Such incredibly simple steps.
Who thought it was a good idea to "disrupt" voting by going electronic?
Who thought it was a good idea to "disrupt" voting by going electronic?
In Minnesota, you show up at the polling place, say your name and address, they find you on the registration list, check you off, and hand you a ballot. No need to prove you are who you say you are. If someone pretends to be you before you vote, then it's immediately and obviously brought to the attention of the judges (and we aren't seeing a massive wave of fakery now). If someone pretended to be you after you vote, they'd get caught.
Of course, someone could fake it, with someone's registration that they know won't vote. But if they repeated it at a single precinct, the odds of being recognized as a repeat voter by the election judges goes up. So they would have to move from precinct to precinct, with a list of viable registered non-voters to use.
Now, consider scale. A statewide Minnesota election is about 1.5M voters. To move the outcome 1% requires 15,000 votes. If one person can manage to vote illegally ten times in a day, it would require 1500 people in a conspiracy. Plus data management, tight enough for no errors. And NO leaks while these 1500 people are trained (and probably paid, if you want that many).
With that in mind, the idea of actually manipulating the election with votes that could be prevented with Voter ID is absurd. But! If we put ID laws in place, we could well reduce the number of voters by 1%, and that result would be biased toward people who are poor or otherwise not fully integrated into mainstream society.
Election manipulation, completely legal, and more effective than the mechanism it purports to prevent. Ugh.
And hey, if voters are dumb enough to fall for that, maybe we can get them excited for touchscreen machines!
It seems like you should be able to do things more easily, less expensively, and with lower risk in a repeatable way in every state.
People are partisan and will buy any story that explains why they lose. A non-trivial portion of Democrats think the Russian advertisements on Facebook changed the election to Trump's favor.
One one hand, I can see the effect that it would have on the makeup of the voters: older, richer, more established.
On the other hand, I couldn't shake the idea that voting is too sacred to not enforce some level of identity verification.
You just swept away my "on the other hand". Thanks.
My arguments for:
First, don't people have to register to vote in most places? I don't see how bundling your Voter-ID acquisition with registering to vote would be bad.
Second, a valid state ID should be enough to vote even with Voter-ID. This DRASTICALLY reduces the number of IDs we need to handle.
My main argument against not doing it right now:
We'd need proper funding that we're not going to get in the current political climate. A half-assed solution would be BAD.
How many times have you forgotten to bring some random item you need for something you're doing? Why stop someone from voting because of a mistake virtually anyone could make?
This is a freedom-based problem. First, what problem is voter id supposed to solve? Well, people cheating by voting illegally. Is this an actual, demonstrable problem? No. Despite grandiose claims by FOX News and Donald Trump, there is no evidence of widespread voting fraud. So we've established that this is a solution to a problem that does not actually exist.
Second, does it impact our freedom? Voting is both our right and responsibility as citizens. Should we be required to carry and show id just to prove that we are citizens? "Do you have your papers, citizen?" used to be a joke we made about the shortcomings of totalitarian communist dictatorships. So yes, it does impact our freedom, as we should be free to go about our day without carrying government id at all times, and I believe that would include the act of voting.
Limiting our freedom to solve fake problems sounds un-American to me.
I've seen plenty of elections come down to 100s of votes. To me this seems like an attack vector we shouldn't ignore.
Besides, we already have the concept of provisional ballots if people end up not having or forgetting their ID.
But again, I don't think we're ready for all this. A half-assed solution would be very bad, and I don't trust the current system to handle this in a partisan way.
Eg, the oligarchs and good Ole boys