ELECTION FAIRNESS: Michael Barone offers advice to Secretaries of State. Excerpt:

There are two other developments I find disturbing. One is the fact that large numbers of political players are charging that the basic requirement of showing voter identification at the polls is a form of undue intimidation. I think this is an astounding and indefensible argument. We have to show identification to cash a check or board an airliner. Identification is easily available to any American — and almost all of us carry official identifying cards on us at all times. To equate the requirement that identification be shown with the violence and intimidation visited on black Americans in the South up to and including the 1960s is, in my mind, to belittle and disparage the courage and bravery of those Americans, most of them black but some of them white, who literally risked their lives in order to see that all Americans would have the right to vote. Their efforts were successful, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly proved to be the most effective civil rights legislation the federal government ever passed.

The other disturbing development is the proposal that election rules should be federalized, perhaps under the current advisory Election Assistance Commission. This raises severe practical problems. The federal government has found it difficult to establish uniform computer systems for individual federal agencies; I understand that a long-term program to do that in the Internal Revenue Service had to be abandoned. Establishing computer-compatible systems for the 50 states and District of Columbia would presumably be much harder. Second, and more important, federalizing election rules would allow nationwide manipulation that could affect election results.

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