To the editor:
Do you think that 2021 Republican restrictions on voting in Iowa that make it harder for senior citizens and the disabled to vote are necessary?
Or that only those who can make it to the polls on election day be allowed to vote?
Or should we go back to the founding of our country where only landowners could vote, when women and blacks were not allowed to vote?
Married women in 1776 could not own property, sign contracts or bring legal suits, and their wages, if they earned any, legally went to their husbands. (Single women had a few more rights.) No woman could vote or hold political office.
Voting was initially limited to property-owning males because educated white men of the time believed that voting was best left to wealthy, white, property-owning males, whom they assumed would make wiser choices.
The United States has progressively widened the power to every citizen. Do we really need to regress?
Julie Stewart
Waukee
Election Day should be a national holiday. National standards for early voting, mail-in, and online voting should be established by law. Voting should be easy for everyone. When you vote, you should receive a standardized printed receipt. We do it with ATMs and stores every day. There’s no excuse to not provide a receipt when voting.
The voting receipt should contain a secure, two-way verified code that can be entered online that presents the entire ballot, what your choices were, the date and time your votes were counted, and how all of the votes were cast and divided up among the electorate.
Again, we use ATMs every day, and there’s no occasional panic to do an emergency audit.
This is a solved problem many times over, and confidence in these systems is well established. Voting should be no different.
In these modern times, we should have a dependable, secure, standardized, and accessible voting systems. Anything less is an attempt to subvert the will of the people.