In 2019, Clinton claimed that Donald Trump was an “illegitimate president,” and that he, Donald, “knows” that the 2016 election was stolen.**
Maybe, but probably not in the manner she thinks he did. Tighter Voter ID laws will “stop the steal” in the future.
By Mike McGee
November 1, 2022
I support Voter ID: and not for the reason you think. Since I was a bureaucrat for years, the first part of this story will likely seem boring and ultra-factual. Never fear, I’ll get to the sweet spot after this little background information on Voter ID.
I’ve been a Civil Rights supporter since I heard Dr. King give a sermon at the Riverside Church in 1961. My high school summer in New York changed my thinking forever. Before, I was a Southern white boy who grew up in a segregated small town in North Carolina. After military service in Vietnam, and law school and a few years in practice, I was an appointed senior manager at EEOC, managing a team of attorneys prosecuting race and sex discrimination federal litigation in North and South Carolina. I am currently 78 and married to a wonderful Asian woman!
That’s why I please ask you not to write me off as a bigot for supporting voter ID as a condition for voting, for all people. I’ll try to inject some humor as I find the right people to skewer. I respect the ACLU, just not their current “voter suppression” fund-raising methods, which screeds I receive by mail much too regularly.
When I use the words “Voter ID” in the rest of our time together today, I ask you to consider this definition. The primary meaning is having a government-issued photo identity card, usually a driver’s license or a non-driver ID card from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The identity must include name, address, and date of birth.
The best kind of driver or non-driver ID is the state-issued enhanced photo driver’s license: https://www.dhs.gov/enhanced-drivers-licenses-what-are-they Anyone can apply for one. They are done in cooperation with the Dept. of Homeland Security and require proof of what’s on the license. My wife and I have had these since 2017. Starting next year, a regular driver’s license alone won’t be sufficient to board a plane. An enhanced ID requires a very small amount of additional work to get, yet they give holders the gift of trust.
I’m not sure a Passport will do as voter identification, since they do not show a state of residence or a home address of the holder on them. There may be other proper forms of identification, but I’m not a student of IDs. The idea of using an affidavit as a substitute is useless at this time in history.
Our country is not the same as in the twentieth century, when population was less, and everyone knew others in their neighborhood. Computerized government records are also now at the point where they can be a reliable part of our public processes, including voting. With the faster moving pace of our lives, and the free access to credit, each citizen needs to be identified, seen and heard. It’s an essential element of our democracy. In less democratic countries, most citizens are even now muffled and kept quiet by the government.
During the twentieth century in the US, Black citizens were systematically and anti-democratically muffled and kept quiet. The same has been so for most rural and poor citizens of any color. Now in the twenty-first century, all muffled American Citizens must come forward and be loud and proud. No one needs to hide behind a lack of formal identification to survive. We, as US CITIZENS, are the champions of the world! We must bring new passion to the act of voting, and not put up with twentieth century voting methods!
Now, in order to visualize undocumented voting, I compare non-ID voting places as being no more substantial than puffs of wind, small gusts of hot air which last only as long as it takes to speak. Surely we can do better than this in our modern world!
The first problem for “puff of wind” voting is that any person can come into any precinct and say they live in that precinct and are 18 or over, and register and vote there. They could then go to another voting precinct and register and vote there by giving a different name and address verbally. Or people who are registered and not likely to vote, like recent Alzheimer’s patients, or the recently deceased, could be used to vote by anyone. And how can we say that a person who legitimately registered to vote is the same person who comes in to claim their vote?
It’s an invisible scam in states without voter ID laws, as undetectable as a puff of wind.
Consider this: what if in the 2016 presidential race, because of no voter ID requirements, the following happened?
I don’t think that Black citizens have done much double or triple voting. This has more likely been the election tactics of ex Clown Prince Donald Trump (he’s not funny anymore). I have no evidence that he used any election fraud tactics when he was elected in 2016 or when he lost the last election. I’m going to follow the same script that Trump is screaming to all: I’m claiming election fraud and a stolen presidential election in 2016.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” from Hamlet, applies equally to Trump, who has been protesting to the high heavens about a stolen election. As a lawyer, I would look askance at any witness who pounded the table and shouted far beyond the normal that someone else is guilty of a transgression. I would start to investigate the background of that witness to see if maybe they are the actual perpetrator of the same transgression. That’s a part of why I’m so suspicious about the ex Clown Prince Trump in particular.
I charge, along with Hillary Clinton, without evidence, that he orchestrated and stole the 2016 election by spending some of his fortune getting his right-wing minions to register multiple times, and go out and vote multiple times, for people they knew were not going to register or vote. Then he tried to steal the 2020 election using the same tactics, except people questioned his legitimacy and Biden received about 7 million more votes than his opponent, and with that difference in volume, Trump’s puff of wind approach did not work. So I claim, without any evidence, that the 2020 election was “stolen from Trump” by the failure of the illegal practices he put into place, and that maybe he was the illegitimate victor in 2016.
The point is made. I have some of the same concerns about mail-in voting and absentee ballots and remote ballot boxes: you may be able to figure out these concerns yourself after reading this article.
—————————————
** https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/hillary-clinton-conspiracy-queen/
mcgeehome 