Government 5, G-5, but I have of course excluded the voter information card as being one of the pieces of ID for two reasons. One, it's primarily valuable for address anyway and even if we had won the earlier vote, this exclusion would still have made sense. At the same time it now is necessary, because we're not restoring the voter information card.
The reason I would ask the government to consider this is that it still involves.... This will link up with the same punitive provision as the government's oath. It's the same in that swearing an oath can still be punished, but it's much cleaner than vouching and it almost certainly will enfranchise a lot more people and, boy, will it help at the polling stations because you're not having double, two people having each to sign things. You're not having all of the more cumbersome side of that, and people who cannot find another person to vouch in their polling division—and keep in mind it has to be in your polling division which narrows the range a bit—can simply swear the declaration. It goes into the record and it can be tracked down and if in any sense you misrepresent yourself, you're subject to the same penalties as would be the case under the partial vouching or vouching by address that the government just added.
Frankly, I don't want to say anything more. I just think that this is very similar to what exists in some other jurisdictions. Again, it goes back to a degree of trust in the voter who has to swear to their address, subject to penalties, and if it turns out that an audit is done and it's found that they mis-swore an oath, they could be prosecuted.
I'd be open to any amendments that would add anything along the lines of the person must be told that audits are done on these declarations and that they do risk actually being prosecuted. I'll leave it at that.