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> waged a legal campaign against the voting rights act, drafted various pieces of legislation aimed at disenfranchising minorities and college students Showing

by pyronik 10y ago

> waged a legal campaign against the voting rights act, drafted various pieces of legislation aimed at disenfranchising minorities and college students Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs.

grzm 10y ago
I understand where you're coming from. That said, voter ID has been used in the US to restrict voting rights. The issue is unfortunately not as straightforward as "straight up common sense". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St... https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
travmatt 10y ago
Please don't misconstrue what I said, the republicans have been engaged in litigation to repeal various portions of the voting rights act in numerous courts through America. This is quite separate from voter laws and it is a separate voting suppression tactic altogether. To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America - the majority of cases last election stemmed from trump voters who tried to defend their actions as 'testing the system.' I can also provide studies that show those voter is laws disproportionately impact minority voters, as well as court judgements where republicans were found to target said voter with these laws explicitly - as in that was their explicit goal, and acted with 'surgical orecision6', in the courts words. This is not to mention the circumstantial evidence, like republican operatives explaining their long term goal is disenfranchisement, or the actions of governors instructing dmv employees to deceive the public and closure of dmv's in minority areas. I'd be open to hear alternative interpretations as to what is happening, but so far my experience has been that those in favor of said laws either approve of disenfranchisement, or have an emotional response as to the 'fairness' of the law, and assume i should adopt their viewpoint.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  I regularly hear that voter fraud is non-existent. However, in California only a utility bill is required to register to vote. How does a study determine that those represent actual citizens?
  - travmatt 10y ago
    State level political parties have the power to challenge the registration of voters within their boundaries.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    Information about who voted is public.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - unprepare 10y ago
    you're unclear about how voter fraud is investigated, and your solution to that is to create more legislation about voting? That is deeply unsettling.
- mherdeg 10y ago
  > To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America I think it might be better to say "irrelevant to the outcome of an election" than "non existent". One kind of in-person vote fraud which can be measured is voting twice: mail in a ballot in one district and vote in person in another district, or (more rare) vote in person in two districts. There were as an order of magnitude guess 400-1000 people who voted twice in both Florida and New York in 2000. And other isolated incidents have been detected, e.g. in 2002 perhaps as many as a few hundred people in Kansas voted in person in two different districts (sometimes two places in Kansas, sometimes one in Kansas and one in Missouri). See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2004/10/people_who_vote_twice.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/200... for the sources here; local newspapers pulled the voter records and cross-checked duplicate names by hand, reaching out to individual people to ask their stories. The issue of whether or not voter fraud is a serious national problem was a big deal in the early 2000s, when the executive branch of the federal government put a LOT of work into trying to find and prosecute voter fraud which they believed was a big deal. They were generally unable to find lots of fraud and their failure to find significant fraud was a big part of the reason that a bunch of US attorneys were, controversially, fired - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_co... , https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Justice_Department_Voter_Fraud_Scandal_Lessons_0.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publicatio... . With respect to the "vote as someone else" in-person fraud problem, that's a lot harder to measure. It seems like if it were an endemic problem we would have found it the last time we went hunting 10-15 years ago. Still I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that everyone should be issued a free, easy-to-get national ID card. Perhaps we should get that system up and running and as soon as there are fewer than (say) 100 cases per year of people being denied an ID despite presenting sufficient documentation, we can think about requiring it at the polls. (When ID-issuance goes wrong it goes really wrong -- see e.g. https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematically-failing-to-provide-the-photo-ids-required-to-vote-in-november/ https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematicall... ).
lotu 10y ago
The thing is in the US we lack a mandatory national or even state id. We use a driver's license which is effectively mandatory in rural parts of the country because otherwise you can't get anywhere. However if you are poor and live in a city the odds that you don't have a driver's license go way up. It turns out that their is no ID the government forces you to have. Clever politicians realize that they don't need to prevent everyone who disagrees with them from voting just preventing 2-3% is likely enough in many races. The idea of voter ID is effective because of what you just said it sounds so reasonable, until you look at the motivation that it disproportionately results in poor people not being able to vote.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Would you support voter ID if it came bundled with a low friction, easy to obtain voter ID card?
  - vinay427 10y ago
    Not the parent commenter, but I personally would support this if the ID card was mandatory and free to any resident citizen. If it was issued by states, the federal government would need to require all states to comply. The REAL ID act was supposed to be a step toward this, but has been continually delayed as far as I know.
  - tasty_freeze 10y ago
    What problem do we have that a voter ID would solve?
    - yehi 10y ago
      Is that a rhetorical question? The reason given for requiring voter IDs (while possibly not the primary one) is to prevent voter fraud. Are you asking if there has every been a case of voter fraud? If so, here is one example [1]. [1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/oagnews/release.php?id=2071 https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/oagnews/release.php?id=...
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs. They also find it surprising that the US has no universal ID system issued at age 18 to absolutely everyone.
- Inconel 10y ago
  I'm curious why such a universal ID hasn't been implemented? I would assume there must be some people against it, what would be their rationale?
  - RubberSoul 10y ago
    The ACLU opposes it for a number of reasons [0]. A lot of objections relate to the potential for surveillance. [0]: https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards
    - Inconel 10y ago
      Thanks for the link. Some of the issues raised definitely have the potential to be problematic.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      Sadly the surveillance ship has long since sailed :( I'd trade a federal ID for dismantling all the domestic spying.
Floegipoky 10y ago
Don't forget, IDs are not free in the US. Seems pretty crazy to force somebody to essentially pay a fee to exercise their Constitutional right to vote.
- ww520 10y ago
  Then have the government paid for it. It's a minuscule cost to have a fair election.
  - TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    Great. Let's do that first, then we can talk about voter ID laws. Doing it in the other order is a non-starter because it deprives people of their fundamental rights.
aanm1988 10y ago
Then you have to ensure voters have access to ID. The reason why it's suppression is that republicans have very often done the exact opposite.
my_first_acct 10y ago
According to one study (relied upon by a US Federal judge in a voter ID case in Texas), 600,000 registered voters in Texas did not (as of 2014) have any form of ID that would be acceptable under Texas' new voter ID law [1]. That was about 4.5% of all registered voters in the state. [1] http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-smitty-smith/tom-smith-public-citizen-says-600000-texas-registe/ http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-s...
flukus 10y ago
> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs. I agree that it's common sense, but data often trumps common sense. Before you combat voter fraud you first have to establish that it's a real problem. To date no one has shown that it's a real problem.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Inconel 10y ago
  I'm pretty much completely uninformed on this issue so please don't take this comment as a challenge to your assertion, but how does the US go about determining whether or not voter fraud is taking place? Do polling/voting officials take some portion of cast ballots and investigate them for fraud and extrapolate the results over the broader voting population? Apologies if this is a stupid question but I'd love to learn about how the integrity of the voting system is maintained in huge countries like the US.
  - tomjakubowski 10y ago
    The kind of fraud that "voter ID laws" are supposed to protect against is "voter impersonation". The fear is that Lisa might know where friend Marge votes, show up to Marge's precinct, pretend to be Marge, and illegally cast a ballot as her. In this way, she could cast multiple ballots in the same election. As far as I can tell, to pull that off at a big enough scale to affect national or even state elections you'd need to know: * The voter rolls for a county. I think that, in California anyway, the best you can do is random access by looking up an individual's record using their name, phone number, mailing address, etc. I don't know how one would acquire the entire list of registered voter. * Near perfect information about which voters will neglect to vote on election day. The reason you'd need to know the second thing is that many attempts at voter impersonation have been foiled because the impersonated person eventually shows up to vote at their precinct — only to be told they've already voted! You also need some logistics: enough people to make it worthwhile, vans to shuttle them from precinct to precinct, etc. The whole things seems way too complicated for an organization to pull off without somebody discovering it. It seems likely to me that voter impersonation could only be a successful tactic in a small town or county's local elections, where you wouldn't need large numbers of people to turn the results in your favor.
baconner 10y ago
OK, but even if you disregard voter ID (others have explained that issue well here already) the Republican party has engaged in a large number of other methods to supress votes. Fighting to overturn parts of the voting rights act , Gerrymandering, reducing polling places in cities with demographics that tend to vote for Democrats, removing early voting days and fighting against vote by mail (methods favored by Democrat leaning demographics), and the list goes on. The Democrats have engaged in many of these same methods in the past btw, but today's GOP have taken it to the next level. So far that I question if many Republican leaders believe in democracy at all anymore.
fencepost 10y ago
Showing ID may not be part of a war against voting rights, but it's also basically completely useless in addressing any kinds of voting problems that have been shown to happen. I'm pretty sure that even now after CRTs are mostly gone more people are killed by falling TVs in the USA each year than are charged with voting abuses that would be addressed by showing ID. But thousands of times as many people as that are prevented from voting because they don't have such ID and are not feasibly able to get it. That doesn't even cover the situations such as Alabama and Wisconsin, where they passed laws requiring voter ID, then proceeded to close or severely curtail the hours at DMV offices across the states - particularly in poorer counties. In Alabama, they closed the DMV offices (for budgetary reasons) in 29 of the state's 67 counties a year after the ID requirement went into effect, and I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the closures included every county with a population >75% black and most of the counties that went for Obama and Democrats. Of course, after the news and analysis of this started, the state that can't afford to keep DMV offices open said “We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” or they can go to any probate judge (who? and aren't they busy?) or county register office. Mmhm. In Wisconsin, they closed and cut hours at offices in more Democratic areas while expanding them in areas that tended to vote Republican. The most egregious one (and the one that got national attention on John Oliver's show) is Sauk City, where the office hours were cut back to the fifth Wednesday of any month with 5 Wednesdays - which in 2016 meant 3 times prior to the election, plus November 30. Admittedly, you could go 20 miles to the next closest (open Mondays and Wednesdays), 30 miles to the one open on the first, second and third Wednesdays of each month or just a little further to the state capitol with pretty normal hours. Hope you're not walking or on a bike, or that you're good with doing a 40-mile round trip on a weekday and that you don't forget to bring something they'll accept as proof of residency. Basically, voter ID as it's presented is a solution to a problem that basically doesn't exist, but it's a solution that happens to have some pretty severe side effects. Maybe the folks pushing so hard for it are incompetent and innumerate, or maybe, just maybe, it's those side effects that are really the goal. Edit: Oh and for the argument that there's massive in-person voting fraud I have a simple question: If you're claiming that are you also therefore arguing that all of the people responsible for monitoring the voting process are utterly incompetent because even when they go looking for it they can't find it? Or are the perpetrators of the fraud simply superhuman and able to get their fraudulent votes counted while leaving no other traces?
Berobero 10y ago
> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights While this is superficially true, pragmatically speaking it depends entirely on the outcome of doing such. If it happens to avoid no voter fraud, but does succeed in making it so certain demographics are inconvenienced in voting, then the effect of it is indeed undemocratic voter suppression. At any rate, the fact that one party is pushing the matter, while the other resisting should suggest that there are expected gains or losses, respectively, for those parties. That's all the more reason to insist on fully demonstrating that there is a bonafide need to implement these measures before blindly doing so under the ultimately irrelevant rationalization that "everybody else does it this way".
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights Showing your ID isn't, but voter ID laws are. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ac...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ori_b 10y ago
> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Yes. And it would make sense if the USA had some form of free universal ID. It doesn't, and the people most strongly in favour of voting ID laws also seem to be the most strongly opposed to universal ID.
- barsonme 10y ago
  I'd be fine if each state requiring ID to vote provided free licenses. States run elections, so it'd make more sense to pass on a federal ID card and just allow states to make their own should they require ID to vote.
  - ori_b 10y ago
    Yes. I would like to see a law passed that required states with voter ID laws to hand out free if to everyone by mail.
- krath94 10y ago
  In the states that have voter ID laws, getting the voter identification card is free. For example, look at Texas: http://www.dps.texas.gov/driverlicense/electionid.htm http://www.dps.texas.gov/driverlicense/electionid.htm But I do agree that in general, it needs to be easier to get an ID in this country
  - baconner 10y ago
    The cost isn't the only issue though. You still have to somehow get to the DMV to get it and oops many Texas DMVs were closed in poorer Democrat leaning areas so it's now a time consuming and expensive journey to go get it. Might be an hour or two away but you can't miss your minimum wage job during business hours or no rent money so what are you going to do? Or say you're old and impoverished and don't have your birth certificate now its a huge problem to get that id. Might be you have to travel to another state and go through a DMV like process to get a copy first and again you don't have the means or time. Texas' strict voter ID requirement was struck down in the courts last summer precisely because of these reasons. It was found that the law, despite free IDs significantly disadvantages black and latino voter's in the state who are much more likely to have issues like above. Didn't stop polling place workers in some areas though some of whom still turned people away based on the non-existent requirement.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
AbrahamParangi 10y ago
Quoting from the wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St... Research has shown that the type of voter fraud that would be prevented by voter IDs is extremely rare; research is mixed as to whether voter ID laws reduce overall turnout or minority turnout; and research has shown that Republican legislators in swing states and districts with sizable black or Hispanic populations push the hardest for voter ID laws. While I personally suspect that both republican and democrat concern about voter ID laws comes from a (mostly overblown) fear of being disenfranchised- I wouldn't really call it common sense any more than it's common sense to believe that the people who aren't going to vote for your policies shouldn't be able to vote at all.
Declanomous 10y ago
My dad and my uncle are in their 60's. They said they were told one of the things that showed people behind the Iron Curtain weren't free is that they had to carry papers/ID with them at all time. My uncle is super conservative, but he is still totally against voter ID laws because at one point it was a point of pride that American's didn't have to carry papers. The same people who held that as a point of pride in the 50's and 60's are now the people who are fighting for mandatory voter ID laws. I honestly believe that if anybody is committing voter fraud, it isn't the people that the republicans are targeting with these voter ID laws.

by pyronik 10y ago

grzm 10y ago

I understand where you're coming from. That said, voter ID has been used in the US to restrict voting rights. The issue is unfortunately not as straightforward as "straight up common sense". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St... https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

travmatt 10y ago

Please don't misconstrue what I said, the republicans have been engaged in litigation to repeal various portions of the voting rights act in numerous courts through America. This is quite separate from voter laws and it is a separate voting suppression tactic altogether. To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America - the majority of cases last election stemmed from trump voters who tried to defend their actions as 'testing the system.' I can also provide studies that show those voter is laws disproportionately impact minority voters, as well as court judgements where republicans were found to target said voter with these laws explicitly - as in that was their explicit goal, and acted with 'surgical orecision6', in the courts words. This is not to mention the circumstantial evidence, like republican operatives explaining their long term goal is disenfranchisement, or the actions of governors instructing dmv employees to deceive the public and closure of dmv's in minority areas. I'd be open to hear alternative interpretations as to what is happening, but so far my experience has been that those in favor of said laws either approve of disenfranchisement, or have an emotional response as to the 'fairness' of the law, and assume i should adopt their viewpoint.

WalterBright 10y ago
I regularly hear that voter fraud is non-existent. However, in California only a utility bill is required to register to vote. How does a study determine that those represent actual citizens?
- travmatt 10y ago
  State level political parties have the power to challenge the registration of voters within their boundaries.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Information about who voted is public.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- unprepare 10y ago
  you're unclear about how voter fraud is investigated, and your solution to that is to create more legislation about voting? That is deeply unsettling.
mherdeg 10y ago
> To the voter id laws, I can provide studies showing that in person vote fraud is non existent in America I think it might be better to say "irrelevant to the outcome of an election" than "non existent". One kind of in-person vote fraud which can be measured is voting twice: mail in a ballot in one district and vote in person in another district, or (more rare) vote in person in two districts. There were as an order of magnitude guess 400-1000 people who voted twice in both Florida and New York in 2000. And other isolated incidents have been detected, e.g. in 2002 perhaps as many as a few hundred people in Kansas voted in person in two different districts (sometimes two places in Kansas, sometimes one in Kansas and one in Missouri). See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2004/10/people_who_vote_twice.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/200... for the sources here; local newspapers pulled the voter records and cross-checked duplicate names by hand, reaching out to individual people to ask their stories. The issue of whether or not voter fraud is a serious national problem was a big deal in the early 2000s, when the executive branch of the federal government put a LOT of work into trying to find and prosecute voter fraud which they believed was a big deal. They were generally unable to find lots of fraud and their failure to find significant fraud was a big part of the reason that a bunch of US attorneys were, controversially, fired - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_co... , https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Justice_Department_Voter_Fraud_Scandal_Lessons_0.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publicatio... . With respect to the "vote as someone else" in-person fraud problem, that's a lot harder to measure. It seems like if it were an endemic problem we would have found it the last time we went hunting 10-15 years ago. Still I am definitely sympathetic to the idea that everyone should be issued a free, easy-to-get national ID card. Perhaps we should get that system up and running and as soon as there are fewer than (say) 100 cases per year of people being denied an ID despite presenting sufficient documentation, we can think about requiring it at the polls. (When ID-issuance goes wrong it goes really wrong -- see e.g. https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematically-failing-to-provide-the-photo-ids-required-to-vote-in-november/ https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematicall... ).

lotu 10y ago

The thing is in the US we lack a mandatory national or even state id. We use a driver's license which is effectively mandatory in rural parts of the country because otherwise you can't get anywhere. However if you are poor and live in a city the odds that you don't have a driver's license go way up. It turns out that their is no ID the government forces you to have. Clever politicians realize that they don't need to prevent everyone who disagrees with them from voting just preventing 2-3% is likely enough in many races. The idea of voter ID is effective because of what you just said it sounds so reasonable, until you look at the motivation that it disproportionately results in poor people not being able to vote.

oh_sigh 10y ago
Would you support voter ID if it came bundled with a low friction, easy to obtain voter ID card?
- vinay427 10y ago
  Not the parent commenter, but I personally would support this if the ID card was mandatory and free to any resident citizen. If it was issued by states, the federal government would need to require all states to comply. The REAL ID act was supposed to be a step toward this, but has been continually delayed as far as I know.
- tasty_freeze 10y ago
  What problem do we have that a voter ID would solve?
  - yehi 10y ago
    Is that a rhetorical question? The reason given for requiring voter IDs (while possibly not the primary one) is to prevent voter fraud. Are you asking if there has every been a case of voter fraud? If so, here is one example [1]. [1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/oagnews/release.php?id=2071 https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/oagnews/release.php?id=...

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs. They also find it surprising that the US has no universal ID system issued at age 18 to absolutely everyone.

Inconel 10y ago
I'm curious why such a universal ID hasn't been implemented? I would assume there must be some people against it, what would be their rationale?
- RubberSoul 10y ago
  The ACLU opposes it for a number of reasons [0]. A lot of objections relate to the potential for surveillance. [0]: https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards
  - Inconel 10y ago
    Thanks for the link. Some of the issues raised definitely have the potential to be problematic.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    Sadly the surveillance ship has long since sailed :( I'd trade a federal ID for dismantling all the domestic spying.

Floegipoky 10y ago

Don't forget, IDs are not free in the US. Seems pretty crazy to force somebody to essentially pay a fee to exercise their Constitutional right to vote.

ww520 10y ago
Then have the government paid for it. It's a minuscule cost to have a fair election.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  Great. Let's do that first, then we can talk about voter ID laws. Doing it in the other order is a non-starter because it deprives people of their fundamental rights.

aanm1988 10y ago

Then you have to ensure voters have access to ID. The reason why it's suppression is that republicans have very often done the exact opposite.

my_first_acct 10y ago

According to one study (relied upon by a US Federal judge in a voter ID case in Texas), 600,000 registered voters in Texas did not (as of 2014) have any form of ID that would be acceptable under Texas' new voter ID law [1]. That was about 4.5% of all registered voters in the state. [1] http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-smitty-smith/tom-smith-public-citizen-says-600000-texas-registe/ http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-s...

flukus 10y ago

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Many people find it surprising around the world that we don't check IDs. I agree that it's common sense, but data often trumps common sense. Before you combat voter fraud you first have to establish that it's a real problem. To date no one has shown that it's a real problem.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Inconel 10y ago
I'm pretty much completely uninformed on this issue so please don't take this comment as a challenge to your assertion, but how does the US go about determining whether or not voter fraud is taking place? Do polling/voting officials take some portion of cast ballots and investigate them for fraud and extrapolate the results over the broader voting population? Apologies if this is a stupid question but I'd love to learn about how the integrity of the voting system is maintained in huge countries like the US.
- tomjakubowski 10y ago
  The kind of fraud that "voter ID laws" are supposed to protect against is "voter impersonation". The fear is that Lisa might know where friend Marge votes, show up to Marge's precinct, pretend to be Marge, and illegally cast a ballot as her. In this way, she could cast multiple ballots in the same election. As far as I can tell, to pull that off at a big enough scale to affect national or even state elections you'd need to know: * The voter rolls for a county. I think that, in California anyway, the best you can do is random access by looking up an individual's record using their name, phone number, mailing address, etc. I don't know how one would acquire the entire list of registered voter. * Near perfect information about which voters will neglect to vote on election day. The reason you'd need to know the second thing is that many attempts at voter impersonation have been foiled because the impersonated person eventually shows up to vote at their precinct — only to be told they've already voted! You also need some logistics: enough people to make it worthwhile, vans to shuttle them from precinct to precinct, etc. The whole things seems way too complicated for an organization to pull off without somebody discovering it. It seems likely to me that voter impersonation could only be a successful tactic in a small town or county's local elections, where you wouldn't need large numbers of people to turn the results in your favor.

baconner 10y ago

OK, but even if you disregard voter ID (others have explained that issue well here already) the Republican party has engaged in a large number of other methods to supress votes. Fighting to overturn parts of the voting rights act , Gerrymandering, reducing polling places in cities with demographics that tend to vote for Democrats, removing early voting days and fighting against vote by mail (methods favored by Democrat leaning demographics), and the list goes on. The Democrats have engaged in many of these same methods in the past btw, but today's GOP have taken it to the next level. So far that I question if many Republican leaders believe in democracy at all anymore.

fencepost 10y ago

Showing ID may not be part of a war against voting rights, but it's also basically completely useless in addressing any kinds of voting problems that have been shown to happen. I'm pretty sure that even now after CRTs are mostly gone more people are killed by falling TVs in the USA each year than are charged with voting abuses that would be addressed by showing ID. But thousands of times as many people as that are prevented from voting because they don't have such ID and are not feasibly able to get it. That doesn't even cover the situations such as Alabama and Wisconsin, where they passed laws requiring voter ID, then proceeded to close or severely curtail the hours at DMV offices across the states - particularly in poorer counties. In Alabama, they closed the DMV offices (for budgetary reasons) in 29 of the state's 67 counties a year after the ID requirement went into effect, and I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the closures included every county with a population >75% black and most of the counties that went for Obama and Democrats. Of course, after the news and analysis of this started, the state that can't afford to keep DMV offices open said “We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” or they can go to any probate judge (who? and aren't they busy?) or county register office. Mmhm. In Wisconsin, they closed and cut hours at offices in more Democratic areas while expanding them in areas that tended to vote Republican. The most egregious one (and the one that got national attention on John Oliver's show) is Sauk City, where the office hours were cut back to the fifth Wednesday of any month with 5 Wednesdays - which in 2016 meant 3 times prior to the election, plus November 30. Admittedly, you could go 20 miles to the next closest (open Mondays and Wednesdays), 30 miles to the one open on the first, second and third Wednesdays of each month or just a little further to the state capitol with pretty normal hours. Hope you're not walking or on a bike, or that you're good with doing a 40-mile round trip on a weekday and that you don't forget to bring something they'll accept as proof of residency. Basically, voter ID as it's presented is a solution to a problem that basically doesn't exist, but it's a solution that happens to have some pretty severe side effects. Maybe the folks pushing so hard for it are incompetent and innumerate, or maybe, just maybe, it's those side effects that are really the goal. Edit: Oh and for the argument that there's massive in-person voting fraud I have a simple question: If you're claiming that are you also therefore arguing that all of the people responsible for monitoring the voting process are utterly incompetent because even when they go looking for it they can't find it? Or are the perpetrators of the fraud simply superhuman and able to get their fraudulent votes counted while leaving no other traces?

Berobero 10y ago

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights While this is superficially true, pragmatically speaking it depends entirely on the outcome of doing such. If it happens to avoid no voter fraud, but does succeed in making it so certain demographics are inconvenienced in voting, then the effect of it is indeed undemocratic voter suppression. At any rate, the fact that one party is pushing the matter, while the other resisting should suggest that there are expected gains or losses, respectively, for those parties. That's all the more reason to insist on fully demonstrating that there is a bonafide need to implement these measures before blindly doing so under the ultimately irrelevant rationalization that "everybody else does it this way".

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights Showing your ID isn't, but voter ID laws are. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ac...

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ori_b 10y ago

> Showing your ID isn't waging a war against voting rights, its straight up common sense like we have to do for every other thing in society. Yes. And it would make sense if the USA had some form of free universal ID. It doesn't, and the people most strongly in favour of voting ID laws also seem to be the most strongly opposed to universal ID.

barsonme 10y ago
I'd be fine if each state requiring ID to vote provided free licenses. States run elections, so it'd make more sense to pass on a federal ID card and just allow states to make their own should they require ID to vote.
- ori_b 10y ago
  Yes. I would like to see a law passed that required states with voter ID laws to hand out free if to everyone by mail.
krath94 10y ago
In the states that have voter ID laws, getting the voter identification card is free. For example, look at Texas: http://www.dps.texas.gov/driverlicense/electionid.htm http://www.dps.texas.gov/driverlicense/electionid.htm But I do agree that in general, it needs to be easier to get an ID in this country
- baconner 10y ago
  The cost isn't the only issue though. You still have to somehow get to the DMV to get it and oops many Texas DMVs were closed in poorer Democrat leaning areas so it's now a time consuming and expensive journey to go get it. Might be an hour or two away but you can't miss your minimum wage job during business hours or no rent money so what are you going to do? Or say you're old and impoverished and don't have your birth certificate now its a huge problem to get that id. Might be you have to travel to another state and go through a DMV like process to get a copy first and again you don't have the means or time. Texas' strict voter ID requirement was struck down in the courts last summer precisely because of these reasons. It was found that the law, despite free IDs significantly disadvantages black and latino voter's in the state who are much more likely to have issues like above. Didn't stop polling place workers in some areas though some of whom still turned people away based on the non-existent requirement.

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AbrahamParangi 10y ago

Quoting from the wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St... Research has shown that the type of voter fraud that would be prevented by voter IDs is extremely rare; research is mixed as to whether voter ID laws reduce overall turnout or minority turnout; and research has shown that Republican legislators in swing states and districts with sizable black or Hispanic populations push the hardest for voter ID laws. While I personally suspect that both republican and democrat concern about voter ID laws comes from a (mostly overblown) fear of being disenfranchised- I wouldn't really call it common sense any more than it's common sense to believe that the people who aren't going to vote for your policies shouldn't be able to vote at all.

Declanomous 10y ago

My dad and my uncle are in their 60's. They said they were told one of the things that showed people behind the Iron Curtain weren't free is that they had to carry papers/ID with them at all time. My uncle is super conservative, but he is still totally against voter ID laws because at one point it was a point of pride that American's didn't have to carry papers. The same people who held that as a point of pride in the 50's and 60's are now the people who are fighting for mandatory voter ID laws. I honestly believe that if anybody is committing voter fraud, it isn't the people that the republicans are targeting with these voter ID laws.