Op-Eds

Photo ID to Vote? Well, OK, But …

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A bunch of guys without photo ID getting ready to vote.
A bunch of guys without photo ID getting ready to vote.

One perennial proposal in the ongoing “fight” (actually more a set of dueling theatrical productions a la professional wrestling) over “election integrity” is a requirement that voters produce official, government-issued identification documents, complete with photo, at polling places.

Anyone who’s ever worked door security at a nightclub (yes, I have) knows that possession of a card with a photo vaguely resembling the person possessing it is no guarantee of identity.  And polling places have a built-in advantage over nightclubs: EVERYONE has to be on the guest list to get in.

Having individuals pretend to be voters when they aren’t doesn’t seem to be a real problem, if for no other reason than that it’s an incredibly labor-intensive way to fraudulently swing an election outcome.

In reality, the photo ID requirement drives seem to be more about making sure that only the “right” people — those who have the time and money to sit around government offices waiting for those very special cards — get to vote.  There being, probably not coincidentally, a strong correlation between being one of those “right” people and possessing a skin tone that matches one of the lighter shades on the Pantone Matching System Color Chart.

But it seems to me that there’s room for a compromise here — a way to take the supposed concern seriously, and do something about it, in return for something that naturally follows from doing so.

Side A of this grand bargain proposal is simple: Give the “photo ID to vote” advocates what they want. You don’t get to vote without showing government-issued photo ID.

Side B is a little messier: Since photo ID is so important that it’s impossible to trust the results of an election not requiring it, all past elections not requiring it are deemed null, void, and of no effect. Every political official chosen in an election without photo ID requirements is automatically recalled, and every law passed by those officials — or by voters in a non-photo-ID election — is rescinded.

Yes, all of them, all the way back.

I have it on good authority that not a single member of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, or any of the legislators or convention delegates ratifying the Constitution, possessed government-issued photo identification documents.

How can we possibly know that the gentlemen purporting to be James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, et al. weren’t just  a gaggle of randos in borrowed wigs and waistcoats who fraudulently passed themselves off as the genuine personages?

If, as its advocates claim, photo ID is necessary to “election integrity,” we can’t trust that any past election was properly conducted or properly decided, and should therefore not consider ourselves bound by those elections’ results.

Your move, “election integrity” panic-mongers.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Missouri Governor Mike Parson Tries to Stick it Where the Sun Don’t Shine

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Photo by EpixRu. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Photo by EpixRu. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

“Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me,” Missouri congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver said in an 1899 speech: “I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”

Note to Missouri governor Mike Parson: You’re getting this “Show-Me State” business all wrong.

Parson tried to charge Elad Gross, a  candidate for state attorney general,  $3,618 for documents Gross requested under the state’s Sunshine Law, claiming more than 90 hours of required “research and processing” at $40 per hour. The “processing” involved having attorneys redact information from the requested documents. The state’s Supreme Court ruled against Parson last June.

In the meantime, the state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, claimed that he couldn’t investigate alleged violations of the Sunshine Law by the governor’s office because that office (rather than, say, the people of Missouri) is his “client.”

Now Parson’s asking the state legislature to amend the Sunshine Law so that he can keep more government documents secret and charge more for handing over such information as it might happen to please him to show.

It’s not just Missouri. Politicians and bureaucrats at every level of American government love keeping secrets from the media and from the mere serfs they claim to work for. They “classify” information, try to hide that information behind novel claims of “executive” or “attorney-client” privilege, or just jack up Sunshine Law fees so that the average taxpayer can’t afford to find out what his supposed employees are up to.

Those first two methods of thwarting transparency probably have to be dealt with in court on a case-by-case basis, but there’s an easy solution to the third.

How many billions of dollars has government spent putting a computer in every cubicle and building Internet-connected data centers complete with public-facing web sites?

Missouri’s legislature, and the legislatures of other states, SHOULD amend the Sunshine Laws — and the amendments should require all government documents and recordings of all government meetings to be posted in a timely manner to public-facing web sites with robust search functionality.

If a government employee, office, or department wants an exception for a particular document or recording, that document or recording should be posted to a closed database/site for review, within ten days, by a court. Or, better yet, by a randomly selected panel of registered voters, with a unanimous vote required to approve keeping the document or recording from public view.

Government transparency should be the rule, not the expensive exception.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

COVID-19 and the End of Government Schooling’s Main Value Proposition

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Photo by Onderwijsgek. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands license.
Photo by Onderwijsgek. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands license.

In mid-2020, I mused that if the COVID-19 pandemic ended up producing any silver linings, the most likely  bright spot would be its impact on government — so-called “public” — education. Throughout the previous spring, government schools had largely shut down in-person classes, switching to ad hoc and, it seems,  fairly lame, “remote learning.”

Some besieged, bedraggled parents held out hope for an autumn return to the previous normalcy. Others looked at the “remote learning” setup and decided they (perhaps in cooperation with other parents) could do a better job themselves — if not permanently, at least until the emergency was over.

By the fall 2020 semester, according to the US Census, the percentage of homeschooling households in America had doubled, from 5.4% of households to 11.1%.

That may have been just the beginning of a long-term trend.

Parents choose government schooling versus homeschooling or vice versa for many reasons, not all of them related to the overall better academic achievement (15-30% better performance on standardized tests, for example) homeschooling boasts.

One BIG reason is financial. In an age when nearly every parent works (regardless of whether the family is single- or multi-parent), homeschooling can mean significant loss of income. At least one parent has to be home to teach, rather than on an outside job.

The value proposition government schooling offers is: “Sure, we do a fairly crappy job of teaching your kids to read, write, and do arithmetic … but hey, who turns down free daycare?”

The pandemic threw a wrench into that value proposition. Suddenly, the kids weren’t disappearing on a yellow bus each morning, leaving Mom and/or Dad available to work a shift and earn a paycheck.

With “remote learning,” many parents had to either quit jobs or invest significant portions of their income in daycare. Some of them decided to turn “remote learning” lemons into homeschooling lemonade.

Others muddled through as best they could, waiting for that return to normalcy (or homeschooled in the interim with plans to send their kids back to government schools when possible). Because, after all, emergencies don’t last forever, right?

Now it’s January of 2022 and another problem with that financial equation, and with the government school value proposition, is rearing its ugly head: Reliability.

Parents who made the best of a bad situation while holding out hope that the government schools would get their act together Real Soon Now find themselves caught in a new cycle of alternating expectation and disappointment as we come up on “700 days to slow the spread.”

Will the government schools be in session this week? How about next week? And the week after that? Who knows?

Those parents can’t assure current or prospective employers that they’ll be available to work next week, or the week after, or the week after that.

They’re caught in the same “quit my job or fork over for daycare” trap they’ve spent the last two years in, with the added irritant of nearly daily uncertainty.

And many more of them are almost certainly eyeing the homeschooling exits.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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