Does this mean we can use them to verify voting and thus the integrity of our elections?
In Canada, you didn't need a proof of residence to vote for the longest time - if you had someone vouch that you live where you said you live. Someone vouched for could not vouch for another person. You could only vouch for one people.
Without this, I wouldn't have been able to vote. I lived with my parents, I didn't have bills addressed to my name, and I had no recent tax forms, by virtue of being a student.
The voter fraud impact on an election (As found by every study and investigation into the question is completely insignificant.) Disenfranchising people like me, or the homeless, on the other hand, is quite significant. Naturally, the Tories, who don't have much luck with either the student, or the homeless demographics, gutted vouching.
Turning one person away from the polls is far worse then allowing one case of voter fraud to slip through. In the case of voter fraud, you have after-the-fact redress - invalidation of ballots, jail time, deportation. In the case of disenfranchisement, its tough shit, try again in four years. Any policy that results in more of the former then the latter is contrary to its purported goals.
Democracy is not best served by voters who don't fully understand the issues. 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.
IMHO, setting a low threshold to weed out folks who are voting on a whim, without having invested in the process, will help the project of democracy.
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 not advocating that we set up intentional barriers, like the poll taxes of old. What I said was that if a side effect of a legitimate effort has a side effect, it's not a bad thing. I was taking that from the idea that uninformed voters aren't helping the process; Mike Rowe explains that better than I can [1].
This is deliberate disenfranchisement.
No. There may be other folks who do want to gag people and would use this as a pretense. You shouldn't simply assume that I am one of those people. You're putting words in my mouth, and trying to say that I'm lying about what my motives are. If that's how you're going to approach debate, then I don't think it's worth wasting bits on you.
[1] http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/08/19/mike-rowe-deliver...
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.
The thing is, those who oppose this really are putting forward a strawman, at least relative to what SCOTUS has told us is in-bounds. They've found that a law requiring ID for in-person voting was OK, because it also provided for
A) A means to obtain IDs for free; or
B) People without ID could still vote by (as I recall) going to city hall and showing other identifying documents
With these conditions, I think it clearly changes from a question of excluding people because of money, to one more like I said, where it's just testing whether people are willing to get off their butts and invest a little bit of effort.
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.
For example, in the 2004 Washington State Gubernatorial race the margin of victory was 129 votes. (The vote tallying was a complete mess. During the manual recount King County poll workers discovered a number of ballots that were invalidated for improper signatures, and also "discovered" 162 previously uncounted ballots in a tray in a warehouse. 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.)
> In the case of voter fraud, you have after-the-fact redress - invalidation of ballots, jail time, deportation.
No you don't. You might be able to jail and deport someone, but there is zero connection between a ballot and a voter. There is no way to remove the invalid ballot and have a correct count. Note that if it were possible to connect a ballot to a voter then you cannot have free and fair 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?
1 - citizen who lies on their jury duty questionnaire to get out of serving.
2 - non-citizens who told the truth on their jury duty questionnaire.
3 - non-citizens who became citizens, but were registered to vote before they became citizens.
The first have committed perjury and are ineligible to vote. The second are ineligible to vote, plus there is some weirdness associated with them even being selected for jury duty, read on. As for the third, jury lists are drawn from voter registration as the requirements to vote and the requirements to be on a jury are the same. It's unlawful to register to vote if you aren't a citizen. So the third group has also committed a crime and are ineligible to vote. And ineligible to become citizens and would face deportation if anyone bothered to followup.
Because they are felons? There's 3 problems with that argument. Some states allow convicted felons to vote, the people in question have not been convicted and it's a bad law to disenfranchise felons.
The jury duty selection process is done by picking drivers' licenses at random. You don't need to be a citizen to have a driver's license.
You're missing option #4, which is far more likely then option #3 - non-citizens who were called up for jury duty, who later became citizens.
Your analysis of group #1 is in contradiction with reality. People make up all sorts of reasons to get out of jury duty. In practice, they are not prosecuted for it.
Based on researching my prior response, Federal courts use voter registration. Some states may use drivers license lists. However, Virginia seems to use voter registration.
There's actually a good chance that you are registered to vote. With the Motor Voter law that has been in place since the 1990s, nearly everyone who has received a drivers license has also been registered to vote. Even in cases where people mark they are not citizens, the systems are screwing up and registering them.
What basis do you have for saying that it's more likely that people have become citizens between being selected for jury duty and going on to vote? Given that 50% of the non-citizen residents are here unlawfully, it seems improbable that there is any majority that have become citizens. I'd just repeat the inquiry as to whether you have any research that follows up on your hypothesis.
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.
1) not being allowed to vote, despite being qualified to do so (your vote doesn't count)
2) voting, but allowing people to vote twice. (this dilutes your vote)
The Supreme Court has found that there are some ID laws that address both of these problems and do not impose any undue burden on people greater than that of normal voting. [0]
Specifically:
1) voter ID is free
2) you can vote up to 30 days before the election
3) you can vote once and only once
Now, not all voting policies address both of these issues. Some address (1) by disenfranchising people, while other policies address (2). However, the Supreme Court said that the Crawford case is a perfect example of a policy that ensures that every qualified person gets a vote, and nobody can vote more than once.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawford_v._Marion_County_Elec...
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...
In fact, that would be better than the current system, where people are required to obtain an ID on their own. We would give people ID.
The alternative is that we don't verify ID. If we don't verify ID, then there is no possible way to know that someone didn't vote twice or didn't vote in a district not their own.
My only question is this: Why is someone who works with the DNC describing how they would pay people to rent cars to drive to states where they would vote illegally? [0] Maybe he didn't do it -- and I don't know if he has. But the fact that any political organization would discuss it should raise questions of how we would root out people that would threaten the integrity of our elections.
However, one of the common hurdles seems to be that ID's are not free, as-in folks need to pay to get government issued ID (which is crazy, if you think about it. you don't even own your ID - the issuing state does) and this may negatively impact our poorest population's ability to participate in elections.
Why don't we issue government ID's for free (paid via taxes, naturally), and then ID folks at the voting booth? Only citizens have the right to vote, why not protect that right?
Also, what good does that do for people who vote by mail? I live abroad, how would they check my ID exactly? I suppose we could do a public-key setup like Estonia, but I can't imagine that rollout going smoothly.
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!).
Despite extreme focus on this issue by right-wing groups in the past decade or so, the number of cases of voter fraud is laughably small.
Regardless, even if there was zero voter fraud - it's crazy to think we check ID's to buy cough syrup, alcohol, every time you use a credit card, see a rated R movie, rent a car, rent an apartment, etc... but not when you vote.
[1] http://humanevents.com/2012/09/17/vote-fraud-alert-one-out-o...
Given that the actual article being indirectly clickbaited [2] suggests these ineligible voters are people who "haven’t voted in at least four years or [...] apparently have moved", is there any evidence to suggest that they are "bogus" rather than normal people with out-of-date paperwork?
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...
[2]: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/09/16/vot...
The difference between those things you listed and the right to vote is that they aren't listed in the constitution -- and it doesn't say anything about an ID card being needed to exercise that right. But it does say that race and a number of other factors should have no bearing.
It's funny that the "constitution party" (as some Republicans call themselves) seem to forget that.
ID'ing voters is simply a mechanism to protect Citizen's rights, as well as the integrity of our democracy.
If my mom hadn't been there to very vocally insist that yes, that is the original birth certificate that the hospital issued after I was born, and yes she would know because she was there, then I would've had an awfully hard time getting a photo ID.
Coupled with DMV closures that (depending on who you ask) were targeted along racial lines, these little cards that we take for granted can be damn near impossible for some citizens to get.
https://thinkprogress.org/after-alabama-enforces-voter-id-sh...
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.
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.
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.
1. The actual amount of in-person voting fraud is incredibly tiny... something on the order of 30 cases per billion votes [1]. This means that any voting ID measure is basically guaranteed to interfere in more legitimate votes (easy example: ex-Amish people who never had government documents) than fraudulent ones.
2. There's a long, long history of people in the US claiming to support voter ID, while actually using the laws involved to suppress minority voters. For example, Republican legislators in North Carolina looked up data categorized by race and type of vote, then used it to remove the voting methods, days, and forms of ID most used by minorities, in the name of "protecting against voter fraud" [2].
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...
[2]: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-n...
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...
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...
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...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/19/gerrymanderi...
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.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/3004654/government/a-tale-of-...
[2] http://oig.ssa.gov/audits-and-investigations/audit-reports/A...
They're supposed to be, however sometimes they aren't. That's a bureaucratic and easily solvable issue, however.
Every person lives somewhere. You register in advance.
The person sees a list of people, one of which is "Spooky23, 123 Spooky St, Spookytown, CA"
I walk up to the table and say "Hi, I'm Spooky23". I sign the paper, am assigned a number, get a ballot, and vote. You're name and address cannot be used again.
That's not correct. Every citizen is assigned one at birth. You cannot choose to not have one, and it's not optional to pay into the system. I agree, however, some people have issues with theirs, but that doesn't preclude a voting ID system from being effective.
> I walk up to the table and say "Hi, I'm Spooky23
The problem is with people who do not vote, and someone else uses their vote illegitimately.
Showing a government issued ID of some sort solves that issue for the most part.
Most people do, because you cannot claim a dependent for tax purposes without an SSN. But we're a nation of >300M people. There are many exceptions.
Example: Your mother falls and breaks her hip, requiring that she move into an assisted living facility in a neighboring town. How does she get to DMV to get her state-issued ID updated?
Example: You're a chambermaid at a hotel, which requires that you work from 5AM to 4PM daily. You don't own a car and you don't get PTO or paid breaks. DMV is open from 8-4, closed from 12-1. Your 1-year lease wasn't renewed and you had to move recently. What do you do?
You also have the issue of right to vote. Municipal elections in my city require residency, not citizenship. How do you distinguish between these elections?
Voter-ID proposals sound reasonable and neutral, but only exist to increase the friction associated with voting to decrease voter turnout, particularly among the poor, elderly and minorities. Just like Amazon has one-click to increase conversion, and eats the cost of accidental orders, the voting system needs to be as frictionless as possible for a strong democracy.