Voter List

At the start of my City Politics class on Monday, Professor Lightbody walked in and noted that he'd voted for the first time in today's election early this morning.

Of course, none of us believed him. As Dr. Lightbody has explained to us many times, the rewards of doing anything in city politics are so small that only the mentally deranged do anything beyond voting. Professor Lightbody would tell you that indifference ensures that no one stuffs the ballot box. It isn't worth the effort.

Of course, those of us who aren't that cynical yet share Uncharted's concern that we need some way to ensure we have legal residents voting and to ensure that voters vote only once. But the Universal Voter List as used in BC is a poor solution. Political parties should not be entrusted to maintain voter lists. They have a preference for certain voters to be on the list and they don't operate in municipal elections so they probably won't send in names until just before a Provincial of Federal election. Most importantly, parties have been shown to be completely incapable of maintaining their own voter lists and they have it easy: all they need to do is check who's bought a party membership in the last year. Nonetheless, showing the complete incompetence of political parties, regularly the deceased, the non-existant, and house pets end up on their lists.

I would instead propose we do what the Federal and Provincial Governments do. The list should be populated with those who've paid taxes, have car and other licenses, etc. Any remaining people can show ID to get on. And those without ID can go through a big of paperwork and sign a declaration (the paperwork should deter people from using fake names). Of course, the declaration is not watertight, but neither is using ID#emdash;if you really want to stuff the ballot box, you can make fake ID cards. At some level an election can be abused.

And since the Federal and Provincial governments work on one list, I'm sure we could even just tag onto their list.

Sadly, common sense isn't very common. Especially amongst politicians.