DHS continues to threaten states that resist the REAL-ID Act

Citizens living abroad are generally known, either via tax filings or you notified the embassy, etc.

I'd think people living abroad are a small enough number to manage some other means of verification (such as your social security number, which every citizen has for free, can only be used to vote 1 time per election).

> Because there are many people who bristle at the thought of being required to possess a government-issued ID

Fair point - however they all already have a government issued ID - a social security number. Instead of a driver's license, we could use that then. I'm just arguing for _some_ form of verification that you are who you claim to be, and that you only get 1 vote per election.

Right now, you can walk into a voting center and just make up a name. The person will find you somewhere on the list and either admit you to vote without any further scrutiny, or inform you that your voting place is someplace else (they'll even give you the address!).

That would be a valid argument if a) you didn't need your ID/Drivers license for virtually everything else that's good in society and b) You had to wait until registration day to get an ID card.

The fair thing to do is to require proper identification in elections. The fair thing to do is to make sure anyone that needs an ID/Drivers license is able to get one, if they are verifiable citizens.

Isn't that mostly an argument to fix broken bureaucracies around IDs?

And they are broken, to be sure. I recently moved away from NJ, but when I was there, renewing my driver's license was a real chore. Their antiquated computer system can't hold a string as long as "Christopher", so they abbreviate on my DL. That becomes a problem at renewal time, because my DL does not match my other IDs, so I always must supply my birth certificate, and jump through other hoops.

That system is broken, and needs fixing irrespective of voting rights.

Heh, try Texas. Vehicle registration and Drivers Licenses are done in different places. If you register the vehicle(s) first, you have to bring proof that you've registered any/all vehicle(s) when you get your license. This is very difficult when you have multiple vehicles, drive in one car with your wife and all vehicles are in both of your names.

The fun part is the registration is the window sticker and you don't need to keep any other paperwork as proof of registration (so we didn't). Also, they can't look up registrations because of different computer systems. We had to take pictures of all the registration stickers, email them to the person processing our license applications (while we sat at the desk), then waited for an hour while they called the state Police to verify the plates matched our address and our names.

After all of that, we both received our licenses in the mail with typos on them.

The most humorous part of the whole situation: We lived in Texas before (and both of our previous licenses were still within the expiration dates). But, we were told, because we had obtained licenses in another state we had to do new applications. Our new licenses have the same ID numbers as the previous ones.

> The actual amount of in-person voting fraud is incredibly tiny... something on the order of 30 cases per billion votes

It doesn't matter what the national rate is (though it's likely higher than 30 per billion votes), what matters is that it happens. Plus there is more than simple impersonation. There is multiple voting. There is voting by ineligible voters. None of these can be stopped unless we can get to a place where verification can happen.

For example, a single county in Virginia has thousands of people who report on their jury duty forms that they are not citizens but who then go on to vote in elections.[1] The point is if they were not citizens then they were voting illegally. And if they were citizens but lied on their jury duty questionnaires they have committed a felony and thus ineligible to vote.

[1] https://pjmedia.com/blog/massive-non-citizen-voting-uncovere...

Given that there are statistically NO illegitimate voters to be weeded out, I think you have to look elsewhere to find the source of the pushback. Maybe check out the several states have used voter ID laws as a way to target and suppress minority voters (and been slapped back by various appellate courts over the past few months) for a start.

Given that investigations have found about 30 cases of voter fraud per billion votes[1], what illegitimate voters are you talking about?

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...

Federal judges recently struck down portions of voter ID laws in North Carolina and Wisconsin

In the case of Wisconsin

> “The evidence in this case casts doubt on the notion that voter ID laws foster integrity and confidence,” Peterson wrote. “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities. To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease.”

In North Carolina,

> “The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/appeals-c...

In the case of North Carolina the representatives actually asked for information on how the proposed law would affect African American voters, then went ahead and did exactly the worst things.

Besides that

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...

Every citizen has a federally issued identification number, aka your social security number.

We could have a list at each voting center. You show up, tell them your SSN (or better yet, produce a card showing it - and yes, I know we'd need to do better than flimsy paper like the current cards are printed on), they cross it off the list and you go vote. Your ID can't be re-used - and your name doesn't matter.

1 ID, 1 Vote... sort of thing.

> Someone who's not willing to invest the effort in getting proper ID (or one of the other ways of voting, like an absentee ballot) is likely also not investing much in becoming educated on the issues.

Great idea. Why not bar people without a college education from voting?

Better yet, why not bar people who don't own land from voting? If you aren't willing to jump through a few hoops, why should you have a say in how the country is run?

The hoops that people need to jump through to become eligible are, by design, made more difficult for certain demographics. This is deliberate disenfranchisement.

The whole point of democracy is that everyone gets to have a say in it - not just the people you like.

I'm sympathetic to Rowe's argument that people who don't care or don't know what they're talking about shouldn't vote, but that's different than saying they should be prevented from voting. If I'm remembering correctly, Rowe said that we shouldn't encourage people to vote who aren't otherwise motivated. I don't see anything wrong with that, but the issue then becomes what barriers you're setting up. If the barriers we set up are costs, either for an ID card or lost wages, I think it's pretty easy to argue that we're excluding poor people, not uninformed people. If, on the other hand, the barrier is you have to mail in a ballot, then that's probably acceptable.

I think the best thing we can do is try to find ways to inform more people about public policy issues, not ways to casually disenfranchise apathetic or uninformed citizens.

> A non-partisan elections monitoring group in Virginia has documented thousands of people who identify themselves on jury duty forms as non-citizens but who have registered and voted. Thousands of voters can easily sway local and state elections.

This should tell you more about how much people want to do jury duty, then how much they want to perform voter fraud.

Also, have you considered that they may have become citizens between the time that they were called up, and the time that they voted?

> Additionally King County had 895,660 listed voters and 899,199 counted ballots. Election fraud happens and it has happened recently and it changes the results of races.

Given the typical procedure in these places (registered voters on a list, list is checked off as people vote) this shouldn't happen even if no verification of identity is done, which means those extra ballots appeared in some way circumventing normal procedure. Adding an ID check to normal procedure isn't going to help.

It seems particularly galling that abuse of the system by those powerful and connected enough to stuff the ballot box is used as justification to make it harder for the powerless to vote.

In some cases, voter ID may be free, but if the nearest place that issues it is in a town 50 miles away, that's only open 10-4 on Mondays through Thursdays, it may as well cost a million dollars to some people.

In other cases, the requirements for getting voter ID may be beyond what is possible for a voter. Again - consider the homeless, the recently relocated, people who don't pay bills.

And speaking of Indiana, you realize that this is also the state that just seized ~50,000 in-progress voter registrations, on suspicion that some number of them may be fraudulent (The bar for which is surprisingly low)? [1] Exactly how many of the non-fraudulent ones do you think will be forwarded by state police to their intended destination, before the election? Would failing to do so even be illegal?

This nonesense is precisely what vouching is supposed to address.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/10...

The problem is that the federal government is pestering the states about it. If they wanted to just require you to use a federal passport they could, but then citizens would object to that for much the same reasons they object to this.

It's turtles all the way down.

I think you'll find that many of the activities they want us to use a federally-acceptable ID for are not, themselves, covered in Article I Section 8.

To some degree perhaps, but it also cannot discriminate against citizens of certain states, as that would be a clear violation of the 14th Amendment.[1] Depending on the test you use for what counts as discrimination, you might find that disallowing certain states' IDs is illegal and/or unconstitutional; for instance, it is clearly discriminatory based on a disparate impact analysis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause

Why does the federal government need to force the states to accept their standard? If you have a great program or proposal, you generally don't need force of law to convince others to participate. If the standard benefited everyone, I am sure the states would implement it.

Lots of reasons. Immigration affairs aren't a state matter, regulating the roadways is.

So a state like New York that has lots of immigrants, whose status may or may not be legal has a compelling public need to license drivers, as licensure is required for things like liability insurance coverage.

A place like Montana may find that some of the consequences of higher levels of identity proofing are difficult or onerous because it's a huge state with few people and many Indian Reservations with other complications.

We don't normally discuss freedom in this way. The other things in the Bill of Rights - Speech, Right to Legal Counsel, etc., we never ask "why do you need to exercise that right?".

So why would you ask why a state needs to exercise the 10th Amendment?

>"the federal government is free to mandate certain things that otherwise would hinder that freedom of movement and trade"

This logic gives the Federal Government almost unlimited power, since almost everything affects commerce. Are you proposing that commandeering of state governments by the federal government be permitted? What limits would you place on this 'right to encourage commerce'?

As it is, it's only by agreement (preserving state sovereignty) that Virginia allows you to use a Maryland ID to buy beer in Virginia in the first place. Or to drive on state roads in Virginia, for that matter. And if your state-issued ID doesn't have a birthdate on it (some don't), then you don't get to use it to buy beer. The system works now why do you think it needs to be mandated?

Side note, do you also think that passing one state's bar exam should allow you to practice law in every state? Or that there should be one national bar exam? Or a uniform set of laws in every state?

Why do you need ID to go between states? I've driven from one coast to the other and never had to show ID or was even stopped once.