The Universal Right to Vote by Mail Act of 2007 (H.R. 281) recently passed the House Committee on House Administration. It would amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require states to allow eligible voters to request a mail-in ballot for all federal elections without having to provide a reason.

In a TechKnowledge piece called “Voter ID: A Tempest in a Teapot that Could Burn Us All,” I shared some thoughts that are relevant to this bill:

Increasing voter participation has been a policy fetish for the last decade or two-never mind whether more voting for its own sake makes a better democracy.… The growth in absentee balloting has undone some of the protections against voter impersonation and multiple voting that previously existed. People are much more reticent to commit fraud in person — it’s riskier — so in-person voting was a natural security against impersonation fraud. Voting in multiple jurisdictions is simply too time-consuming to do on any scale when it has to be done in person.

The bill would require states to verify signatures on absentee ballots by cross-checking them with voters’ signatures on the official list of registered voters, but this only begins to shore up the security hole opened by mass absentee balloting.

The people who want this bill undoubtedly believe it will improve both the political discourse and their electoral prospects. Folks on the other side — the proponents of identification requirements for voting — will only be energized by these efforts, which lower the bar for both legitimate voting and for voter fraud.

Both sides should just drop this food-fight-to-the-death and work on substantive policies that they believe will win voters to their sides. Hopefully, those policies are centered on limited government, free markets, and peace.