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 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 REAL ID act was supposed to be a step toward this, but has been continually delayed as far as I know.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/oagnews/release.php?id=...
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!
If the later, then I can understand why people are against requiring such an arbitrary form of identification.
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.
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.
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.
Can you link to a single instance of voter fraud effecting the outcome of an election?
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]
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 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
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.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-s...
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.
But I do agree that in general, it needs to be easier to get an ID in this country
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.
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 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 am curious, can provide a citation for your comment? I have heard this claim (or something similar) before but have never seen hard evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
They also find it surprising that the US has no universal ID system issued at age 18 to absolutely everyone.
[0]: https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards
I'd trade a federal ID for dismantling all the domestic spying.
Showing your ID isn't, but voter ID laws are.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ac...
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The reason why it's suppression is that republicans have very often done the exact opposite.
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".
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.
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?
Doing it in the other order is a non-starter because it deprives people of their fundamental rights.