Weirdness at the Department of Motor Vehicles

Only in a bureaucracy could this happen...and when it happens in a democratic country, it's time for a vote to dismantle the bureaucracy...

Every few years Americans traditionally renewed our drivers' licenses. Through most of the twentieth century, the focus of this exercise was on updating the pictures of our faces, which typically look different after five or ten years have passed. My last mugshot was extremely, and deliberately, unflattering; my weight hasn't changed since it was taken but the few people who've seen it have always exclaimed that I must've lost a lot of weight. There is a consensus that the mugshot before last still looks more like me than the last one does. I was willing to give the D.M.V. a chance to take a more realistic-looking picture.

This year, though, blaming the coronavirus, the letter from the D.M.V. said they weren't renewing pictures, and were asking people just to indicate whether the basic information on the license had changed, stick a money order into an envelope, and mail it to them. (Or, if they were anti-American enough and stupid enough, type the information into scannable, hackable, spyware-infested electronic devices which, if linked to "our secure web site," would compromise the security of that web site--on the presumption that most evildoers would at least find it easier to steal identity information off the fools' cell phones than to steal it off the D.M.V. database.)

The amount of the money order was not exactly made clear in the letter. Apparently there were at least four different possibilities and, each time I read the letter, it sounded as if a different one was applicable. I called the one phone number that had been set up for all D.M.V. questions for the entire state. Not surprisingly, I didn't get any information there. I finally looked up the information online, although of course the information the D.M.V. uses must never, never, never be transferred, no matter how secure they think their web site is, through the Internet outside the D.M.V. site, where it is not secure. That the D.M.V. web site is set up to encourage people to type that information into their own computers--or even their "smartphones," spare us all--is a crime that ought to get several idiots in the D.M.V. banned from employment in any job where they might have access to a computer, for the rest of their lives. Anyway, the web site mentioned only the cheapest of the four different fees the letter had mentioned. I liked that answer and decided to send them the amount the web site mentioned.

Well, first I waited through the quarantine thing. Then I waited to convince an older relative that I was disease-free enough to do an odd job to earn the money. Then that person had to do the quarantine thing. Then I waited to borrow the money from someone who was feeling poor and grumpy, which is probably a symptom. This person uttered fighting words, in the presence of a person of Irish descent who was worried about a sick relative, and instead of snapping back I just sat there thinking "Oh mercy, this person is older than the one I was supposed to have been working for this weekend, and probably this one ought to be doing the quarantine thing." I am getting older but that's still something in the snow-on-the-fourth-of-July category that nobody should plan on ever seeing again. But I finally got the cash, in time to mail it in before the end of the month, so this morning I tucked the cash into the envelope and headed out to the post office.

The post office occupies one half of one block in my town, and the D.M.V. occupies the other half. People who are new in town often park on the D.M.V. side when they are going to the post office.

So on the way into town I was offered a lift, and we got to talking about where we were going, and without even thinking about it the driver pulled up in front of the D.M.V. I got out and started to walk across the parking lot to the post office.

But wait! What was going on? The D.M.V. was not closed. A person who was going in said "Do you have an appointment?" I didn't. "I don't either," the person said.

Well. Why would anybody spend five dollars to buy a money order and send it by certified first class mail when they could just open a door and hand the contents of the mail around the door?!

I opened the door and showed the envelope to an employee...and the employee said, with genuine fear, as person held the form and the amount of money requested in cash, "I'm not allowed to process the payment while you're here! I have to set up an appointment! You have to use the web site or the one phone line for the entire state to set up an appointment!"

We the people of these United States need to take a stand. Government employees have to respect the valuable time of the taxpayers on whom they depend for the food they eat. Any time anyone who is being paid out of our tax money dares to suggest that we call someone else, go somewhere else, or come back another day, as distinct from saying "Please may I go and do that right now, just to make sure that this is done correctly today so that I won't be asked to interrupt your valuable time to correct any mistakes I might make," there needs to be some major adjustment in that government office. We are the employers. Government officials are the employees. We need to stop paying them for presuming that, if granted an audience with us on one day, they can expect to take up any more of our time in their current lifetime. It needs to become automatic:

IF A GOVERNMENT OFFICE NEEDS ANYTHING FROM US THAT CAN'T BE TAKEN CARE OF IN ONE DAY, IT MUST REFUND OUR TAXES, OR IF NECESSARY SIMPLY DEFUND ITS OWN BUDGET, TO MAKE SURE THAT WE RECEIVE US$100 FOR EVERY ADDITIONAL DAY THAT OFFICE'S FUNCTIONS OCCUPY OUR TIME.

We need a law to that effect. Low-level government officials tend to seek a sort of emotional relief from the stress of dealing with their co-workers by hiding in uselessness and demanding that the taxpayers use up more time to talk to other people. Very well, let them have it, if they have been trained properly: Any suggestion that a taxpayer who has already taken the time to talk to them might spare even more time to talk to anyone else begins with the payment of a fine from the employee to the taxpayer, on the spot, in cash. First the $100 bill, then the whine about something needing to be done using any other minute than the one in which the employee is speaking.

The thing every government employee should be trained to fear most is that a taxpayer might, Heaven forbid and fend, make another phone call or go to another office or even think about whatever transaction is taking place, today, after today...the obligatory result of which will be that the first government employee is fined and, in normal circumstances, fired! I think that may be the most valuable reform that can be made in the direction of making our government more cost-effective. It would eliminate unproductive employees from government offices without even using up pink paper, much less requiring supervisors to make studies of which employees most need to be dismissed.

Only legislation will have this effect, though. Several people have already documented what happens when an honest, ethical person takes a job in an office infested with time-wasters and pledges not to waste the taxpayers' time. What happens is that the time-wasters actively hate that person and show their hate by becoming even more useless than they have been, until, since the system makes it hard for all the time-wasters to be thrown out of the office, the head of the office caves in and gets rid of the efficient worker because that person "was not good for morale."

The appointment system has advantages--for years the D.M.V. was chronically full of impatient people, all breathing one another's germs and building up hostility--and I didn't want to discourage that. In order to avoid wasting taxpayers' time government offices must, however, correct the appointment systems they've been trying to set up by keeping all identifying information about people out of electronic devices. Instead of collecting people's names, the appointment setter should give each taxpayer a password, which can be printed off a computer, written down after a telephone call, or mailed out with requests for forms and fees. "You may use the D.M.V.'s 'secure' computers to set up an appointment," I said, "but the real name of any living person is just too valuable to the enemies of this country ever to be transferred through the Internet. That won't happen."

I was considering my alternatives here. Virginia being a relatively literate and affluent State, we do not have the problems some inland States are reporting with people having drivers' licenses, voter registration cards, and similar identifying documents. Many people keep such things in their cars or in their trench coat pockets. This made it much easier for those who wanted photographic identification for each voter to get legislation to that effect, which reportedly some States still don't have. Virginians are typically proud of our identities--dangerously so, in this Information Age--and happy to whip out proof that we are the Tracy Lee Doe of "Doe Hill" every time we drive a car, use a bank or bank document or credit card, fill a prescription, sign a contract, take a class, or vote. I've had neighbors who wanted to offer me a lift show me their drivers' licenses just so they would feel Properly Introduced. And even though I've also had drivers' licenses printed out with incorrect information on them, so I know that drivers' licenses are not actually proof that someone's not an enemy spy, and think respect for privacy should outweigh concern about illegal voting...in real life I'm as proud of my identity as anyone else is.

But, as a mature, stable, frugal adult, do I actually need a current driver's license? I don't drive, except in emergencies. I seldom pay other people to handle money for me, and when I do it's the post office, which handles cash and therefore has a system as secure and reliable as cash; I don't need proof of identity for banking purposes. I don't travel and don't plan to sign any contracts to pay anything over time. I'll be greatly surprised if the Ponzi scheme known as Social Security still exists when I'm seventy; I certainly don't expect to depend on the small share of a small income I've paid into it. I don't use prescription drugs. I've been looking forward to taking some of the classes many colleges offer free or cheap to older people, but I have lived all these years without the benefit of those courses. I used routinely to fill out I-9 forms on jobs, but the corporations that use those forms don't hire people over age 50. Although I receive mail through a post office box, some companies insist on adding names and home addresses to their correspondence, so if I ever needed to prove it, as it might be for claiming  a share of whatever may remain of the McFilthy oil money, I could still prove that I am the Whoever of Wherever I am in real life. All I'd have any real trouble doing, without official state identification, would be voting. I think voting is a valuable civil right everyone should exercise, but plenty of people don't vote, and they seem to lead reasonably satisfactory lives in their lazy, irresponsible, public-spirit-challenged way.

I could be sufficiently provoked just to stop paying the D.M.V. a few dollars every few years. Anyone looking at the last picture they snapped of me would probably agree that that picture, alone, was sufficient provocation to withhold money from them forevermore. I do think it's everyone's public duty to oppose the pernicious idea of using individual identity rather than cash to pay for things, which puts any country where people are stupid enough to do it one step away from The Handmaid's Tale, and the case might be made that just having a state-issued identification document is supporting that very, very bad idea.

Anyway, the employee near the door went into a back office and get a superordinate employee to set up an appointment using the D.M.V.'s very own computer. Seeing three people who could stand witness enter the office, I made sure those people could see that the envelope the employee took contained the form, and the cash, the employee needed to process right then and there.

In literally less than two minutes, out popped the superordinate employee. This was a young woman whose long black hair and drapey black veil made an especially effective combination. If she were found to be the source of the idiocy operating at the D.M.V. this morning, she could probably earn a fair living, whether she has any sense of rhythm or not, just showing up at parties impersonating an Arab dancer. Or a native of several other countries that have recently been at war with ours. Not that people like her and me are necessarily always going to be at higher risk than people with paler hair or darker skin or folded eyelids, but currently, though the young woman might not have travelled enough to realize it, our identities happen to be especially valuable to evildoers.

Had she simply filed the form and the money? She had not. She had brought back an official printed form authorizing the bearer to bring the same form and the same money back in October.

I might have made that up in science fiction (I think there was something like it in a movie called Brazil) but I was surprised to see it, in real life, in a country that's still classified as a democracy. I had to wonder whether, in an election year, in a State that's legislated that drivers' licenses be used to identify voters, someone was hoping to discourage as many people as possible from voting.

Anyone up for election this November needs to stop pouring money into silly, low-content campaign advertisements and break out a serious plan for restoring common sense to the D.M.V. Which should include making it impossible for the identity information the D.M.V. has traditionally been allowed to store, in filing cabinets, to be transferred to the D.M.V. via the Internet. Instead of trying to encourage people to type D.M.V. information into computers and transmit it electronically, the new D.M.V. must begin with a recognition that computers with modems are not secure and never will be...so, rather than encouraging people recklessly to link their computers to "our secure web site" and hand their driver's license data directly to evildoers, the D.M.V. should stick to the traditional system whereby people fill out paper forms at the local D.M.V. office and hand them directly to employees. The web site could be used to process requests for exemptions, which could allow D.M.V. employees to visit locations where they could fill out paper forms on behalf of people with disabilities.

Useless Solutions versus Useful Solutions: The Long Overdue Sequel

Following up on this post, finally...

http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/11/lame-explanations-useless-solutions.html

The correspondent's e-mailed reply to that post was that the correspondent was currently dealing with a much less sophisticated type of identity thief, more like cookie-stealing children than like professional burglars. What that kind of thief would do to steal someone's identity, the correspondent wrote, would be to set up an e-mail account for some name like "Priscila" instead of "Priscilla" and post plagiarisms or other garbage at a pay-per-post site under this variant form of my name, or the name of whomever else they might choose to harass in this way. Asking for documentation of the person's real-world identity might make things a little harder for these really lazy, really clueless thieves.

Mmm...maybe. It might even push them to take one step further into criminality. Using keys instead of a big clunky crank to start a car did, at one time, discourage car theft (and also make it easier for more people to drive cars). That helped for a short time, until people who wanted to steal cars learned about (a) hot-wiring and (b) stealing keys. Today we just take it for granted that if you don't want your car and your keys to be stolen, generally a good way to make that less likely is not to let every single person you know hold on to them. In the case of car keys, specifically, adding that extra step did serve other useful purposes, but nobody now imagines that the existence of car keys is going to prevent car theft.

One very good way to discourage a lot of the thieves in this world is just not to have the kind of things they want to steal. I'm a poor and obscure old lady; that makes my identity useless to the majority of real-world thieves. I have no credit cards, no car, no television set; that forces a large percentage of real-world thieves to find another target. Nevertheless...we do live in a world in which people have broken into churches to steal boxes of Bibles.

I keep harping on this topic, at this web site, because--poor and obscure though I am--my real-world identity is still a commodity that relatively honest people have in fact offered to buy. Why? Because I'm a citizen of the United States. That is all it takes to make your identity a hot item in international criminal circles, Gentle Readers, and if you also happen to be the basic human color it makes your identity especially valuable to ISIS. (And if you happen to be Canadian, in some criminal circles that might be even better. It depends on the target for criminal activity. In some places Canadian citizens may be more trusted than U.S. citizens.)

Be extremely careful about mailing out any clue to your real-world identity, anything that would give anyone fewer than several hundred guesses about who you really are, fellow North Americans.

(Disclaimer: I've not read this relatively new book yet and don't know to what extent I agree with it...I do, however, trust Glenn Beck's research team to document whatever they allow GB to use in his books, so I'd guess that this is a good book so far as it goes. I'll admit that it's not the perfect Amazon link for this post, because ISIS are by no means the only international criminals Out There. I'll also admit that I am not, and don't particularly want to become, well enough informed about international criminal activity to know what the perfect book link for this post might be...if there is one.)



So how are editors of writing sites, content farms, and'zines supposed to screen out the garbage? Bad news for those who want to get rich quick...if you're offering worthwhile, edited content, there is no substitute for actually, like, editing what you buy. Even for spelling. Computers are never going to know whether a title like "Meditation To" is correctly typed, because computers can't tell whether it's meant to inform readers that "this is a meditation on a Cosmic Mystery for which I don't want to choose a name," or "this is Meditation #2 that follows Meditation #1," or "in a discussion of stretching, massage, deep breathing, and other pain control techniques, this is the part about meditation helping too." Nor will computers know to what extent an informative article about a seven-step process has been hastily "spun off" an older article about the same process, or independently written drawing on new research. You have to know those things. That is what qualifies you to be an editor.

Do the work. Learn the English language. Read the classics of English literature so that you know where recently written pieces fit in. There is not and will never be an easy alternative.

If you're promising people substantial nonfiction content that does more than vaguely remind readers about a product you're selling, study the field in which you're publishing. If you want to offer worthwhile content about vitamin supplements or motorcycles or custom-quilted slipcovers, there is not and will never be an easy alternative to learning what those products do, and how, and which ones perform best in which conditions.

If you're just a young entrepreneur who wants to offer content all around the big round world (which is what my correspondent appeared to be), and English is not your first or second language and you're past your peak language-learning years, and you can't even imagine how much time, money, or effort it would take to become qualified to edit all the different types of content you want to publish...traditional publishers never had to learn all the languages or study all the fields of knowledge Out There, no. What they had to do was hire people who were qualified to edit everything they wanted to publish.

If that's still sort of overwhelming...it's sort of overwhelming to me, too, and I am pretty well informed about the English language and the literature that's been published in it. What can I say? Take it slowly. Start where you are, and build from there.

There is no substitute for actually doing what you want to get paid for doing.

Lame Explanations, Useless "Solutions"...

Here's part of an e-mail conversation with a European site that advertised for writers at Problogger:

"
[The site manager wrote]:
Okay I will remove your account from the platform then. We have no
official purpose for documents, we just have to do this to prevent
banned users from coming back, and that's quite a few I can tell you.
Thanks for understanding.

On 17-11-2016 4:08, Priscilla King wrote:

> All personal information, such as real-world names and images, is sensitive to abuse. "Priscilla King" is a U.S.-based, IRS-registered business owned by a native American citizen. The easiest way to verify that this business has existed since 2006 is to read things posted at https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/ and elsewhere. Information about the owner of the business/brand "Priscilla King" can be transmitted by real-world mail upon receipt of a confirmed contract to work with your organization. It would not be cost-effective to mail out the information without such a contract, especially as copies of such information sent outside the U.S. would need to be filed with the U.S. government. In fact, due to the confirmed market value of the identity of the writer known as Priscilla King, you need to send an international SASE with the legal name of the owner of your business to the mailing address displayed at priscillaking.blogspot.com.

"

Now, how stupid can this line of thinking get? Identity documents, whether transmitted by real mail or e-mail, don't prevent banned users from coming back. Duh. You banned these users because they were unethical, so you know they're going to steal some documents. Are you going out to their workspace to confirm that their face looks like the face on the driver's license they copied for you? No, you're going to sit there and accept the plagiarism or slander or whatever, for which you banned some 19-year-old writer, now being done by some 50-year-old "writer" who, upon investigation, turns out to be the 19-year-old's computer-illiterate uncle.

Here's what you do if you want to find legitimate writers online: investigate the quality of the work done under the brands we've taken some time and trouble to build. Priscilla King (this one, anyway) is a brand who "lives" in cyberspace, but from the day one I've been as careful of "her" standards as I am of my own in real life. Every word I've posted has been either my own, or a legitimate and properly credited quote. Every picture I've posted has been either my own, a friend's, a free photo site's, or a properly credited link. Every idea I've uttered or endorsed has been one I sincerely believed to be true at the time; if I've been convinced that I was in error, I've fixed the error; if it went beyond a simple error of fact, I've posted at length about how and why my opinion changed. You can't confirm that by looking at a picture of my face. You can confirm it by reading my web site, and only by reading my web site. One reason why I'm such the total "paranoid" privacy fanatic is that I've invested a lot in my brand.

I'm well prepared to believe that this web site manager is trying to keep out some of the plagiarists and scammers who pulled down some other minimally edited writing sites, in the past, notoriously including Bubblews. I know it's very bad for a writing site when people just copy and paste a computer-translated article from Forbes in such haste they don't even check how much of a table pasted into "their" post, which is something I personally saw a would-be e-friend do at Bubblews. But peeking at copies of drivers' licenses is so not the way to keep those people from coming back to ruin your reputation. It's a way to help those people ruin the honest writers' reputations.

And if you're not intelligent enough to see that coming, frankly, you're probably not qualified to be an editor or publisher of mine. I am sorry about this, but #BlueLivesMatter and you really ought to make a few friends in the law enforcement community, or at least read the occasional detective novel.

Virginia Requires Voters to Show Photo ID

Governor McDonnell has signed the bill requiring anyone voting in Virginia to show a photo ID.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/26/virginia-is-now-officially-a-voter-id-state/

How bad is this, given that most voters are already required to show photo ID in order to drive cars, get jobs, go to school, and in some cases even move around their school or office, and given that the bill provides for a waiver of the nominal cost of renewing a driver's license if a voter is all that destitute? Er. Um. I don't see the violation of human rights that some Democrats claim is embedded in this new law.

On the other hand, I don't see the improvement in the security of the vote that some Republicans have tried to claim, either. This web site has already discussed how cheap and easy it is to get a misleading photo ID...even when you want an accurate one. If Patrick Moran wants to impersonate a bunch of deceased Democrats, he can probably still do that, and in places like Fairfax and Alexandria he could probably buy a wig and a dress and include some deceased African-American female Democrats. People would think, "Somebody called Lulubelle Marie Smith looks like that? Well, it says she's 97 years old...bless her heart, I guess she's just glad she can still walk around." Because in the kind of mob scene found in urban DMV's and polling areas, people who don't know each other very well are not inclined to take time to get acquainted.

But even if Patrick Moran votes in the name of the late Lulubelle Smith and Ms. Smith's great-nephew sees him and says, "That's funny, I thought Great-Aunt Lulubelle was dead," I'm not convinced that that matters, as long as elections are being conducted without paper ballots. Electronic votes counted overseas are likely to be counted the way foreign interests want them to be counted. If there's not a pile of recyclable paper ballots sitting in an office, we can count on seeing the candidates who most appeal to certain foreign interests win every election, year after year, no matter how unpopular those candidates may be in every actual neighborhood you visit.

Delegate Rob Bell has succeeded in getting identified with the right side of a controversy, but has he succeeded in taking a step toward more accurate election results? This web site doubts that.

If anything, tying electronic voting to voter ID could be a step toward eroding the secrecy of the ballot, empowering the nastier sort of foreign interests to arrange for those who consistently vote for U.S. interests to suffer all sorts of mishaps, losses, and "accidents"...unless, of course, we smarten up and demand paper ballots.

Hacker Update?

Maybe the person who hacked into my Yahoo account is a fan?

This message from Rand Paul was in my in-box today:

"Dear Priscilla,

Thank you for your donation to the Stand with Rand Money Bomb.

Your contribution means the world to me.

It's great to know that we stand together in defense of the Constitution.

Thanks to your support, we sent a loud-and-clear message to Washington that we will not sit idly by while our God-given rights are stripped away.

As promised, here is the link to my CPAC speech, so you can see the message you helped send. "

If I had e-money to spare, this would be a welcome response to a gift of, as discussed last week, $90. But I do not have e-money to spare. I did not donate money to the Money Bomb. My e-mail was hacked into by someone in, according to the computer, Turkey. Is it possible that someone in Turkey hacked into my e-mail for the purpose of supporting Rand Paul?

If so, much as I like Senator Paul, I have to condemn the person(s) in Turkey. This is not the way the game is played. You have to play by the rules to win. Cheaters aren't wanted on this team.

If you are not a U.S. voter and want to show support for Rand Paul, you can buy his new book, Government Bullies, new from the publisher. If you want to show support for Rand Paul and me, you can buy copies of his first book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington, as Fair Trade Books; they'll cost $5 + $5 for shipping in North America, more elsewhere, discount on shipping multiple books to the same address. And I'll accept any contributions any cat lovers want to make to the Cat Sanctuary.

But you do not have my permission to impersonate me...even in order to send money to Rand Paul. I don't think the Senator would like that. I certainly don't.

If foreign interests are impersonating me in order to participate illegally in U.S. politics, that's a crime, and I'm not willing to be an accomplice. Attention Google and Yahoo, attention all foreign readers, attention all readers in the U.S. government. I've been hacked, and I want to be monitored. I am not planning to travel widely in the next three months. If I go online from anywhere other than the southwestern point of Virginia or the northeastern corner of Tennessee, I'll announce that here. If any Yahoo or Paypal activity in my name can be traced to a computer in any other part of the world, that constitutes identity theft and I will so testify in court.

And remember, Grandma Bonnie Peters has been hacked too...she is both older and, at the moment, busier than I am, but I'm sure she would testify against the hackers also.

Hacker Finds Pris

Fair disclosure to everyone who communicates with me via my personal Yahoo account: It looks as if the same person(s) who hacked into Grandma Bonnie Peters' account last winter may have found their way into mine.

Since, so far as I know, we all know to use e-mail only to bring publicly available information to each other's attention, this is probably more of a nuisance than a disaster. However, youall may want to save any strange e-mails from me that you may have received, and share these e-mails with Yahoo to help them track down the hacker.

Here's what's happened so far: Earlier this morning, "at 6 p.m. EET," Yahoo sent an automatic e-mail reporting that someone hacked into my e-mail from Turkey. I also received a link sent to me and a batch of e-friends. I didn't click on the link, but it looks like a commercial link.

Gentle Readers, I think you know I wouldn't send you commercial links by e-mail. If paid to promote someone's business, I'd put the link in an advertorial post right here.

The hacker also tried connecting my account with services I don't use, including Facebook and Flickr, and also (ooohhh, this is so annoying) "updated" the account to icky, ugly, inefficient, and apparently more vulnerable Yahoo Neo. I've demanded Yahoo Classic back, but meanwhile Yahoo is telling everybody that they're receiving a high volume of this kind of complaints at this time.

It can happen to any of us, Gentle Readers. Please make sure that any information you e-mail is public information. No links to a bank account (unless you have a special Paypal account with no more than ten dollars in it). No real addresses for private homes. No real names. No family pictures. And if you want only the person to whom you're writing to be in on your business plans, send them by real mail only.

SB 1256: Voter Photo Identification

Virginia Senate Bill 1256...what can I say?

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?131+ful+SB1256ES1

This bill barely squeaked through the State Senate, 20-20, then cleared the House by a 65-34 plurality. Why this one, and not one of the simpler ones that merely asked voters to show photo ID? Apparently the left wing's objections to asking voters to show state ID cards, which have been available for years, were that this proposal was too cheap and simple. Why require people to use a system that's been working, after its fashion, for years when you can set up yet another board of appointed officials to oversee that system and find yet another excuse to raise taxes?

Several correspondents still seem to think that state photo IDs are a necessary adjunct to state voter registration cards, and they may be pleased by SB 1256. This web site maintains that it's dead easy to get a state photo ID with incorrect information on it, without even trying, and anyone motivated to try could easily get half a dozen photo IDs in different names by visiting different crowded urban DMV offices on different days. This web site maintains, further, that the secret to preventing election fraud is not photo IDs but paper ballots. The position of this web site is that SB 1256 may make some people feel more inclined to trust reported election results, but it won't make election results more accurate. And, unlike its simpler counterparts in the House, SB 1256 will cost the state money.

HB 1337 Update: Loud Dispute in Place of ID?

Virginia House Bill 1337 has been through some interesting ups and downs since its proposal by Delegates Rob Bell and Mark Cole, such that its current version is now claimed by Delegate Surovell:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?131+ful+HB1337H2

I liked it better in its original form. I still see nothing in there about protecting the privacy of voters' identity information, which is what I see as the serious concern. Instead there's a long set of instructions for making the polls noisier places by having people shout out "challenges" and counter-claims...and more noise, of course, makes it harder for people to focus on what they're supposed to be doing at the polls, and easier for urban fraudsters to get away with what they should not be doing.

If there's a legitimate concern about opening the voting process to blind people (who should vote) or illiterate people (who probably shouldn't vote), there could have been something about having someone prepared to lead those people quietly aside...

HJ 611: Preserving Secrecy of the Ballot

Virginia House Joint Resolution 611 will, if enacted, officially protect the right to vote by secret ballot:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?131+ful+HJ611

I wish it specifically addressed the fact that anything transmitted via the Internet is not secret, but this is long overdue.

Did President Obama Commit Identity Fraud?

We all know that President Obama, like many security-conscious people including me, used a deceased relative's Social Security number as a "nine-digit pass code" on a utility account. Since utility companies don't need to know anybody's Social Security number there's nothing wrong with that, and it's not fraud--you can tell utility companies up front that what you're willing to let them use is some other set of nine digits that you'll remember. But an anonymous blogger at Minute Men News reports that our President has, in the past, used fraudulent Social Security numbers on tax returns and a draft card...

http://minutemennews.com/2013/01/petition2congress-investigate-barack-obamas-use-of-forged-ssn/

The Minute Men had better be sure this one's true. This story is too serious to publish if they can't prove their facts.