Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

1 Methods

1.1 Impediments to voter registration

1.2 Photo ID laws

1.3 Purging of voter rolls

1.4 Limitations on early voting

1.5 Felon disenfranchisement

1.6 Transgender disenfranchisement

1.7 Disinformation about voting procedures

1.8 Inequality in Election Day resources

1.9 Closure of DMV offices

1.10 Caging lists

1.11 Gerrymandering

1.12 Jim Crow laws

1.13 Off-year elections

https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/fighting-voter-sup...

In 2017, at least 99 bills that restrict access to registration and voting were introduced in 31 states. Thirty-two states have some form of voter ID law currently in effect. These ID laws don’t affect all people equally: people of color, low-income people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities disproportionately lack the types of IDs that states deem acceptable.

http://projectcensored.org/the-right-to-vote-a-candid-histor...

In 2012, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) influenced several states to pass restrictive voter ID laws, which particularly impacted low-income voters, people with disabilities, and voters of color. Electoral reform is needed, López reports. Elections and the fight for voting rights are tools to be used to bring about revolutionary change and real democracy for the multiracial working class.

There has not been any corporate media coverage of this story as of March 19, 2012.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/voter-suppression...

...The Ohio law removed voters from eligibility for sitting out three election cycles and failing to respond to a state warning that their eligibility was at risk; this was proof enough, the state said, that the voters had moved elsewhere. Ohio says the law is no more than housekeeping, an effort to tidy up the rolls, not voter suppression. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled last September that it violated federal law protecting registrants who choose not to vote....

(One of several specific measures noted.)

More importantly, anti voter fraud laws are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

What do you mean by that statement? Are you suggesting voter fraud doesn't exist?

It exists but is (currently) so rare that most of the solutions create far more problems than the actual problem itself.

What about voting machine hacks, do they count as voter fraud?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/days-after-activ...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/29/us_voting_machines_...

I'd have to confirm, but I think most people consider "voter fraud" to be fraud conducted individually by voters. The claim that voter IDs are required is a putative measure against this. Thing is, that fraud is exceedingly expensive to conduct relative to impacts.

Voting machine hacks are wholesale to voter fraud's retail, and can swing far more votes, within or across multiple states. Systemic suppression methods, including role exclusion, gerrymandering, and the like, are also similarly far more efficient.

It exist but it's not statistically significant enough. It certainly doesn't warrant the huge drawbacks of disinfranchising voters.

I'm not into vote manipulation tactics, but calling these unlawful is a partisan position, I don't believe they are officially illegal.

Oddly enough, the mechanisms themselves are sharply partisan. I find the unilatirality of concern itself telling.

Approximately zero of those are unlawful. "Off-year elections"? Really?

A high vote count is not an unmitigated good.

Part of the problem is how solotronics phrased the question. Strictly speaking, until a method codified in law is ruled by courts to be unlawful, it is, in the strict definition of the word, legal.

Just as the suppression of votes by women, ownership rights of men over wives and children, sale of useless (or harmful) patent medicines, and the wholesale slaughter of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and others in Germany in the 1930s-1940s was, in the strict sense, legal.

What is also the case, however, in the specific instance of the voter-suppression methods listed is:

1. That there is record of them being specifically adopted with the goal of dissuading specific elements of the public from voting.

2. That similar methods have previously been found unconstitutional and/or illegal.

A thing being "legal" is not the only test of its goodness. A thing being strictly legal today is not an assurance that it will be legal tomorrow. A thing having a history of strongly resembling tactics used to, and being specifically presented as a way of, disenfranchising voters in ways that have been found specifically unconstitutional also generally bodes poorly for it.

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