conservatives.
Why is Photo I.D. Important?
Once again, it’s something that all middle-class people (many of whom are Conservatives) carry as a matter of course. Something that poor people and young people (no driver’s license, for example) find more difficult to attain. actually, having good photo I.D is already the surest way to have a smooth experience at the polling station.
Bottom Line on this Policy
“Let’s do anything we can to make it easy for our supporters to vote, and hard for the other parties’ supporters to vote.”
Great democracy.
But It’s Worse Than That
Let’s take a look at some of the comments on that meme Are these really people you identify with?
Note the first responder and his preoccupation with PRIVILEGE. “‘I’ve got it so I deserve it. You don’t, so you don’t.”
Sharon is a typical responder. She is probably a very nice person who has played the game all her life and found that she didn’t end up with the prize they promised her for being a good little girl. Since it couldn’t be her fault, it must be that everybody else is to blame.
Cate, whether she realizes it or not, is both racist and xenophobic. She’s after those immigrants who are gonna come and get her position in society if she doesn’t slap them down.
John, at the bottom, is just plain selfish. “If it makes my life easy and everyone else’s more difficult, it’s good.
But it Gets Worse:
Seriously? If you’re below the poverty line you don’t get to vote? I like the third comment, about uneducated voters, considering the number of spelling and grammar mistakes in all these posts. And we hear the same old elitist song. “If you don’t have a job, it’s because you’re lazy.”
And on We Go:
Okay, we’ve now bumped the ante up to five years as a citizen before you get to vote. Anybody for ten?
And back again to the fiction that there is widespread voter fraud. She’s not sure about irregularities at all. She just wants to be sure, because it allows her to support a racist, elitist policy.
Where’s the Real Fraud?
The only documented instances of electioneering I can find for the last 15 years are: first, the manipulation of voter i.d. to keep poor people from voting that I mentioned above. This was accomplished by the Conservative Party when they were in power. The second instance was the Robo-Calls in the 2011 Federal Election, when people were called and told their polling station had been moved when it hadn’t. The perpetrators? The Conservative Party of Canada.
So don’t let them fool you. This is a misleading campaign to solve an imaginary problem in order to get support for an anti-democratic election trick. Are these xenophobic, selfish people really the type you want to ally yourself with? Then don’t support their propaganda.