We live in a society where personal identification has become a normal and widely accepted part of everyday life. To board an airplane, open a bank account, pick up a package at the post office, purchase certain products, or access countless services, presenting an ID is routinely required. Such a requirement is not generally seen as an affront to individual freedom, but rather as a basic practice of administrative organization and a guarantee of security.
Given this reality, it is difficult to understand why the simple act of presenting identification at the time of voting generates such strong opposition in certain sectors of political life in the United States. Voting is one of the fundamental pillars of democratic life. Therefore, it would seem natural for the electoral system to seek, with the greatest possible clarity and transparency, to ensure that each vote effectively corresponds to a legitimate and properly identified voter.
Defending voter identity verification should not be interpreted as a restriction on the right to vote, but rather as a safeguard of the integrity of the electoral process itself.
The principle behind it is simple and easy to understand. If identification is considered necessary for numerous everyday activities of far lesser civic importance, it becomes all the more reasonable when it comes to participating in the selection of a nation’s leaders.
It is precisely for this reason that systematic opposition to this practice raises understandable perplexity. Those who reject identification requirements rarely manage to provide an explanation that withstands even the most basic test of common sense.
Their arguments often shift toward abstract hypotheses or purely conjectural scenarios that bear little resemblance to the concrete reality of contemporary administrative life.
In a properly organized state, civic rights naturally coexist with basic administrative rules designed to ensure their correct application. Identity verification is neither a radical innovation nor an extraordinary measure. It is simply a matter of applying to the electoral process the same principle of responsibility and verification that is already established in almost every other domain of public life.
Ultimately, the issue should not be viewed as an ideological dispute, but rather as a matter of institutional consistency. When a society requires identification for nearly all relevant activities of public life, refusing that same verification at the moment of voting does not merely seem contradictory. Above all, it appears to lack an explanation that truly satisfies even the most elementary standard of common sense.
César DePaço
Entrepreneur and Philanthropist
Honorary Consul of Portugal (2014–2020)
Founder and CEO, Summit Nutritionals International Inc.®
Founder and Chairman of the Board, DePaço Foundation
Unwavering advocate of Law Enforcement and Conservative Principles