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Comment by travmatt | Hacker News Reader

The upcoming fight over redistributing is likely to decide our country for the next ten years.

On one hand, republicans have waged a legal campaign against the voting rights act, drafted various pieces of legislation aimed at disenfranchising minorities and college students, and chosen for their attorney general a prosecutor who viewed mintority voter registration a felonious offense. This isn't mentioning a president who has not wavered from the view that the 3 million vote margin he lost the popular vote by is the byproduct of fraud.

On the other hand, you have a former president and possibly the most popular/powerful politician in America signal this will be his primary focus, an opposition party looking to expand use of the efficiency gap metric as a tool for enforcing fairness, and possibly a justice system willing to step embrace these concepts (the wisc. decision). Not to mention a motivated and very angry base.

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> waged a legal campaign against the voting rights act, drafted various pieces of legislation aimed at disenfranchising minorities and college students

Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs.

The thing is in the US we lack a mandatory national or even state id. We use a driver's license which is effectively mandatory in rural parts of the country because otherwise you can't get anywhere. However if you are poor and live in a city the odds that you don't have a driver's license go way up. It turns out that their is no ID the government forces you to have. Clever politicians realize that they don't need to prevent everyone who disagrees with them from voting just preventing 2-3% is likely enough in many races.

The idea of voter ID is effective because of what you just said it sounds so reasonable, until you look at the motivation that it disproportionately results in poor people not being able to vote.

> The idea of voter ID is effective because of what you just said it sounds so reasonable..

This goes for more than just voter ID. Politicians will say things that "sound reasonable" or "are common sense" on the surface, but the motives and fact once you get into the details tell a much different story.

Would you support voter ID if it came bundled with a low friction, easy to obtain voter ID card?

Not the parent commenter, but I personally would support this if the ID card was mandatory and free to any resident citizen. If it was issued by states, the federal government would need to require all states to comply.

The REAL ID act was supposed to be a step toward this, but has been continually delayed as far as I know.

What problem do we have that a voter ID would solve?

Is that a rhetorical question? The reason given for requiring voter IDs (while possibly not the primary one) is to prevent voter fraud. Are you asking if there has every been a case of voter fraud? If so, here is one example [1].

[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/oagnews/release.php?id=...

I think the above poster is implying that voter fraud is so infrequent as to not be a problem.

I also note that mandatory ID laws wouldn't have stopped the case you linked - they had IDs but the fraudulent bit was the citizenship!

I'm not from the US but don't IDs require proof of citizenship? I mean, if an illegal immigrant were to try to get a driver license wouldn't they have to prove that they were legally in the US? Or can anyone from any country take a driving test and get a legal American drivers license?

If the later, then I can understand why people are against requiring such an arbitrary form of identification.

One can be a legal resident of the US, have a driver's license, and be unable to vote. I know a number of foreign nationals with licenses.

A bored immigration guy in Detroit once amused himself by pointing out that neither my driver's license nor my draft card showed that I was in fact a citizen of the US, or I guess a legal resident. When I said that this was the only ID I was carrying, and shrugged, he waved me through.

if an illegal immigrant were to try to get a driver license wouldn't they have to prove that they were legally in the US?

Varies from State to State as far as know. At least in some states it's enough to prove that you live in the state, not that you are living there legally.

There's been activity to standardize checks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act

I definitely had to show the 4 types of documents the last couple of times I've moved (photo/birth/status/address). Stupidly, the first id that was obtained by showing that stuff didn't serve as proof of the first 3 when I moved again.

Youve linked an example of a woman who registered some non-citizens to vote which did not sway the election in her favor. I agree that non-citizens should not vote, but i do not agree with increased regulation from the government in order to fight against voter fraud which did not influence an election.

Can you link to a single instance of voter fraud effecting the outcome of an election?

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article322208/Missouri-...

I'll admit that I am surprised youve managed to find an election influenced by fraud, unfortunately the proposed solution of voter id laws dont seem to address this situation.

How would voter id laws prevent an american citizen from voting in a different district?

For example the texas election ID doesnt even include your address.[1]

[1]http://www.dps.texas.gov/DriverLicense/electionID.htm

I was answering a direct request for "a single instance of voter fraud [a]ffecting the outcome of an election". I have no comment on voter ID laws.

areyousure?

im kidding, but seriously thats a really interesting article/event - what search terms did you use, or did you have prior knowledge of that incident?

I do find it amusing to post under my username, but perhaps it is a bit caustic.

I found the incident a few months ago when I simply tried to collect a bunch of data on voter fraud in order to estimate how prevalent it is. Because the issue is so highly politicized, you have to dredge through an excessive amount of bullshit just to find references to specific elections. That election is mentioned in this article (which I, incidentally, recommend reading in full) about Hans von Spakovsky in the New Yorker, albeit in a VERY different guise than two relatives of the candidate: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/29/the-voter-fraud...

A much more interesting election is that of Loretta Sanchez to the House of Representatives in 1996. That resulted in a Congressional investigation that lasted for over a year, whose findings are worth reading if you're interested in analysis of voter fraud. For a quick link to an article from the time, see for example http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/13/cq/sanchez.html

Can you link to a single instance of a voter affecting the outcome of an election?

Yeah, i noticed this a couple hours ago, but after the edit time had expired.

Faith in the electoral system

I would have more faith in the electoral system if more people voted. This would result in fewer people voting.

Why? If people don't want to vote, then they shouldn't vote. A person not voting because they know they are uninformed or don't care is great.

I disagree with you. That's fine though, I don't mind if you have that opinion, as long as it doesn't lead to disenfranchising people.

Only if it is proven to prevent fraud and not to disenfranchise voters. Here's the thing: voting day fraud doesn't happen in any significantly meaningful amount. Voter ID's true motivation is to disenfranchise voters, and it's justified by claiming it prevents a threat which simply doesn't exist.

Probably, but it would need to be extremely low friction. If poor people need to take a half day and go wait in line somewhere to get their new ID, that's not good enough.

Do states not have a 'State ID'? I know we have them in the state I'm in. It's even easier to get than a driver's license and is used for all the same things except you obviously can't drive with it. They're also cheap.

Uh, you guys have passports? (or am I overlooking something really simple?)

Nope. Only people who need to leave the country have passports. This generally doesn't apply to the working poor.

~35% of Americans have passports. No reason to get one until you need to travel abroad.

Passports exist here but not everyone has one. Off the top of my head, I'd say that most people don't have one.

I was in my 40s before I had one.

According to one study (relied upon by a US Federal judge in a voter ID case in Texas), 600,000 registered voters in Texas did not (as of 2014) have any form of ID that would be acceptable under Texas' new voter ID law [1]. That was about 4.5% of all registered voters in the state.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-s...

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society.

Yes. And it would make sense if the USA had some form of free universal ID. It doesn't, and the people most strongly in favour of voting ID laws also seem to be the most strongly opposed to universal ID.

In the states that have voter ID laws, getting the voter identification card is free. For example, look at Texas: http://www.dps.texas.gov/driverlicense/electionid.htm

But I do agree that in general, it needs to be easier to get an ID in this country

The cost isn't the only issue though. You still have to somehow get to the DMV to get it and oops many Texas DMVs were closed in poorer Democrat leaning areas so it's now a time consuming and expensive journey to go get it. Might be an hour or two away but you can't miss your minimum wage job during business hours or no rent money so what are you going to do? Or say you're old and impoverished and don't have your birth certificate now its a huge problem to get that id. Might be you have to travel to another state and go through a DMV like process to get a copy first and again you don't have the means or time.

Texas' strict voter ID requirement was struck down in the courts last summer precisely because of these reasons. It was found that the law, despite free IDs significantly disadvantages black and latino voter's in the state who are much more likely to have issues like above. Didn't stop polling place workers in some areas though some of whom still turned people away based on the non-existent requirement.

I'd be fine if each state requiring ID to vote provided free licenses. States run elections, so it'd make more sense to pass on a federal ID card and just allow states to make their own should they require ID to vote.

Yes. I would like to see a law passed that required states with voter ID laws to hand out free if to everyone by mail.

Please don't misconstrue what I said, the republicans have been engaged in litigation to repeal various portions of the voting rights act in numerous courts through America. This is quite separate from voter laws and it is a separate voting suppression tactic altogether.

To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America - the majority of cases last election stemmed from trump voters who tried to defend their actions as 'testing the system.' I can also provide studies that show those voter is laws disproportionately impact minority voters, as well as court judgements where republicans were found to target said voter with these laws explicitly - as in that was their explicit goal, and acted with 'surgical orecision6', in the courts words. This is not to mention the circumstantial evidence, like republican operatives explaining their long term goal is disenfranchisement, or the actions of governors instructing dmv employees to deceive the public and closure of dmv's in minority areas.

I'd be open to hear alternative interpretations as to what is happening, but so far my experience has been that those in favor of said laws either approve of disenfranchisement, or have an emotional response as to the 'fairness' of the law, and assume i should adopt their viewpoint.

I regularly hear that voter fraud is non-existent. However, in California only a utility bill is required to register to vote. How does a study determine that those represent actual citizens?

State level political parties have the power to challenge the registration of voters within their boundaries.

you're unclear about how voter fraud is investigated, and your solution to that is to create more legislation about voting? That is deeply unsettling.

Information about who voted is public.

>This is not to mention the circumstantial evidence, like republican operatives explaining their long term goal is disenfranchisement

I am curious, can provide a citation for your comment? I have heard this claim (or something similar) before but have never seen hard evidence.

> To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America

I think it might be better to say "irrelevant to the outcome of an election" than "non existent".

One kind of in-person vote fraud which can be measured is voting twice: mail in a ballot in one district and vote in person in another district, or (more rare) vote in person in two districts. There were as an order of magnitude guess 400-1000 people who voted twice in both Florida and New York in 2000.

And other isolated incidents have been detected, e.g. in 2002 perhaps as many as a few hundred people in Kansas voted in person in two different districts (sometimes two places in Kansas, sometimes one in Kansas and one in Missouri).

See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/200... for the sources here; local newspapers pulled the voter records and cross-checked duplicate names by hand, reaching out to individual people to ask their stories.

The issue of whether or not voter fraud is a serious national problem was a big deal in the early 2000s, when the executive branch of the federal government put a LOT of work into trying to find and prosecute voter fraud which they believed was a big deal. They were generally unable to find lots of fraud and their failure to find significant fraud was a big part of the reason that a bunch of US attorneys were, controversially, fired - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_co... , https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publicatio... .

With respect to the "vote as someone else" in-person fraud problem, that's a lot harder to measure. It seems like if it were an endemic problem we would have found it the last time we went hunting 10-15 years ago.

Still I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that everyone should be issued a free, easy-to-get national ID card. Perhaps we should get that system up and running and as soon as there are fewer than (say) 100 cases per year of people being denied an ID despite presenting sufficient documentation, we can think about requiring it at the polls. (When ID-issuance goes wrong it goes really wrong -- see e.g. https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematicall... ).

I understand where you're coming from. That said, voter ID has been used in the US to restrict voting rights. The issue is unfortunately not as straightforward as "straight up common sense".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...

https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

>Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs.

They also find it surprising that the US has no universal ID system issued at age 18 to absolutely everyone.

I'm curious why such a universal ID hasn't been implemented? I would assume there must be some people against it, what would be their rationale?

The ACLU opposes it for a number of reasons [0]. A lot of objections relate to the potential for surveillance.

[0]: https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards

Sadly the surveillance ship has long since sailed :(

I'd trade a federal ID for dismantling all the domestic spying.

Thanks for the link. Some of the issues raised definitely have the potential to be problematic.

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights

Showing your ID isn't, but voter ID laws are.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ac...

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs.

I agree that it's common sense, but data often trumps common sense. Before you combat voter fraud you first have to establish that it's a real problem. To date no one has shown that it's a real problem.

I'm pretty much completely uninformed on this issue so please don't take this comment as a challenge to your assertion, but how does the US go about determining whether or not voter fraud is taking place? Do polling/voting officials take some portion of cast ballots and investigate them for fraud and extrapolate the results over the broader voting population?

Apologies if this is a stupid question but I'd love to learn about how the integrity of the voting system is maintained in huge countries like the US.

There are several kinds of voter fraud.

First, there's voter impersonation--where you go to a precinct, and claim to be someone else and vote under their name. This tends to be relatively easy to catch; the general estimate of fradulent votes cast in this manner is less than 1 in a million, although there's certainly been more attempts that were easily caught (quite a few people last November tried to do voter impersonation to prove how easy it was and got busted instead). It can't be decisive, because before you get to a margin of victory in this range, you're going to discover that we can't actually ascertain the voting intentions that well (misread ballots happen about ~1 in 10000)--this is basically what happened in 2000; the margin of victory in Florida pretty much depends on what you consider constitutes an actual vote in the ballot.

A related type of fraud is using the vote of someone who should be ineligible to vote. You'll sometimes hear claims of millions of people on the voter rolls who shouldn't be on them, and the people who are concerned about this worry that they will be used for voter impersonation. Most of these cases basically boil down to the state didn't hear that you died or moved. States generally only bother to cross-reference their databases to purge people from these lists every few years, but it's still pretty easy to tell if someone cast a fraudulent vote in the meantime if you compare dates.

The least common case of voter fraud (at least in the US) is outright ballot-stuffing: where precincts lie about the counted results. Most precincts count their results in the presence of observers from independent election monitoring groups and representatives of candidates and political parties, which reduces the scope to commit this kind of fraud.

More common is mail vote fraud, where someone intercepts the votes of people who are voting by mail-in ballot. Estimates of this kind of fraud is perhaps 1 in 100,000--it's still not going to be decisive, since (as said above) the inherent inaccuracy in vote counting will crop up before then.

It's worth point out that there is no national vote in the US. Voting is entirely decided by the states, and many details about how you conduct the vote and vote counting process may be left up to individual counties or sometimes even precincts.

The kind of fraud that "voter ID laws" are supposed to protect against is "voter impersonation". The fear is that Lisa might know where friend Marge votes, show up to Marge's precinct, pretend to be Marge, and illegally cast a ballot as her. In this way, she could cast multiple ballots in the same election.

As far as I can tell, to pull that off at a big enough scale to affect national or even state elections you'd need to know:

* The voter rolls for a county. I think that, in California anyway, the best you can do is random access by looking up an individual's record using their name, phone number, mailing address, etc. I don't know how one would acquire the entire list of registered voter.

* Near perfect information about which voters will neglect to vote on election day.

The reason you'd need to know the second thing is that many attempts at voter impersonation have been foiled because the impersonated person eventually shows up to vote at their precinct — only to be told they've already voted!

You also need some logistics: enough people to make it worthwhile, vans to shuttle them from precinct to precinct, etc. The whole things seems way too complicated for an organization to pull off without somebody discovering it.

It seems likely to me that voter impersonation could only be a successful tactic in a small town or county's local elections, where you wouldn't need large numbers of people to turn the results in your favor.

The not-so-hidden secret is that voter id laws would stop one type of fraud - in person voting fraud, or the most logistically challenging and hardest to do. Most old white people rely disproportionately on mail-in voting, oddly enough there are no pushes to restrict access to this method of voting (even though it is the easiest to defraud) - voting fraud legislation tends to focus on the methods that minorities use.

That's not really true. Republicans have also fought against having open access to mail in ballots. In many states you need to have a "justification" in order to get a mail-in ballot. If anyone could get a mail-in ballot it would be good for minorities and the poor as you wouldn't have to actually go to the polls.

Not just red states have this rule. New York, hardly a bastion of conservatism, also restricts absentee voting:

>Qualifications to Vote by Absentee Ballot

>Absent from your county or, if a resident of New York City absent from said city, on Election Day.

>Unable to appear at the polls due to temporary or permanent illness or disability; or because you are the primary care giver of one or more individuals who are ill or physically disabled.

>A patient or inmate in a Veterans' Administration Hospital.

>Detained in jail awaiting Grand Jury action or confined in prison after conviction for an offense other than a felony.

https://www.elections.ny.gov/VotingAbsentee.html

The New York State legislature is often controlled by both parties and it's in the GOP's best interests to do what they can to stifle the vote while they have control.

The voter rolls are provided to the candidates.

Big campaigns also already build statistical models of likely voter behavior (they use it to try to contact people who they think they can influence).

Still not hordes of people out committing felonies on election day.

OK, but even if you disregard voter ID (others have explained that issue well here already) the Republican party has engaged in a large number of other methods to supress votes. Fighting to overturn parts of the voting rights act , Gerrymandering, reducing polling places in cities with demographics that tend to vote for Democrats, removing early voting days and fighting against vote by mail (methods favored by Democrat leaning demographics), and the list goes on.

The Democrats have engaged in many of these same methods in the past btw, but today's GOP have taken it to the next level. So far that I question if many Republican leaders believe in democracy at all anymore.

Quoting from the wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...

Research has shown that the type of voter fraud that would be prevented by voter IDs is extremely rare; research is mixed as to whether voter ID laws reduce overall turnout or minority turnout; and research has shown that Republican legislators in swing states and districts with sizable black or Hispanic populations push the hardest for voter ID laws.

While I personally suspect that both republican and democrat concern about voter ID laws comes from a (mostly overblown) fear of being disenfranchised- I wouldn't really call it common sense any more than it's common sense to believe that the people who aren't going to vote for your policies shouldn't be able to vote at all.

Then you have to ensure voters have access to ID.

The reason why it's suppression is that republicans have very often done the exact opposite.

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights

While this is superficially true, pragmatically speaking it depends entirely on the outcome of doing such. If it happens to avoid no voter fraud, but does succeed in making it so certain demographics are inconvenienced in voting, then the effect of it is indeed undemocratic voter suppression.

At any rate, the fact that one party is pushing the matter, while the other resisting should suggest that there are expected gains or losses, respectively, for those parties. That's all the more reason to insist on fully demonstrating that there is a bonafide need to implement these measures before blindly doing so under the ultimately irrelevant rationalization that "everybody else does it this way".

My dad and my uncle are in their 60's. They said they were told one of the things that showed people behind the Iron Curtain weren't free is that they had to carry papers/ID with them at all time. My uncle is super conservative, but he is still totally against voter ID laws because at one point it was a point of pride that American's didn't have to carry papers.

The same people who held that as a point of pride in the 50's and 60's are now the people who are fighting for mandatory voter ID laws. I honestly believe that if anybody is committing voter fraud, it isn't the people that the republicans are targeting with these voter ID laws.

Showing ID may not be part of a war against voting rights, but it's also basically completely useless in addressing any kinds of voting problems that have been shown to happen. I'm pretty sure that even now after CRTs are mostly gone more people are killed by falling TVs in the USA each year than are charged with voting abuses that would be addressed by showing ID.

But thousands of times as many people as that are prevented from voting because they don't have such ID and are not feasibly able to get it.

That doesn't even cover the situations such as Alabama and Wisconsin, where they passed laws requiring voter ID, then proceeded to close or severely curtail the hours at DMV offices across the states - particularly in poorer counties.

In Alabama, they closed the DMV offices (for budgetary reasons) in 29 of the state's 67 counties a year after the ID requirement went into effect, and I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the closures included every county with a population >75% black and most of the counties that went for Obama and Democrats. Of course, after the news and analysis of this started, the state that can't afford to keep DMV offices open said “We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” or they can go to any probate judge (who? and aren't they busy?) or county register office. Mmhm.

In Wisconsin, they closed and cut hours at offices in more Democratic areas while expanding them in areas that tended to vote Republican. The most egregious one (and the one that got national attention on John Oliver's show) is Sauk City, where the office hours were cut back to the fifth Wednesday of any month with 5 Wednesdays - which in 2016 meant 3 times prior to the election, plus November 30. Admittedly, you could go 20 miles to the next closest (open Mondays and Wednesdays), 30 miles to the one open on the first, second and third Wednesdays of each month or just a little further to the state capitol with pretty normal hours. Hope you're not walking or on a bike, or that you're good with doing a 40-mile round trip on a weekday and that you don't forget to bring something they'll accept as proof of residency.

Basically, voter ID as it's presented is a solution to a problem that basically doesn't exist, but it's a solution that happens to have some pretty severe side effects. Maybe the folks pushing so hard for it are incompetent and innumerate, or maybe, just maybe, it's those side effects that are really the goal.

Edit: Oh and for the argument that there's massive in-person voting fraud I have a simple question: If you're claiming that are you also therefore arguing that all of the people responsible for monitoring the voting process are utterly incompetent because even when they go looking for it they can't find it? Or are the perpetrators of the fraud simply superhuman and able to get their fraudulent votes counted while leaving no other traces?

Don't forget, IDs are not free in the US. Seems pretty crazy to force somebody to essentially pay a fee to exercise their Constitutional right to vote.

Then have the government paid for it. It's a minuscule cost to have a fair election.

Great. Let's do that first, then we can talk about voter ID laws.

Doing it in the other order is a non-starter because it deprives people of their fundamental rights.

Here in Texas, upon realizing that most of the improperly cast ballots they had trumpeted as voter fraud were cast by eligible voters, Republicans are now drafting a bill to make it illegal to lie on a voter ID affidavit. In other words, they want to make it possible to prosecute registered voters who accurately identify themselves at the polls and cast a ballot in an election they're eligible to vote in.

Sounds creepy and far-fetched, right? Surely they would only use a law like that to punish voter fraud. Oh, but they're already talking about prosecuting registered voters who voted in the last election.[0]

How are they going to do that? Well, it wouldn't be possible if voter fraud were real, because all they have to go on is the affidavit forms filled out with the names of eligible, registered voters. The real perpetrators would be a mystery. But if you assume that voter fraud doesn't happen, that all of the ballots were cast by eligible voters voting honestly as themselves, then all you have to do is track them down by their voter registration records and prosecute them for perjury.

For every eligible voter they arrest, ten thousand will be scared away from the polls. For every person they prosecute, a hundred thousand registered voters will avoid the polls for fear of breaking the law. (I have no idea if those numbers are overstated or understated. The point is that it's well worth their effort even if they don't convict anyone. I'm sure they accomplished plenty just by floating the idea.)

Remember this when you're wondering how "close" we are to authoritarianism in the United States. It's here. It has always been here. It just isn't evenly distributed. There's a constant battle to incrementally expand it in one place or roll it back in another. Dribs and drabs. Boring politics.

It would be cliché to say if you're reading this then it will affect you last -- cliché and wrong. By design, this kind of disenfranchisement will never affect the vast majority of the American registered voters reading this on HN. We have the financial means and the technocratic know-how to abide by whatever rules they invent to reduce the voting power of the underclass. If you're black or brown, so much the better. You will probably vote successfully, and they will point to you as proof that the system works and democracy has not been subverted.

Did I mention that the votes in question were never even counted? So I should have said they're considering prosecuting eligible, registered voters who tried to vote as themselves but had their ballots thrown away.

[0] "The chief election officers in two of the state's largest counties are now considering whether to refer cases to local prosecutors for potential perjury charges or violations of election law." http://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2017/02/18/hundreds-tex...

The Republican take on what happened: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/19/hundreds-texans-m...

Another take; you decide: https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2014/11/18/texa...

More background: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/court-filing-accuses-t...

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