The NYT Released an Oregon Trail Style Game about Voter Suppression
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I was registered at a polling place in SoCal on election day, but was living in NorCal for school. They didn't let me vote. Proof:
"If you moved more than 15 days before the election AND you moved to another county and did not register in that county, you may not vote in any local or state election until you register using your new address. https://cavotes.org/vote/how-vote/if-youve-moved
It is exceptionally strange that I can't walk into ANY polling place, type in my social security number, show someone my ID for verification, and vote. Can't they pre-load the voting machines with the SSN/Name of every citizen and every issue in every county? Surely it would be less than 10GB. Better yet, allow me to vote online.
There's a huge push to get young people to register to vote on college campuses, but I bet half of them use their parents' home address as their permanent residence. If they aren't in the same county on election day, they can't vote. Yes, I'm aware of absentee ballots, but I image many registered voters think they can just walk into any polling place on election day.
"...but I image many registered voters think they can just walk into any polling place on election day." I'm not sure why anyone would think that, it has never been the case. Typically, at least where I live, I get a card in the mail a few months before the election telling me exactly where my polling place is and how to get an absentee ballot if I need one.
I think the security gained from residency tests and registration are worth disenfranchising people who don't bother to gain a basic understanding of the election system (It's literally a question answered with a pity phrase -- Your vote is only valid in the precinct you have registered in.)
With voting limited to your designated polling place, all they have to do is have at each polling place a list of people who are registered to vote there, and check them off as they are let in to vote.
With "vote anywhere" voting, you'd have to have the polling places all coordinating in semi-real time to maintain one big list. If a polling place lost network connectivity they might have to suspend voting there until it is fixed, and in less densely populated areas where polling places might be very far apart that could be a big deal for the people who came to vote at that location.
The semi-real time constraint is that when someone votes at place X, then for each other polling place Y in the state, the knowledge that the person has voted at X must be available at Y in less time than the person can travel from X to Y.
Note that you cannot rely on simply detecting who voted more than once after the fact and disqualifying their votes, because you won't know who they voted for and so won't be able to correct the count.
There are ways to design systems so that you could vote anywhere, with after the fact checking that does allow the count to be corrected instead of semi-real time checking, without having to keep track of who voted for whom, but those would require big changes to how we vote [1]. Until we can do something like that, limiting in-person voting to a designated polling place is probably here to stay.
[1] For example, one could do a system based on a digital cash system. There are digital cash systems where a bank can issue you a digital dollar (basically a string of bits) that has these two properties: (1) the bank can recognize it as a digital dollar they issued when someone tries to deposit it, (2) the bank cannot tell who they issued it to, and (3) if the same digital dollar is deposited twice, the bank then can tell who it was issued to.
Using such a system, election officials could play the role of the bank, setting up two different kinds of such digital dollar systems (I'm assuming a two party race). One system issues "Digital Trump Dollars" and one issues "Digital Clinton Dollars". Each registered voter is issued one Trump dollar and one Clinton dollar. To vote, the voter "spends" the digital dollar for their candidate at any polling place, and simply deletes the digital dollar of the other candidate.
To count, the election officials simply see which candidate has had more of their digital dollars deposited. If someone deposits their candidates digital dollar at more than one polling place (or more than once at the same polling place), the election officials know who they were and they know which candidate's digital dollar it was so that they can correct the count.
After the election, they consolidate all the provisional ballots, make sure there's only one with your name on it, and that you didn't sign the register in your registered polling place, then they should have opened it and counted your votes for Federal races.
I was only talking about the "being disenfranchised" part of the original post - you have the right to cast a vote on Federal issues as long as you were registered in the state by their deadline.
Back when Republicans were the Party of Lincoln it would have been both factual and partisan of me to say they were the political party of abolition, and the Democrats were the party of plantation owners.
Secondly, it creates a real division between, white, Latina (which remember is an ethnic group, not a racial group ... many Latinos in the US self-identify as white in addition to their ethnicity), and of course black.
Thirdly, it doesn't really hammer home the right issues. The Latina woman's son gets dysentery a few minutes in and then there's a statement about paid time off. Those things have nothing to do with each other.
There's more to it but this game simply plays into the Trump camp thinking that the media is soft on rational thinking ... which unfortunately this game confirms.
I'm with her and will be voting in Brooklyn fwiw
Again, calling something partisan is the intellectually lazy way of trying to dodge an argument. It imparts no new information, and tries to establish a false equivalency between two parties for no reason other than 'fairness'. Again, you can't dismiss the civil war as 'partisan' because one political party wanted slaves and the other did not.
>Secondly, it creates a real division between, white, Latina (which remember is an ethnic group, not a racial group ... many Latinos in the US self-identify as white in addition to their ethnicity), and of course black.
In a country where a state GOP party researched the ways that blacks voted specifically to find the ways to best disenfranchise them, it's pretty safe to say these battles have been fought over racial lines for a long time. Trying to pretend these fights aren't over racial lines is again trying to establish some sort of false equivalency.
>Thirdly, it doesn't really hammer home the right issues. The Latina woman's son gets dysentery a few minutes in and then there's a statement about paid time off. Those things have nothing to do with each other.
You're incorrect. Minority voters are disproportionately affected by curtailing early voting because of precisely the situations you just mentioned, which is presumably why the game raised those issues. People who work hourly jobs have a harder time taking time off in large numbers to vote, and especially if those voters can't afford to stand in a line for hours at a time. The game is showing precisely why those long lines are intended to hurt those voters.
'partisan' is not a dismissive word and you can certainly call the civil war 'partisan' - that's the very definition.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/partisan
The video is partisan because it clearly reflects the viewpoint of one side and not the other, and the Civil War was fought by two partisan groups: the anti-slavery North and the pro-slavery South.
>In a country where a state GOP party researched the ways that blacks voted specifically to find the ways to best disenfranchise them, it's pretty safe to say these battles have been fought over racial lines for a long time. Trying to pretend these fights aren't over racial lines is again trying to establish some sort of false equivalency.
The fights are over racial lines - but they're also over socioeconomic lines and it's certainly not a unique problem to the US.
>You're incorrect. Minority voters are disproportionately affected by curtailing early voting because of precisely the situations you just mentioned, which is presumably why the game raised those issues. People who work hourly jobs have a harder time taking time off in large numbers to vote, and especially if those voters can't afford to stand in a line for hours at a time. The game is showing precisely why those long lines are intended to hurt those voters.
I didn't make that statement so I don't know what you're talking about. People who are already on the line aren't working. In this case she made the decision before finding out her child had dysentery. I agree with your point ... but the video game simply didn't address it.
"Others complained about long lines, shuttered polling locations and inexperienced polling-place employees. Entire blocks and buildings of voters in some districts were purged from the voter rolls, de Blasio said."
[0] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/officials-investigating-...
If you are alleging something, your theory runs into some problems:
1. The DNC doesn't run the elections, as another commenter posited.
2. The voters who were purged were disproportionately Spanish, and minority & Spanish voters have disproportionately voted for Clinton and against Sanders [0]. Are you suggesting that the DNC secretly coordinated with an outside body to purge voters to hurt their presumptive nominee?
Personally, I tend to assume bureaucratic incompetency quicker than I do a conspiracy.
In any case, to avoid a false equivalency, these are the facts:
Democrats may be associated with a voter purge (itself a legal and routine occurrence) which took some voters out of rolls who, based on their demographics, broke disproportionately for their nominee.
Republicans have mounted a coordinated and sustained assault on the franchisement of minorities in America. This includes the encouragement of voter intimidation, and: """ A review of these documents shows that North Carolina GOP leaders launched a meticulous and coordinated effort to deter black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. The law, created and passed entirely by white legislators, evoked the state’s ugly history of blocking African Americans from voting — practices that had taken a civil rights movement and extensive federal intervention to stop.
Last month, a three-judge federal appeals panel struck down the North Carolina law, calling it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.” Drawing from the emails and other evidence, the 83-page ruling charged that Republican lawmakers had targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” """[1]
[0]http://time.com/4301762/new-york-voting-problems-hillary-cli... [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/inside-th...
My point in both of my comments is both parties/any party operates in its self interest. The GOP do what they need to do and the Democrats do what they need to do. I don't see the democrats as some white light in a world of evil, I see a political organization that is willing to do whatever it needs to do for self preservation. To use your words, I think there is bureaucratic incompetency on both sides, yet people spent time and money to take a really good idea and use it to smear one side. I say this as someone who has not ever and probably never will vote republican.
I'm not sure if you played the game but it associated long lines, reduced polling locations and clueless polling employees with GOP tactics when those same exact issues cropped up in the democratic primary. My point is why say GOP and just say these things happen in all polls?
The game didn't even touch on the North Carolina law. It's the Republicans doing it now but let's not forget the role Democrats had in overseeing Jim Crow laws.
>My point in both of my comments is both parties/any party operates in its self interest. The GOP do what they need to do and the Democrats do what they need to do. I don't see the democrats as some white light in a world of evil, I see a political organization that is willing to do whatever it needs to do for self preservation. To use your words, I think there is bureaucratic incompetency on both sides, yet people spent time and money to take a really good idea and use it to smear one side.
Expect the issue at hand is one group is being proven to engineer voter suppression, which is a specific claim that rises above mere bureaucratic incompetence. The fact that these actions can be shown to be more than bureaucratic incompetence is the entire crux of the discussion. This is comparable to a zero tolerance policy saying that someone bringing a pocketknife to school is exactly as guilty as someone who brought a ka-bar into school with the intent of killing his teacher.
>It's the Republicans doing it now but let's not forget the role Democrats had in overseeing Jim Crow laws.
I'm pretty sure this is the definition of false equivalency. FWIW, Jim Crow laws were perpetuated by a coalition of Southern Conservative Democrats and Mid-western Repbulicans. The Democrats on their own didn't have enough numbers to survive the attacks by Northern Liberal Democrats.
I mean, there are famous examples of those southern Democrats leaving the Democratic party and becoming Republicans. Like Strom Thurmond.
If one were trying to categorize them according to today's ideologies, they'd be republican. They were more conservatives than they were democrats, and the only reason they were democrats was lingering bitterness over the civil war.
“People keep asking, ‘When they passed this law, were they racist in their heart?’ It doesn’t matter,” he added. “You look at the heart of their policies. If I tell you this law is going to affect black people more than anyone else, and you still go ahead and do it, you yourself are making clear exactly what you are.”
Longtime Republican consultant Carter Wrenn, a fixture in North Carolina politics, said the GOP’s voter fraud argument is nothing more than an excuse.
“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.
“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”
Barber, though, argued that Republicans are playing with words. """ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/inside-th...
It's telling that the party opposed to voter verification laws stands to gain from the potential votes of tens of millions of illegal residents. As far as I know, no one is checking outside of states with voter ID laws.
"A comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation finds 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast"[0]
Seems like a pretty comprehensive check if you ask me.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...
You try and shift the burden of proof onto your opponent and ask them to prove a negative, and in the absence of this intentionally impossible proof you advocate stripping the rights of franchisement from broad swaths of minority groups by using a cute analogy that doesn't really map well to reality. And then you pat yourself on the back and walk away feeling smart.
Back in the real world, away from your fantasy, voting rights are central to American democracy and laws that strip americans of them should actually be shown to be needed, besides the fact that one political party currently only likes white people and subsequently stokes racist anger.
Here's an intellectually honest argument:
> Voter fraud probably happens sometimes, but not on any significant scale. Admittedly we don't really know because there's no way to verify. What we'd lose in preventing that isn't worth what we'd gain.
That's different from:
> It only happens 31 times in a billion votes because they didn't find evidence otherwise. There's no way to get evidence, and I'm against any measure that would allow it. Any argument against me is likely racist in nature.
This is what we're reading here.
To be honest I'm not sure what you're arguing. As a quick rundown, people register to vote and then they vote. If a person checks a voters id before voting, they are ensuring the person casting a vote is the same person who registered. This in no way prevents an illegal alien from registering to vote. Ensuring illegal aliens don't vote actually happens during the registering to vote, as most states require some proof before registering them. So as best I can tell you're advocating a solution that doesn't work and has nothing to do with a problem that doesn't exist.
For a dose of reality, election fraud does actually happen, but again, the ways in which it happens aren't addressed by voter id laws - again, because voter id laws aren't being pushed to solve any real problems.
""" This sort of misdirection is pretty common, actually. Election fraud happens. But ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws (Wisconsin is a rare exception) aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed on Monday with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.
Instead, requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens. """[0]
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...
I'm not talking about illegal aliens voting.
My point was that it's unfair to claim voter fraud via impersonation never happens because we have little evidence of it happening, while acknowledging nobody has to verify who they are and fighting to ensure they never do.
If movie theaters don't employ security to pat down people and watch attendees over security cameras, candy will continue to be snuck in. They choose not to, and that's fine, but by no means does that suggest nobody is sneaking candy in. It just means they've chosen not to enforce it, just like we've chosen not to verify people are who they say they are.
If we were handing out money this way, it'd be abused instantly. If we verified identity this way before doing background checks for buying a gun, you guys would immediately point out how ridiculous it is. Yet voting is different.
If your talking about voter fraud via impersonation, I find you have even less of an argument then you did when I assumed you were referring to illegal aliens voting.
As I've cited frequently in this thread, stealing an election via in-person vote fraud is an extremely inefficient and difficult way to steal an election. It's ridiculous to suggest that you are concerned about voter fraud, and then focus solely on the types of fraud empirically proven to happen least. It's equally ridiculous to say that because the empirical evidence we do have disproves your opinion, then that research must be wrong and thusly you don't have an onus to provide any proof of your allegations. Much more voter fraud happens with absentee and mail-in ballots, but since these voters are typically white that is OK.
In any case, you are trying to dress up the actual intentions of the laws to nobler causes than reality suggests. State GOP parties have already been found in court judgements to use Voter ID laws as weapons to suppress minority votes, and I quote 'with surgical precision.' They've weaponized DMV's toward this goal, by shutting down centers in minority areas, cutting hours, and directing employees to avoid giving out free voter ID's and not advertise such services.
These laws are explicitly racist because they specifically target minorities to deprive them of their rights to vote, and this is why they have been, and continue to be struck down in courts of law across the country.
I'll keep it short this time. Here's the point:
> It's unfair to claim voter fraud via impersonation never happens because we have little evidence of it happening, while acknowledging nobody has to verify who they are and fighting to ensure they never do.
Agree or disagree?
Voter fraud would be noticed when a person goes to the polls and finds out that they have already voted.
Actually, yes. It's called voter registration fraud, and it works by registering people who don't actually exist or are not eligible voters.
If you'll accept that we have no way of verifying if someone votes as someone else, and no way of even noticing if that impersonated voter doesn't vote, then any fraudulent voter registration is essentially open season for anyone with the knowledge of it. We wouldn't know about it, and we couldn't know about it unless we actually verified people are who they say they are.
This essentially means the argument that in-person voter fraud doesn't exist needs a big asterisk next to it that says, "assuming no fraudulent voter registration, but if there is some, we have no way at all of measuring how much in-person voter fraud is occurring."
Fortunately, voter registration is a process that can be tightened as is needed, and registrants can be made to show proof of identity, proof of citizenship, and every other proof needed. But to intentionally do a poor job at voter registration so that you may then pass draconian voter id laws is pernicious. But the crucial difference is again the time needed to register voters happens independently of elections, and these results can be contested by all parties well before elections actually occur, not the day of elections.
If we don't try and muddle different concepts, and conflate separate concerns, we again see that voter id laws are unnecessary, onerous, and in reality intended to supress the turnout of minority groups.
No. A voter ID law would solve the problem of, "any known invalid voter registration can allow untrackable voter impersonation because the impersonator will never be verified."
That is in-person voter fraud. It takes place after fraudulent voter registration, and voter ID stops it. There's no rational interpretation that it doesn't.
> Fortunately, voter registration is a process that can be tightened as is needed, and registrants can be made to show proof of identity, proof of citizenship, and every other proof needed.
But it doesn't, and even that implies no mistakes or corruption takes place. If even a single one does, that's decades of scot-free voter impersonation that can be done. It also assumes fraudulent voter registration hasn't already happened (!!) which is also unverifiable (particularly since states legally can't require voters to verify their citizenship).
> If we don't try and muddle different concepts, and conflate separate concerns, [...]
I'm not muddling them at all! I can't get you to follow logic rationally without claiming racism. Clearly Voter ID would stop impersonation of fraudulently registered voters. That doesn't mean it's the best way to stop it, but it verifiably would, so it's dishonest to claim otherwise.
To give you credit, though, this is a totally fair argument:
> we again see that voter id laws are unnecessary, onerous, and in reality intended to supress the turnout of minority groups.
I mean, it's a stretch to claim intent, but if you state it like this, it's totally reasonable:
> Voter ID laws are unnecessary, onerous, and disproportionately affect minorities. Enacting them would cause more problems than it'd solve.
There it is! Just, you know, leave out the unfair parts:
> In-person voter fraud doesn't happen. Voter ID laws wouldn't fight it. Anyone who disagrees must be racist.
These are the parts that make it tough to have a rational discussion.
Nothing you said here is true, why are you saying this? Parties can, and regularly do, challenge voter roles, make them appear in person and prove their citizenship and identity[0]. It's also untrue that states can't legally require voters to verify their citizenship, why are you trying to pass this misinformation as true?[1] Lastly, elections are left to the states and local governments - the federal government does not run them.
Again, past your deceit, there are legal ways to prevent, find, and challenge voter registration fraud. The way to prevent voter registration fraud is to prevent voter registration fraud, not try to disenfranchise minorities.
As to your claims these tactics aren't racist, I'm a believer in calling a spade a spade - so we'll have to disagree. But the facts are:
1. Republican party officials __have been found in court to research ways in which blacks vote, then crafting legislation to 'surgically' disenfrachise them__. 2. Republicans have been suing in order to rollback protections of the Voting Rights Act - you know, the act passed by congress by its champion Martin Luther King Jr. 3. Republican voter id laws have been getting struck down in court because they 'have a disproportionate and disparate impact on minority communities'. 4. Republican voter id laws have been empirically shown to disproportionately lower turnout among minority voters in studies[2] 5. Republican governors have been closing dmv's and cutting dmv hours in minority-majority areas, and instructing employees not to advertise or discuss the free ID's that courts have decreed must be available to voters.
I understand that it's fashionable to cry 'race card' every time evidence of racism is presented, but personally I'm of the belief that if something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck - we should call it a duck.
If it makes you feel better, I don't believe that these Republicans are racist, I just think they implement racist laws because blacks largely vote democratic and they'd rather suppress them than actually do the hard work of outreach. But alas, it's largely useless to try and separate their intent from their actions - the end result is that they are seeking to disenfranchise voters based on their skin colors.
[0]https://www.thenation.com/article/north-carolina-republicans... [1]Specifically, the Times reports that the Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration has been “systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180” black residents in Sparta, Georgia “by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights.”http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/a-georgia-town-is-sending-po... [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/04/new-e...
No--that's proving residence. I said they can't require voters to prove their citizenship. [1]
I didn't say parties can't challenge voter rolls, either.
> If it makes you feel better, I don't believe that these Republicans are racist, I just think they implement racist laws because blacks largely vote democratic and they'd rather suppress them than actually do the hard work of outreach. But alas, it's largely useless to try and separate their intent from their actions - the end result is that they are seeking to disenfranchise voters based on their skin colors.
That may be true. I'm not a Republican, though, so it seems unfair to dismiss my arguments based on unrelated actions. Some of them probably are legitimately racist, but that doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to verifiable potential for voter fraud.
I'll go as far as to say that some degree voter fraud is likely acceptable and expected in a system that strives to ensure nobody is hindered in their exercise of voting. Any inconvenience is going to turn people away and you can't possibly verify any more rigorously without adding inconvenience. The discussion is in where the line is.
[1] http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/02/feds-b...
As someone else has pointed out, voter impersonation would be a slow and difficult path to stealing an election, so I am skeptical that it takes place on a large scale, but I have reservations about the claims made in this review.
Instead, requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens. """ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-com...
The game format doesn't really do much here. Of course extremely long lines, abusive bosses, distant polling locations and abusive election observers are bad. Clicking yes/no doesn't really get the point across better. I'd rather read an article with some research about how different demographics are impacted. Heck, ending the game with a link to some statistics would have been good (correct me if I missed them).
I want to juxtapose this with another game with a social message: Cart Life. It had you making decisions as a low income worker. As the game went on your series of problems and decisions start accumulating in a way that helped communicate that small problems in the right place for people with no safety net can be disastrous.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a game is a good way to communicate interactions between things or events in an easy to digest way, but probably a bad way of communicating a simple "this exists" message, since a game can contain whatever you imagine.
It'd make the white programmer from California seem like the unlucky one.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state#D...
It turns out most people aren't criminals and don't abuse the opportunity to impersonate another voter.