One of my college roommates lives in the District of Columbia, in a condominium about fifteen minutes from our house. He also has a summer house in Nova Scotia, and generally goes there for about four months a year. This summer, he asked me to do him a favor and drop by his condo every two weeks to bring mail upstairs and water his plants. I did.

This was not a very difficult assignment, and became rather routine. I didn’t notice anything astounding in his mail (I was surprised that he didn’t get any misdirected mail; we do all the time). One item that came to him sometime in September was the absentee ballot that all registered DC voters receive without asking.

I looked at the ballot envelope and said to myself: “You know, I could simply fill out this ballot, sign his name to the back, and mail it in. Who would ever know?” The system seemed very vulnerable that day.

You may remember when Republican Maryland Congressman Andy Harris suggested that, in that the hurricane damage in North Carolina might affect the ability of residents to get to the polls, that an assumption be made that the majority of those voting in western North Carolina would vote Republican and that the state’s Electoral College vote be approved by the State Legislature on that assumption.

This proposal led to much outrage (and in fact, it seems based on mailed in ballots that western North Carolina’s total vote number is not going to be affected by the hurricane), and was presumably quickly shelved. But then I thought about Jimmy Carter. Carter, now 100, from everything that I have read, is not thinking the way he did when he was, say, 90. So my question is (and I don’t know the answer): is Jimmy Carter mentally competent enough to know or express that he wanted to vote for Kamala Harris? Let’s say, for a moment, that he can’t, or that he is not able to put an X in the box or sign his name.

Jimmy Carter, reports say, voted for Kamala Harris using a mail in ballot. But did he fill in the ballot? Did he sign his name? Or was the ballot handled by one of his relatives or caretakers? Is it any different that it would have been if I had decided to fill out, sign and mail in my roommate’s ballot? How secure really is our system?

The Republicans are probably going to contest certain aspects of the election process if Harris is declared the next president. They have already said as much, and telegraphed even more. And the Democrats, for good reason, belittle their suspicions or their nefarious intentions. But in fact, how secure is our system?

We had supper last night with friends, one of whom is a Montgomery County MD election judge. His volunteer job, as I understand it, is to be convinced that the voting that has taken place at his assigned precinct has been properly performed, and then to take the results on some sort of flash drive and, with another judge, take the flash drive to a location in Gaithersburg, where all Montgomery County precinct flash drives are collected and from where the vote reporting process moves forward.

He didn’t get a lot of training for this job, and he doesn’t think he was ever really vetted. So what would happen if he decided not to take the flash to the Gaithersburg center? Or if he had an accident on the way? And so forth. The system is not perfect, that’s for sure.

So there are potential flaws in mail voting, and with in person voting. Mail voting seems the least secure, since anyone can sign and send a ballot. It is surprising that there are as few problems as there are. But even in person voting can be problematic.

We haven’t yet talked about the problem of identifying eligible voters at the polls, and this certainly is another matter of controversy. Precincts only know if you are a citizen because you say (under penalty of perjury) that you are, for example. And this has become a matter of increasing controversy.

And, since the demise of the Voting Rights Act, many states have been trying to limit voting by the opposition. Or, to put it another way, Republican states try to make it as hard as they can for presumed Democratic voters to get to the polls.

It seems to me that we now have the techniques to avoid most of these questions. All we need is a national ID card, with built in technology, to identify a voter. Why don’t we use these techniques? Why are there stated arguments from the “left” that such national ID cards would unconstitutionally limit privacy rights, and from the “right” unstated arguments that such national ID cards would increase Democratic voters? Why do both say that the question of qualification for voting (for federal as well as state and local elections) is a matter of state law, rather than federal law? (As to the last question, you can point to the Constitution; this is one of the many constitutional elements that could be amended, updated and improved)

We already have a number of ID cards. We have passports, we have driver licenses, we have Medicare cards, we have Social Security cards, we have Selective Service cards. Why not combine all of these into one type of ID card, distributed at birth or naturalization, updated every 5 or 10 years, with built in biometrics and photographs? Over 100 countries do have compulsory national ID cards, and many others have non-mandatory cards which serves as an ID card for voting for those who have it. We could end most of our eligibility questions if we only had national ID cards.

While ID cards would help, and while voting by mail or by drop box clearly has its potential weaknesses, the number of problematic votes historically has been very limited, and our system is apparently about as accurate as a human-created system can be. And we see that most of the questions that are raised are partisan questions, raised generally by right wing Republican groups, or maybe foreign based groups, looking to create chaos in our voting. This of course raises a different range of questions.