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No one should be praised other than the people who discovered "the mistakes". The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Re

No one should be praised other than the people who discovered "the mistakes". The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Republicans and has been around since forever. The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. Those thousands can _easily_ be achieved, however, with sloppy aggressive and unnecessary purging. I wish there existed the political will to issue "citizen ID" cards (or other mechanisms) to all citizens, like they do in civilized countries. These could be used for residency and authentication for voting, banking, taxes, and other functions. This authentication mechanism would instantly remove the phony concern of voter fraud amongst republicans while not disenfranchising voters.

andrewla 7y ago
> The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered. I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2]. [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu... has a good set of articles attempting to debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on "credible allegations" [2] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d... -- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology, and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.
  - andrewla 7y ago
    > If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
    - crispyambulance 7y ago
      By "truly inactive" I mean voters who can't vote because they're dead, no longer live in that voting district, never actually existed, or are ineligible to vote. If these names appear as having voted, those are invalid and might be an indication of fraud. There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place. Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.
romwell 7y ago
> "citizen ID" cards We call them passports :)
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  Those are halfway there. The problem is they're out-of-reach financially to many people ($145~) and they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence. I am thinking of something akin to the Chinese Resident Identity Card, which does track enough info to determine voter eligibility, I think.
  - romwell 7y ago
    I mean, the cost is not inherent to the ID itself: a piece of paper doesn't have to cost anything. We also have passport cards, which is the credit-card sized version of the passport, and only works for travel to Mexico/Canada (but is still a national ID). >they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence. You know, I can Google my name and get my current address out of public databases (TruePeopleSearch, etc). I can also see my current address on the voter record from the website by entering the VoterID number. The passports have numbers. These can be used to pull/check the address from a voter record database. It's less than trivial. The address itself doesn't have to be on the ID. TL;DR: issue passport cards for free to all citizens, force the states to let anyone with such a card to vote with a federal law.
    - crispyambulance 7y ago
      > It's less than trivial. It's doable, but it's certainly not trivial. And no, it's not just "a slip of paper" it's far more than that when you consider all the human, bureaucratic and technical infrastructure, systems and support that would have to be behind it. Sure, there are trashy and unreliable online aggregators like mylife and their ilk that can provide all kinds of dubious info. I am talking about something much more rigorous and reliable. There are steps in the right direction occuring now (like Real ID) but even these half-measures have been years in the making and have years to go.

andrewla 7y ago

> The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered. I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2]. [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu... has a good set of articles attempting to debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on "credible allegations" [2] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d... -- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology, and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.

crispyambulance 7y ago
> [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.
- andrewla 7y ago
  > If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
  - crispyambulance 7y ago
    By "truly inactive" I mean voters who can't vote because they're dead, no longer live in that voting district, never actually existed, or are ineligible to vote. If these names appear as having voted, those are invalid and might be an indication of fraud. There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place. Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.

romwell 7y ago

> "citizen ID" cards We call them passports :)

crispyambulance 7y ago
Those are halfway there. The problem is they're out-of-reach financially to many people ($145~) and they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence. I am thinking of something akin to the Chinese Resident Identity Card, which does track enough info to determine voter eligibility, I think.
- romwell 7y ago
  I mean, the cost is not inherent to the ID itself: a piece of paper doesn't have to cost anything. We also have passport cards, which is the credit-card sized version of the passport, and only works for travel to Mexico/Canada (but is still a national ID). >they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence. You know, I can Google my name and get my current address out of public databases (TruePeopleSearch, etc). I can also see my current address on the voter record from the website by entering the VoterID number. The passports have numbers. These can be used to pull/check the address from a voter record database. It's less than trivial. The address itself doesn't have to be on the ID. TL;DR: issue passport cards for free to all citizens, force the states to let anyone with such a card to vote with a federal law.
  - crispyambulance 7y ago
    > It's less than trivial. It's doable, but it's certainly not trivial. And no, it's not just "a slip of paper" it's far more than that when you consider all the human, bureaucratic and technical infrastructure, systems and support that would have to be behind it. Sure, there are trashy and unreliable online aggregators like mylife and their ilk that can provide all kinds of dubious info. I am talking about something much more rigorous and reliable. There are steps in the right direction occuring now (like Real ID) but even these half-measures have been years in the making and have years to go.