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Comment by travmatt | Hacker News Reader

It’s odd and telling to me that you criticize the repeal of voter ID laws without actually mentioning why they were declared unconstitutional. They were repealed after North Carolina Republicans were shown in court to have investigated the ways in which minorities voted, the types of ID’s they carried, and then issued laws with ‘surgical precision’ to affect said voters, then went on to brag about their effects on the ‘Obama coalition’. If you are having a hard time understanding why they were declared unconstitutional I’d encourage you to read the court decision that declared them so, it does a good job of laying out the steps North Carolina Republicans used to specifically target and disenfranchise minority voters.

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From the court decision [1]:

> But, on the day after the Supreme Court issued Shelby County v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013), eliminating preclearance obligations, a leader of the party that newly dominated the legislature (and the party that rarely enjoyed African American support) announced an intention to enact what he characterized as an “omnibus” election law. Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans. In response to claims that intentional racial discrimination animated its action, the State offered only meager justifications. Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.

That does seem pretty damning when you read their justification

[1] http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/nc-4th.pdf

Voter ID laws themselves were not declared unconstitutional, the extra actions by the Republicans were. I see no effort from Democrats to offer any option on how to secure our elections, which is especially damning considering they've spent the whole last year falsely claiming that they were "hacked".

Active election fraud is almost exclusively in the favor of the Democratic party. I can't remember the last time someone on the right was arrested for fraudulently filling out registrations forms, or when >100% of the registered voters in a district voted for the Republican candidate, as happened as recently as the 2016 presidential election in Detroit in the favor of Clinton.

The problem isn't voter ID. It's two sides using it as a way to unfairly benefit their interests. One side pre-emptively and the other actively during the vote. Both are wrong, but Voter ID itself isn't.

> Active election fraud is almost exclusively in the favor of the Democratic party. I can't remember the last time someone on the right was arrested

A nice key word there, arrested.

Especially given that multiple members of Trump's electoral team, even his own family, were found to have violate electoral law and fined.

I get it though, they were just "confused" and making "honest mistakes".

I think you lack a grasp of the issues. Failing to fill out an FEC form properly and registering dead people to vote are two different things. The former doesn't even affect the vote count.

Quit playing for your side and accept when you've read a valid point.

Given that there have been less than 4 instances of people arrested for "registering dead people to vote", your spin of things of this as a "hugely Democrat issue" is mountains out of molehills.

> The former doesn't even affect the vote count.

Some of the people mentioned in my example _were_ shown to have voted twice.

> Quit playing for your side

My side? I'm a US permanent resident, I'm not eligible to vote. That doesn't make me blind to the fact there are huge issues with the system here, and fault to be found on both sides of the aisle.

Each of the frauds identified in [0] in the 2016 cycle, for which Republicans were criminally charged, affected the vote count.

“Quit playing for your side”, indeed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16118842

> A nice key word there, arrested.

Given the Republicans arrested for voter fraud (yes, the kinds that actually affect the vote count) in the 2016 cycle, the more key phrase seems to be “I can't remember”.

It's not that it didn't happen, repeatedly and recently, it's just that fortythirteen doesn't remember it, perhaps because it clashes with a preconceived worldview.

> I can't remember the last time someone on the right was arrested for fraudulently

I can, it's this https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-court...

You seem to be making several different points here, so lets unpack your claims.

>Voter ID laws themselves were not declared unconstitutional, the extra actions by the Republicans were.

Wrong, North Carolina's Voter ID laws were declared unconstitutional as they were used to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”[0]

>I see no effort from Democrats to offer any option on how to secure our elections,

Are you saying the Secure Elections Act[1] doesn't have Democratic sponsors?

[1]https://www.lawfareblog.com/assessing-bipartisan-secure-elec...

>which is especially damning considering they've spent the whole last year falsely claiming that they were "hacked".

Democrats were 'hacked', unless you are claiming that John Podesta, Colin Powell, and the DNC didn't have email accounts that were broken into. I think your strawman claim is that democrats are maintaining that vote counts were altered, which again is a strawman - no one serious is actually making that claim, it would seem you're trying to claim a fringe view as a mainstream (strawmanning).

>Active election fraud is almost exclusively in the favor of the Democratic party.

That's the typical claim, yes. Your comment is interesting though, since you seem to want to limit the discussion to 'active voter fraud', as opposed to methods that indirectly lead to unfair elections - like voting laws designed to disenfranchise minorities with 'surgical precision'. If we expanded the scope of the discussion, we'd see you're arguments conveniently leave out those methods that Republicans have been using for the past 30+ years.

>I can't remember the last time someone on the right was arrested for fraudulently filling out registrations forms, or when >100% of the registered voters in a district voted for the Republican candidate, as happened as recently as the 2016 presidential election in Detroit in the favor of Clinton.

You mean those precincts where workers miscounted voters? Didn't the Republican Secretary of State say they were errors, and in any case didn't affect the outcome in the state? Seems like you're fishing.

>The problem isn't voter ID. It's two sides using it as a way to unfairly benefit their interests. One side pre-emptively and the other actively during the vote. Both are wrong, but Voter ID itself isn't.

It seems like you're closing your argument with 'both sides', and in any case 'both sides' aren't having their voter id laws thrown out in court because they are explicitly being used to drive disenfranchisement.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/us/politics/voter-id-laws... [1]https://www.lawfareblog.com/assessing-bipartisan-secure-elec...

> Active election fraud is almost exclusively in the favor of the Democratic party. I can't remember the last time someone on the right was arrested for fraudulently filling out registrations forms

How about for actually fraudulently voting someone else's ballot. (Ironically, after publicly making your exact argument about voter fraud being exclusively a Democratic thing.) [0]

Or voting twice because of Republican voter fraud claims. [1]

Or ballot-box stuffing. [2]

All from the 2016 election.

[0] https://www.salon.com/2017/03/22/former-colorado-gop-chairma...

[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-court...

[2] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/gydkk3/the-face-of-voter...

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