Strict Id Laws Don’t Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel
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Examples of ways to put your thumb on the scale:
* refuse to accept college IDs as valid for voting, even those issued by the state government because it's a state school (college students are more likely to vote for the "wrong" party). Hunting licenses? Cool (people with hunting licenses are more likely to vote for the "right" party).
* prevent college students who live most of the year in-state, and can prove it, but have an out-of-state driver's license, from voting.
* place extra hoops on people whose name doesn't match their birth certificate, make them produce every document with every change and toss their registration if there's a typo (this mainly affects married women, who are more likely to vote for the "wrong" party). This is an effective way to disenfranchise a lot of older women who don't have a current driver's license.
* close as many DMV offices as you can in counties where people don't vote your way, restrict the hours on the remaining offices.
I’m joking of course, a hunting license isn’t a form of ID. Curiously, my CHL isn’t a form of ID, even though it is state issued, has my pic, and I had to be finger printed to get it.
There is, of course, no bias in the types of people that have one but not the other.
In terms of rigor of identity authentication: CHL > Driver's license.
But at the state level you will need much more. We are talking 12 years of transcripts and a high school diploma. Vaccination records going back to birth. Income information (paystubs, bank accounts) on you and your family so they can verify your ability to pay tuition or qualify for aid. In order to qualify you’ll need to undergo background checks (felons are not eligible for aid). Then you need letter of reference from at least 3 individuals and your HS guidance counselor. Finally, you will need official SAT test scores, and the college board does their own process of identity verification.
Is the process perfect? No. But if you were looking for a vector for fraud, student IDs are probably one of the most onerous.
In a free and fair election, the right to vote is not be based on your detailed personal history, or whether you have done something that looks off and might cause you trouble with authorities.
Even if it's just fear of imagined trouble that puts people off feeling safe to obtain the necessary approvals to vote, that's enough to prevent a free and fair election.
All I am saying is we have a good idea that the person with a CCL is that person and they are not a felon (in some states felons cannot vote).
Anybody can go to a community college including a noncitizen. There is no background check and no real verification the person is who they say they are. You just show up and have your picture taken.
If you are going to trust one of these forms of IDs it is clear that it should be the CCL.
Undocumented, student visas, etc are banned from buying guns
What I meant is we know the person is who they say they are when they have a CCL. This means if a noncitizen has a CCL they would be unable to use this as proof they are a citizen.
If a noncitizen goes to a university they could claim they are somebody other than who they are and could use the fake ID as proof to vote. Since there are no background checks to get a university ID it isn't really proof of anything.
But I think student IDs do undergo a pretty significant verification. They are going to at least need transcripts and some other ID card like a driver’s license to prove your id. They do background checks as a matter of course for funding. Community colleges do verify residency to determine which tuition rate you pay. 99% of the students most community colleges are state residents anyway. They could have just made a requirement that state funded schools must display residency information and an expiration date in the card, and there would be no problem.
Honestly I think the best solution is to just give a free ID to everyone. As far as I know every state that requires an ID for voting has free IDs. We should make it easier and more convenient instead of allowing a bunch of alternative forms of ID. Driver's license, voter ID license, generic state ID or federal ID (passport) should be sufficient.
Private institutions have a flat tuition rate (although if you are an international student they will verify that you have the financial capability to pay full tuition, since as a non-resident you wouldn't qualify for federal aid, and their tuition rates are set anticipating that you will qualify for federal aid). When there is actual money involved, you can be damn sure that processes are in place to verify you are paying the correct rate. As always when real dollars are at stake, the process is vetted, inspected, and verified at multiple levels. The proof of residence for my local community college was not dissimilar from the DMV. People want to get paid what they're owed.
But again, if there are any concerns about the stringency of this process, they could have been resolved via recently enacted legislation. But they weren't, and that may have been an intentional omission.
Look, I'll agree that student IDs are not up to par with other forms of IDs in terms of the information printed on the actual card, and that maybe some of the processes should be standardized across the state. Just because my local CC is good with these things and has sensible protocols doesn't mean all CCs strive to achieve that standard. There are a lot of CC and state schools out there. But the fact that an entire party has made securing the vote their raison d'être, yet steadfastly refuses to consider students valid voting constituents is strikingly indicative of a bad faith effort.
You're correct, there's no bias on the system for background checks. Anyone of any race, color, or creed can get a background check to verify their eligibility to exercise their right to own/carry firearms and vote.
I agree, and it's in Texas' state law: any legal resident regardless of race, color, or creed can apply for a concealed carry license. It's truly bias free.
I think you mean paid for by taxes and/or insurance, not quite the same as free
Rumors are the mob delivered the election for Kennedy; even those historians who argue otherwise essentially characterize it as the democratic party stealing the election "An order from the mob to work for Kennedy only insured a total Chicago effort of the kind that historically had been known to work miracles in the early-morning hours of vote counting"
Lyndon Johnson famously stole his 1948 senate election
Democrats were plenty happy to use vote harvesting to take Orange County, Ca while arguing against it in Georgia (2018).
[ed] And a new one just hitting news today, https://www.phillymag.com/news/2021/10/13/marie-beren-voter-...
I would respectfully disagree with your assertion this is a one party issue
Adding things to the FEC responsibility is not a solution, because the FEC is by structural design nonfunctional in normal conditions, and has sometimes been (e.g., most of 2020) completely nonfunctional due to lack of a quorum.
Things become a whole lot simpler when stuff can just get tacked on to your ID, and appropriate institutions can check the status of such endorsements in a central database.
> In theory, this should make both sides happy.
One side will never be happy, because their entire strategy (according to leaked internal documents) is voter suppression.
A reminder: there is very, very little voter fraud in the US. Most of cases of fraud that have been discovered turned out to be members of that side that is so very concerned with voter fraud.
I am all for a national ID (please, PLEASE end using Social Security for this), and migrating to a national standard for driving that generalizes most of the 'how to drive' and 'how signs must look'; ideally also some minimum of how roads should be designed (less enforced, more of a guide).
This is really key here. Practice shows 2 things: (1) a national ID is needed to operate the United States and (2) in lieu of a proper system, a much worse system is being used with ongoing catastrophic impacts to people's lives from fraud and identity theft as well as the commensurate cost to the state at every level.
Why does it get bipartisan support in Oregon, a state known for intense partisan demonstrations and showdowns? Because it’s so much easier that you’ll never want to do it another way.
Mail-in voting has a lot of benefits:
- It’s automatic. You’ll get a ballot every election at your home, so you don’t need to remember about elections.
- You get a pamphlet with statements from each candidate and supporting organizations. This helps you get informed about everyone.
- You have time to send it back. This allows you to make a more deliberate choice.
- You don’t have to take time off or go anywhere.
- You can verify via a web portal that your ballot was received and counted.
Is voter ID actually solving any real problems with the system? To my knowledge, fraud is normally sniffed out and prosecuted. I think a well-oiled mail voting system provides so many clear benefits to voters that we should be encouraging it in more places.
From what I understand, signature-based validation is secure enough to prevent most fraud problems. At least to the extent that it’s not much different from any other voting system.
Again, I support federal ID, but to me that’s separate from voting. Maybe I put my federal ID number on the ballot, and then states can ensure it was only used once.
You'll find that the right opposes this idea. National IDs spook the "don't tread on me" crowd and cutting DMV availability is a common "money saving" approach taken by the same people demanding additional documentation for voting.
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
[2] https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/04/millions-in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws
Reading that quite short list, it seems like Australia, Canada, UK and the US are the only ones which do not require IDs. I wonder if it has something to do with old British legal system, that they kind off share.
Unfortunately, federally assigned IDs are a weirdly hot-button issue in America. Whether it's the libertarian insistence that national ID leads to authoritarianism[1], or the evangelical strain that sees it as a potential Mark of the Beast[2].
[1] https://www.cato.org/commentary/you-value-privacy-resist-any...
[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-national-biometric-id_b_5...
If the would be voter doesn't have ID, then someone who knows them has to make a sworn affidavit that the voter is who they claim to be.
Thats not the same thing as we have in the US
EDIT: Note, in particular, that a utility bill (e.g. a gas bill as mentioned in an ancestor comment) is sufficient in Ontario. For the purposes of this comment thread, this would fall into the (allegedly) laughable situation of lacking voter ID.
[1] https://www.elections.on.ca/en/voting-in-ontario/id-requirem...
In Canada, my grandmother didn't need any "ID" to vote, period. All she needed was for me, who had acceptable ID to vouch that she was an eligible voter, voting in a riding that she was eligible to vote in.
Somehow, the country has not yet devolved into an orgy of lawlessness.
Thats not what they have in the US. I can literally come up with a common name, say Ben Levi, and vote on Ben’s behalf. If Ben decides to show up, he’s in trouble, not me.
In Canada you are typically required ID. If you lied about your grandma and the real Ms. vkou shows up to vote, she’ll have ID proving who she is, and Elections Canada has your name written down to throw you in jail for lying under oath.
I mean, yeah, you don't have to be a resident of the state or even a citizen to go to a university in the US.
Doesn't matter if you're a resident of the state. https://help.vote.org/article/17-i-am-a-college-student-shou...
> The choice is legally yours. You have dual residency, so you can register back home or on campus as long as you don't register to vote in both states. You can use our Voter Registration Tool to register to vote in less than 2 minutes.
This is the exact reason that issuing indistinguishable driver's licenses to non-citizens was controversial.
> Doesn't matter if you're a resident of the state.
The point is that maybe it should. It's reasonable to say that people should vote in the place where they're a permanent resident and not somewhere they're likely not going to reside by the end of the term of office for the election in question.
It's not as if they can't vote, they can vote where they're actually from. Or demonstrate the intent to move to the state where they want to vote by getting a state ID there.
I don't think it's ever been controversial to permit permanent residents to have drivers' licenses.
No, it wasn't.
Because nondistinguishable licenses for immigrants had been issued for generations when the controversy, which was about licenses issued to people without valid immigration status, erupted.
A lot more US citizens have a driver's license than a passport. It's the most common form of identification and if it doesn't specify citizenship then there will be millions of people who don't have any picture ID that can prove their citizenship status.
That problem could easily be solved by specifying whether you're a citizen on your driver's license. It's a poor excuse to extend the problem to other forms of ID that don't prove citizenship status.
No, I don't. Because there is no reasonable on topic argument you could be getting at.
> A lot more US citizens have a driver's license than a passport. It's the most common form of identification and if it doesn't specify citizenship then there will be millions of people who don't have any picture ID that can prove their citizenship status.
Which is fine in the context of voter ID, because presenting ID to vote is notionally to confirm that the person presenting to vote is the person registered (authentication), not that the person registered is allowed to vote (authorization).
Authorization of registered voters and removal/disqualification of unauthorized voters is, even in Voter ID systems and proposals, handled separately from voter ID, typically by the same kind of processes used without voter ID.
That doesn't really have anything to do with voter ID at the polls, because the point of voter ID at the polls is not to prove that you are eligible to vote. Proof of eligibility should be taken care of when you register to vote.
The point of ID at the polls is to show that you are the person who you claim to be, so that the poll workers can check to see if you are on the registered voter list.
A driver's license proves state residency (one of the requirements needed to vote), a student ID does not.
Neither a school ID nor a drivers’ license says anything about citizenship. They’re the same in that regard.
That's not what that says. Students can proclaim residency in the state they are attending school, yes. That also means in Texas you have 30 days to register your car, 90 days to change over to a Texas driver's license, etc.
>Neither a school ID nor a drivers’ license says anything about citizenship. They’re the same in that regard.
We're not talking about citizenship, we're talking about residency. A student ID does not prove state residency, so it does not past muster whatsoever. Texas has legal explanation covering this specific scenario: https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/elo/gsc1.pdf
I'll state it again: a student ID does not prove residency.
The comment upthread I initially replied to stated student IDs aren't appropriate because they don't demonstrate citizenship; I pointed out neither does a drivers' license.
The appropriate time to look at residency/citizenship is at the voter registration step. This is already done!
Except student IDs don't even do that. They prove your student status, not state resident identity. That's why you can't use student IDs to buy alcohol, board a plane, or purchase a firearm. Voting and buying guns are both constitutionally guaranteed rights. Are you OK with people buying guns with student IDs? If you are, at least you're being consistent.
Many student IDs are not even issued by the states (private schools). Also, there are hundreds of schools per state, being a student at Piney Woods Community College isn't easily verifiable if it's even in the state.
>The comment upthread I initially replied to stated student IDs aren't appropriate because they don't demonstrate citizenship
Nor do they demonstrate residency, nor are they valid for a number of other rights and privileges so it holds that they're not accepted.
>I pointed out neither does a drivers' license.
Which is true, but not what I stated above.
>The appropriate time to look at residency/citizenship is at the voter registration step. This is already done!
Some states have same day registration so it is not already done. Nonetheless, a student ID is a poor ID for exercising a person's right to vote.
I can hear leftists screeching from here over this proposal. That's exactly what Republicans want... Now student IDs can't be issued to illegal immigrants, need the same verifications required for DLs, which is White supremacy or something.
> school in most cases already knows this information because they need it to verify the tuition rate for which a student qualifies.
Which is hilariously inaccurate. I knew many students who feigned residency to save themselves tens of thousands.
>But GOP-run state legislatures didn’t do this and the reason why seems obvious given the public intonations coming from these individuals.
Because it was shot down by Democrats. Republicans just want to bring the US to the 21st century and match what the rest of the first-world countries are doing. Anything else is regressive.
Nonetheless, as far as Texas is concerned, students can get a free voter ID that qualifies, so the student ID point is moot.
I am a leftist. I see nothing wrong with this proposal (I mean, I proposed it, right?). Illegal immigrants going to CC wishing to pay resident rates will have to prove their residency just like everyone else, as is the current situation. I don't see an issue with that. Do you? It seems to me maybe you have a caricature of leftists in your mind if you think this proposal would have leftists screeching.
> I knew many students who feigned residency to save themselves tens of thousands.
Which is fraud and can be detected and caught easily. If legislatures wanted to fortify the requirements to make them more uniform across counties they could have. They didn't. And it's telling.
> Because it was shot down by Democrats.
Shot down? The bills that were passed were written and supported by Republican legislatures and signed into law by Republican governors. Democrats didn't have a say over anything. Republicans could have passed anything they wanted and Democrats were and are powerless to "shoot" anything down. Not sure how it's cogent to bring up minority opposition here.
> Nonetheless, as far as Texas is concerned, students can get a free voter ID that qualifies, so the student ID point is moot.
You mean free as long as their time is worthless, right? Because they already have an ID that should qualify, but doesn't because of "reasons". Where those reasons are vague and unsupported by fact and evidence. After all, we have no evidence so far to support the idea that students are committing widespread voter fraud. Republicans can't seem prove such a thing is happening despite decades of searching for it (gee, maybe because it's not happening).
We know.
>I see nothing wrong with this proposal (I mean, I proposed it, right?).
No problem with denying illegal immigrants student IDs because they have to be at the same standards required for other voting IDs? Awesome, glad we agree.
>Illegal immigrants going to CC wishing to pay resident rates will have to prove their residency just like everyone else, as is the current situation.
Correct, except now they'll have to prove lawful presence, and residency if they are to be the same standard as other voter IDs. They can't prove lawful presence because they immigrated illegally, so my point stands.
>I don't see an issue with that. Do you?
Not at all! Tax money for citizens and legal immigrants should absolutely not go to illegal immigrants. No issues here, glad we agree.
>Which is fraud and can be detected and caught easily.
Apparently not. There are hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants defrauding the government by using other's social security numbers, etc. and it's been tough to stop it.
>If legislatures wanted to fortify the requirements to make them more uniform across counties they could have. They didn't. And it's telling.
They did... What are you talking about? This is a state standard that is the same across all counties. It's telling that you have absolutely no clue here.
>Shot down?
Yes, national IDs, voter ID laws are continuously shot down by Democrats, or are tampered in committees etc.
>You mean free as long as their time is worthless, right?
Just like voting, buying a gun, etc. It's not 100% free in time to exercise your rights.
>Because they already have an ID that should qualify,
Except they don't, as I have laid out above. Student IDs are not valid practically anywhere for identification such as airplanes, bars, buying alcohol, purchasing firearms, etc.
>but doesn't because of "reasons"
Yes, "reasons", also known as "uncomfortable facts that go against the narrative."
>Where those reasons are vague and unsupported by fact and evidence.
Those reasons are well defined and support by facts, logic, and evidence.
>After all, we have no evidence so far to support the idea that students are committing widespread voter fraud.
Thankfully because they're not allowed to use their student IDs, glad we're treating them like normal citizens.
>Republicans can't seem prove such a thing is happening despite decades of searching for it (gee, maybe because it's not happening).
Cool, same how there haven't been illegal weapons purchases with student IDs because they're not allowed for that either. Glad the Republicans are being consistent.
34 states require a birth certificate or proof of legal residency.
16 states do not require the above, but that does not mean that no identification at all is required.
The state already knows John Jones, born 1st January 1970, is eligible to vote - I merely have to prove that I am John Jones, born 1st January 1970.
It actually does not know this. This is a very hard problem to solve in the US. There can be positive evidence of this (John Jones has been a resident of California since birth, has a birth certificate (state document) and a Social Security (federal) number reflecting that), but John Jones may have been born in PA with no Social Security number or birth certificate at all and be a current resident of California, having moved there last year, and a perfectly legitimate US citizen eligible to vote in California for local, state, and federal offices.
There is no national US citizen registry, mostly for historical reasons, and making one is a total political nonstarter. Further, states are individually responsible for determining if someone is probably an eligible voter, and so there’s different processes and checks in place depending on the state.
For most taxpayers, that's the SSN, and its widely used for other purposes.
Republicans mostly seem to have a problem when people point out that their incompetence is causing them to leak publicly, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28867562
[1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxp...
Here are the voter registration requirements in New Hampshire, to pick a state out at random, for example: https://sos.nh.gov/media/nbhlz4bt/registering-to-vote-in-new...
You can literal simply pinky swear and sign a document in front of an election official at your voting place and time that you are an eligible voter to register, and then go vote. They have no practical way of truly verifying what you say in most cases. There are legitimate edge cases that need this, so that’s why things work this way.
It's more fundamental than that: states are individually responsible for determining who the eligible voters are. There are variations from state to state as to the terms of residency in the state, whether felons or people who have been declared mentally incapacitated [0].
That, among other things, causes a substantial difficulty in attempts to (say) conform presidential elections to the national popular vote outcome; one of the functions of the electoral college is to (mostly in a very nonlinear binary fashion) normalize the results by state to the total population rather than simply the enfranchised population (hence the 3/5ths rule being a compromise between "count the slaves" and "don't count the slaves" in the weighting process).
You go to vote. They check ID to determine whether the person standing there is who they claim to be. Then they check the voter registration rolls to see if that person is eligible to vote.
How is that different from accepting college IDs because students are more likely to vote for the "right" party? Seems like both options are biased one way or another.
College students are residents. The policies of the local government affect them. Regardless of who they'd vote for, they deserve a say.
If concealed carry licenses are accepted, student IDs should be as well. That's what he's saying.
https://www.ncsl.org/Documents/Elections/The_Canvass_May_201...
What state governments issue a college ID? It’s been a while for me but I don’t recall much evidence required for me to get a college ID and even though I went to a public state university, it definitely was not government issued. Nobody would have accepted it as proof of identity besides the college, certainly not for voting
Form I-9 says school ID card with a photograph is a document that establishes identity.[1] It doesn't say it has to be state issued.
Form W-2 is a wage and tax statement from your employer. What identification is involved?
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/form-i-9-acceptable-docume...
And make sure those remaining offices are nowhere near any bus lines, so if someone does not have a car they either have to take an expensive cab ride or spend a lot of time walking when they go to get their ID. And make sure that IDs are only issued during work hours in midweek so you can't get your ID on a weekend--which means many minimum wage workers will have to lose a day's pay to get their ID.
And once people do have whatever ID you require, there are still ways to make it harder for the "wrong" group to vote.
• Restrict absentee/mail-in voting so people have to show up in person, but also greatly reduce the number of polling places in areas with too many of the "wrong" group.
• Make it illegal to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote.
The first can result in polling places where people have to stand in line for several hours to get their turn to vote, and can only drink whatever water they happened to bring with them. Of course they could leave the line to go get water, but then might lose their place and have to start all over.
Have you ever tried to buy beer with a school ID? There is a reason they aren't accepted as a government issue legal ID.
The US federal government and at least some states accept school ID to verify identity.
But it points at the ways in which any additional legal hurdle at all can become far more burdensome than lawmakers expect it to even if no one is intentionally trying to make it hard. It's all levels of government plus nature itself all adding new hurdles at the same time.
Allowing college students with an out of state drivers license to vote with their college ID guarantees them TWO votes- because they can legally file a mail in vote to the state they have that driver's license in.
Some hunting licenses require residence in the state that issues them. For those that do, provided they have a photo or something similar, there is no reason to not accept them. Odds are though, if you have a hunting license, you also have a driver's license.
Isn't that an (easily detectable) felony?
We just went through a 6 months long audit of the results in Arizona’s Maricopa county. The auditors there claimed massive fraud that would have flipped the election occurred. After much fanfare for months, they quietly packed up shop and did everything they could to avoid mentioning their conclusions were that the results of the previous audit were upheld.
I’ve been hearing about the voter id debate since I was in high school decades ago, and still no evidence this behavior is occurring. It’s well enough to conjecture this thing might be occurring, but eventually after decades you need to put up the evidence.
Often they are even lawmakers! Pro tip never get high on your own supply, there, chief. But I get that state legislatures are cowtown nobodies and yeah they often actually are dumb enough to believe the prolefeed.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/559812-ohio-republi...
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-court...
https://www.dailylocal.com/2021/01/14/chester-county-man-fac...
https://www.azmirror.com/2021/07/13/vote-fraud-scottsdale-wo...
https://www.newsweek.com/man-charged-voting-dead-mother-trum...
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/fraud-c...
Whether you voted is public record, and literally anyone can pull death records as well, and compare the two. Mostly not a match, but every now and then it turns up a few republicans who thought they'd "even the score" since "it's so easy to get away with".
Voter ID generally isn't supposed to be proof of residence, its proof of identity; it exists to prove that the voter is the person registered, not that the registered person is authorized to vote.
Most IDs acceptable for voting do not prove authorization (or even “authorization but for the potential of disqualification by felony”), so not accepting college ID because it doesn't prove authorization to vote is...not well justified, even in the public logic of voter ID.
Of course, voter ID proponents have let out the private partisan internal logic lots of times when they thought only people aligned with their faction were listening, so we don't need to speculate why the rules are inconsistent with the public logic.
A bit of an aside, when I moved to California I wasn't able to vote in the primaries because I refused to pledge loyalty to the Democratic party, though registering to vote was rather easy. In Texas registering was rather easy and I could vote in primaries.
[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/primary-elections-californi...
[2] https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/political-parties/no-party-...
That would be sad, because local governments are the ones that pass ordinances criminalizing homelessness (e.g. sleeping and urinating outside). I think it would be unconscionable to prevent people from having a voice in their governance based on their landownership status, but I guess we can hardly call such an idea out of line with America’s founding values.
When I came to California it was kind of funny that I was able to vote in local elections immediately. I hardly knew anything about the area, what could I possibly vote for?
I still don't get why people think they are entitled to participate in party-internal candidate selection elections without even claiming membership (with absolutely zero commitment ot pledge of loyalty of any kind) in the party.
(There are primary elections that serve different functions than selecting party nominees, often simultaneously with party primaries, and you've always been able to vote in them in California without identifying with a party; California has extended the scope of them and gotten rid of most party primaries, though the Presidential primary is still a closed party primary.)
Really all the address proves is that I was able to get mail at this address when I got my license.
Super convenient if you would like to vote a few dozen times in different places, I'm sure, but that's not what it's "supposed to be" at all. I want people voting exactly once, and _only_ where they are residents, and _only_ if they are US citizens. That's the law.
You have to prove residency (electric bill or something) and they invalidate your former driver’s license so you can’t do something like just hop across the border and get a new license because you lost your last one for whatever reason.
Some databases also include Canadian provinces.
People voting multiple times isn't really a risk, because it's incredibly stupid. It's a felony, so if you get caught, you go to jail. But if you get away with it, you've flipped one vote, and even a very close election isn't going to be settled by a couple of votes.
There were a very small handful of people who got caught voting twice in the 2020 election, or casting someone else's ballot: two or three in Georgia and in Pennsylvania. Most voted twice for Trump.
Slightly tangential, but you are required by law to get a new license when you move to a new state. And the DMV will take your old license when they give you the new one. You can move around within a state and have a stale address on your license pretty easily, though.
It's not hard to imagine how a rural university or large manufacturing facility could sway things in state level elections if a ton of people went across the street to vote on lunch break rather then went home and voted at home after work/school thereby changing what district they vote in.
But since voting records are public, this would be trivially detectable.
People sign when they vote and signatures can be matched against registrations. When we examine this, we don't find a large number of people performing voter impersonation.
Can you give a good source or two please?
Senator Rand Paul: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/rand-paul-voter-georgia-r...
Chairman of Arizona Govt and Elections Committee: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/everybody-shouldnt-b...
etc etc, this is just what immediately came up in the last year. Among "the right sorts" they'll occasionally get complacent admit it's all about partisan advantage and not actually about fraud at all.
The Chairman of the Arizona's Gov't and Elections Committee is simply expressing what has been a common conservative sentiment for ages--that voting is a responsibility, not just a privilege, and one that shouldn't be exercised lightly. Rand Paul, at least if we're being charitable, is making the same argument.
None of those sentiments are inherently discriminatory, neither conceptually nor in practice, which is fundamentally what matters. The belief that the government should actively "Get Out the Vote" is a policy preference, not a constitutional imperative--at least not in the U.S., which lacks mandatory voting laws. "Get Out the Vote" is just a pithy statement of one's preferred policy.
Though, without rigorous oversight it's quite easy--almost trivial, even--to apply those sentiments in a discriminatory manner. AFAIU, Thomas Hofeller, the infamous Republican strategist and redistricting consultant whose personal papers were revealed by his daughter after his death, approached voter ID laws this way--drafting them in ways that were inherently, knowingly, deliberately discriminatory, supported by reams of empirical data, though I'm not sure if racially or otherwise illegally discriminatory on their face. Some of his gerrymandering proposals, by contrast, were explicitly racially discriminatory. ("Hofeller's hard drive also retained a map of North Carolina’s 2017 state judicial gerrymander, with an overlay of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that these maps—which are currently at the center of a protracted legal battle—might also be a racial gerrymander.", https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-files-of...)
1. a citizen with the legal right to vote
2. a resident of the district the vote is cast in
My dad moved around a lot (Air Force) and I learned from him that to avoid trouble with the state tax people,
1. register to vote
2. get a driver's license
3. vote
to establish a residency for tax purposes. Otherwise, you can get dinged for taxes from multiple states.
Proving residency again on election day is just a pointless hoop for voters to jump through. That will have already have been taken care of.
These are all significant factors in a tax residency analysis but not the only ones.
If you find yourself facing a question over tax residency, factors like where you spent your time, where you have residences, where your job is located, where your service providers (doctors, lawyers, etc.) are all
For example, if you rent an apartment, have a driver's license and are registered to vote in Nevada, but you own a large house in California, spend most of the year there, and your most substantial professional and personal dealings are in California, good luck defending your Nevada tax residency claim if the FTB comes knocking.
A static document doesn't prove current residence. And someone can reside in more than 1 state. They just have to pick 1 for taxes and voting.
The fact that MA will conscript nonresidents for jury duty is morally wrong, but besides the point.
Registering to vote in two states is a really easy way to end up in jail.
I’m aware of no state in the country that mandates a driver’s license for all residents. It would really defeat the purpose of a driver’s license! Only residents _who drive on public roads_ are required to obtain a license. That’s absolutely not the entire population.
> guarantees them two votes
This is an absolutely inaccurate claim. They are not _guaranteed_ two votes, because no one is offering such a guarantee. And no one offers such a guarantee, because voting in the same election in two different states is illegal, and is fairly trivial to catch, since who voted in which elections are public records in most (all?) states.
If you want to drive in that state. Seems odd to require a drivers license to vote if you live on a college campus where everything is in walking distance.
I really don't understand why that was not the focus whenever this came up. Not having ID is a huge impediment to constructive participation in society. Need to open a bank account, take out a loan, rent a house, drive a car, fly somewhere, get a job, etc., etc., then you'll almost certainly need ID.
Voting once every now and again of course is important, but to people who genuinely don't have the means to get ID for themselves, I'm sure it's a vanishingly small problem compared to their immediate concerns of surviving day to day.
It's crazy that the outrage is about the ID requirement for voting and so much effort has gone into that, rather than being outraged about people not being able to get ID and the effort going in to making that easier for them.
Generally fixing this issue is done with very time intensive, high-touch non-profit work. States rarely put in the effort to assist the most complicated ID cases.
There are lots of old people in the Mississippi Delta who never got birth certificates and who can’t use the most common documents to prove citizenship/ eligibility to vote. IIRC they can try to petition a judge / court, but it is a big hurdle, especially for people who are not highly motivated to vote and are people who don’t drive. Some people are left behind, but I can’t find good stats/estimates of how many are affected.
Certainly not the loudest, party leaders, media, etc who have been telling us the problems they will have if voting required ID for years and years. Pretty terrible that they have been aware of this and have done really nothing to help those poor people except when it may affect them getting votes. Really makes you cynical about their motives and selfishness.
I'm sure it's easier said than done, but they're passing trillion dollar budgets, going to war and bombing the brown people in Syria and Libya, bailing out banks that caused housing collapses, etc. They absolutely could solve this problem with a tiny modicum of effort in comparison.
The really sad thing now with results like this is that they're likely to just stop caring about the problem entirely and forget these people if it doesn't actually affect their vote.
> It’s hard and expensive.
Again, I don't think it is relative to what else gets spent and what else gets done. Social services spending on a state and federal level is just gargantuan and increasing so I don't see quite where your last sentence connects to reality.
https://madison.com/lifestyles/the-us-states-spending-the-mo...
Your link shows that a lot of money is being spent, but not nearly enough, or perhaps in the wrong places. The ~$3000 per capita spending numbers are laughably small. People on average are going to use more than that per year. So the question is: how is that money actually distributed? Who is getting more than they need, because plenty are going without enough. Social programs are famously not very well funded, so your argument that social welfare programs are swimming in "gargantuan" levels of cash doesn't ring true to me, and the numbers you show bear that out. Like I said, expect people (like yourself) to balk at requests to increase funding in social programs. Usually the number one response I will get from legislators is that the already spend enough as is, why do they need to spend more?
My wife was a social worker for a number of years, so I got to see how "social welfare" is actually spent. From what I witnessed inside the social work industrial complex, a number of corporations have sprung up that work to milk this government money without ever actually helping anyone in the process. They will hire social workers to visit people in need of crisis management or some other social service, but essentially their job is to just fill out reams and reams of paperwork leaving no time to actually help anyone. The corporation gets a huge stack of state dollars, the social worker gets a mere $14.00 for their hour, and the person in need is left wanting and in need. It's a difficult system to change because there are entrenched interests now dependent on the revenue stream. If you want in on that money, you're going to need the same lobbying power as these corporations.
I wasn't saying nobody does, I'm sure some under appreciated and under resourced groups who actually want to make things better for these poor people are doing great, difficult work and care deeply about the issue.
That does not include any federal or state politician of note though, nor any media corporation or their journalists, or any other "activists" or twitter trolls who only pretend to care about it when voter ID comes up.
I'm not sure if my rhetoric wasn't quite clear -- I did not mean to imply that literally nobody cares about getting people ID for reasons other than voting, or has ever once raised the issue until that post I just made.
Honestly if there are people without ID and an inability to acquire one that's a bigger issue because of the many things you can't do without an ID voting is pretty low on the list.
* prevent college students who live most of the year in-state, and can prove it, but have an out-of-state driver's license, from voting.
* place extra hoops on people whose name doesn't match their birth certificate, make them produce every document with every change and toss their registration if there's a typo (this mainly affects married women, who are more likely to vote for the "wrong" party). This is an effective way to disenfranchise a lot of older women who don't have a current driver's license.
---
Do you have studies/papers/numbers for any of these groups?
More importantly, I think it is necessary for everyone to /feel/ satisfied that the elections are fair to maintain faith in the system. Requiring IDs seems like an easy nod to that effect
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...
Its obviously not, because lots of people think that it it is unfair in and of itself, and this feeling is buttressed by the fact that politicians pushing for specific versions of it keep getting caught admitting that their motives are more about stopping people that don't vote their way from voting than election security in the usual sense when they think they have a friendly audience.
There isn't anything unfair about making elections more secure in itself. Both security and fairness are valid issues. If a politician is against either of these, it's a bad sign.
There are ~150k voting precincts in the US. 300k people across the nation is probably on the order of a dozen at the most effected precincts. Opening half an hour earlier and closing half an hour later would have a larger effect on ensuring people get to vote.
I’ve read it 10x and am still baffled. It’s the “voter turnout reduction of ID laws” part that I don’t understand. I guess I should go read the paper itself.
> The lack of negative impact on voter turnout cannot be attributed to voters’ reaction against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement. However, the likelihood that nonwhite voters were contacted by a campaign increases by 4.7 percentage points, suggesting that parties’ mobilization might have offset modest effects of the laws on the participation of ethnic minorities. Finally, strict ID requirements have no effect on fraud, actual or perceived. Overall, our findings suggest that efforts to improve elections may be better directed at other reforms.
Which is completely different from their title.
That should be interpreted as "voter turnout reduction due to ID laws," or perhaps "voter turnout reduction as a result of the implementation of ID laws."
Checks and balances of power is naturally inefficient, and tends to result in a more stable system.
This is the problem. In the US, there is no equivalent universal ID. Voter ID laws keep people out by requiring forms of ID that certain people tend not to have, e.g. requiring a driver's license, which immigrants and inner city residents might not have.
My dad who is a unicersity prof does not drive a car and does not have a driving license. Using driving license as a voter ID seems crazy to me.
The dynamic is different in the US. The US doesn't have national elections. All elections are run by each individually federated state. The national government of the US does not have the authority to override this.
If there was will in the US for a national ID, Congress and the powers that be could achieve this within a few years if they wanted.
The reason is the combination of:
1. The power to run elections was delegated to the states
2. States don't want to give up that power
3. The only way to change that would be for the states to vote to give up those powers
Yes, as you point out, not all federations are this way. Many others are missing #1 or #3 above. I pointed out that the US was a federation simply for legal context. As of course, local governments don't really have much power against the central government in a unitary state.
Democrats would be onboard with a free federally administered voting ID. Republicans wouldn't, though, because it's not about fraud, it's about making it more difficult to vote, because they lose when more people vote, and they literally said as much to the supreme court as a justification for their voter restrictions laws.
(they see it as "political party is not a protected class, so there is no legal prohibition from creating voter laws which are designed to disadvantage their political opponents")
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/supreme-court-gop...
There have been examples of this being gamed in the US. Gerrymander the county then force your political opponents into the least convenient polling place in the county.
Here in Australia, there are so many checks and balances when it comes to counting votes that it actually disgusted me when I heard some of the games various entities were playing in your last presidential election. The fact that the number of votes cast wasn't released until results were tallied and they kept "finding" more to count was perplexing. That partisan orgs like unions were given the contract to do the counting was also a really strange thing to do. And that scrutineers were kicked out in places was a disgusting act, here they by law must be allowed to watch everything regardless of political affiliation.
We also do not let counters out of the room until everything has been counted and accounted for and have multiple checks along the way to make sure nothing has been lost or added. Seems statistically unlikely to me that individual fraud would make any difference in US elections given how decentralised it is, if anything was happening it'd be powerful players controlling who is counting and how they are deciding which votes count and which don't.
"Under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, the cut-off for receipt of mailed postal votes is 13 days after election day." - https://www.aec.gov.au/media/media-releases/2019/05-17b.htm
That sounds like an unpleasant experience for the counters.
(The same happens in the States. Provisional ballots. Mail-ins. Ballots that wouldn't feed properly and need hand examination.)
I'm not aware of that actually happening. Here are some details on some allegations that were made, but the gist is that nothing improper actually did happen:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/12/donald-tru...
Anyway, I believe Australia has a prime minister rather than a president, so I don't think they can be talking about Australian elections.
You’re thinking of the preliminary count in a polling place. On election night, basically the only thing that’s being counted (estimated) is which of the two (expected) main parties in a seat has the lead. It’s the only thing scrutineers pay attention to - no one watches the preliminary Senate count. Declaration votes (out of area) and below the line Senate votes (complex preferences) aren’t counted /at all/ on election night. No one has ever stopped me from leaving the polling place during a count.
Once the preliminary count is done, the ballots are driven off by the Officer in Charge into the night in his or her personal car for the real count. It’s not hard to be an OIC - it was offered to me while I was still at uni. There’s no particular ethical or vetting requirements to be one, and they’re often older folk who don’t bother reading the rules and requirements, and I’ve seen them do things that are brazenly illegal. Entire boxes of votes have gone missing in the past. We have had to re-run an entire election recently because of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Australian_Senate_speci...
It’s one thing to be critical of shoddy election practises and I support your indignation, but let’s not fall into tired “America bad” tropes. Elections are hard. We muck ‘em up too.
A while ago, the state changed the rules so that one form of ID was required to register (photo required) and one form of ID required to vote (photo required).
This made registering much, much easier, which made voting much much easier, especially for young people.
There was national freak out over this. HOLY FUCKING SHIT THE REPUBLICANS ARE REQUIRING IDS TO VOTE! YOUNG PEOPLE AND MINORITIES WONT BE ABLE TO VOTE!
Voting rates went up, especially among the young. The only people who had problems were very elderly people who had lived at the same address for long time (no need to register) and we’re had stopped driving. Most were Republican.
Partisan organizations released non-peer reviewed studies showing the vote was superseded. Partisan publications (for example, Mother Jones) treated these press releases as fact, but mainstream fact checkers pointed out they were bullshit. They have since been largely scrubbed from the Internet.
I can’t imagine why it’s OK to require two forms of ID to register (a consensus position as of 2007 or so), but requiring a single ID to register and vote is a human rights violation.
What other reason could there be given the overwhelming evidence that no legitimate voter is stopped by these laws?
The statement near the end of the abstract - "Finally, strict ID requirements have no effect on fraud, actual or perceived." - seems surprising to me, and I'd like to see how they arrived at that conclusion.
If I had to take a guess, I'd say that voter fraud was already very low to begin with, and the rare occurrences that do happen wouldn't be helped with ID laws.
But how does it not have an effect on perceived fraud, when all of the people perceiving fraud are arguing for strict ID requirements? I think I know the answer (these people perceive fraud in response to their "team's" loss, regardless). But it would be interesting to read what the authors say.
Most western European countries also have significant voter security measures, although comparisons are often hard to make because they piggy-back voter registration on the mandatory residence registration process. In Germany for example you get a voting card in the mail, but you have to shlep to your local citizens office with proof of residency (lease, etc.) within 30 days of moving. In Georgia you can register to vote entirely on line, but they check your ID at voting time.
Whether or not election security is an actual problem, one side saying “just trust the process” is not going to be credible. That’s true in America, and that’s true in Taiwan. Hence the elaborate process in Taiwan.
> Although a majority of both Republicans and Democrats express some degree of confidence in the nation's voting system, Democrats are far less confident than Republicans. The current poll shows that 59% of Democrats say they are least somewhat confident that their votes will be cast and counted (including just 13% who are very confident), compared with nearly 9 in 10 Republicans (87%, including 44% who are very confident).
Right before the 2020 election, 30-40% of people in both parties though the election wouldn’t be conducted fairly: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distru...
After the 2016 election, 2/3 of Democrats believed Russia had “tampered with vote tallies” to help Trump win: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
In the U.S., it is true that the push for voter ID laws as a supposed fraud prevention measure has been the formulation of one modern political party, as are claims of widespread fraud in general. These claims have been refuted ad nauseum by election experts for years, yet they are still used by that party as justification for voter ID and a raft of other measures that consistently have uneven impacts on specific groups.
What's most recently changed is that, while these false claims were used to preemptively disenfranchise select voters pre-election, they are now being used by the loser in efforts to delegitimize the actual election results.
The effect of this has been for that same political party to now introduce yet more measures in the state legislatures they control. And, in some cases, they have wrested control away from state secretaries, allocating it to themselves.
All of this is on the back of false claims.
A refutation of OP's statement would involve you actually demonstrating statistics of fraud across the country, not references to foreign countries and their protocols that might differ.
The success of any voter registration protocol should be evaluated through the lens of Type 1 and Type 2 errors in a statistical model. There are almost zero Type 1 errors in the current US protocol. The Republican agitation is trying to increase Type 2 errors, on the faux premise that Type 1 errors are high - which is completely baseless.
It is fashionable in "intellectual " forums to pretend that conservative actions have a legitimate basis, but they are mostly about undermining democracy.
If that hypothesis is true, then people will never stop believing in voter fraud until said demographics no longer have any significant representation in politics.
Poll citizens and ask how much voter fraud they think happened in the last election, in their state, before a voter ID law is passed. Wait for a voter ID requirement to be passed, and another election to happen. Ask again. Compare. Repeat a few different places if you want to be thorough.
That's one method, anyway.
("Polled citizens' perception of a thing about the world is wildly wrong, and changes in that perception don't follow changes in reality the way you'd hope they would" is a so-common-it's-boring result in political science)
It's possible to exploit this: you can claim somebody else's name, and apparently get away with casting their vote. If that person also votes, then that's easily detected. If the jurisdiction doesn't have a way to separate provisionally-authentic ballots from ID-verified ballots, then the election only needs to be re-done if the number of fraudulent votes is large enough to impact the outcome of the election. Elsewhere, both provisional ballots would be spoiled.
I've voted in a number of elections where my ID didn't match my address. In those situations, they didn't take my word for it, I had to provide an alternative means of proof I am the person I claim to be and that I live where I'm registered.
Also, what states have the individual find themselves on the voter roll? I've always had to provide the proof of my ID/address to a person at the polling station and they would find my ballot.
> Also, what states have the individual find themselves on the voter roll?
I've added a parenthetical to clarify that. That would indeed be absurd.
In my state you show up and give a poll worker your name, and they look it up in a binder with the list of registered voters for the polling station and cross it off. The binder's open on a card table, so if you have good eyes and can read upside down you could get a name. I'm pretty sure there was a Murphy Brown episode where the title character actually committed vote fraud in this way (to vote before she was old enough).
States do provide voter databases of registered voters (at least to the major parties for electioneering), so if you had access to one you could find a name to use. My state definitely does, because I once got election mail with my voting history for the last 5 or 6 federal elections.
Each state is tasked with voter registration/validation. Why provide an ID at all when every single voter and vote is going to be verified against the established voter rolls anyways? Every state has a register/recorder office that validates eligibility to vote at the state and federal level that is far more thorough than asking volunteer poll workers to becoming poll police.
I don't know where you live, but it sounds like people are trying to stifle your voice with what amounts to BS.
This seems awfully not-secure.
All it takes is a motivated group of people to pull off election fraud. Someone wouldn't be doing this solo. You don't think mobsters, corrupt politicians, or even foreign intelligence couldn't manage to sway close elections using this method?
To sway any election its needs to be done a couple thousand times at least. How exactly would that work? How many people could you recruit to do it and nobody says anything? How much would be paid per ballot cast?
I posted this elsewhere in the replies but it seems like an open secret. It seems like once the corruption reaches a critical mass, "the system" is no longer interested in thoroughly following up with fraud allegations. It stands to reason that once the politicians who are willing to commit fraud get elected, they appoint people to key positions that are in-debt to the political machine. Prosecutors have to decide whether or not to pursue an investigation. Judges can dismiss a fraud lawsuit for lack of merit or standing. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to dismiss efforts to actually cut down on corruption, but I just wanted to name a few.
No, because it's batshit stupid to involve large numbers of people in a conspiracy because the probability of a leak rapidly approaches 100% and your ability to track down the leak rapidly vanishes. Much safer to get a single operator inside the election administration -- "finding" and "losing" ballots, printing bad ballots that "accidentally" leave a candidate off, etc.
Once the political machine has control over "the system", they can shield the grunts from consequences.
It won't until it does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results...
This is made more likely by voter rolls being public. In NC, you can even see if a given person voted in a given election. Not their vote, but whether they voted or not. Which is information you could use to identify identities up for impersonating.
At scale you would need to pay people. Now you risk getting caught trying to pay the wrong person. And for what?
I would bet your money is better spent running propaganda web farms or dark money advertising.
You can't, which is exactly why it's not a serious concern.
At worst it's a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise minority voters, for example the NC voting law, where the legislature requested info on racial differences in how people vote before creating their bill.
https://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-court-rejects-republic...
Of course this suggests that efforts to GOTV helped mitigate the voter ID requirements, which is part of why GOTV efforts and other support for people voting is being targeted now in many states.
A way around such shenanigans could be some legislation where the government is required to give everyone an id card for free - and to put the onus on govt for achieving that.
From my perspective, it's genuinely weird that requiring voter id would be disenfranchising... but I know that is how things are in the States. So either stop voter ID laws, or defang them by making IDs trivially available.
Trying to get a "RealID" for a family member was a nightmare because apparently her ORIGINAL birth certificate from 70 years ago was not acceptable to the asshole behind the desk at the DMV. So we had to get a certified copy from the county this person was born in that bore some seal or stamp the clerk wanted.
Guess who had lost decades worth of birth records, thus requiring us to pay for a special search process that took weeks?
An expensive, time-consuming nightmare start to finish.
There are people out there who have no idea where they were born because their parents didn't tell them, people whose parents held their birth certificates hostage for whatever reason, etc. Lots of people who rent and share an apartment might not have a single utility bill in their name. "Just give us a bank bill" someone says. Welllll in getting all frothy about terrorism we now demand banks verify the identity of their customers using...a government issued ID. The whole thing gets cyclical very quickly.
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/after-alabama-enforces-vot...
https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article322208/Missouri...
While I would allow the possibility of it being a real issue, that’s not really what I meant. I’m most surprised that TFA claims that strict voter ID requirements have no impact on perceived fraud.
Yea, that's not exactly a complete list. One example is undercounting. Another is changing people's party affiliation, so they cannot vote in primaries.
You tried to simplify the far more extensive and comprehensive list of types of voter fraud into a list of categories. In doing so you removed all actionable information from the threat types. What you did is similar to saying that all computer hacks are remote or local. They are, but so what? That isn't actionable, because it removes all the actual descriptive information.
Aren't the primary elections the business of the parties conducting them and not really part of the democratic process at all, but rather a way for parties to find their favorite candidate to put up for the real election? In that case, it doesn't matter for voting rights if a party excludes someone from their own election, does it?
That's the ideal but not the real-world truth, where the parties are entangled with the legal process. If a person leaves one of the major parties, it is almost impossible for them to be recognized legally as a candidate for a presidential election. That's one of the reasons why you get Communists and Centrists in the same political party. The can't possibly ascribe to the same party platform, yet they are members of the same party.
The first example I'd call "ballot stuffing"--it's really a catchall term for shenanigans around turning the actual returned ballots into an official count. This even would cover things like poor ballot design (e.g., butterfly ballots in Florida's elections) that aren't strictly speaking fraud.
The latter example is a fourth category of electoral shenanigans that I'd loosely term voter intimidation; essentially any mechanism by which people are dissuaded from casting a ballot in the first place, which I omitted because most of this category is unfortunately legal.
> In doing so you removed all actionable information from the threat types. What you did is similar to saying that all computer hacks are remote or local. They are, but so what? That isn't actionable, because it removes all the actual descriptive information.
No it's not. While it's true that the ballot stuffing category does contain a rather disparate list of potential frauds, they're all almost entirely solvable by auditing and oversight of the physical process of counting ballots. And more stringent checks on who can cast ballots (which strict id laws purport to be) don't affect it one whit. A more specific look at how to fix an election might dive into the details more, but grouping them in one category doesn't really affect the analysis here.
You can call it ballot stuffing, but you are inventing your own definition when you do that.
"Ballot stuffing or ballot box stuffing is a form of electoral fraud in which a greater number of ballots are cast than the number of people who legitimately voted. The term refers generally to the act of casting illegal votes or submitting more than one ballot per voter when only one ballot per voter is permitted." [1]
> The latter example is a fourth category of electoral shenanigans that I'd loosely term voter intimidation; essentially any mechanism by which people are dissuaded from casting a ballot in the first place, which I omitted because most of this category is unfortunately legal.
That is absolutely not voter intimidation. I had my registration changed by someone who did this, so I am well aware of what happens here. I was not intimidated. [2] Voter intimidation is a federal crime and defined in the Civil Rigts Act and the Hatch Act.
> A more specific look at how to fix an election might dive into the details more, but grouping them in one category doesn't really affect the analysis here.
It absolutely does affect the analysis. You should be able to see that, since I pointed out two specific threats that your categories didn't cover. There are more, too. You cannot properly model threats unless you identify the actors, the vulnerability, how the vulnerability can get exploited, and some sort of analysis. You need to create a model of risks, not just pronounce "There are basically three kinds of voter fraud" using an incorrect, incomplete list. If you don't model risks, how do you know your categories are correct? THat's like when Oracle called itself, "Unbreakable". [3] [4]
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_stuffing
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Intimidation_of_voters
[3] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240043867/Ellison-Oracle-is-unbreakable
[4] https://www.cnet.com/news/oracle-unbreakable-no-more/The analysis is why strict voter ID laws didn't have an effect on actual or perceived voter fraud. So tell me why distinguishing undercounting matters for that analysis.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jul/14/are-state-leg...
This means the real question is, to what extent does the current system contribute to integrity issues? So far, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that it does. So, what is the rationale for introducing additional ID requirements, beyond what already exists via voter registration, matching at the polls, etc.?
The US doesn't require citizens to have ID to exist. That's part of "freedom" in America (I mean this genuinely).
So it is an additional step if you want to vote. Cynical state governments have tried to shape who can vote for them by making IDs mandatory and strategically closing ID offices in certain areas, reducing office hours (among other barriers). It's not a hypothetical situation.
Voter ID laws in the US are weaponized to reduce turnout. Make ID compulsory, then make getting ID really cumbersome (reduce office hours, increase wait times, increase costs).
The US doesn't require citizens to have an ID just to exist. That's part of the "freedom" Americans like to talk about. It sounds like every citizen in Spain already has a DNI so they should be able to vote without additional hassle.
It's the additional hassle to vote that opponents of voter ID laws cite as the crux of the issue. If you pair mandatory voter ID laws with strategic ID office closures (among other barriers), you can influence who can vote. This has already happened; it isn't hypothetical.
I have read many times that requiring an ID card to vote in the US is seen by many as undemocratic as certain demographics are hindered from voting. To me this is absurd. To create trust that elections are held without fraud, IDs are an essential building block.
Requiring an ID card without taking steps to ensure those IDs are available easily and for cheap. There are almost no "election security by voter ID" bills that provide the latter. On the other hand, making voter ID mandatory has been accompanied by closure of offices or reduction of hours, increasing wait times and so on. It's clearly a dirty trick.
Right, as any good security engineer will tell you, the best time to fix a hole is after its already been exploited.
What's the threat model you're concerned about here?
As an outsider, I find it really weird how instead of agreeing to id requirements, Sunday-voting, and automatic registration like most countries, Americans prefer to fight the other side's requirements with silly arguments like "We can't vote on a Sunday, that would offend The Lord!", and "We can't use ids to vote because black people don't know how to get them."
"Vote on saturday" would skew elections toward those who work M-F jobs.
We need mail-in voting. It would solve so many problems. But the reason one party has fought against it so hard is because stripping certain communities of their precincts and poll workers and such to create massive waits for voting is a key part of their disenfranchisement strategy...and keeping voting as an in-person activity because it does such a wonderful job of keeping The Poors out of polls, thus starving progressive candidates of votes.
...for other people (their own voters, because of age demographics of the parties, being disproportionately more likely to qualify for mail-in [absentee] ballots under the restrictive rules they prefer to general mail-in availability)...
That's the case in America, too.
Not everyone has a driver's license. It's possible to get a non-driver ID from the motor vehicle department in most states, but not everyone without a driver's license has this either.
There's also no federal ID, other than a passport, which a large number (majority?) of people don't have.
This is a big part of the reason why separating voter registration from voting makes sense in the US. Voter registration allows identity to be confirmed using a variety of documents, which would be less practical to check at polling time.
The "solution" to this (assuming a solution is needed, which no-one seems to be able to justify well) is to have a federal ID or a federal ID standard (like Real ID), coupled with a requirement that every citizen has such an ID.
It's amusing that conservatives are the ones pushing for this "papers please" approach. Apparently their fear of imaginary voter fraud by imaginary immigrants outweighs their fear of a new federal government-imposed requirement that impacts their precious "freedoms".
>"It's amusing that conservatives are the ones pushing for this "papers please" approach. Apparently their fear of imaginary voter fraud by imaginary immigrants outweighs their fear of a new federal government-imposed requirement that impacts their precious "freedoms".
This is some really snide rhetoric.
> I'm in favor of a Federal ID
But there isn't one now. This means that your original point about the case with IDs in America being similar to Europe is not actually relevant here.
In any case, what problem do you think requiring ID at time of voting is solving?
I think a Federal ID would be better for record-keeping, but even without one, people really should have to provide a robust identity verification document to vote. If someone just needs to show up and say "I am so-and-so" and doesn't need to provide anything but a signature, that doesn't seem secure at all.
Election fraud Chicago style: Illinois’ decades-old notoriety for election corruption is legendary https://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/election_fraud_chicago_styl...
https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Electronic_Data_Interchange_Per...
Other countries have actual ID cards. They are issued for free to and required of every single citizen. The US does not: it has a long history of suspicion of national government IDs.
Because of this, a "voter ID" in US states can mean whatever the state legislature wants it to mean, and republican legislatures are often accused of restricting valid forms of identification to specifically those which republican voters have more often than democrat voters.
I think it's more that the people in power and their supporters have had reason to make government IDs hard to come by for the transient, poor, and other undesirables. Or they simply don't want to 'muh tax dollars' going to the 'lazy bum' on the street getting a government ID card. I think there's also been a fair amount of pushing by the auto industry to make drivers licenses the default ID, too - starting in the fifties you really saw the "you have a car if you're important/Made It" attitude creep into US society.
By the way: did you notice that the politicians shouting loudest about illegal immigration tend to be associated with industries and states that use lots of illegal immigration (like, saaaaay, farming?)
It's not about stopping illegal immigration. It's about them having power over their workers. "Illegals" don't talk to police, public health officials, DAs, OSHA, etc about pesky things like missing/deducted paychecks, workplace safety, violence/theft, etc.
"They're stealing your jobs" is just how they sell it to Joe Q. Public, because one way to win someone over is to tell them that there's someone further down the ladder than them.
The countries where you see that kind of behavior tend to be the ones that have ended up with dictators or quasi-dictators. There's been plenty of serious discussion recently about the risk the US faces of ending up on that road.
Whatever the arguments might have been for this 5 or 10 years ago, now seems like a really bad time to make a change like this. And again, what is the positive case for making the change? What problem is being solved? There already is a voter identification requirement at registration time, and a mechanism for detecting fraudulent votes.
Again, if this is how software was developed, this bill would be a pull request with 5000 changed files and a million changed lines, mostly refactoring, but there will be a few tiny changes that break the security model. Of course, when you try to point this out, they try to shout you down.
You need an ID to drive, buy alcohol/tobacco, get on an airplane, get state/federal benefits, apply for a bank account or loan, but somehow you aren’t required to prove your identity when voting everywhere in this country.
You can register on the spot but you need both ID and proof of address.
Also telling anyone who you voted for on the day is illegal. You can not post about it, because all party voting advertising is banned on the day.
I find this funny when Americans argue about things we figured out in the 90s.
We also have MMP which means you have more than one party so for example Bernie would have his own party.
>the likelihood that nonwhite voters were contacted by a campaign increases by 4.7 percentage points, suggesting that parties’ mobilization might have offset modest effects of the laws on the participation of ethnic minorities.
So, what they're saying here is that increased efforts to contact minority voters (ostensibly endeavored because the laws were interpreted as punitive towards that group) may have resulted in a slight increase in turnout sufficient to overcome suppressed numbers.
There is also anecdotal evidence that these laws make some in groups who feel targeted by them more determined to vote as a matter of principle (irrespective of campaign outreach efforts).
At the end of the day, however, the requirement that some voters wield outsized determination is not exculpatory for those who seek to disenfranchise them, and these efforts don't stop with voter ID laws. Poll location closures leading to massive overcrowding and long waits in select areas; outlawing efforts to make those who wait more comfortable by, for example, providing water; attenuated hours at select locations; weekend closings; outlawing Sunday/church-sponsored efforts to vote; curtailing of mail-in ballots, etc are just some of the surgically targeted tactics employed.
Do you think a state like Indiana (for example) asks New Hampshire for voter roll data to make sure citizens who moved between the two states aren't double voting?
I don’t find it “insane” that countries speak different languages or drive on the other side of the road
That won't happen of course (here in the UK). The free ID will be bundled with the legislation to require voter ID, with some pathetic head-start of maybe a few months to a year or so.
1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Pons%20Vincen...
Despite the fact that I voted in multiple cycles in the same town and polling place and the ladies working at the polling station remain unchanged over the years, because my signature was slightly off from the ones in their records they started saying out loud "hey wait a minute this does not seem legit".
They started getting visibly angry and I started getting terrified because I am not white and there were a bunch of semi angry looking Trump people in the room with us.
They asked me for another form of ID so I showed them my drivers license and then they were like "OK all is well" and calmed down.
But still that experience of fear is what I imagine is going to prevent people from coming out to vote, especially in districts where Democrats haven't provided any meaningful reform when they have been in office(see rural areas getting killed under Clinton/Obama). If you combine an electorate that is already discouraged + the fear of altercation it spells doom in the long term.
This culture of fear is what the Republicans want and its what they need to hold on to power amid changing demographics. They will strip the government of every last thing they possibly can on their way out of relevance.
I won't ever give up my right to vote but would I have fought back if they continued pressing the issue? Would I accepted a provisional ballot that may result in my vote being thrown into the trash or becoming ineffective on election day? I don't really know.
You do know that there are Republicans who aren't white, and that some of them are very much in favor of improving voter registration?
https://www.facebook.com/KimberlyNKlacik/videos/303559960671...
Maybe it comes from being in the military, which is harshly meritocratic, reasonably color-blind, and expects people to overcome obstacles. I'd rather work to reform the demographic outreach/culture of an adversarial party with a sound policy platform, than work to overcome the patronizing, low-expectations deconstructionist culture of a party that pays lip-service to my demographic to advance its terrible policy platform.
But if I had my pick as a non white person I'd definitely pick Democrats every time. There was a lot of depressing moments during the bush years after 9/11 but when Obama went into office(I was in college) it felt like a weight had been removed from not only me but everyone around me. It felt like the future could be anything I wanted it to be and that good times were ahead. People around me became more optimistic and positive. Yes he did not improve material conditions for many of the states. Even if he was a farce this alone was a very nice thing.
Then Trump brought back those terrible feelings that I couldn't quite explain when I was in Middle/High School. All I know is that whatever the Republicans are selling, i'm not buying ever. In my time on this planet all I have ever seen is them turn the sentiment in the country from optimistic to pessimistic.
The military is pretty objective but I have my doubts. The whole Air Force Academy having a large chapel and the notion that many enlisted and top brass are evangelicals that favor other Christians gets me thinking that it is not so cut and dry. I have considered joining just due to wanting to get that discipline and help to improve my country in some way but I have been advised against it for two reasons. My current salary is many multiples over whatever benefits I could get from the Air Force + multiple stories of racism and intolerance. It makes sense since many recruits are there because they have no other options so you're not getting the cream of the crop but i'm sure there are a lot of serious people in there as well and so in reality it is probably a mixed bag.
Chapels in the military are non-denominational, and while Christians are prevalent in the senior ranks, leveraging their religion inappropriately is a quick way to be subjected to an Equal Opportunity complaint. The military is ~2 million people strong. Racism and intolerance incidents will be non-zero in any population that size. Compared to the general population in 2021 and America's disintegrating social cohesion, I'd place a bet that the military has fewer per-capita incidents than the general US population. The military is also better-educated than the genpop.[6][7]
Look into becoming an Air Force National Guard or Reserve officer. Part-time military service is the most flexible way to contribute without completely destroying your civilian income stream. Being a Reserve officer is the closest I've found to having my cake and eating it too.
[1]https://youtu.be/VqVSt0_Zmuk
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
[3]https://youtu.be/vTxeHZtbXHo
[4]https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-seeks-become-worlds-next-025...
[5]https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/05/china/china-world-biggest-nav...
[6]https://facethefactsusa.org/facts/tanks-and-humvees-caps-and...
[7]https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2017/07/29/report-you...
Malarkey. I just got my first RealID in California last month, and I was in the DMV for around 20 minutes. And this wasn't in some bougie city with a special DMV.
Make a reservation, show up, done.
Older article but wouldn't be surprised if more states are doing similar things today.
"Many ID-issuing offices maintain limited business hours. For example, the office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is open only on the fifth Wednesday of any month. But only four months in 2012 — February, May, August, and October — have five Wednesdays. In other states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas — many part-time ID-issuing offices are in the rural regions with the highest concentrations of people of color and people in poverty"
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/chal...
>Make a reservation, show up, done.
California has already done the work in making voting accessible and it isn't califronia politicans arguing for voter ID laws. California isn't a battleground state and is run by people who have pushed to make voting as seamless as possible. Alabama, after passing voter ID laws, then turned around and made it more difficult for people to obtain IDs. [1]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-01/alabama-c...
Many people in the rural US (which is a ton of people) are hours away from a place that will issue identification.
All of the politicians pushing for ID laws brush away the whole obtaining an ID thing as an already solved problem… except it very much isn’t. Anyone that had to try to visit the DMV in a large city has likely discovered you’re lucky if it’s only a day-long affair.
Since when has this been the standard? Is anything else inconvenient? Strikes me as a little ridiculous.
That is absurd. That's not the goal. Only citizens can vote, and the votes need to be legitimate.
It's not the objective of the ruling party in the UK, for example. Quite the opposite...just to get the right people to vote.
It's well beyond time for a universal federal ID card, which could serve numerous purposes such as voting, general identification, more easily getting a passport, travel, government benefits & programs, and so on. You get one at birth and then update the photo every N years or if you need to change pertinent information. When I was born I got a Social Security card, there's no reason that shouldn't have been a multi-purpose national ID card instead.
Yet, it makes completely sense for the Democrats to highlight that the Republicans are the ones who are trying to prevent absolutely legitimate citizens from voting because they are an anti Democratic Party.
Because between 2 groups, one which prefers more citizens voting and one which tries to win by preventing citizens from voting, it’s good that the group that encourages citizens to vote wins.
Whatever argument you have about why this is a good thing is utterly lacking in substance, because the US has a defacto ID and it's horrendously bad (talking about that SSN).
Just issue a proper ID system for goodness sake, what a stupid set of problems to have in the modern era :/
The SC is more than happy to put limits and exceptions on Constitutional protections. The hardest part is getting that first exception in place. Once it's there, you can slowly bring forth more cases that expand that exception ever more.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-26/...
(Anecdotally, from talking to my friends and acquaintances from Arizona, I think at least one type of voter fraud is extremely widespread: remaining registered there even after you’ve moved away, because you want your vote to be in a purple state and therefore count more. Most people don’t even think of this as fraud.)
It’s just very frustrating to me that these kinds of claims have been made for decades, and actual laws are being passed predicated on these claims being true. Yet every time evidence is requested, it never turns up. Either this widespread, endemic fraud is so nefarious and perfectly executed that it can’t be detected, or it doesn’t exist at this point.
Why isn’t it incumbent upon the people making these claims to prove them in court? Why can’t they do that? Massive fraud has been alleged at the highest levels of government and they can’t go in front of a federal judge and say that plainly. A lot of people are quick to make claims of fraud in front of cameras, but in front of a judge the word ‘fraud’ doesn’t leave their lips? Why? Until they argue a full-throated systematic voter fraud case on the scale they claim openly in a court of law, I don’t see why anyone should entertain these ideas anymore.
It’s time to put up or shut up with the evidence. Millions of dollars spent, an entire party singularly devoted to finding and preventing fraud above any other legislative agenda, private corporations have been paid millions in taxpayer money to investigate this fraud. Privacy and voting rights are being trampled on in there name of finding and preventing this fraud. It’s not enough anymore to sit back and humor the people making these claims. Millions of people believe it exists and that has been perpetrated on a grand, international scale. There should be mountains of evidence that this kind of activity occurred but hardly a scintilla can be found. Why? because no one is looking hard enough? No. It’s not found because it is not there.
1. Requiring ID to vote requires definition. The various laws hastily passed in the wake of the 2020 election are not all the same. For example, Texas allows you to use a gun club membership as ID but not a student ID [1]. Other states have different requirements for allowed IDs;
2. There's absolutely no evidence this is even necessary. Example: less than two dozen cases of voter fraud from 2020 [2]. Different states have different numbers but over the years we're talking about possibly hundreds of cases;
3. Strict ID requirements are merely one aspect of an overall and coordinated effort of voter suppression by GOP-led state governments aimed at people who tend to vote Democrat.
4. Voter suppression is endemic within the GOP. Example: the Ballot Security Task Force [3] that resulted in a consent decree with the Federal government to try and curb voter suppression. There is a long history, particularly in the southern states in the post-slavery era of denying the right to vote to African Americans through requirements such as owning property or literacy tests not required by white voters;
5. The GOP is by far the biggest source of voter suppression but it doesn't have a monopoly. Example: efforts by the Gore campaign in Florida in 2000 to invalidate military ballots [4]. Note that such efforts are generally wildly unpopular even in the Demoratic voter base.
6. Margins of error in the effects of voter suppression being well less than 1% doesn't mean they aren't significant. That can swing elections.
7. The rush by GOP-led state houses to pass voter suppression bills under the guise of election integrity should be taken as evidence of the effectiveness of the measures;
8. The intangible part of these voter suppression efforts is to deter minority voters from going to the polls and also as virtue signaling to the Republican base;
9. Even though state IDs themselves can be free the supporting documentation might not be. There are a significant number of Americans who don't, say, have a valid birth certificate. Getting such documents if you were born, say, on a Native American reservation can be extremely difficult. Even if you can get all that, it's often painful to even get various forms of IDs. You might have to travel far out of your way and spend half a day or more to get such ID. Some people have the flexibility with work. Some do not; and
9. Poll access isn't universal. Certain areas may have limited polling places that mean queueing for hours whereas others might allow you to vote within minutes.
All of this is why mandatory voting is so important. It fundamentally undermines democracies if the election process itself is politicized. You see this as some states have given the authority to overturn election results by a political figure (eg the Secretary of State).
Denying the right to vote to convicted felons is an example of something that sounds noble but is nothing more than a form of legal voter suppression.
In Australia, elections are organized by a quasi-government body, the Australian Electoral Commission ("AEC"). You vote on a Saturday so polling places are easy to find (ie schools). In your registered district your name will be in a book and when you show up they just cross off your name. Voting out of district doesn't require any special procedure. You simply fill out your details and these are consolidated later to ensure you didn't vote twice.
It's worth repeating that Democrats aren't necessarily against any form of voter ID as this straw man argument is used a lot. There are degrees of voter ID and allowing a gun club membership card while disallowing a university student ID is clearly intended to target Democratic-leaning voters so it should be exposed for what it is.
[1]: https://www.statesman.com/news/20160923/politifact-take-gun-...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/04/despite-g...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force
[4]: https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/02/politics/bush-gore-military-b...
You fell for fake news. A Texas concealed handgun license is not a "gun club membership", it's an official state photo ID that requires a background check, fingerprinting, and an 8 hour course to obtain.