We are also not required to have or carry ID to carry out any of our constitutionally protected rights.
We would need to set up a service where a representative from the government would come to your house on demand, verify your identity, and issue you a free ID whether you live in downtown DC, rural New Mexico, or somewhere in Puerto Rico. Otherwise this is a non-starter.
Go buy a gun without ID, and tell me how it goes.
You said ID was not required to carry out any other Constitutionally-protected rights. That is simply untrue, as illustrated by my example.
This notion that Democrats keep pushing - that a sizable portion of their voting base is too dumb to get an ID - when massive developing countries like India that are still struggling with basic things like sanitation have long ago solved this problem - is nothing short of embarrassing.
There are people in rural India that live in straw huts that have EPIC cards.
The solution, if this problem exists as they say, is to get everyone proper ID. Not "let's have just anyone vote and we'll trust their word". Universal PKI-backed national ID would be a program everyone should be behind but it would never see the light of day in the US, because maintaining a "disenfranchised" voting bloc is more valuable as a bargaining chip than the positive social contributions of such a program.
> Not "let's have just anyone vote and we'll trust their word".
That's not how it works here. Voter registration requires proof of eligibility, poll books, signatures, and address checks are used for verification. Thanks in part to multiple levels of safeguards, impersonation fraud has been effectively non-existent. Of course, Rockland County and similar cases may prove the existence of other attacks on our democracy that don't depend on impersonation fraud.
Unsuccessful fraud is effectively non-existent.
There is no public data about successful fraud.
So why not make the system bulletproof?
Why do we constantly improve encryption algorithms? Why do modern web browsers not work with cipher suites on 5 year old hardware making them effectively useless e-waste? According to information security folks I can't even be trusted with the hardware in my own house. But we trust that all the mail in ballots were filled out only once by the person whose name is on the ballot. Okay.
The notoriously liberal (/s) Heritage Foundation maintains a public database of all known election fraud cases in the U.S., finding less than two-dozen cases since 1979. Many independent studies come to the same conclusion. Physical voting fraud is statistically negligible, if not perfectly non-existent.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be cautious about fraud, but impersonation fraud will not be how it happens unless we centralize and digitize voting. With that will come the inevitable centralization and digitization of new systemic risks at scale.
And how is that less of a barrier than requiring an ID? Just fix so that it is easy to get an ID like most other countries have.
Source?
The fact is you need ID for SNAP and Medicaid benefits.
So who are all these people with no ID, no money, no food, no identity, no anything but somehow all eligible voters?
There are dozens of examples of Republican states attempting to disenfranchise minority voters.
Not sure why you’re bringing up money, food, or identity here. But as a simple example: picture an average middle class New Yorker. They do not drive. They don’t travel internationally. Why would they need to go get an ID? (I lived in NY for about 11 years, and went a long chunk of that without bothering to get an ID. Only did eventually so that I could rent a car)
I wish you’d recognize that the “problem” you’re suggesting needs solving was invented by political actors with the sole intent of increasing their odds of winning elections. There’s no other real problem they’re trying to solve.
Great, do that, first, and once that is in place in a manner that is secure for the future, we can talk about whether it makes sense to condition the franchise on it.
Of course, the people that are most for Voter ID are also opposed to that (in fact, in some cases, they have simultaneously adopted voter ID rules and made it harder to get IDs, specifically targeting minor areas for the latter effect.)
That's not the solution because lack of ID isn't really the problem.
These problem is that the Republican party's goal is to disenfranchise people who demographically tend to vote Democratic. The difficulty in getting an ID is not an accidental feature of the system — it is an intentional policy choice made to prevent people from exercising their right to vote.
Until this root problem is fixed, any bureaucratic solutions are simply a game of whack-a-mole. If you make IDs easy to obtain, legislatures will enact rules preventing people from using them [1]. If you amend the state constitution to enfranchise felons, legislatures will invent procedural reasons to re-disenfranchise them [2].
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/stat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_F...
"Funnily", Donald Trump, a convicted felon, was allowed to vote in Florida, who typically bars convicted felons from voting, because "he had not yet been sentenced, therefore the conviction was not yet complete".
I guarantee any other Floridian in the same position will be laughed at if they try to vote using this (non) precedent.
It's impossible enough to get things done these days, why should they waste political capital solving a problem that doesn't exist?
Likewise you can't enter a bar, buy booze or cigarettes, rent a car or hotel room without ID because no one can be trusted.
> it hasn't been a problem yet
This is a bit naive. The hackers of yore (think RMS) would refuse to set passwords on their accounts. Those days are over. Would you be open to having a blank password on your HN account? If not, why? It hasn't been a problem yet.
Second, these two things are not the same. People routinely try to defraud businesses because they get tangible value out of it. They don't routinely try to defraud elections: Not only is the punishment more severe for the latter; the would-be fraudster gets practically nothing of value for his efforts.
And to say it's not a problem is not naive. Investigations are routinely carried out in response to allegations of voter fraud, and practically none result in any serious accusations let alone convictions, and certainly none at the scale that could affect an elections outcome.
Jimmy Carter has documented his own first hand account with it.
> We asked John Pope, a friend of ours, to go to the courthouse to represent me. When he arrived he was dismayed to see the local political boss, Joe Hurst, ostentatiously helping my opponent. He was requiring all voters to mark their ballots on a table in front of him and telling them to vote for Homer Moore. The ballots were then dropped through a large hole in a pasteboard box, and John watched Hurst reach into the box several times, remove some ballots, and discard them.
https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/the-fi...
One thing I have asked a handful of R friends and family is this: after 2016 Trump claimed 3M+ illegal votes were cast. Not only did he have a personal interest in rooting out such illegal voting, but he was duty-bound to do something about it. He formed a committee, headed by Kris Kobach (which is its own significant story) to investigate ... and nothing came of it. So, which is it: was Trump negligent in not stopping this massive amount of illegal voting, were they incompetent in that they didn't find any, or were they just lying?
Another recurring news item every two years is about how some eagle-eyed county registrar has found hundreds of dead people enrolled to vote. Huzzah, voter fraud proved once again! The fact is that people die all the time (and move away) and one of the routine duties of the registrar is to use official records to scrub the voter rolls. When my folks died I didn't go to the registrar and ask them to remove their names. In the half a dozen times I've moved I've never notified the registrar that I've moved. Such reports are a non-story. The next time someone brings it up I'd love to ask: hey, what is the breakdown on that list? How many of them are not citizens? How many are affiliated with each party. I'm sure it would show that there is no conspiracy going on, just people moving and dying.
For many people, getting an ID requires taking a day off work, which for many can mean their family is going to miss one or more meals, or even worse, that they miss a car or rent payment.
Consequently, this is also a strong reason why Republicans have repeatedly blocked attempts to make voting day a national holiday, while at the same time strategically closing down polling locations -- so working poor (predominantly registered Democrats) have a harder time voting.
But it gets even worse than that. During segregation era, it wasn't uncommon for black women to be turned away from hospitals and be forced to give birth via midwives, then be unable to obtain birth certificates for their children. Because they have no official birth certificates, states deny them IDs.
Example: https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/05/07/florida-woman-real-i...
Voter ID laws are explicitly designed to disenfranchise these people, because they're virtually always proposed by individuals representing the very states that denied black people birth certificates, and in many cases, those same individuals proposing the laws lived through the very era when those birth certificates were still actively being denied.
That said: I'm mostly in agreement - the solution is to get these people proper IDs (and by extension, birth certificates). However, I think you'll find the very people proposing these ID laws are going to be the same ones stonewalling any attempts to address the problems I laid out.
In some places native Americans can’t get IDs because of their address.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-...
https://journals.law.harvard.edu/crcl/voter-discrimination-t...
In Florida, voters passed a law that made it easier for people released from prison to vote. It was still blocked by the legislation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/28/ron-desantis...
A student ID does not require the holder to get both a state and FBI background check. Besides the background checks, obtaining a license to carry (Texas gun permit) also requires an ID that could be used for voting itself. Student IDs, not so much. Also, I think people really underestimate the number of Democrat leaning gun owners in Texas.
There are far more relevant examples to use, including cost and difficultly navigating bureaucracy for obtaining documents. Throwing that Texas example in there weakens the argument and I really wish people would stop so the real arguments can be taken seriously.
Forgery is far more simple for those than a LTC
This is the percentage of voter fraud found in the US by the conservative Heritsge foundation.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...
The largest voter fraud ever attempted in the US was actually 2020 with the Republican fake electors.
I think you are misunderstanding my intent here.
The student ID thing is a weak argument. If they need a government issue ID/passport to get a student ID -- then so what if a student ID is not allowed? They already have a valid ID to vote with.
It's a distraction. Texas has been doing trumpism since before trump was a thing. Allowing LTC but not student ID does 2 things only and neither has to do with voting; it pisses off people not in their camp and being a valid Texas state ID keeps in line with using a valid Texas ID in places where that is used (not only voting).
A student ID is not a valid Texas state ID (voting or otherwise). Stating that LTC is okay and not a student ID specifically for voting is them trolling and you are falling right into it. It's getting people caught up on something that seems like it's done to disadvantage one side, but really a student ID is simply not a valid Texas ID, nor is it good for anything other than as a supporting identity document to go along with primary or secondary ID documents in obtaining a valid Texas ID. Note: you can't get a LTC without a valid ID.
My vote for largest voter fraud was 2000, of course no one would call it that.
But a student is allowed to vote in the state where they are attending college or their home state. But not both.
Of course Texas did everything possible to make it harder for college students to vote
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/28/texas-young-voter-tu...
States have a constitution right to establish its voting rules. If students want to vote in Texas and Texas requires a valid Texas ID then the student needs a Texas approved valid ID to vote. There is a list of IDs the state of Texas considers valid, including a passport, however a student ID is not a valid ID as recognized by Texas for any state business.
If that is simply beyond your being able to look at without grasping for straws and moving the goal post [we are talking about LTC vs student ID specifically, if you wanted to talk about voting locations then you should of went with that and left the ID thing out of it, which was exactly my point in the first post]. Anyway the only valid conclusion I can come away with from this discussion is that you only want to indulge in faux outrage and win kudos or something.(unfortunate but what a weird way to waste time) You have fun with that and I hope you get bunches of kudos, take care.
https://campusvoteproject.org/student-id-as-voter-id/
You really think it’s an apolitical policy in Texas?
And states don’t have a carte blanche ability to have whatever laws they want to about voting, there were a bunch of lawsuits and laws passed in the sixties about that….
Citation needed
I for one am not behind this until we have actual privacy laws with teeth, and those laws have put a stop to the ongoing widespread abuses of the identification system we already have. As it stands, people's nebulous fear of handing out their DL/SSN numbers is the main thing holding back a deluge of every other business (including websites) demanding your ID for one purported reason or another, but really to augment their surveillance databases.
Literally not a single soul on Earth has ever said this.
Rather, what they're saying, which is an indisputable fact is:
- getting an ID requires money and access to a DMV
- DMVs are segregated by race because of prior factors like districting and redlining.
- Black Americans are more likely to vote Democrat.
- Black Americans are more likely to be poor and therefore are less likely to have an ID.
- therefore, Democrats on average have less ID.
Again, this isn't an opinion, it's just factual based off of very simple logic and statistics.
You can literally go look up, right now, what percentage of Black Americans have ID versus white Americans.
Its not a talking point, it's just real. The US is complex and has hundreds of years of extreme racism under it's belt.
Newsflash - that means not everything is perfectly split by race or equality accessible.
> The solution, if this problem exists as they say, is to get everyone proper ID
Wow, you make it sounds so easy.
Why then is it that, despite decades peddling voted ID laws, the GOP absolutely refuses to even humor the idea of making ID more accessible?
Could it be that their intentions arent as pure as yours?
2. Transactions get rolled back all the time for various reasons.
3. The global digital financial system is a result of decades of evolution and millions of man-years of work.
I also think you disenfranchise too many people when you do that.
- People who work on oil rigs won't get to vote
- People who do shift work covering the hours the polls are open wont get to vote
- People who are of sound mind, but too unwell to travel to a polling location wont get to vote
- November is Red/blue king crab season in Alaska, guess those people don't get to vote
- Flight attendants & pilots might be away from home that day.
- People in the military might be on exercise that day, we're cutting them off (though I'll assume deployed service members will get to vote wherever they are)
- Long haul truckers are out of luck
- Anyone on vacation is missing their chance
- College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend?
I personally couldn't care less as long as they only vote once.
Also, all rights come with responsibilities, and part of the responsibility of voting is registering to vote, getting your ID, and showing up to vote. We shouldn't bend society to let people who don't want bare minimum responsibility to participate in their right.
We have no problem putting serious restrictions on rights of people in other areas coinciding with responsibility.
Among it's many faults, I think this is one advantage of the weird US method of running elections at the county level. While it is probably easier to corrupt individual election corps, due to it's distributed nature it is harder to systematically corrupt all of them. This does mean that US elections are strangly inconsistent from county to county, but that is the price you pay for a distributed system.
As a counterpoint to the "electronic election transactions are impossible to secure" platform, look at the credit card processing systems, yes there is fraud, but compared to the volume of daily transactions it is insignificant. the point being, large scale trusted electronic transactions are possible.
Let's get back to brass tacks and stop all the monkey business. Even if there is no tomfoolery goin on (and I believe there is) why not make it beyond doubt?
BTW, Dominion is actually diebold amalgamated with a couple other "voting" machine vendors into a single corporation.
I don't know that it's that unpopular. I disagree with the 100% fool proof and verifiable claim though. I can think of lots of interesting ways of screwing with it, e.x. manipulating the chain of custody or tampering with the ballots to make errors likely.
Everything is a balance. Paper ballots aren't magically 100% secure, and in person voting comes with trade offs. Ex making it difficult for the military to vote, and making it such a big production for my highly disabled sister that she probably wouldn't bother.
I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. That doesn't mean I disagree that in person isn't "more" secure.
You can't trust the machines. You can't trust the election authorities. You can't trust the post office. Those are fundamental assumptions, not FUD or measured concerns.
Elections should be designed for bad situations, because the results don't matter that much when things are good. Maybe a civil war is likely, or maybe it just ended and people are trying to rebuild trust. In any case, people don't trust each other, and they don't trust the authorities, but they are still trying to have legitimate elections.
The goal is not 100% security, 100% correctness, or something equally silly. The goal is a system where either every major party has a justified belief that the elections were legitimate and fair, the reported results are mostly correct, and there was no substantial fraud. Or at least one party questions the results due to widespread fraud. You want to trust the results, even when you can't trust the people running the elections.
Many paper ballot systems have been designed under such assumptions. The system assumes that the people running the elections cannot be trusted, but they also can't trust each other. You can't trust the people, but you trust that the system will detect and report any attempts at large-scale fraud.
Right now the complaint for voter fraud are things like no ID requirements, mail in ballots etc. If those go away it'll be something else.
The most important aspect of elections is that the vast majority of losers accept the outcome. If they don't, the elections failed. It doesn't really matter if there was fraud or if the losers just don't accept the result. The fundamental reason is the same in both cases: too many citizens don't support the system.
Right. Which is why in all 3500+ elections (and yes, every county has a separate election, with separate ballots, separate rules and separate groups of folks managing the elections. In fact, it's your neighbors who manage and staff the elections in your county) every election day, there are generally representatives from each candidate and party involved in each race, from city council member, animal control officer, coroner, mayor, congressperson, etc., etc., etc. at each polling place and counting center (where different) who are there to make sure their candidate is not shortchanged.
This happens everywhere, ever time and is nothing new. IF there are claimed "irregularities," recounts are performed and lawsuits filed and adjudicated.
But don't believe me. Go ahead and work at the polls. They hire and train folks to work at polling places during the elections. See for yourself. Or is that too much work and you'd rather rely on someone else (you trust them, but not anyone else?) to tell you what goes on at the polls?
Please.
Then there is a second count that produces the official results. That count is done at a higher level (county-equivalent for most elections and city/municipality for local elections), largely to ensure a more uniform treatment for various edge cases.
In fact, I’d call electronic voting unpopular given the many, many examples on this page.
What does in person (with an ID) add to election security? That practice most certainly restricts voting unless there's a holiday for election day.
What keeps in person voting from being manipulated less than other good practice elections?
Why did in person voting become a big issue only just before and after 2020 election?
Why didn't anybody pay attention to what some states did after 2000 election?
Given that there are >3500 elections (one for each county) in the US every cycle, and all the competing eyes on the polls, counts and storage of ballots in each of those 3500+ counties makes compromising enough people to affect an election incredibly unlikely.
Anyways, haven’t most/all districts gone to paper ballots, the electronic part is just auto tabulation. They can be counted manually if necessary.
Voter ID and blocking mail-in / early voting are just a few examples of contemporary Republican voter suppression efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Even if it's at a polling place on the day of, it's still a secret ballot. As such, of course it's hidden. It's a secret ballot. What are you going on about?
Is it painful talking out of your ass like that? It certainly stinks. Yuck!
I think you're a small-minded troll who revels in the pain and suffering of others. As such, whatever scorn is heaped on you is likely well deserved.
> More than one in five polling places have closed over the last decade, according to an ABC News and ABC Owned Stations analysis of data from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, the Center for New Data and the Center for Public Integrity. https://abcnews.go.com/US/protecting-vote-1-5-election-day-p...
This is after Shelby County v. Holder, and now states are shutting down polling stations to suppress the vote --- well you can no longer accuse them that in the courts, but it is clearly what they are doing.
Just like how Alabama passed a voter id law and then closed half their DMVs, the ones in black neighborhoods. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/alabama-closes-d...
There's no "sanctity of the voting booth" - shutting down polling stations and DMVs and then requiring people to visit the DMV and the polling station and making it intentionally more difficult for some people, this is all very very obvious and you can't hide it from me by waving a flag in front of my face.
Here's the actual plan:
Require in person voting, "protect" the polling places with armed masked goons working for ICE to "keep illegals from voting" and then call it freedom.
Give me a break. Do you really think we're that dumb?
I'm not saying that to deride your instinct here that a polling place being a private booth is kind of Cool™, just that providing accessibility (or, if I had my druthers, making voting _mandatory_ and giving everyone the day off to do it) sometimes requires we open the idea book and consider how we can make sure everyone who has the right to vote can do it.
Have you honestly never heard of this before?
Does the actual reality that exist in the actual world that we actually live in matter more?
Tossing unnecessary burdens on the process is how they mess with this thing you think is so holy
Requiring ID is a problem given that a lot of people don't have easy access (or access at all) to legal ID, for various reasons, some as simple as cost. Having a license costs money on an ongoing basis and you need to have access to documents to prove your identity like a birth certificate, and some citizens don't have those through no fault of their own, like losing everything in a fire or even the relevant records agency itself burning down. Thankfully there are often fee waivers for hardship but there are certainly corner cases where saying 'if you want to vote you need ID' is basically a poll tax, something we rightfully banned in the US a long time ago.
It's about keeping the undesirables out of the voting booth.
For the Republicans it's the immoral and poor and 'non Americans' who shouldn't really be voting.
And IMO it's gross attitude for a democracy.
I love this notion that the US is such a special snowflake that there's always a reason that things that work nearly everywhere else couldn't possibly work here.
After all, if nine months of partisan rioting in an election season is kosher before a "free and fair election", which leads to over twenty five deaths, then not voting shouldn't be a big deal.
Unless, of course, a compulsory level turnout has value in lending legitimacy given the the broader context of antidemocratic events.
Democratic governments should not have the political protection of citing the compulsory turnout. Whether the political currency lent by the compulsory turnout is implied or overtly cited.
The political currency that the turnout lends is something that needs to be earned via the legitimate practice of government.
If the government processes become corrupt, then the voter turnout should be one avenue of reflecting that opinion by the populace.
The choice to withhold a vote is as democratically "sacred" as the right to vote.
You are free to not vote for any candidate in Australia. You are free to write "Fuck you all" on your ballot. All you must do is attend a voting station. And unlike the US, there are many legally enshrined protections to ensure you can.
I'm not sure your complaint. You are the one that tarred mandatory voting with a wide brush. I apologize for offering a counter-argument.
Whereas my arguments are referencing democratic logic. I'm attempting to speak to a general logical framework of principles, rather than to (too much) give specific place opinions.
I took your "counter argument" statement about the existence of Australian compulsory voting as fact.
I'm not sure what the point is of returning to, what, partially contradict me on the details of Australian voting and where it isn't exactly totally compulsory?
Truly with all due respect, I think that you're having an argument with yourself at this point.
I very much agree.
In Australia you can go along, write "screw you" on the ballot, job done, attendance recorded.
And the fine if you miss it is only a few bucks. It's a good nudge get everyone participating.
The protest is in the visible lack of turnout, and more relevantly in the lack of turnout of voting blocks that have historically shown up. Still agree?
I know that this is hard for you guys.
So I'll simplify it with an example scenario, which also tests your democratic moral logic.
Which is more democratic?
An election of Kim Jong Un in North Korea with 100% compulsory turnout. Or
An election of Kim Jong Un in North Korea with 5% non-compulsory turnout?
The answer, very obviously, is that the scenario with 5% non-compulsory turnout is more democratic.
This is the correct answer because the 95% that did not show up to vote would be seen by the world as a protest vote against a corrupt system. This is a necessary and valuable democratic mechanism. As it deprives Kim Jon Un's corrupt government of democratic legitimacy.
As it stands, North Korea has 100% voter turnout.
Do you want to veer toward or away from North Korea's model of "democracy"?
What you have in Australia is publicly visible compulsory turnout, period. Aside from whatever you might do privately in the election booth.
You can claim that Australia is a model of non-corruption. Maybe it is.
But compulsory turnout sure is a large step in corrupting elections, and one could argue a hallmark of corrupt elections. As well as a highly unusual shared characteristic with the most corrupt governments in the World.
Lack of turnout has never made the blindest bit of difference anywhere, and is indistinguishable from laziness and disinterest in actually democratic countries. But in Australia we can see the numbers who spoiled their votes.
In North Korea Kim Jong Un is free to invent the attendance figures just as much as he is the prevalence of votes for himself.
I really think people are too uninformed for compulsory voting. I envy these people. It would be nice not to care. I don't need them looking at a list of candidates and being like "Oh I remember that guy, he made a cameo in Home Alone 2, check"
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification...
No one imagines that everyone is just fine with what is implied to be the same level of discrimination in accessing air travel that they state is going on when voter ID requirements are in force. And yet.
I disagree in regard to your assertion as to what voter ID is about.
Disagree all you want, they aren’t exactly keeping it a secret.
You aren't quoting a "they", you are quoting one man.
Last, by your logic, eliminating voter ID is about winning elections for the democrats.
The idea just rubs me the wrong way.
I understand America is somewhat unusual among most Western nations that lots of people don't have passports. A driving license should serve as a good ID card but lots of people don't have one of those either. As a Brit the idea of an ID card also feels undemocratic to me. In the UK we have inexpensive passports and a national voter registration database, with signatures and adresses recorded, why would that not work in the US?
I fear that uninformed people will just fill in the bubbles though, and then you start getting votes based on name recognition only, and thats already a big enough issue.
In the US, we also have county (and state) voter registration databases with signatures and addresses recorded. And they do work in the US. The only real difference is that those practices are determined at the county and state levels and not at the national level. That's not a bug. In fact, it's required by our Constitution.
That some places abuse that really sucks. For me at least, that doesn't happen where I live.
We also have an entire party who thrives on reduced turnout, and they basically control everything right now.
Interesting how there's a near 100% overlap of states which didn't implement this form of voter disenfranchisement and states where Democrats won. Thank you for informing me of that.
The only thing that matters is seizing on a narrative and running with it, whipping up fear and discontent.
The solution is to heal the partisanship in US society that infects everything there, and acts like poison on public discourse and trust.
Even assuming it is, how do we solve the other issues it causes if it's the only way to vote? e.g.:
- How do US citizens that don't live or are not at the time of voting physically in the US vote? e.g. overseas military personnel.
- People that live in remote areas of the country without easy access to in person voting stations?
- Those with limited mobility and have a hard time physically getting to a voting station?
- Those with limited transportation options? e.g. don't have reliable access to a car.
- Those that do shift work and can't or can't afford to take the time off?
- The estimated millions of Americans that don't have a valid form of ID?
End of the day, even if in person voting with a valid ID is the only reliable way to vote, we also need to evaluate the marginal reduction in voting fraud against disenfranchising voters.
Disenfranchisement is not just a side effect, it's the main effect of this thought process.
In theory you could just run it through the exact machine again and you'd get a good test for what is going on, and you have a physical copy to count / verify.
I think it is a good system, and about as close to digital as I want to get.
Some solid old school tech and some reasonably new.
That's exactly how we do it in New York as well.
What's more, before I'm given that paper ballot, I need to provide my name and address, then provide a signature which is compared to the signature on file with the Board of Elections. If the signature doesn't match, I don't get to vote.