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Then why are Democrats against showing an ID to prove you are who you say you are? Why are Democrats OK with allowing ballot harvesting in California when the e

Then why are Democrats against showing an ID to prove you are who you say you are? Why are Democrats OK with allowing ballot harvesting in California when the election in North Carolina was invalidated for the same reason?

throwaway5752 7y ago
Ballot harvesting is not de facto bad. It can help increase turnout with indigent, disabled, and elderly. However, what happen in North Carolina was 1) ballot harvesting 2) alteration of the harvested ballots. They picked up the ballots and then changed the ballots they collected Did that happen in California?
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  (It didn't!) The results in NC-9 are also incredibly suspicious even back down to the Republican primary.
  - jerf 7y ago
    "(It didn't!)" How do you know? And moreover, why should I know that? Elections have no purpose if nobody trusts the results afterwards. That dominates all other concerns about elections, because if you don't have that, your election with all the other desirable characteristics is still just so much wasted time.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      Assuming ballots were modified is kind of a weird stance to take, isn't it? I mean, you're welcome to assume it, but we don't have many historical cases of it happening until recently. It'd be one thing to assume it by default in every state if we knew there was a long history of it happening everywhere... instead we seem to be treating the possibility as an excuse for making it harder for citizens to vote. Weird how that works. We could always verify the ballots after the fact if you're really concerned that every absentee ballot is being forged.
      - jerf 7y ago
        "Assuming ballots were modified is kind of a weird stance to take, isn't it?" No, it's perfectly sensible stance to take. The stakes are enormous and the idea that everyone's just so peachy-keen on fair play that we don't have to structure the system to be robust against hostile modification is refuted merely by stating the case. Just bring up whoever are your political bogeymen and ask yourself if they're that moral. The answer is no, obviously. They're the bad guys. (Besides, didn't we just spend two years agreeing that the Russians were deeply involved with our elections in all sorts of nefarious ways? Now suddenly elections are all totally safe and anyone who questions it is obviously racist and just wants to keep the brown people from voting. You'll pardon me if I can't keep up with all the shifts in the Official Opinions. I'm sure no Russians have looked at our remote ballots and thought about what they could do with it. Or whomever else you like.) In addition to the first-order security concerns around getting a fair ballot count, there's also the second-order concerns that elections must not just be fair, but have all the appearance of being fair. They don't appear fair when the ballots are filled in, and then disappear from the pipeline for arbitrary periods of time, only to re-appear somewhere else. Even if the system is stipulated to be entirely fair, when the loser (who could be the Good Guys, you know, because obviously the Bad Guys are waaay more likely to cheat than the Good Guys) says "Hey, the vote may have been manipulated!", how do you prove them right or wrong? Personally, I have my own conspiracy theory which is that it rather suits our Powers that Be that the increasing number of absentee ballots and similar voting "options" makes the elections easier to forge, and citing "oh, what if poor suffering people don't get to vote?" is a rather convenient cudgel for them to pick up and hit anyone who wants to ensure security in voting with.
        kevingadd 7y ago
        The fact that these necessary options for making the vote accessible might be exploited does not justify getting rid of them. Many, many people cannot or will not get to a polling booth, especially given how many unreasonable constraints our government puts on voting. It's simply not acceptable to sacrifice accessibility on the altar of 'election integrity', especially when we don't have enough evidence to prove it's necessary. I agree that making elections not only fair but visibly fair is important. If anything, lowering accessibility like this might reduce faith in elections. I'm not arguing in favor of e-voting or un-validated ballots here. It's simply unreasonable to disenfranchise that many people on what is basically a (in all fairness to you, very plausible) conspiracy theory. We have too much of that going on in 2019 as-is.
everdev 7y ago
Wild guess -- Rep. & Dem. political parties are more motivated by self-serving interests than guided by any sustained principles. Both will easily flip on war, justice, tax reform, voting, etc. as needed. Part of the problem is it's easy to complain and spitball ideas when you're out of power, it's a lot more complex to gain consensus and implement policy when you're in power.
- dashundchen 7y ago
  Republicans are definitely not interested in enfranchising eligible voters, especially demographics they think will vote against them, and it shows: Whether it's removing polling places where demographics work against them [0], purging voter rolls with a heavy bias against black voters [1], placing polling places in gated communities [2], cutting down polling places in cities, onerous requirements to obtain a voter ID [4](essentially becoming a poll tax), or refusing to renew and update the Voting Rights act, it's clear the Republican party is not interested in allowing every legal citizen the right to vote. [0] https://lawandcrime.com/civil-rights/gop-removes-sole-polling-place-from-famous-hispanic-majority-city-in-kansas/ https://lawandcrime.com/civil-rights/gop-removes-sole-pollin..., [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/georgia-black-voter-registration/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/georgia-black-voter-regist... [2]https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/politics/elections/south-florida-polling-place-moved-to-gated-community-requiring-voters-to-show-id/67-611792472 https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/politics/elections/south-f... [3] https://www.texasobserver.org/election-identification-certificates-voter-id/ https://www.texasobserver.org/election-identification-certif... [4] https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Amendment-4-Former-Felons-Voting-Rights-Bill-508130061.html https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Amendment-4-Former-Felon... [5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-have-a-secret-weapon-in-the-midterms-voter-suppression https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-have-a-secret-weap...
  - pfranz 7y ago
    This is just anecdotal, but the individuals I've talked to seem to mirror this. I'm imprinting my own perceptions of this, but it's often an elitism that populism (following the will of the majority) is self destructive and there's this privileged class that knows better--whether that's a certain class of voters (people responsible enough to hold an ID) or a political class. When I try and dig in, their opinions seem very shallow and self serving. I don't think their idea, in concept, is entirely without merit. Senators used to be elected by the state legislature because the intention was they represent the state's interest, not necessarily the voter's. Things like capping the House has really skewed representation and the Electoral College...which has undermined any "genius" that might have been intended by the EC. These otherwise well-read people don't seem interested in these problems, they're just supportive of the approaches you describe.
aaomidi 7y ago
Most democrats are fine with an ID if it's given free of charge and the transportation and loss of wages for the day are covered.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Speaking for myself, I'm not. There's no evidence that they're necessary, and in many states where they are mandated including my home state they were biased against individuals that usually don't vote for Republicans - in the case of NC the law was designed to "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision" [0] according to the courts. [0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693/supreme-court-declines-republican-bid-to-revive-north-carolina-voter-id-law https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693...
  - aaomidi 7y ago
    Which is my point of remove the bias of getting an ID and then it's fine. In its current state it's not fine and shouldn't be pushed.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      It's absolutely important to separate the concept of 'requiring ID to vote' and the concept of 'encouraging everyone to have ID', as you point out. ID is useful for many different things. Voter ID laws have an obvious historical impact and can be assumed bad at this point, but we shouldn't allow that to turn us negative on IDs in general. They're too essential in modern society.
  - codegrappler 7y ago
    How would you design an unbiased ID system?
    - runako 7y ago
      Some ideas for a baseline: 0) Many states that require ID to vote are moving in the direction of permit less carry for firearms. (I think GA, where I live, has the condition that a permit is required but officials are not allowed to request it.) An unbiased system would recognize that if permitless is sufficient for carrying firearms, it should be sufficient for voting. 0') Recognize that filing other official documents does not require ID. Notably, tax filings do not require any kind of ID, yet the information contained in them is considered extremely sensitive (e.g. knowing the AGI from a form is considered sufficient authentication in some government interactions). Recognize that many citizens of voting age simply do not need an ID. If you don't buy alcohol, fly on a plane, or drive, your need for ID becomes vanishingly low. If you just do basic stuff like go to the grocery store, physician, and park, you may find that you never need an ID. So again, do not require ID for this fundamental exercise of participation in government. 1) Accept all federal and state-issued IDs. States have a habit of cherry-picking, for example by accepting firearms licenses and not student IDs. That means accepting student IDs from public universities, among other things. 2) Make the provision of ID the responsibility of the government. That is: IDs should be free to acquire and free to replace. Acquisition of IDs should not be biased against the homebound by e.g. requiring a citizen to present herself in a government office at any time to obtain one. Social Security cards function according to these rules, so our government has known how to do this for generations. 3) Grandfather existing citizens. The last slave in the US died barely 40 years ago; there are likely millions of people born in situations where birth certificates may not have been issued. Pre-computer records were destroyed from time to time. The onus is on the government to track citizens, not the other way around (ref: US Constitution). So there needs to be a way to (transparently, without effort on the citizen's part) get ID to people like my uncle, who has lived in the same place for ~70 years no matter whether he can produce his birth certificate. The basic problem is once you do all that, you defeat the goals of the modern voter ID project. So there's no reason to aim for an unbiased ID system here. Either aim for the real goals (which require bias) or don't implement voter ID.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
For the record, showing an ID would __not__ help with the sort of absentee ballot shenanigans that took place in NC9 (which was election fraud not voter fraud). If anything, it doesn't do anything at all - it's elections security theater.
mikeash 7y ago
Because there’s no significant amount of fraud occurring that ID requirements would fix, and ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups.
- FakeComments 7y ago
  Can you cite something to support that? It sounds like a just-so claim: it’s not really a problem, and the people complaining are just bad people! As far as I’m aware, not only is there not accurate study — jurisdictions like Washington intentionally make it difficult to track whether non-citizens are voting by issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship. This is why WA has to have enhanced ID — they don’t meet the federal standards of ensuring people they issue ID to are here legally. It seems strange that people refuse to even talk about it and resort to nasty ad hominems if there genuinely is no issue. By contrast, insulting the motivations of people genuinely trying to stand up for the law and act with integrity because you decided to employ force and just override them is deeply, unrecoverably immoral.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    Go look for citations to support your claim that voter ID is needed and identity fraud is pervasive in elections. It'll be hard to find some, because historically it just doesn't happen. It'd be one thing to put those laws in place in response to pervasive fraud, but historically we just have lawmakers explicitly saying they did it to reduce voter turnout which is... kind of a mistake. Whether or not ID is issued to non-citizens is a massively different issue. People need ID for all sorts of stuff - that doesn't mean everyone with ID is automatically going out there and skipping work to stand in line to vote.
    - andrewla 7y ago
      > because historically it just doesn't happen I understand the objections to voter ID based on unequal access to acceptable identification. But I don't understand the "it just doesn't happen" argument. This kind of voter fraud seems like it would be nearly impossible to detect. I guess you could look at how often ballots are spoiled because of signature mismatches or incidences of "the registry shows that you already voted". It seems like once voter id laws are passed, any laws or regulations limiting access to ID are de facto challengeable under the Equal Protection principle.
kevingadd 7y ago
Identity fraud when voting basically doesn't happen. We're talking dozens of cases in a given election, even when people investigate it. There are other kinds of fraud that are pervasive (like harvesting absentee ballots and modifying/discarding them) and those should be policed, but voter ID laws historically do literally nothing except punish people who don't have access to ID - like people whose birth certificates burned up in a fire, or people whose nearest DMV office is hours away. We have decades of evidence that voter ID is a waste of time and money. It has one very obvious reason. It also seems to be pretty close to illegal, if not illegal.
8note 7y ago
democrats are against ID laws because the government and employers together have made it too difficult to get an ID for the working class
amanaplanacanal 7y ago
Fully in favor of universal voter ID. It should be issued by the federal government to all US citizens of voting age. It's letting individual states decide what ID they will accept that's the problem. Unfortunately there is no way that Republicans would agree to it. I don't know if Democrats would or not.

throwaway5752 7y ago

Ballot harvesting is not de facto bad. It can help increase turnout with indigent, disabled, and elderly. However, what happen in North Carolina was 1) ballot harvesting 2) alteration of the harvested ballots. They picked up the ballots and then changed the ballots they collected Did that happen in California?

akhilcacharya 7y ago
(It didn't!) The results in NC-9 are also incredibly suspicious even back down to the Republican primary.
- jerf 7y ago
  "(It didn't!)" How do you know? And moreover, why should I know that? Elections have no purpose if nobody trusts the results afterwards. That dominates all other concerns about elections, because if you don't have that, your election with all the other desirable characteristics is still just so much wasted time.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    Assuming ballots were modified is kind of a weird stance to take, isn't it? I mean, you're welcome to assume it, but we don't have many historical cases of it happening until recently. It'd be one thing to assume it by default in every state if we knew there was a long history of it happening everywhere... instead we seem to be treating the possibility as an excuse for making it harder for citizens to vote. Weird how that works. We could always verify the ballots after the fact if you're really concerned that every absentee ballot is being forged.
    - jerf 7y ago
      "Assuming ballots were modified is kind of a weird stance to take, isn't it?" No, it's perfectly sensible stance to take. The stakes are enormous and the idea that everyone's just so peachy-keen on fair play that we don't have to structure the system to be robust against hostile modification is refuted merely by stating the case. Just bring up whoever are your political bogeymen and ask yourself if they're that moral. The answer is no, obviously. They're the bad guys. (Besides, didn't we just spend two years agreeing that the Russians were deeply involved with our elections in all sorts of nefarious ways? Now suddenly elections are all totally safe and anyone who questions it is obviously racist and just wants to keep the brown people from voting. You'll pardon me if I can't keep up with all the shifts in the Official Opinions. I'm sure no Russians have looked at our remote ballots and thought about what they could do with it. Or whomever else you like.) In addition to the first-order security concerns around getting a fair ballot count, there's also the second-order concerns that elections must not just be fair, but have all the appearance of being fair. They don't appear fair when the ballots are filled in, and then disappear from the pipeline for arbitrary periods of time, only to re-appear somewhere else. Even if the system is stipulated to be entirely fair, when the loser (who could be the Good Guys, you know, because obviously the Bad Guys are waaay more likely to cheat than the Good Guys) says "Hey, the vote may have been manipulated!", how do you prove them right or wrong? Personally, I have my own conspiracy theory which is that it rather suits our Powers that Be that the increasing number of absentee ballots and similar voting "options" makes the elections easier to forge, and citing "oh, what if poor suffering people don't get to vote?" is a rather convenient cudgel for them to pick up and hit anyone who wants to ensure security in voting with.
      - kevingadd 7y ago
        The fact that these necessary options for making the vote accessible might be exploited does not justify getting rid of them. Many, many people cannot or will not get to a polling booth, especially given how many unreasonable constraints our government puts on voting. It's simply not acceptable to sacrifice accessibility on the altar of 'election integrity', especially when we don't have enough evidence to prove it's necessary. I agree that making elections not only fair but visibly fair is important. If anything, lowering accessibility like this might reduce faith in elections. I'm not arguing in favor of e-voting or un-validated ballots here. It's simply unreasonable to disenfranchise that many people on what is basically a (in all fairness to you, very plausible) conspiracy theory. We have too much of that going on in 2019 as-is.

everdev 7y ago

Wild guess -- Rep. & Dem. political parties are more motivated by self-serving interests than guided by any sustained principles. Both will easily flip on war, justice, tax reform, voting, etc. as needed. Part of the problem is it's easy to complain and spitball ideas when you're out of power, it's a lot more complex to gain consensus and implement policy when you're in power.

dashundchen 7y ago
Republicans are definitely not interested in enfranchising eligible voters, especially demographics they think will vote against them, and it shows: Whether it's removing polling places where demographics work against them [0], purging voter rolls with a heavy bias against black voters [1], placing polling places in gated communities [2], cutting down polling places in cities, onerous requirements to obtain a voter ID [4](essentially becoming a poll tax), or refusing to renew and update the Voting Rights act, it's clear the Republican party is not interested in allowing every legal citizen the right to vote. [0] https://lawandcrime.com/civil-rights/gop-removes-sole-polling-place-from-famous-hispanic-majority-city-in-kansas/ https://lawandcrime.com/civil-rights/gop-removes-sole-pollin..., [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/georgia-black-voter-registration/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/georgia-black-voter-regist... [2]https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/politics/elections/south-florida-polling-place-moved-to-gated-community-requiring-voters-to-show-id/67-611792472 https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/politics/elections/south-f... [3] https://www.texasobserver.org/election-identification-certificates-voter-id/ https://www.texasobserver.org/election-identification-certif... [4] https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Amendment-4-Former-Felons-Voting-Rights-Bill-508130061.html https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Amendment-4-Former-Felon... [5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-have-a-secret-weapon-in-the-midterms-voter-suppression https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-have-a-secret-weap...
- pfranz 7y ago
  This is just anecdotal, but the individuals I've talked to seem to mirror this. I'm imprinting my own perceptions of this, but it's often an elitism that populism (following the will of the majority) is self destructive and there's this privileged class that knows better--whether that's a certain class of voters (people responsible enough to hold an ID) or a political class. When I try and dig in, their opinions seem very shallow and self serving. I don't think their idea, in concept, is entirely without merit. Senators used to be elected by the state legislature because the intention was they represent the state's interest, not necessarily the voter's. Things like capping the House has really skewed representation and the Electoral College...which has undermined any "genius" that might have been intended by the EC. These otherwise well-read people don't seem interested in these problems, they're just supportive of the approaches you describe.

aaomidi 7y ago

Most democrats are fine with an ID if it's given free of charge and the transportation and loss of wages for the day are covered.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
Speaking for myself, I'm not. There's no evidence that they're necessary, and in many states where they are mandated including my home state they were biased against individuals that usually don't vote for Republicans - in the case of NC the law was designed to "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision" [0] according to the courts. [0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693/supreme-court-declines-republican-bid-to-revive-north-carolina-voter-id-law https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693...
- aaomidi 7y ago
  Which is my point of remove the bias of getting an ID and then it's fine. In its current state it's not fine and shouldn't be pushed.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    It's absolutely important to separate the concept of 'requiring ID to vote' and the concept of 'encouraging everyone to have ID', as you point out. ID is useful for many different things. Voter ID laws have an obvious historical impact and can be assumed bad at this point, but we shouldn't allow that to turn us negative on IDs in general. They're too essential in modern society.
- codegrappler 7y ago
  How would you design an unbiased ID system?
  - runako 7y ago
    Some ideas for a baseline: 0) Many states that require ID to vote are moving in the direction of permit less carry for firearms. (I think GA, where I live, has the condition that a permit is required but officials are not allowed to request it.) An unbiased system would recognize that if permitless is sufficient for carrying firearms, it should be sufficient for voting. 0') Recognize that filing other official documents does not require ID. Notably, tax filings do not require any kind of ID, yet the information contained in them is considered extremely sensitive (e.g. knowing the AGI from a form is considered sufficient authentication in some government interactions). Recognize that many citizens of voting age simply do not need an ID. If you don't buy alcohol, fly on a plane, or drive, your need for ID becomes vanishingly low. If you just do basic stuff like go to the grocery store, physician, and park, you may find that you never need an ID. So again, do not require ID for this fundamental exercise of participation in government. 1) Accept all federal and state-issued IDs. States have a habit of cherry-picking, for example by accepting firearms licenses and not student IDs. That means accepting student IDs from public universities, among other things. 2) Make the provision of ID the responsibility of the government. That is: IDs should be free to acquire and free to replace. Acquisition of IDs should not be biased against the homebound by e.g. requiring a citizen to present herself in a government office at any time to obtain one. Social Security cards function according to these rules, so our government has known how to do this for generations. 3) Grandfather existing citizens. The last slave in the US died barely 40 years ago; there are likely millions of people born in situations where birth certificates may not have been issued. Pre-computer records were destroyed from time to time. The onus is on the government to track citizens, not the other way around (ref: US Constitution). So there needs to be a way to (transparently, without effort on the citizen's part) get ID to people like my uncle, who has lived in the same place for ~70 years no matter whether he can produce his birth certificate. The basic problem is once you do all that, you defeat the goals of the modern voter ID project. So there's no reason to aim for an unbiased ID system here. Either aim for the real goals (which require bias) or don't implement voter ID.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

For the record, showing an ID would __not__ help with the sort of absentee ballot shenanigans that took place in NC9 (which was election fraud not voter fraud). If anything, it doesn't do anything at all - it's elections security theater.

mikeash 7y ago

Because there’s no significant amount of fraud occurring that ID requirements would fix, and ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups.

FakeComments 7y ago
Can you cite something to support that? It sounds like a just-so claim: it’s not really a problem, and the people complaining are just bad people! As far as I’m aware, not only is there not accurate study — jurisdictions like Washington intentionally make it difficult to track whether non-citizens are voting by issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship. This is why WA has to have enhanced ID — they don’t meet the federal standards of ensuring people they issue ID to are here legally. It seems strange that people refuse to even talk about it and resort to nasty ad hominems if there genuinely is no issue. By contrast, insulting the motivations of people genuinely trying to stand up for the law and act with integrity because you decided to employ force and just override them is deeply, unrecoverably immoral.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  Go look for citations to support your claim that voter ID is needed and identity fraud is pervasive in elections. It'll be hard to find some, because historically it just doesn't happen. It'd be one thing to put those laws in place in response to pervasive fraud, but historically we just have lawmakers explicitly saying they did it to reduce voter turnout which is... kind of a mistake. Whether or not ID is issued to non-citizens is a massively different issue. People need ID for all sorts of stuff - that doesn't mean everyone with ID is automatically going out there and skipping work to stand in line to vote.
  - andrewla 7y ago
    > because historically it just doesn't happen I understand the objections to voter ID based on unequal access to acceptable identification. But I don't understand the "it just doesn't happen" argument. This kind of voter fraud seems like it would be nearly impossible to detect. I guess you could look at how often ballots are spoiled because of signature mismatches or incidences of "the registry shows that you already voted". It seems like once voter id laws are passed, any laws or regulations limiting access to ID are de facto challengeable under the Equal Protection principle.

kevingadd 7y ago

Identity fraud when voting basically doesn't happen. We're talking dozens of cases in a given election, even when people investigate it. There are other kinds of fraud that are pervasive (like harvesting absentee ballots and modifying/discarding them) and those should be policed, but voter ID laws historically do literally nothing except punish people who don't have access to ID - like people whose birth certificates burned up in a fire, or people whose nearest DMV office is hours away. We have decades of evidence that voter ID is a waste of time and money. It has one very obvious reason. It also seems to be pretty close to illegal, if not illegal.

8note 7y ago

democrats are against ID laws because the government and employers together have made it too difficult to get an ID for the working class

amanaplanacanal 7y ago

Fully in favor of universal voter ID. It should be issued by the federal government to all US citizens of voting age. It's letting individual states decide what ID they will accept that's the problem. Unfortunately there is no way that Republicans would agree to it. I don't know if Democrats would or not.