Over at American Thinker, Jon N. Hall has posted a nice item collecting some ideas on how to improve election integrity.

It’s scandalous that our election systems are still vulnerable. It should be well nigh impossible to interfere with America’s elections. It’s disappointing that America’s tech gurus haven’t come up with systems that secure our elections from tampering and fraud. You’d think they’d be competing with each other to be the first to come up with the most elegant solution. Sad!

A key issue he brings up is that states, that have started to require proof of citizenship, haven’t addressed all the non-citizens already on the voter rolls. Hall’s proposed solution is for voters to show their Social Security cards at the polls. I’m not a fan of this approach for two reasons. One the SSN isn’t supposed to be a proof of identity (abused all the time I know). Secondly, this is a back door into a national Id; which is its’ own separate discussion, the short of it is I think the power should remain with the states.

Mr. Hall does mention the possible use of E-Verify as a tool for states to verify citizenship. From what I understand of the system there is a likelihood of false negatives but applying a check of voter rolls against E-Verify could serve as a first level filter to identify registrations that deserve a closer look from election officials.

Another issue noted in the item is that it is legal for states to allow foreigners to vote in state and local elections, Something that CA and other states are permitting. There is a federal law that one must be a citizen to vote in federal elections. More often than not, election ballots are a mix of federal, state and local officials all on the same ballot. An obvious solution to this problem would be for states to conduct separate elections for federal officials.

Having separate elections for the federal offices has attractions, because the quadrennial presidential election is the election that brings out the voters and creates those long lines at the polls. If there were only one to three items on the ballot (that is, U.S. representative, U.S. senator, and U.S. president), that would expedite voting.

The source item also references another solution that Mr. Hall has written about designed to help with “the identification of alien voters and other fraudsters”.

…all presidential “ballots” in all the states be sent to the feds to go into a single file, which could then be used to identify alien voters, multiple voters, etc.

I’m all for this idea, as long as it is only used to verify voters and not to used to count ballots.

At the end of the source item there is a link to another item Mr. Hall wrote about the abuses in the recount process.  While there is much we can do to improve election integrity on the front end, if you want to steal an election, the real action is on the back end of the process. For us citizens the even bigger struggle is, as Mr. Hall notes:

A fraud-free, error-free, tamper-proof election system is something America’s political class just doesn’t want us to have.

Source: American Thinker – Election Integrity in Kansas and Beyond