It adds cost and there is no indication of an actual existing problem that it would solve that justifies the cost. Even if you ignore the fact that all actual voter ID proposals have been fairly overtly aimed at discouraging voting among selected groups of eligible voters that tend to vote in a way unfavorable to the preferences of those promoting voter ID, or that several times implementation of voter ID has been accompanied by targeted efforts to reduce access to new/replacement IDs in areas where, again, disfavored voters by the group advancing voter ID love, and even the more basic fact that it adds another point of potential failure due to human error even when pursued honestly, the fact that it to all indications provides nothing of value for the direct, immediate added cost is enough reason to oppose it.
At a minimum it provides more confidence and faith in the voting system. That’s not a small benefit.
It also provides a safeguard against fraud in future elections.
It’s easily worth the small cost of requiring an ID.
The real reason the Democrats strongly oppose it is they currently have a lock on the “don’t care about or follow politics but can be dragged along by friends” votes.
I think you may underestimate just how hard it is to obtain ID in most of America. First, you have to locate the 5+ forms: birth certificate, multiple bills in your name at your address, previous id if any, etc. Many people (homeless people come to mind) would never be able to obtain all these records. Trying to obtain a drivers license at age 18 was a massive undertaking and myself and my family and had lived in the exact same house for my entire life!
Now imagine. You're poor. You're working multiple jobs, taking care of your children, etc. Even if you manage to come into the DMV on the first try with all the forms perfectly ready and in order - something the DMV makes nearly impossible - you will still probably going to wait 2+ hours to even get up to the window to start the process. When you add up traveling to the DMV, being there, and coming back, you could be missing the vast majority of a day of work, something that can get many minimum-wage workers fired.
In the abstract, requiring stringent ID to vote seems like something everyone should get behind. In practice in the United States, these laws are only enacted by Republicans that are threatened by shifting demographics. If all poor people in major population centers were voting, the Republican party would all but evaporate, or have to severely alter its message
There's no evidence suggesting a meaningful amount of false votes are being cast by people without IDs. So if you don't think fraud is going on, you won't be more confident. If you do think fraud is happening without any substantial evidence, why would this change make you more confident?
Additionally, allowing voting without an ID also provides confidence and faith in the voting system. Why trust a voting system that rejects people for forgetting their wallet or for being a walking teetotaler?
The defacto "photo ID" in the United States is a state issued driver's license. Yes, some places informally use this for age verification as a result. But not everyone has the ability to drive (whether by choice or by disability), so not everyone is going to have this document.
So identification for this purpose will have to rely on a patchwork of various documents in order for it to work. But even considering this, if photo ID were tailored in a bipartisan manner as such to ensure complete access is possible, there probably wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case in some states.
The classic argument you hear, for instance, regarding Texas' often-struck-down-but-still-living-on voting ID requirements (https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/acceptable-fo...), is that a handgun license is considered a sufficient form of voting ID, but a college photo ID is not. I will add, reviewing the document, that from my perspective, it is logically puzzling to me why, for those aged 70 and older, it is okay to have an infinitely expired ID and still be allowed to vote given the typical "voter ID" arguments you hear in favor. Unless there is a "demographic advantage" here that the law is covertly aiming for, that is.
This would solve other problems - for example the use of insecure social security numbers as de facto national ID, and passwords, which you give to everybody yet can be used to steal your identity simply by knowing. Like, this is actually a big problem in the US that affects numerous people, and would save the economy million of dollars minimum, probably more, by solving in a secure way.
Then, with reasonable confidence that national ID had the uptake rate necessary to pull it's lack of below the level of impact which would effect elections, you could make voter ID mandatory.
Weirdly, no one ever seems to start with the - far more problematic - "hey national ID is kind of a big problem..." when they propose voter ID though. They also don't start with any data about in-person voter fraud (except if you count all the people who get caught trying to commit it to "prove" it's totally easy to do everytime this comes up).
But equal access is what matters here. If the ruleset is such where you make it a lot easier for certain groups to vote over other groups, chances are you will be found to be in violation of the 24th amendment or at least the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. Texas voter IDs have been struck down more often than not so far so obviously a lot of judges have taken a dim view to Texas' intent.
It's a terrible argument to anyone who thinks for a moment: A handgun license is issued by a state government agency, often with antifraud features. A college photo id, not so much.
The general media however has focused on the college ID vs handgun permit argument. So it has to be mentioned.
And more: the argument consists of digging deeper and asking why, in the past decade, such a sudden, incredible, apocalyptically urgent need has arisen for in-person checks at polling places, with no equivalent need for ID checks with absentee/mail-in ballots.
Fraud with mail-in ballots would be orders of magnitude easier to pull off. Why don't states with draconian polling-place ID laws also have draconian ID laws for mailed-in ballots? Why, in those states, don't you need to bring multiple proofs of identity, residence and citizenship to a notary to stamp your ballot in triplicate before mailing it in? If fraud really was what they were worried about, they'd be consistent across these types of ballots. They aren't.
Also it's worth looking into the whole package of policies that usually comes with these rules. It's not just ID rules; it's a particular kind of ID, and a particular set of paperwork requirements, and closing down ID-issuance offices in certain locations, and closing down polling places in certain locations, and reducing hours for voting at the locations that remain open, and... well, let's just say meditate on that and you'll figure out what "problem" is being solved. If you're still not convinced, just go read the defenders of these policies, in their own words, in court filings, explaining why they're doing this.
Voting is fundamental enough that it should only be restricted in the event of pressing, urgent, demonstrated, proven issues, and only the absolute minimum restrictions should be put in place. Voter ID doesn't "solve" any such issue, and is not the minimum necessary restriction in any event (there are already mechanisms for challenging suspected fraudulent voting, if you're truly worried about that).
As recent bombers have discovered, this isn't the 70s Unibomber era anymore, and every piece of mail is individually bar code tracked and enormous computerized fingerprint databases exist along with CCTV footage and cell phone monitoring databases. Using the US mail to commit a crime in a general sense (not strictly election fraud) would have been fairly untraceable in 1970 but half a century later it would be an extremely foolish strategy. The USPS is slightly less locked down than my bank, but much more locked down than my local food store, for example.
At one point his office was forced to actually investigate and look for fraud, and what they found... were wealthy people -- typically Republican voters -- who owned properties in multiple locations and were voting at each of those locations.
Absentee/mail-in ballots make that kind of fraud much easier, but despite it being the only fraud he ever found, Kobach never pushed for any kind of purge of multiple-property-owning voters from the rolls, or ID checks for mailed-in ballots. Wonder why...
Identity is determined, confirmed during the registration step.
Identity is reaffirmed at the poll site, with both ID and signature verification. (Address and signature for postal ballots.)
The manufactured outrage about "voter fraud" is used to justify ratcheting up the voter id requirements. Specifically, requiring voters have government issued photo id. Which costs money. Which makes it a poll tax. Which is unconstitutional.
Provide government id for free and everyone who supports democracy and enfranchisement is totally on board.
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Those of us who understand election administration also oppose the unnecessary bureaucratic gatekeeping imposed in places like Georgia. For example, if your drivers license says "chris co255" and your voter id says "chris-co255", even though everything else matches, your registration will be purged.
Cast opposing such kafkaesque draconian measures as partisan if you wish.
2) Only 91% of whites, 73% of blacks and 81% of hispanic citizens have a government issued ID, so you're disenfranchising a lot of people by requiring it.
That is a lot of barred experience. Sounds a bit like second-class citizenship.
Comment, based on the down votes, Is this wrong? Can you buy a air ticket in the US and travel by plane without an ID?
At least in my state, you can also travel on a train, go to a baseball game, attend a concert, and buy lottery tickets and cigarettes and beer (provided you look old enough) without ID.
If you want to make a voter ID compulsory, let’s have that discussion but included within it must be that the card is free, available the same day, easy to get on a weekend, accepted by every state and territory and voting location, and has minimal paperwork requirements for all circumstances of birth including home, midwife, unknown parent or parents, overseas, and domestic to two non-citizen parents.
Until you do that, the ID requirement is effectively disenfranchisement and that cannot stand for voting.
I wonder how common ID usage is per state. Would be interesting to see how that correlate to state that currently require ID for voting.
Forgot Your ID?
In the event you arrive at the airport without valid identification, because it is lost or at home, you may still be allowed to fly. The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name, current address, and other personal information to confirm your identity. If your identity is confirmed, you will be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint. You will be subject to additional screening, to include a patdown and screening of carry-on property.
You will not be allowed to enter the security checkpoint if your identity cannot be confirmed, you chose to not provide proper identification or you decline to cooperate with the identity verification process.
Your argument falls apart anyway. None of the things you listed are rights, they are privileges. Voting is a right.
I'm personally not in favor of voter ID laws but (unfortunately) there is plenty of precedent for restriction of fundamental rights.
Which based on what I read about issue is often the case. You can buy alcohol on pretty much any piece of paper (student id) while the one for voting has more requirements. You can loose driving license for variety of things, including health, not paying court fees, etc.
If you can't be motivated to drive a car, open a bank account (under KYC laws), buy a handgun, fly on an airplane, hold a legit tax paying job (under form I-9), enter federal controller property such as an office building, buy and drink alcohol, go to a concert, any number of zillions of things, why permit someone that disconnected from society to vote? They have no skin in the game and they clearly do not care enough to put forth the most minimal effort to fix their problem, yet they want to impose their active dis-motivation upon us all by voting and thats somehow good.
If someone is allowed to be completely disconnected from reality but should still be able to vote, should someone completely disconnected from reality be allowed to buy a handgun under an identical argument that anyone should be allowed to do anything they feel like?
Should it be easier for someone to vote for "literally Hitler" without an ID than it is to buy a harmless handgun or hunting rifle? Surely, voting is more important.
Because there's nothing in the Constitution that requires you to be "connected to society" to vote. Nor is there any provision that says you must be "motivated" (motivated for what exactly??? The things that motivate me are different from the things that motivate you). The Constitution doesn't require you to be employed or even have shelter. The Constitution purposely doesn't say "only people who have HN commenter VLM approved lifestyles are allowed to vote" because the whole idea of "freedom" is allowing someone to choose to live as weirdly as they want to.
>yet they want to impose their active dis-motivation upon us all by voting
No they don't want to "impose dis-motivation" on anyone. Even if they did, that's their right to do so. I don't appreciate a Christian "imposing Christ" on me, and some may vote candidates that want to turn America into a theocracy, yet I don't arbitrarily decide Christians don't get to vote. I also don't want white supremacists candidates to get elected, but I don't arbitrarily decide that white supremacists don't get a right to vote.
Most people who live as shut-ins don't see it as a problem, not my choice to live like that, personally, but I don't tell other people how to live their lives.
To take a example from Europe, membership cards from schools/universities, banks, and driving license work as automatic identity cards. For those who neither study, have a bank account or drive then the police should provide one. For the wast majority this mean that ID cards are automatic process of normal life, and for the rest it is a simple matter of requesting one at the nearest police station. As a result almost everyone has some form of identification card or an other.
But what does that have to do with voting? Should they have a harder time voting because they already have other major problems anyway?
Lets imagine we had a state which got tired of vulnerable and weak social security number. In every place where it is used we replace it a two factor hardware token that include bio-metric data (a photo), issued by the government or institutions like banks that by law are required to follow strict requirement of identification. I think we can both agree that this initiative would not have the goal to make voting harder, nor prevent voting fraud, but rather fix identity theft caused by the weak password-like system of social security numbers.
Wouldn't it be better to work to fix the problem of a lack of ID than to just throw up our hands and claim we don't need it?
For example, radical right wing pundit Ann Coulter was registered to vote in two places at the same time. (I don't recall if she also cast both ballots. Unlikely.) That is an error, not a fraud.
Such errors are inevitable in our state-based voter registration database administration. Worsened because only registered people are tracked. Versus listing all people and having flags for their eligibility.
The fix is nation wide universal automatic voter registration. Just like every other mature democracy.
>The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Thank you. I'm surprised and a bit embarrassed to admit I was ignorant of the fact that it was clearly spelled out in an Amendment, but am happy to have rectified that ignorance.
I do think an ID that you need to have and is gvt issued should be baid by taxes. But noone likes those.
The second is that the past does not predict the future. Politics getting kind of absurd in the US. People are radicalizing to an extreme degree. When people are assaulting and trying to intimidate one another because of relatively minor differences of political opinion, it should be assumed that voter fraud is going to be an increasingly severe threat to election integrity.
Maybe most importantly of all. You don't want to wait until it's a severe issue to stop it. At that point you risk having already have lost the faith of the electorate and that's only going to lead to bad outcomes. You want to preempt bad actors.
Yes, it is.
> When I voted all I had to do was walk in, sign a sheet by my name, and go vote. There was no verification or validation of anything. I could have just as well signed by another individual's name.
You have unusually lax security at your polling places; the standard method is more like providing your name and address, having a poll worker find the matching name/address combo on a list, and then being presented with a page to sign; it's true that the just sign in method you describe is somewhat subject to a “find a blank space right before closing time and sign there” attack, but it's equally the case that that can be (and is every place I've ever voted) mitigated without voter ID.
> If I was smart I'd do it somewhere closer to the closing of poll times to help minimize the chances that they'd show up. I could then go from station to station doing similar things.
If you start after 90% of people have voted and then do it at multiple sites (with a smaller share remaining that will vote at each site), you are fairly likely to get detected—not more likely than not. If you've got a dozen or so people doing that at every federal election (every two years), you'd have a higher expected rate of detected in person voter fraud than we actually have in the US.
Why aren't more instances of voters realizing that someone has already voted on their behalf if this is so easy and smart?
I can see two reasons (there are likely more):
1) If someone is going to vote as another, and they are smart about it, they will do some pre-research to pick out likely non-voters to become. Voting as someone else who is not going to vote would not likely be caught, because that non-voter will have no opportunity to notice the 'heist' since they do not go vote.
2) At least in the US, with low voter turnout (55% for the 2016 election is quoted by this page [1]) then someone has a somewhat large chance of simply randomly picking a non-voter as their "surrogate", and if they do win that pick, then that non-voter will not notice due to their not going to the polls.
Now, whether either of these strategies would allow an individual to amass sufficient votes to change an outcome is unknown. Even "close" races in the US often have a few thousand votes difference in the final counts, so for someone (or some group) to change an outcome they either have to find enough #1's above to amount to several thousand votes or have to "win" at #2 picks enough without "losing" at a #2 pick enough to get caught out. So it feels like it would be difficult to pull off a few thousand of these, in a single day, without getting caught unnless a fairly large group is involved. And the problem then (with large groups) likely shifts to keeping the entire group quiet about their activity (i.e., leaks from a group member become the downfall point, not other voters noticing double voting).
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout...
Sure, that gives one person doing it one time a fairly reasonable chance of not being detected.
It doesn't give a repeated, signficant pattern of such fraud a decent chance of avoiding detection.
Because you are proposing - at the bottom end - trying to get at least a few hundred fraudulent votes in, to swing a very close race. That's coordinated votes too - somehow you want to orchestrate this (and this is exactly what's always proposed as being the problem by voter ID advocates).
Let's be generous and say each operative can achieve 10 votes at different polling stations. This is hugely optimistic. So to get to a hundred votes (probably not enough in even the closest races) you need to
(a) find 100 non-voters who you know won't turn up that polls (hint: you can't - it's all probabilities)
(b) find 10 people to pull this off. And to be clear: this is recruiting 10 people to commit serious state and/or federal crimes. Which has a couple of problems - how do you find them? Why do they agree to do it? And what's the probability of any one of them getting caught? - and it is a probability. Remember in this example the numbers are hugely optimistic - so the probability someone gets caught rises rapidly to 100% as you increase the numbers.
which leads us to (c): someone will get caught. Throughout this whole effort you're literally one poll worker happening to know a person, or getting a bad feeling and calling that person's address afterwards, or a neighbor or member of the community hearing "I'm Julie Smith of this address" and going "wait that's not her" - because you're trying to infiltrate a community here, and the odds on election day the poll workers and voters know the names and faces of the people you propose to pretend to be, is also pretty high. So - someone, one of your operatives, gets caught.
Why do they stay quiet about the operation? They're facing criminal charges and jail time. They can be offered a deal if they roll over on your other operatives or you. How much are you proposing to buy their silence with? Why do they take the risk in the first place if not for monetary incentive?
Ah you say - but maybe it's a whole lot of independent actors doing it. Which okay, let's go with that - how do these people, in sufficient numbers, do enough local research to not get caught in sufficient quantity? - remembering that, when people do the "I just show up and say I'm someone else thing" as "activism" - they get caught.
EDIT: Also worth noting - unless the election rolls are actually destroyed, you also need to keep this all secret forever. If anyone has a crisis of conscience later and leaks it, then at minimum you - the coordinator - definitely go to jail since everyone will happily roll on you to avoid it.
Which is what is likely the reason why not much seems to be happening, too many angles to "get caught" and so few groups attempt a coordinated attempt.
This was always one of the valid arguments against computerized voting machines and in favor of paper ballots. The paper ballots require "feet on the ground" attacks with high risks of detection. The "hack the machines" attack requires no large coordinated "feet on the ground" groups, and given some of the machines were reported to be internet connected, could be accomplished from a remote (and therefore safe) location.
PS - the number of "likelys" is because I have no sources for anything (beyond the 55% turnout figure) so it is all "guesstimates".
If someone is attempting to commit in-person voter fraud, they'll need to sign the name that matches the line they put it in. If they're just mistakenly signing on the wrong line, that will, first of all, probably be obvious to both them and the poll worker immediately, and even if not, it will probably be obvious to anyone coming along behind and checking if there's a discrepancy. (Unless the signature is well and truly illegible, and if that's the case, they can check it against the signature from the previous election for that person.)
So you change one vote while taking the risk that you won't be able to match their signature under pressure, or that their signature will already be there because they've voted already or will find yours when they vote later, exposing your scheme. With that chance of failure, is the ten years in jail worth it?
For what it's worth, I agree that the risk:reward is pretty messed up. But we're not the metronome for politics in the US. People are doing all sorts of stupid things, and seemingly getting even more radical. I'm sure you'd agree that there are plenty of people that would think by adding a few votes they'd be doing their part to 'save the world.' I mean there are people assaulting each other over political differences. People are going literally crazy from politics.
At the vast majority of polling places it's more complicated than "sign a sheet by my name". You fill out a form and tell them your address and the poll worker looks your name up. If you are signing next to a name, the poll worker verifies that you're signing next to the correct name (the one you told them).
In that case, if you tell the poll worker that your name is Bob Smith and it turns out Bob Smith has already voted, you're now probably going to jail.
If enough people to make a difference start doing that, it's going to be noticed.
However, even in your case where you just sign next to a name (I've never seen a polling place like this by the way, and I think your polling place should implement better security), there's a good chance that the person who's name you signed comes in after you. If this happens often enough to matter, there will be an investigation, and they'll probably stop the policy of letting you look at the list of who's voted before you tell them your name.
We know this doesn't happen often because numerous voter fraud commissions over the years were unable to find any evidence of this.
>" I'm sure you'd agree that there are plenty of people that would think by adding a few votes they'd be doing their part to 'save the world.'"
Apparently not, because no there have no reports of people being turned away because someone else already voted as them.
There was a Trump supporter who was convicted for trying to vote twice in 2016, but his most recent voter fraud commission was unable to find any evidence of serious voter fraud--despite desperately trying to do so.
Well, that and the fact that the people sponsoring the laws keep getting caught saying that either the racial or partisan impact (or both) are the point when they think no one but their ideological allies is around to hear.
Sure, there's external circumstances and policy action which supports that conclusion without the admissions, but they also keep admitting it.
Or they don’t believe your estimates of low levels of voter fraud.
Oops.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/more-trump-deception-on-vo...
The vast majority of dead people voting come from reports of states comparing voting records to death records. In one example South Carolina reported that 953 people voted after being deceased between 2005 and 2012.
However when they investigated 207 cases from the 2010 election they found that '106 cases were the result of clerical errors by poll managers; 56 cases were the result of bad data matching, meaning that the person in question was not actually dead; 32 cases were “voter participation errors,” including stray marks on lists erroneously indicting they had voted; three cases were absentee ballots issued to registered voters who cast ballots and later died before Election Day; and 10 cases contained “insufficient information in the record to make a determination.”'
It’s a basic and sensible precaution.
So we do not bother.
That said, my state autoregisters people as they come of age and get an ID. Vote by mail has high participation rates.
People can walk into an elections office and vote if they have some difficulty. Doing that is free, they just gotta get there.
People even run ballots out to voters. I did that volunteer work one year. Was cool actually. I helped voters vote.
And yet, in the last decade, at least 11 states have passed laws adding new voter ID requirements. Because of the lack of a voter fraud problem, the disparate impact is clearly the main objective of the laws, which proponents of the laws are frequently quite clear about. The idea that they might be used to theoretically avoid fraud is basically a convenient justification that just might pass constitutional muster.
It's not that Democrats hate national ID cards because freedom and Republicans like them because safety. It's that Republicans like requiring voter ID cards because adding barriers to voting benefits Republicans, and Democrats dislike them because adding barriers to voting hurts Democrats. If it weren't voter ID cards, it'd be something else. Previous obvious attempts included poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests. When those fail, you just make sure the lines to vote in the wrong party's districts are going to be much longer than the lines to vote in the right party's districts.