I must be psychic
A couple of weeks ago, in a post about Birmingham’s vote fraud, I wrote:
Of course, I fully expect someone from the Labour Party - with the sheer brazen chutzpah that comes effortlessly to them - to argue that this is a great argument for ID cards.
Really, it’s just too damn easy:
David Blunkett has called for urgent action on electoral fraud following the Birmingham vote-rigging scandal.
The former home secretary described the case in which six Labour councillors were found guilty of postal vote fraud as “totally outrageous”.
He called for individual rather than household voter registration - backed up by a national ID card scheme.
As No2ID point out:
Of course, a moment’s thought reveals that ID cards wouldn’t prevent any kind of “citizen not present” fraud, such as fraudulent postal voting, precisely because the citizen and his ID card aren’t available to be verified.
Spyblog has more, including a transcript of Blunkett’s comments on Question Time. Yet again, it seems that ID Cards are a solution in search of a problem - feel free to make your suggestion as to what they’ll next be dragged out as the catch-all cure for.
3 Comments
Obesity. We’ll include weight in the database, and then if our new Health Security Facilitators find you looking like a possible burden on the NHS they’ll know how much you weigh!
Comment :: 07 Apr 2005 @ 5:03 pm
…and we’ll have built a gigantic national database of absolutely everybody as well.
Comment :: 07 Apr 2005 @ 5:04 pm
Also, to make it fully secure from the dangers of fradulent voting, why not write your ID number next to the vote so that it can be typed into a great big database? This would save a lot of money because it could be used to target the bribes on the shallow-minded swing voters personally and send them free shampoo samples on the morning of the election. Get it right and those few brainless individuals will come out smelling lovely for a tenth of the expense, while the rest of us have had to suffer the consequences of sharing the same government with them.
Comment :: 08 Apr 2005 @ 12:29 am