Hacker News Reader

Double-voting is only one thing people are paranoid about. The other is the 12 million possible votes from undocumented (a.k.a illegal) immigrants.

"Paranoid" being the operative word, since illegal immigrants -- who don't want surprise government attention -- are even less likely than everybody else to commit voter fraud. For them, it's a stupid and unnecessary risk for no tangible reward.

Let them. There should be citizenship for anyone living or working in this country for six months regardless of how they get here. To do otherwise is to exploit people and subject them to man's inhumanity to man as we are seeing with recent administration policies. That and the precarity and exploitation foisted upon undocumented workers by US corporations using the threat of state violence while crowds call for blood.

Wouldn't that open up the country for interference from other gov't?

Bad idea.

A steady trickle of immigrants is much better because then it forces cultural integration, especially when the immigrants do not speak English. A flood of immigrants will lead to a nation divided among cultural lines without the possibility of integration because the cultural bubbles will have already been established.

We should focus on helping impoverished nations develop, so people don't have to leave from their birth countries to find comfort.

But kill NAFTA.

In the US there's really not any community of non-English speaking citizens, so whatever to your complaints about integration, the kids desperately want to integrate (and the parents usually agree).

And of course the whole thing where foreigners are scary is as much a modern panic as anything. In periods of pretty open immigration, lots of states didn't require citizenship to vote:

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

> In the US there's really not any community of non-English speaking citizens

Source? lol

There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Spanish speaking people and families living in LA, NYC, Miami etc. Many business in the area offer their services in Spanish, and there are enough entertainment options in Spanish that there isn't much of a need to learn English to get by day to day.

What significant counterexample are you thinking of?

A few thousand people here or there is a laughable threat to whatever culture exists in USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._communities_where...

So first of all, the numbers on that page support my point without whinging over definitions.

But if you look at what I said, I didn't say anything about language spoken at home or primary language or anything like that, I explicitly said community of non-English speaking citizens, which pretty clearly means people that don't speak English anywhere.

That's cherry picking at best. Have you been to Anaheim, Stanton, Santa Ana, the entire agricultural belt of California?

Okay, but it's never been shown to be a problem in any meaningful way. Didn't Trump form a commission to investigate this after the election and then quietly dissolve it after they found nothing? Even the exaggerated reports I've seen from right-wing publications hyping up the threat of 'illegals voting' (ie. Heritage Foundation) detail absolutely paltry numbers of voter fraud(and there really aren't very many reports at all). And of the voter fraud they do detail, a very very small proportion is actually 'voter impersonation'.

I'd really love to see any evidence at all to the contrary.

I think that has more to do with finding one provocative phrase (not by the parent, but by the propagandists who popularize it) that will inflame people in three ways: Voting fraud! Illegal immigrants! And the racial implications of both.

>Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting something they don’t deserve that they would rather make everything in life more complicated, less efficient, and harder on everyone (including themselves) than allow a little bit of inefficiency in the system to be accepted as the trade off.

Except some dozend billions here and there at the military

You've overlooked the race, income, etc. factors, which still matter more than most people would like to admit.

Consider a "radical" idea. Who doesn't get to vote if they don't have an ID card?

>Americans

Yeah well not all of us, thanks.

Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t mean all Americans are that way.

On behalf of USians, I apologize for monopolizing the word "Americans" when two entire continents have a right to the word.

Please never use the slur USians again. Thank you.

Yes... the preferred term is Murcans.

> The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy.

And yet numerous other countries think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. You could probably get away without ever locking your front door, but why would you when the added security is so easy to implement? Even Mexico has cracked this nut, I think we could too.

Generally these are countries where one of the following is true:

1. The ID in question is nationally compulsory to carry out most day-to-day tasks, and so no one is disenfranchised by having to show it. In the US, on the other hand, there are lots of people without any form of ID card

2. The country has a history of large-scale in-person voter fraud.

In Mexico, both of these things happen to be the case.

I think the current state of US politics all but guarantees that any attempt to implement voter ID cards would result in attempts to lower turnout. Every implementation would be done at the state level, and a bunch of states have already been seen doing anything they can to thwart turnout to the opposing party.

If such an ID scheme were laid out fairly in the constitution, I think the US could do it fairly. But today? It'll never happen.