Believe it or note, requiring ID to vote in the United States is considered controversial.
1) Free. Period. Otherwise you're going to disenfranchise poor people who can't afford even $50 to get an ID.
2) Universally accessible. If we're going to require it, then we need to make sure everyone has one, from a little old lady living 100 miles from civilization in Montana, to the homeless living in camps near San Jose.
So you don't really need those things, but they may be proxy issues for other hard-to-solve issues.
It's the same sort of thing in most European countries, you need to prove who you are, and usually doing that costs some one-off nominal fee. Voting is always going to carry some cost, whether that's money or in externalities imposed on voters.
I'm not saying Iceland and other European countries are "comparable to the US", I'm sure we could spend all day moving that particular goal post.
I was just pointing out that there's nothing wrong per-se with requiring ID to vote. I'm somewhat familiar with the US history on the matter, and realize that in practice, and I think uniquely in the US, it's a wedge issue that's historically been motivated by voter disenfranchisement.
But it's important to separate that practical concern about particular implementations from the very notion that having a national ID system and using it for things like voting could never work.
I'm curious about how this works in practice. If you're a tourist visiting the US during a vote can you just show up to a voting polling station and cast a vote? If you don't have to show your ID what happens from the time you walk up to a polling station until you cast your vote and walk out again?
As it happens, essentially no one in the US commits voter fraud of this sort (the go in, vote as someone you’re not, kind. Ballot stuffing may or may not be a thing, or rigging of digital elections may be a thing).
The US also makes voting day be on a normal work days, it’s not a holiday or weekend, and people don’t get time off work to vote. There are often very long waiting lines to vote. So telling people they need an ID to vote leads to people actually being disenfranchised, in the US, if they just forgot their ID.
And again, actual voter fraud is so rare that it’s national news when someone is convicted of it (and people go looking for it often).
In most states, you must be registered to vote before election day. In those states, non-citizens who attempt to vote will be asked their name and address before they are handed a ballot. When they are found to not be on the registration list for that polling precinct, they will not get a regular ballot. They may be given the chance to cast a provisional ballot, but it will be thrown out during the counting process when evidence cannot be found that the person was eligible to vote.
The voter registration process has proven to be a highly effective means of preventing ineligible voters from voting. The exceptions tend to be when different government departments fail to communicate effectively to catch people registering in multiple places, or ineligible criminals attempting to register. Voter ID does not meaningfully improve the security against non-citizens voting.
Okey, so there's a list of people eligible to vote at a given polling station, but how do you you get on that list?
If there's no mandate to show ID do you just show up for registration and say your name is John Smith living at such-and-such St? The federal census is every 10 years so that claim can't be checked against that. Do local governments maintain their own name/address databases?
Are they ever going to say "we don't believe that you live here". What do you do then? Show up with a utility bill with your name on it?
To answer your questions about voting in the US, everything varies by state/territory. All of them require you to register before you are allowed to vote. The deadline to register is usually weeks to months before election day. A few states allow you to register on election day and your vote won't be counted until your registration is confirmed. When you register (or in the lead up to the election) you are assigned a specific polling location. Many states have some sort of absentee or mail ballot that allows you to vote if you can't or don't want to physically go to a polling place. You have to be registered ahead of time to receive one of those ballots.
On election day you show up to your assigned polling place and tell them your name. The polling place will have a list of people eligible to vote at that location and will match your name to their list. You might be asked to sign next to your name on their list to confirm you voted and potentially confirm your identity. I have no idea if anyone really reviews the signatures. If your name isn't on the list, you may be given a provisional ballot and then there will be a process to investigate why you weren't on the list. Provisional ballots generally aren't counted unless a race is extremely close and a large percentage of those ballots end up being disqualified for various reasons.
An extremely determined tourist might be able to lie their way into filling out a provisional ballot but it wouldn't be counted because their eligibility wouldn't be confirmed. They could potentially impersonate a known eligible voter, but that would require them knowing the correct polling place, knowing that person has not yet voted, and be willing to commit an obvious fraud. The upside for committing that type of fraud is extremely low considering the effort that would be required to swing anything but the smallest elections. There is no real evidence that anymore than a handful of people attempt this type of thing during any election.
A national ID sounds like a terrible idea for this country right now.
It's a very poor system that was never designed for its current use. We have many of the downsides of a poorly implemented national ID and very few of the upsides. We need an actual purpose built national ID.
Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens. Community organizers have proven to be extremely effective at getting voters to the polls. If a preliminary step is for them to get them their card, I'm sure they won't flinch from that duty.
> Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens.
The proper time to verify citizenship is during the registration process, when there's time to be thorough. You can't do a reasonable job of validating ID or checking that a person is only registered to vote in one place at the polling place.
But if you want to implement paper ballots across the board at the same time, or even 1st, than let's make that happen. As you say, any progress is better than none. Since you are obstructing voter id and not obstructing paper ballots (I assume), than by all means, let's do that first.
Ignoring for the moment how improper it is for you to take such a personally accusative tone: The voter ID opposition has been thoroughly justified by the lack of evidence that the problems it solves are real enough to need solving, and by the fact that even the slightest awareness of the context surrounding these voter ID proposals makes it clear that they are not good-faith attempts to make our elections more fair.
In short: nobody's falling for the lies. They're too transparent.
I would be pleased if you did not personally insult those who you are speaking to.
The lack of evidence is a farce, since any attempts to collect such evidence are met with stonewalling and refusal by democratically controlled local and state government.
In 2014, a study released by a team of professors from Old Dominion University and George Mason University estimated that approximately 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted In the 2008 presidential election. (Versus 56% of legal citizens voting)
As immigration reform becomes more and more of an issue, there is incentive for that 6.4 percent number to further increase, and indeed it may have in 2016, but that data is proving hard to pry loose. Since there are 11 million illegals in the US by the lowest estimate (high estimates are 20 million) this is not a non-problem.
As for the disenfranchisement canard. Even Nate Silver acknowledges it's non-validity. Silver has noted, this argument doesn’t make sense because the vast majority of adults in America hold some form of photo identification and states with voter ID laws offer qualifying documentation at minimal or no cost.
Not letting a citizen vote is just as much voter fraud as a non-citizen voting. Except its worse, because it is performed by the state.
By the way, the single prosecuted case of voter fraud from 2016 I'm aware of, is a man in Colorado, who voted for his wife after she'd moved out of state. They're both citizens.
You should be able to handle this like you do getting a passport. Fill out the forms, get a proper picture taken, slap it in the mail, get your shiny new documents back in two weeks.
I filled out the forms to renew my passport and took them to my local post office. The only person staffing the passport desk refused to take my forms because I hadn't filled in the name of my employer. I pointed out that the website explicitly states that that field is optional, and that the website will not even allow you to print a form that doesn't pass its validation. She hallucinated that the field is optional only in the case that you have no employer.
So, I had to travel to a passport office. The desk there really wanted me to fill in the name of my employer, but at least they didn't refuse to take my perfectly valid form based on their own personal delusions.
Some stats on Wisconsin, which is supposed to provide a free voter ID: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html
The state believes requiring IDs disenfranchises the poor. It’s actually the disfunctional state governments that do it.
a) Want to make having an ID as a prerequisite for voting
and
b) Are deeply against any form of national ID card (or anything else that makes it cheap and easy to get an ID)
It's almost (almost) like they want to prevent poor people from cities (who don't need cars) from voting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...
Also it’s hard for poor people to get ID cards because our governments make the process hard and time consuming. It’s a manufactured and not inherent problem.
No proposal for voter ID in the US has ever accompanied a serious effort to ensure all citizens have easy access to suitable ID.
Many proposals have been explicitly crafted on the back of data gathering campaigns to determine which forms of ID "unfavorable" groups generally do not have.
We used to look people up in big books, that are printed for the occasion, to make sure their piece is valid and they haven’t already voted - which took a long time and led to queues. That’s the part we digitized.
But you can vote without ID as long as you have that piece of paper and know your birthdate.
I’m actually not sure how the homeless vote (they can’t receive the piece of paper), but I guess they probably do a mail vote at their local municipality.
We do have a central registry of every citizen, so I guess that might scare some Americans.
You don’t need that though, you could pick up your registration at any municipality with your ID. That’s how I vote, I work from before the voting starts to after it closes, so I vote via mail.
US has same registry. It might not include every american but I'd be suprised if it doesn't have 99.99% of all Americans in it.
This doesn’t seem to be the case for most of the proposed American requirements, at all.
Most other countries in Europe have mandatory govt id anyway, so it’s not a major burden.
Automatic registration is likely controversial in the US for different reasons, as other posters mentioned.