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> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls. >

by rdtsc 7y ago

> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls. > “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller. I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controversial, but India, with more people, poverty and issues seems to have managed it. Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? > The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September [...] voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people But that means 200k some thousand should have been purged. If they died, and a death certificate was issued, doesn't some government database know about it and say, "yeah, person is dead purge their voter record". It's 2020 almost, we flew people to the moon, there is a Tesla roadster in Sun's orbit, self driving cars, but somehow managing a few hundred million voter records is an impossible task and I don't understand why.

wongarsu 7y ago
In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on, local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way. It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in the US.
- scrooched_moose 7y ago
  I mean, that's largely what voter registration is - a database of every citizen's address. The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like college students. These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political tool to alter turnouts.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    > There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved. I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc).
    - CompanionCuuube 7y ago
      > (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc). If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        Hardly. The Republicans are against databases, population registration, ID cards, and gun tracking databases. It's only the voter ID they're in favour of.
      - ebiester 7y ago
        So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's no problem. Now, things get complicated and we would have to do work to get it right in that we have inconsistent rules on residency in terms of students and temporary housing, and we have a significant number of people who don't want to see a national registry of citizens (see issues with using SSN as a national ID) but there's nothing specifically that Democrats would object to philosophically. The problem comes when we start trying to purge the rolls and there are false positives. The bigger problem is when those false positives are disproportionately citizens of color. Similarly, voter ID cards are not problems philosophically as much as these ID laws disproportionately affecting poor people and people of color. If you want an ID law, you make IDs free, you account for many of the edge cases like elderly people who don't have birth certificates yet are clearly citizens, and you bend over backwards to make sure everyone who can vote gets one regardless of it costing a little more.
- zanny 7y ago
  Meanwhile the NSA records and analyzes every communication (that they can see, at least) you make over the Internet, and has probably megabytes worth of per-person profile information on a large chunk of the world population.
  - omnimus 7y ago
    Of course the state knows they just can't admit they know. Besides that you are alive and your adress they probably also know if you are going to vote and who.
kasey_junk 7y ago
It’s not a technical problem it’s a political one (or really it’s a whole host of historical and current political problems). One of 2 major parties in the US has made making it hard for people to vote a central strategy. This has happened in the past as well.
- andrewla 7y ago
  I think you're replying to a different point than the GP was making -- the "major party" you are (I assume) referencing is also the party that backs Voter ID laws, which the GP was explicitly pointing out as a solution to the problem.
  - slg 7y ago
    It is fundamentally the same point since that party doesn't want to make it easy and free to get a voter ID. If you have to take a day off work to go to the DMV or need to pay some fee to get your ID, then requiring ID is in practice making it harder to vote. If you want to require a voter ID, it is the duty of the government to assure that everyone citizen who wants one has one.
    - andrewla 7y ago
      Everybody has an ID. Find a study that shows differently (for example [1]) and you'll be able to see how obviously synthetic it is. I have no doubt that the people who are opposing Voter ID have no nefarious motive, but there's a lot of confirmation bias at work that creates a false narrative that getting a photo ID is "difficult" and that people without photo IDs are common and disproportionately minorities. [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...
      - bearcobra 7y ago
        I'm not sure I understand what objections would be to the study you cite.
CelestialTeapot 7y ago
No, that doesn't follow that 200k "should have been purged." It just means that 200k MIGHT have been correctly purged. People move all the time and don't always remember to update their voter registration until too late; people do die, yet previous voter purges have incorrectly matched up death records resulting in registered voters being denied their right to vote at the polls. Well, we don't actually have the Constitutional right to vote. The only vote that matters is that of the members of the Electoral College, which is tilted in favor of the Republicans in close elections. That's how we got Bush II and Trump.
crooked-v 7y ago
> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. For an example direct quote from a court case: https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280 https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280
- jimmywanger 7y ago
  > Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. Also, your source is not substantiated. I'd be happier if proof of citizenship was required to vote, not just photo id. Don't know of a practical way to do that except to check passports, but the passport office would be overwhelmed.
  - pedasmith 7y ago
    How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative? Let me put it into computer terms: when your program isn't fast enough and you've got a nice profile trace, do you start your analysis with the functions using up a lot of time? Or do you start among the functions that aren't using lots of time? Why approach vote fraud any other way? The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted. Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
    - jimmywanger 7y ago
NelsonMinar 7y ago
Elections are de-federalized in the US; they are run by each state or, really, each county. That explains a lot of the mess. The other problem is there's never been a real effort to establish a universal ID in the US. Which means you can't fairly do voter ID, since a lot of people don't have ID for various reasons. The lack of voter ID doesn't turn out to be a big problem; there's basically no voter fraud in the US. But it means there's no proper role of eligible voters, either. The politics of this can't be ignored. The Republicans have a deliberate strategy of making it difficult for people to vote, and employ that strategy every time cleaning up voter roles or enacting voter ID comes up. They do not operate in good faith.
eropple 7y ago
> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? In a very real sense: because that would make it easy to vote. Free IDs are directly inimical to the effort to prevent people from voting. That prevention is a major effort of one major American political party because it's seen as the only way they can win in an increasingly diverse country. The folks who are against free IDs--who want it to be hard to vote--also get very weird about "databases of people", even though they already exist and corporate entities compile them right alongside governmental ones every day. I get the desire to assume good faith in this, but we literally have the receipts.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  > also get very weird about "databases of people", I always frame the argument like this to my family when they complain. "I'm not opposed to the government maintaining a database of everyone's current address and related information, but if they are going to do that, they should provide free IDs and encourage everyone to participate."
- jandrese 7y ago
  Purging voter rolls is something parties can do tactically to help improve their chances of winning. For instance, in Florida: https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712 https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712 The GOP learned a long time ago that if you win it doesn't matter how dirty you are. You're not going to prosecute yourself after all. By the time the leadership changes hands everybody will have forgotten about it.
ilikehurdles 7y ago
Voter ID doesn't solve the problem of outdated/invalid voter rolls at all. I can have an ID from a state I no longer live in for many years after I move out of that state. I can also have an expired ID for the state I currently live in. If I don't regularly buy alcohol or drive, I probably won't feel hard-pressed to spend a day renewing my ID.
- sigzero 7y ago
  And neither of those IDs would allow you to vote if it was implemented.
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    Thank you for reinforcing my point. That's a great example of how I would get disenfranchised despite being a resident of the district I'm voting in, while the IDs themselves would have no effect on whether a voter is wrongfully purged from the voter rolls.
briffle 7y ago
In the state of WI when they first implemented Voter ID, there were some entire counties where there was a single DMV location, that was only open for a few hours a week. (of course, during normal business hours). This makes it incredibly difficult for people that are poor, or young, and obviously have no drivers license to then take off work, and get themselves to the town across the count between 11am and 2pm on a Thursday. If you add in some of the requirements for getting a valid State ID, it can be even harder for people to get. (Many poor people don't have ready copies of their birth certificate, marriage license to show the change in name, etc)
pimmen 7y ago
You don’t gave a low cost, accessible national ID. In Europe, we do. Democracy is for everyone, not just those who can drive or with a passport, but everyone so unless the US gets a national ID for everyone any restriction on identification will disproportionately hit low income voters.
e40 7y ago
I am still baffled at the election system in this country. It's not an accident, it's designed to be this way, for the last 15+ years, at least. People in certain states, in a certain party, know their way to victory is to disenfranchise a certain other party's members.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  For some literal quotes on the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno... > "Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?" > I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters. > "The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It’s done for one reason and one reason only."
  - e40 7y ago
    I've seen uncountable articles from reputable news organizations. Is it that people have their head in the sand or think it's just fake news? Because if the people that vote for GOP candidates are OK with this, then they are completely alien to me. Maybe we should split into two nations, one for people who think this is disgusting and one for those who don't.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
Such "seams" are needed in the voting system to allow states to disenfranchise people. The country has a very rich and recent history of disenfranchising blacks wholesale, and that history is what guides changes to the voting system today.
davvolun 7y ago
Republicans say Democrats just want to get all the poor people/illegals registered to up their vote, Democrats say Republicans want to suppress votes to keep control. I think most Americans have a problem with the government keeping lists about them. How that makes sense in the modern age of driver's licenses, SSNs, and the Patriot Act, I'm not sure, but as long as people here are so against the idea, it's kind of dead-in-the-water.

by rdtsc 7y ago

wongarsu 7y ago

In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on, local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way. It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in the US.

scrooched_moose 7y ago
I mean, that's largely what voter registration is - a database of every citizen's address. The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like college students. These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political tool to alter turnouts.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  > There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved. I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc).
  - CompanionCuuube 7y ago
    > (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc). If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Hardly. The Republicans are against databases, population registration, ID cards, and gun tracking databases. It's only the voter ID they're in favour of.
    - ebiester 7y ago
      So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's no problem. Now, things get complicated and we would have to do work to get it right in that we have inconsistent rules on residency in terms of students and temporary housing, and we have a significant number of people who don't want to see a national registry of citizens (see issues with using SSN as a national ID) but there's nothing specifically that Democrats would object to philosophically. The problem comes when we start trying to purge the rolls and there are false positives. The bigger problem is when those false positives are disproportionately citizens of color. Similarly, voter ID cards are not problems philosophically as much as these ID laws disproportionately affecting poor people and people of color. If you want an ID law, you make IDs free, you account for many of the edge cases like elderly people who don't have birth certificates yet are clearly citizens, and you bend over backwards to make sure everyone who can vote gets one regardless of it costing a little more.
zanny 7y ago
Meanwhile the NSA records and analyzes every communication (that they can see, at least) you make over the Internet, and has probably megabytes worth of per-person profile information on a large chunk of the world population.
- omnimus 7y ago
  Of course the state knows they just can't admit they know. Besides that you are alive and your adress they probably also know if you are going to vote and who.

kasey_junk 7y ago

It’s not a technical problem it’s a political one (or really it’s a whole host of historical and current political problems). One of 2 major parties in the US has made making it hard for people to vote a central strategy. This has happened in the past as well.

andrewla 7y ago
I think you're replying to a different point than the GP was making -- the "major party" you are (I assume) referencing is also the party that backs Voter ID laws, which the GP was explicitly pointing out as a solution to the problem.
- slg 7y ago
  It is fundamentally the same point since that party doesn't want to make it easy and free to get a voter ID. If you have to take a day off work to go to the DMV or need to pay some fee to get your ID, then requiring ID is in practice making it harder to vote. If you want to require a voter ID, it is the duty of the government to assure that everyone citizen who wants one has one.
  - andrewla 7y ago
    Everybody has an ID. Find a study that shows differently (for example [1]) and you'll be able to see how obviously synthetic it is. I have no doubt that the people who are opposing Voter ID have no nefarious motive, but there's a lot of confirmation bias at work that creates a false narrative that getting a photo ID is "difficult" and that people without photo IDs are common and disproportionately minorities. [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...
    - bearcobra 7y ago
      I'm not sure I understand what objections would be to the study you cite.

CelestialTeapot 7y ago

No, that doesn't follow that 200k "should have been purged." It just means that 200k MIGHT have been correctly purged. People move all the time and don't always remember to update their voter registration until too late; people do die, yet previous voter purges have incorrectly matched up death records resulting in registered voters being denied their right to vote at the polls. Well, we don't actually have the Constitutional right to vote. The only vote that matters is that of the members of the Electoral College, which is tilted in favor of the Republicans in close elections. That's how we got Bush II and Trump.

crooked-v 7y ago

> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. For an example direct quote from a court case: https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280 https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280

jimmywanger 7y ago
> Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. Also, your source is not substantiated. I'd be happier if proof of citizenship was required to vote, not just photo id. Don't know of a practical way to do that except to check passports, but the passport office would be overwhelmed.
- pedasmith 7y ago
  How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative? Let me put it into computer terms: when your program isn't fast enough and you've got a nice profile trace, do you start your analysis with the functions using up a lot of time? Or do you start among the functions that aren't using lots of time? Why approach vote fraud any other way? The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted. Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
  - jimmywanger 7y ago

NelsonMinar 7y ago

Elections are de-federalized in the US; they are run by each state or, really, each county. That explains a lot of the mess. The other problem is there's never been a real effort to establish a universal ID in the US. Which means you can't fairly do voter ID, since a lot of people don't have ID for various reasons. The lack of voter ID doesn't turn out to be a big problem; there's basically no voter fraud in the US. But it means there's no proper role of eligible voters, either. The politics of this can't be ignored. The Republicans have a deliberate strategy of making it difficult for people to vote, and employ that strategy every time cleaning up voter roles or enacting voter ID comes up. They do not operate in good faith.

eropple 7y ago

> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? In a very real sense: because that would make it easy to vote. Free IDs are directly inimical to the effort to prevent people from voting. That prevention is a major effort of one major American political party because it's seen as the only way they can win in an increasingly diverse country. The folks who are against free IDs--who want it to be hard to vote--also get very weird about "databases of people", even though they already exist and corporate entities compile them right alongside governmental ones every day. I get the desire to assume good faith in this, but we literally have the receipts.

mywittyname 7y ago
> also get very weird about "databases of people", I always frame the argument like this to my family when they complain. "I'm not opposed to the government maintaining a database of everyone's current address and related information, but if they are going to do that, they should provide free IDs and encourage everyone to participate."
jandrese 7y ago
Purging voter rolls is something parties can do tactically to help improve their chances of winning. For instance, in Florida: https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712 https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712 The GOP learned a long time ago that if you win it doesn't matter how dirty you are. You're not going to prosecute yourself after all. By the time the leadership changes hands everybody will have forgotten about it.

ilikehurdles 7y ago

Voter ID doesn't solve the problem of outdated/invalid voter rolls at all. I can have an ID from a state I no longer live in for many years after I move out of that state. I can also have an expired ID for the state I currently live in. If I don't regularly buy alcohol or drive, I probably won't feel hard-pressed to spend a day renewing my ID.

sigzero 7y ago
And neither of those IDs would allow you to vote if it was implemented.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  Thank you for reinforcing my point. That's a great example of how I would get disenfranchised despite being a resident of the district I'm voting in, while the IDs themselves would have no effect on whether a voter is wrongfully purged from the voter rolls.

briffle 7y ago

In the state of WI when they first implemented Voter ID, there were some entire counties where there was a single DMV location, that was only open for a few hours a week. (of course, during normal business hours). This makes it incredibly difficult for people that are poor, or young, and obviously have no drivers license to then take off work, and get themselves to the town across the count between 11am and 2pm on a Thursday. If you add in some of the requirements for getting a valid State ID, it can be even harder for people to get. (Many poor people don't have ready copies of their birth certificate, marriage license to show the change in name, etc)

pimmen 7y ago

You don’t gave a low cost, accessible national ID. In Europe, we do. Democracy is for everyone, not just those who can drive or with a passport, but everyone so unless the US gets a national ID for everyone any restriction on identification will disproportionately hit low income voters.

e40 7y ago

I am still baffled at the election system in this country. It's not an accident, it's designed to be this way, for the last 15+ years, at least. People in certain states, in a certain party, know their way to victory is to disenfranchise a certain other party's members.

crooked-v 7y ago
For some literal quotes on the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno... > "Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?" > I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters. > "The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It’s done for one reason and one reason only."
- e40 7y ago
  I've seen uncountable articles from reputable news organizations. Is it that people have their head in the sand or think it's just fake news? Because if the people that vote for GOP candidates are OK with this, then they are completely alien to me. Maybe we should split into two nations, one for people who think this is disgusting and one for those who don't.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago

Such "seams" are needed in the voting system to allow states to disenfranchise people. The country has a very rich and recent history of disenfranchising blacks wholesale, and that history is what guides changes to the voting system today.

davvolun 7y ago

Republicans say Democrats just want to get all the poor people/illegals registered to up their vote, Democrats say Republicans want to suppress votes to keep control. I think most Americans have a problem with the government keeping lists about them. How that makes sense in the modern age of driver's licenses, SSNs, and the Patriot Act, I'm not sure, but as long as people here are so against the idea, it's kind of dead-in-the-water.