It's time for a National ID card

The card above was issued to me when I was five years old in my native Argentina over 60 years ago. It was FREE issued by the national government. Before you think we shouldn’t mimic a third world country I want to point some things out. Argentina was the first country to convict someone in a court of law of a crime based on fingerprint evidence. It was the first country to require all it’s citizens to be fingerprinted. Now a common practice throughout the world. It was the first country to perform a successful blood transfusion. Heart bypass surgery and the artificial heart were developed there. The Bus for ferrying people around was invented there. The first working flyable helicopter.  That ball point pen you all use on an everyday basis was invented there in 1943.  It’s not as backward as some would have you believe. For the most part elections there are fairly honest because you need ID. 

Every citizen in the country is required to have his ID card on him at all times and you must present it when you vote. Imagine if this was a requirement in these last elections in the USA? It would make cheating far more difficult. If you had to put your thumbprint when you voted instead of a signature and combined it with a serial number it would be much more difficult to forge ballots since any excess ballots would require a unique fingerprint to match your vote. Imagine also that a copy would have to be sent to a voting integrity Bureau that would have them on file in case a vote had to be recounted. You could make such a requirement also with a mail in ballot. One copy to the local election board and a card with your thumbprint  and unique serial number to the integrity bureau. This would make it exceedingly difficult to forge ballots and produce a unique fingerprint for each ballot. 

Unless we fix the current electoral system there will always be questions about the electoral process and it’s integrity. Of course this is just my idea. The trick is to get the system to make it almost fool proof and get rid of areas that can get tampered with such as computer programs that can switch votes. Unless the population at large has faith in the integrity of the system they cannot have any trust in the government. If a group of people hell bent on winning at any cost get into government and ignore and have contempt for the rules and the laws and we let them. The we deserve what we get.

Americans have to get over their reservations about a national standard identity card and providing their fingerprints. You have to tender your fingerprints to work for the federal and many local governments. You have to turn in fingerprints to get a passport, security clearances etc. A national identity card would go along way to limit identity theft, cheating on elections and limit fraud. The only people who oppose such a move have ulterior motives and they are usually not good ones. It’s time to push for a national standardized ID card.