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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

We should be more worried about voter id. I still don't understand how you can vote without a legal id. I mean look at California, they require zero proof of your identity to vote according to Wikipedia. That's bonkers to me.

In my home country Bolivia, we are required to present a valid national ID to vote.

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In the US elections are run by the states, and unfortunately a certain consistent set of them are well known for making it extremely difficult for certain groups of people to vote. Since voter ids would be given by the states, there is historical evidence to suggest those specific states can not be trusted to not use said ids as a way to discriminate against those they do not want to vote.

This sounds like bullshit presented as a butter croissant.

The US does not have a national ID due to privacy fears. Stealing an election by casting fraudulent ballots still requires forging documents and hundreds of conspirators willing to commit a felony even in the tightest races.

Well, USA doesn't have a reasonable national legal ID and consider it unacceptable to implement one.

The reason is that we don't have any universal ID and some people think requiring an ID is a burden on exercising your rights.

Others like you worry that, without ID, there will be lots of fraud. I keep hearing that there is not very much fraud, but I don't know how they know without a baseline that's verified with ID.

I also don't know why voter ID is too much of a burden, but IDs for gun purchases are not. If they are both rights shouldn't they have similar standards for checking eligibility?

I don't know how you imagine voting works, but there are in fact records. You can't vote unless you are registered. The specifics varies wildly state-to-state, making it hard to discuss in detail. But the gist of it is that if you are not legally eligible to vote, it's difficult to do so. And the penalties are so extreme that casting a single fraudulent vote is absurdly risky, making it a very unappealing crime. Especially since virtually zero elections are decided by so few votes.

Elections are audited and fraud is found in only very, very rare cases, hence the widespread confidence that voter fraud is a minuscule issue. Other election issues are very real. By any metric, the number of eligible voters who are denied the right to vote dwarfs the number of people who cast ineligible votes.

How do you audit without IDs? Like, why not just find some dead person who is still registered, and vote in their stead?

And how do they verify citizenship, or other elligibility requirements? Can you just specify a bugus address so they don't catch you?

Thankfully, recent lawsuits are at least forcing counties that notoriously have more registered voters than they have age 18+ citizens to clean up their voter registrations.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_...

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