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Friday, October 30, 2026Oct 30

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Burdensome voter ID argument utterly fails and other letters to the editors

Letters to the Editor
Letters to the Editor Letters to the Editor

Burdensome voter ID argument utterly fails

At age 22, having failed to register in advance of the 1972 presidential election, I missed my first opportunity to vote. Four years earlier, at 18, I was then ineligible to vote. My point? The responsibility of casting an intelligent ballot should be more challenging than falling off a log.

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent calls any concern about the integrity of our electoral process “a stupid lie” and proceeds to quote newly minted Georgia statesman Jon Ossoff to buttress his claim that the 2020 election came off “impressively smoothly” and that all such efforts to tighten the process constitute voter suppression.

Sargent utterly fails to prove the contention voter ID is unduly burdensome and should not be expected of certain populations – when ID is required for so many other activities, why wouldn’t we require it for something as important as voting?

He fails to refute the obvious: If “ballot harvesters” are allowed to collect others’ ballots, if ballots are mailed to everyone on outdated lists and if registration lists are not updated scrupulously, there will be fraud on some scale. Perhaps not enough to steal elections, but enough to undermine confidence in the system.