9 ms·

The first is a good idea, but the second is not. Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote and thus compromise elections. In person fraud i

The first is a good idea, but the second is not. Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote and thus compromise elections. In person fraud is very uncommon, and it would be very difficult for a foreign government to pull off a large scale interference without being detected. After all, we struggle to get people to show up to vote once already! The idea of mass ballot fraud seems difficult to countenance without literally paying masses of people to vote (which I believe is extremely illegal). EDIT: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597 EDIT 2: If you want to see real foreign interference, check out that time that Bill Clinton publicly aided the election of Boris Yeltsin. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf-agree-on-a-loan-for-10.2-billion.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf-agre...

erentz 8y ago
Right. The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy. You’d need thousands of people doing it in most districts to have any impact, and that would get obvious really bloody quickly. I think this is a pretty good example of what I find to be the typical of an American practice of cutting off their own nose to spite their face. [1] Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting something they don’t deserve that they would rather make everything in life more complicated, less efficient, and harder on everyone (including themselves) than allow a little bit of inefficiency in the system to be accepted as the trade off. In this case it’s the hysteria around a few cases of voter fraud out of hundreds of millions, so they’d prefer to see a system enacted in which tens of millions of voters will be disenfranchised. Silly and out of proportion. [1] this doesn’t seem to be the saying I want for this situation but I couldn’t think of a more appropriate one.
- wavefunction 8y ago
  >Americans Yeah well not all of us, thanks.
  - erentz 8y ago
    Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean all Americans are that way.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    On behalf of USians, I apologize for monopolizing the word "Americans" when two entire continents have a right to the word.
    - irrational 8y ago
      Please never use the slur USians again. Thank you.
      - krapp 8y ago
        Yes... the preferred term is Murcans.
- zebraflask 8y ago
  You've overlooked the race, income, etc. factors, which still matter more than most people would like to admit. Consider a "radical" idea. Who doesn't get to vote if they don't have an ID card?
- hueving 8y ago
  Double-voting is only one thing people are paranoid about. The other is the 12 million possible votes from undocumented (a.k.a illegal) immigrants.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    Let them. There should be citizenship for anyone living or working in this country for six months regardless of how they get here. To do otherwise is to exploit people and subject them to man's inhumanity to man as we are seeing with recent administration policies. That and the precarity and exploitation foisted upon undocumented workers by US corporations using the threat of state violence while crowds call for blood.
    - apearson 8y ago
      Wouldn't that open up the country for interference from other gov't?
    - MatrixAlgebra 8y ago
      Bad idea. A steady trickle of immigrants is much better because then it forces cultural integration, especially when the immigrants do not speak English. A flood of immigrants will lead to a nation divided among cultural lines without the possibility of integration because the cultural bubbles will have already been established. We should focus on helping impoverished nations develop, so people don't have to leave from their birth countries to find comfort.
      - maxerickson 8y ago
        But kill NAFTA. In the US there's really not any community of non-English speaking citizens, so whatever to your complaints about integration, the kids desperately want to integrate (and the parents usually agree). And of course the whole thing where foreigners are scary is as much a modern panic as anything. In periods of pretty open immigration, lots of states didn't require citizenship to vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote_in...
- xienze 8y ago
  > The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy. And yet numerous other countries think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. You could probably get away without ever locking your front door, but why would you when the added security is so easy to implement? Even Mexico has cracked this nut, I think we could too.
  - untog 8y ago
    I think the current state of US politics all but guarantees that any attempt to implement voter ID cards would result in attempts to lower turnout. Every implementation would be done at the state level, and a bunch of states have already been seen doing anything they can to thwart turnout to the opposing party. If such an ID scheme were laid out fairly in the constitution, I think the US could do it fairly. But today? It'll never happen.
  - azernik 8y ago
    Generally these are countries where one of the following is true: 1. The ID in question is nationally compulsory to carry out most day-to-day tasks, and so no one is disenfranchised by having to show it. In the US, on the other hand, there are lots of people without any form of ID card 2. The country has a history of large-scale in-person voter fraud. In Mexico, both of these things happen to be the case.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- chefkoch 8y ago
  >Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting something they don’t deserve that they would rather make everything in life more complicated, less efficient, and harder on everyone (including themselves) than allow a little bit of inefficiency in the system to be accepted as the trade off. Except some dozend billions here and there at the military
xienze 8y ago
> Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote Is that the case in the numerous other countries that require voter ID? I find it funny how we always use “but every other country does it!” when talking about things the US should adopt (e.g., the metric system, socialized healthcare), but that’s apparently not a good reason when talking about voter ID. Even countries with far poorer populations than our own seem to think being able to provide proof of who you are at the time of voting is a good idea, why can’t we?
- devmunchies 8y ago
  I have no idea why this has become a right vs left, polarized issue.
  - untog 8y ago
    This might be my political bubble speaking, but the vast, vast majority of voter suppression stories I've seen have been Republican legislatures trying to deprive the Democratic party of votes. But even if that's not the case, it stands to reason it'll end up being a left/right thing, because it's the right trying to deprive the left of a vote, or vice versa. The two party system guarantees it.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    It's because the right benefits from low turnout. The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority, benefits from large turnout. The Democratic party, a center left or center right party depending on who you talk to, has co-opted the left voter base and thereby depends on higher turnout during general elections. As a centrist party, they intentionally suppress turnout during primary elections (e.g. by not advertising the date in my community) to restrict ideological choices.
    - prolikewh0a 8y ago
      >The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority. No party is currently doing this unless you include third parties. The American left works for business too.
csours 8y ago
Voter ID laws would be OK if they were passed along with funding to provide Voting IDs to citizens. Somehow, they never are... (generally speaking, in the US)
mikejholly 8y ago
Voting requires ID in almost every other western democracy, including Canada. The rest of the world see it as very reasonable to identify yourself at a polling station. It's odd that this is so contentious in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws
- s2g 8y ago
  mostly cause the laws get abused to target mostly democrat voters.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Likewise, Democrats turn a blind eye towards voting id because they benefit from non eligible voterw voting, because they usually vite Democrat. There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point
    - tzs 8y ago
      > There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point The difference between your point and his point is that he could easily provide evidence for his, since there have been numerous lawsuits over these laws by civil rights groups, and the evidence was well publicized in those cases, and there have also been academic studies of these laws. Some links: [1] [2] [3]. There are ineligible people who vote, but almost all of them do so by means that would not be stopped by voter ID laws, most commonly absentee ballots. This makes it very hard to find evidence that supports you points. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-voter-id-laws-discriminate-study/517218/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-vot... [2] https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discriminating-intent https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discri... [3] https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
- MatrixAlgebra 8y ago
  ID requirements make a tremendous amount of sense. Fear of those laws repressing certain groups should just incentivize watchdogs and protections ensuring that repressive regulations are not passed. Seriously, just because a good law could be abused does not mean we should avoid enacting such a law. That sort of thinking would seriously restrict our legal system if it was applied in all cases.
kilroy123 8y ago
What about finger paint, like most other countries use? You just simply get an unwashable ink on your thumb. It does a few things. It shows you voted already. Also, puts a little bit of social pressure on people you see who don't have the mark.
- NikolaNovak 8y ago
  Never heard of that... fascinating! I don't think it's used in Croatia, Bosnia, US or Canada. Can you provide examples? Thx!:)
  - komodo 8y ago
    I'm not sure how unique it is to Iraq, but there were tons of photos of it on American news after that country was 'liberated' https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch
  - igitur 8y ago
    We use it in South Africa. https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592 https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592
  - Cyph0n 8y ago
    This approach has been used in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution, and is still in use.
  - kilroy123 8y ago
    Mexico does it and just had a huge election and turnout.
Mountain_Skies 8y ago
All of the drivers license offices in the city limits of Atlanta were shutdown at the same time Georgia enacted a photo ID requirement for voting. Though only a temporary situation, for a period of time anyone living in the city who wanted an ID was required to hike out to the suburbs. The state responded to criticisms of how difficult it could be for some to get an ID even if offered for free by having a bus travel around the state with the state issued ID issuing facilities available on the bus. That program was poorly funded, the bus often broke down, and usage was very low. Think they ended up doing away with the bus. The city of Atlanta eventually did get a new drivers license center and photo IDs are available free of charge to those who fill out an affidavit stating they cannot afford the ID fee. It's difficult to know how much fraudulent voting takes place. I'd like it better if there were photo ID requirements in place but if we're going to do that, the process for obtaining such an ID must be made orders of magnitude easier. For those in rural areas, getting to the county seat can be a challenge. Polling places are much more widespread than locations to obtain photo IDs. The added requirements of the Patriot Act for government IDs likely has made this situation even worse. Photo IDs are useful for many purposes beyond voting. I don't want to have a society in which one must carry a photo ID at all times but I'd also like to live in one where anyone can easily obtain one. Seems like this is the real problem that needs to be solved.
andrewflnr 8y ago
> Voter ID cards are historically used to I'm so sick of this excuse. The correct response is "... so let's not do that this time, mkay?" Specifically, make them absolutely free-as-in-beer and only require minimal time and effort to obtain (benchmark: proof of address is too much effort). You do this explicitly on the basis that voting is a universal right and requiring money for it is abhorrent, as is any other obstacle not strictly required for ensuring uniqueness. Now you can also get rid of the half-assed national ID system comprised by our driver's licenses, state IDs, etc. And the people who want to use voter IDs to disenfranchise people have to shut up because you've addressed their supposed point. Get it over with, already.
- oxide 8y ago
  If the entire point is to disenfranchise a voting base, why would the entity pushing for the adoption concede these barriers? If I am throwing a wall up, I generally don't build ladders into the wall itself.
  - andrewflnr 8y ago
    The point is political judo. They've already advocated for ID cards, so they can't very well openly object to modifying them in a way that obviously increases freedom, at least not without tipping their hand in a more obvious way. They can't do it without cooperation, so it's possible to ensure that it can't be implemented in a disenfranchising way if the opposition wanted to, which frankly is evidence they don't. And really, it's not an unreasonable idea. Other countries do this just fine. We just need to not mess it up.

erentz 8y ago

Right. The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy. You’d need thousands of people doing it in most districts to have any impact, and that would get obvious really bloody quickly. I think this is a pretty good example of what I find to be the typical of an American practice of cutting off their own nose to spite their face. [1] Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting something they don’t deserve that they would rather make everything in life more complicated, less efficient, and harder on everyone (including themselves) than allow a little bit of inefficiency in the system to be accepted as the trade off. In this case it’s the hysteria around a few cases of voter fraud out of hundreds of millions, so they’d prefer to see a system enacted in which tens of millions of voters will be disenfranchised. Silly and out of proportion. [1] this doesn’t seem to be the saying I want for this situation but I couldn’t think of a more appropriate one.

wavefunction 8y ago
>Americans Yeah well not all of us, thanks.
- erentz 8y ago
  Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean all Americans are that way.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  On behalf of USians, I apologize for monopolizing the word "Americans" when two entire continents have a right to the word.
  - irrational 8y ago
    Please never use the slur USians again. Thank you.
    - krapp 8y ago
      Yes... the preferred term is Murcans.
zebraflask 8y ago
You've overlooked the race, income, etc. factors, which still matter more than most people would like to admit. Consider a "radical" idea. Who doesn't get to vote if they don't have an ID card?
hueving 8y ago
Double-voting is only one thing people are paranoid about. The other is the 12 million possible votes from undocumented (a.k.a illegal) immigrants.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  Let them. There should be citizenship for anyone living or working in this country for six months regardless of how they get here. To do otherwise is to exploit people and subject them to man's inhumanity to man as we are seeing with recent administration policies. That and the precarity and exploitation foisted upon undocumented workers by US corporations using the threat of state violence while crowds call for blood.
  - apearson 8y ago
    Wouldn't that open up the country for interference from other gov't?
  - MatrixAlgebra 8y ago
    Bad idea. A steady trickle of immigrants is much better because then it forces cultural integration, especially when the immigrants do not speak English. A flood of immigrants will lead to a nation divided among cultural lines without the possibility of integration because the cultural bubbles will have already been established. We should focus on helping impoverished nations develop, so people don't have to leave from their birth countries to find comfort.
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      But kill NAFTA. In the US there's really not any community of non-English speaking citizens, so whatever to your complaints about integration, the kids desperately want to integrate (and the parents usually agree). And of course the whole thing where foreigners are scary is as much a modern panic as anything. In periods of pretty open immigration, lots of states didn't require citizenship to vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote_in...
xienze 8y ago
> The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy. And yet numerous other countries think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. You could probably get away without ever locking your front door, but why would you when the added security is so easy to implement? Even Mexico has cracked this nut, I think we could too.
- untog 8y ago
  I think the current state of US politics all but guarantees that any attempt to implement voter ID cards would result in attempts to lower turnout. Every implementation would be done at the state level, and a bunch of states have already been seen doing anything they can to thwart turnout to the opposing party. If such an ID scheme were laid out fairly in the constitution, I think the US could do it fairly. But today? It'll never happen.
- azernik 8y ago
  Generally these are countries where one of the following is true: 1. The ID in question is nationally compulsory to carry out most day-to-day tasks, and so no one is disenfranchised by having to show it. In the US, on the other hand, there are lots of people without any form of ID card 2. The country has a history of large-scale in-person voter fraud. In Mexico, both of these things happen to be the case.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
chefkoch 8y ago
>Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting something they don’t deserve that they would rather make everything in life more complicated, less efficient, and harder on everyone (including themselves) than allow a little bit of inefficiency in the system to be accepted as the trade off. Except some dozend billions here and there at the military

xienze 8y ago

> Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote Is that the case in the numerous other countries that require voter ID? I find it funny how we always use “but every other country does it!” when talking about things the US should adopt (e.g., the metric system, socialized healthcare), but that’s apparently not a good reason when talking about voter ID. Even countries with far poorer populations than our own seem to think being able to provide proof of who you are at the time of voting is a good idea, why can’t we?

devmunchies 8y ago
I have no idea why this has become a right vs left, polarized issue.
- untog 8y ago
  This might be my political bubble speaking, but the vast, vast majority of voter suppression stories I've seen have been Republican legislatures trying to deprive the Democratic party of votes. But even if that's not the case, it stands to reason it'll end up being a left/right thing, because it's the right trying to deprive the left of a vote, or vice versa. The two party system guarantees it.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  It's because the right benefits from low turnout. The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority, benefits from large turnout. The Democratic party, a center left or center right party depending on who you talk to, has co-opted the left voter base and thereby depends on higher turnout during general elections. As a centrist party, they intentionally suppress turnout during primary elections (e.g. by not advertising the date in my community) to restrict ideological choices.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    >The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority. No party is currently doing this unless you include third parties. The American left works for business too.

csours 8y ago

Voter ID laws would be OK if they were passed along with funding to provide Voting IDs to citizens. Somehow, they never are... (generally speaking, in the US)

mikejholly 8y ago

Voting requires ID in almost every other western democracy, including Canada. The rest of the world see it as very reasonable to identify yourself at a polling station. It's odd that this is so contentious in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws

s2g 8y ago
mostly cause the laws get abused to target mostly democrat voters.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Likewise, Democrats turn a blind eye towards voting id because they benefit from non eligible voterw voting, because they usually vite Democrat. There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point
  - tzs 8y ago
    > There, I've made my point and provided as much evidence as you have towards your point The difference between your point and his point is that he could easily provide evidence for his, since there have been numerous lawsuits over these laws by civil rights groups, and the evidence was well publicized in those cases, and there have also been academic studies of these laws. Some links: [1] [2] [3]. There are ineligible people who vote, but almost all of them do so by means that would not be stopped by voter ID laws, most commonly absentee ballots. This makes it very hard to find evidence that supports you points. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-voter-id-laws-discriminate-study/517218/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/how-vot... [2] https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discriminating-intent https://now.tufts.edu/articles/proving-voter-id-law-s-discri... [3] https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
MatrixAlgebra 8y ago
ID requirements make a tremendous amount of sense. Fear of those laws repressing certain groups should just incentivize watchdogs and protections ensuring that repressive regulations are not passed. Seriously, just because a good law could be abused does not mean we should avoid enacting such a law. That sort of thinking would seriously restrict our legal system if it was applied in all cases.

kilroy123 8y ago

What about finger paint, like most other countries use? You just simply get an unwashable ink on your thumb. It does a few things. It shows you voted already. Also, puts a little bit of social pressure on people you see who don't have the mark.

NikolaNovak 8y ago
Never heard of that... fascinating! I don't think it's used in Croatia, Bosnia, US or Canada. Can you provide examples? Thx!:)
- komodo 8y ago
  I'm not sure how unique it is to Iraq, but there were tons of photos of it on American news after that country was 'liberated' https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=iraq+voting&tbm=isch
- igitur 8y ago
  We use it in South Africa. https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592 https://twitter.com/aminahmather/status/760788698560622592
- Cyph0n 8y ago
  This approach has been used in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution, and is still in use.
- kilroy123 8y ago
  Mexico does it and just had a huge election and turnout.

Mountain_Skies 8y ago

All of the drivers license offices in the city limits of Atlanta were shutdown at the same time Georgia enacted a photo ID requirement for voting. Though only a temporary situation, for a period of time anyone living in the city who wanted an ID was required to hike out to the suburbs. The state responded to criticisms of how difficult it could be for some to get an ID even if offered for free by having a bus travel around the state with the state issued ID issuing facilities available on the bus. That program was poorly funded, the bus often broke down, and usage was very low. Think they ended up doing away with the bus. The city of Atlanta eventually did get a new drivers license center and photo IDs are available free of charge to those who fill out an affidavit stating they cannot afford the ID fee. It's difficult to know how much fraudulent voting takes place. I'd like it better if there were photo ID requirements in place but if we're going to do that, the process for obtaining such an ID must be made orders of magnitude easier. For those in rural areas, getting to the county seat can be a challenge. Polling places are much more widespread than locations to obtain photo IDs. The added requirements of the Patriot Act for government IDs likely has made this situation even worse. Photo IDs are useful for many purposes beyond voting. I don't want to have a society in which one must carry a photo ID at all times but I'd also like to live in one where anyone can easily obtain one. Seems like this is the real problem that needs to be solved.

andrewflnr 8y ago

> Voter ID cards are historically used to I'm so sick of this excuse. The correct response is "... so let's not do that this time, mkay?" Specifically, make them absolutely free-as-in-beer and only require minimal time and effort to obtain (benchmark: proof of address is too much effort). You do this explicitly on the basis that voting is a universal right and requiring money for it is abhorrent, as is any other obstacle not strictly required for ensuring uniqueness. Now you can also get rid of the half-assed national ID system comprised by our driver's licenses, state IDs, etc. And the people who want to use voter IDs to disenfranchise people have to shut up because you've addressed their supposed point. Get it over with, already.

oxide 8y ago
If the entire point is to disenfranchise a voting base, why would the entity pushing for the adoption concede these barriers? If I am throwing a wall up, I generally don't build ladders into the wall itself.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  The point is political judo. They've already advocated for ID cards, so they can't very well openly object to modifying them in a way that obviously increases freedom, at least not without tipping their hand in a more obvious way. They can't do it without cooperation, so it's possible to ensure that it can't be implemented in a disenfranchising way if the opposition wanted to, which frankly is evidence they don't. And really, it's not an unreasonable idea. Other countries do this just fine. We just need to not mess it up.