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Comment by elmer2 | Hacker News Reader

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> Example two: Voter ID. In every country in the world, you need ID to vote. Democrats have pushed to completely remove it for years.

Would just like to point out that here in .au you don’t need ID to vote (as in to show up and cast your vote, not talking about registering).

Is also like to point out that in other countries the national government issues ID to their citizens. The US doesn't have anything like that.

You also don't need ID to vote in Britain, which like USA does not issue mandatory ID cards (at least not yet).

How about you recognize that historically the most important voting problem in the USA, by far, has been voter suppression -- which is increased by voter ID mandates?

Most of the cheating historically happens in the American South and that cheating, making it harder for people to vote continues to be a time-honored tradition in that part of the United States still.

Donald Trump and the current Republican Party does not care about anything other than winning at all cost. And if they don’t win, they will cry like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

I am appalled by that comment. Cedric, Lord Fauntleroy does not cry!

Ah, the "rampant voter fraud" narrative. Which has been disproven time and again, including when Republicans go looking for it (see: Arizona).

Often its projection:

> A Minnesota prosecutor charged conservative activist James O'Keefe and influencer Cam Higby on Wednesday with felony unlawful voting and identity theft for posing as registered voters at Minnesota polling places during the August primary as part of a hidden-camera stunt they later posted online.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/minnesota-charges-c...

It's always funny to me how it feels like no one applies critical thinking when it's their "team" making the argument. By "no one" I mean "no one Republican".

If Trump lost by 200000 votes and claimed "There were 210000 illegal votes!", wouldn't it be easy to present at least one? But they'd scrape the bottom of the barrel of "evidence" in court for one count of fraud...

And Donnie, if you knew the exact number (which is oddly the number you lost by, plus a little bit), doesn't that mean you tallied all the fraudulent votes, well, where's the list then?

Unfortunately, it's a well-known psychological phenomenon that many (most?) people will start to believe a statement they hear repeatedly.

Before the 2020 election Trump primed his base by claiming over and over again that he could only lose if the election was rigged. Then, immediately after the 2020 election results were tallied, he and every right-wing media outlet spent the bulk of their airtime announcing that the election was stolen. It comes as no surprise that a significant fraction of the Republican voter base started to believe it was true, despite multiple investigations and dozens of court challenges about fraudulent votes failing to produce any evidence.

It's also not surprising that a significant fraction of the Republican base believes election fraud in general is rampant, which conveniently allowed Republican legislatures to make sweeping changes to how future elections would be held... like their standard voter suppression fare of closing polling locations, removing large blocks of voter registrations without notice, slowing processing of mail-in ballots and changing the rules regarding postmarks and late ballots, adding ID requirements, and, in some cases, revoking the validity of existing IDs.

All while the reality is that only around 1:10^6 votes are ever substantiated as fraudulent (e.g., Arizona has proven 36 cases of voter fraud among 42 million votes cast over the last 25 years).

See: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

Remember, Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, who had been Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel in the 1950's. And McCarthy was famous for waving around "lists of known Communists" in the government and never actually showing them to anyone who could prove or disprove the claim.

Voter ID was an issue in my country. By law everyone has to carry valid ID on them at all times.

But it is considered vital that every citizen gets the chance to vote including homeless people so they had to find a compromise. Although ofcourse the number of hobos who want to vote is largely theoretical.

In my country that group of people is surprisingly active voters (where I live there a lot of discounts for disadvantaged people to get ID - hard part is queue in migration office) and coincidentally there good people which organizes buses to make easier travel for vote.../s On more serious note is very open secret especially in small counties .

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