Then why are Democrats against showing an ID to prove you are who you say you are? Why are Democrats OK with allowing ballot harvesting in California when the election in North Carolina was invalidated for the same reason?
It sounds like a just-so claim: it’s not really a problem, and the people complaining are just bad people!
As far as I’m aware, not only is there not accurate study — jurisdictions like Washington intentionally make it difficult to track whether non-citizens are voting by issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship. This is why WA has to have enhanced ID — they don’t meet the federal standards of ensuring people they issue ID to are here legally.
It seems strange that people refuse to even talk about it and resort to nasty ad hominems if there genuinely is no issue.
By contrast, insulting the motivations of people genuinely trying to stand up for the law and act with integrity because you decided to employ force and just override them is deeply, unrecoverably immoral.
It'd be one thing to put those laws in place in response to pervasive fraud, but historically we just have lawmakers explicitly saying they did it to reduce voter turnout which is... kind of a mistake.
Whether or not ID is issued to non-citizens is a massively different issue. People need ID for all sorts of stuff - that doesn't mean everyone with ID is automatically going out there and skipping work to stand in line to vote.
I understand the objections to voter ID based on unequal access to acceptable identification.
But I don't understand the "it just doesn't happen" argument. This kind of voter fraud seems like it would be nearly impossible to detect. I guess you could look at how often ballots are spoiled because of signature mismatches or incidences of "the registry shows that you already voted".
It seems like once voter id laws are passed, any laws or regulations limiting access to ID are de facto challengeable under the Equal Protection principle.
The ID laws are already challenged, but the nature of our courts means they remain in place for years while the gears of justice turn.
So we have a small proven negative impact on democracy from voter id laws, and a small unproven negative impact from their absence; I don't think it's unreasonable to prevent a crime that is easily preventable under those circumstances.
Why do your numbers get labeled as "proven" and mine as "unproven"? You're eager to declare it to be impossible to figure out how pervasive voter fraud is based on imagined hypothetical difficulties, but you're eager to pull out numbers saying that ID requirements don't discourage people, despite obvious holes in the measurement (such as people who decided not to vote because they don't know about the affidavit).
I’d be happy with requiring ID as long as it’s free and easy for all eligible voters to obtain. That has not been the case with these laws so far.
1. A person votes using the name of another registered voter. This will be detected any time the registered voter in question also casts a vote. Typically, the second person voting with the same registration will immediately be flagged and told they can't vote because they already voted. Worst case, you find it afterwards by seeing that they "voted twice." This can also be detected in cases where the registered voter didn't cast a vote by asking them whether they actually voted, and seeing who says "no" when the records say "yes."
2. A person votes using the name of a stale registration for a voter who moved away. This can be detected by seeing if the person still actually lives in the area.
3. A person votes using the name of a dead person. Detected by comparing with death records.
4. A non-citizen registers and votes using their own name. You can see who voted and check to see if they really are citizens.
Despite this, there is no evidence of any large-scale voter fraud. Known instances number in the single or at most double digits per year, nationwide. If it's happening, then it must be because nobody has ever gone looking for it. Note that the necessary evidence is all public information, so it's not just a matter of governments not looking for what they don't want to see. You'd have to propose that no university political science research group, no think tank, no public policy center, no lobbyist group, and no political party has ever gone looking for it either. And even if somehow that were true, that voter fraud is a major issue that nobody has ever gone searching for, then the best thing you can say is that these onerous and often discriminatory laws are being passed on the basis of no data, when data could be readily obtained!
> 1. A person votes using the name of another registered voter
I'm not aware of any comprehensive analysis of how common this is. Ballots are frequently rejected or require provisional ballot (I had to fill out a provisional ballot once in NYC because someone had voted my ballot; no fraud in this case (probably) since the signature in my box was one of the neighboring lines in the book) but I can't find anything definitive saying how often this particular event happens.
> 2. A person votes using the name of a stale registration for a voter who moved away. This can be detected by seeing if the person still actually lives in the area.
This analysis I think is never done; analyses of voter registration routinely show huge numbers of voters who are no longer at the registered address. Once again, no proof here that anything is problematic with this, but I'm not aware of any comprehensive analyses of the scope of the problem (that is, some notion of how often these voted or had a second registration that voted, effectively voting twice. This could theoretically be targeted since voter rolls are semi-public-ish.
> 3. A person votes using the name of a dead person. Detected by comparing with death records.
This is harder than it sounds because people often share names with deceased people, and even addresses for familiar relations. Death records are not always comprehensive, especially if the individual has been deceased for a while. I've seen a couple of one-off analyses on these [1] but nothing that makes me confident that we have a grasp on the scope of the issue.
> 4. A non-citizen registers and votes using their own name
I'm not sure how you'd measure this one at all - in some ways this is the least significant because there are plenty of circumstances where aliens are permitted to vote in local, municipal, or state elections.
We have plenty of laws around preventing electioneering, voter intimidation, vote selling, etc., a voter id law does not seem substantially worse than these for identifying specific voting problems that are difficult to otherwise detect. Motor voter laws ensure that almost every licensed driver is a registered voter. I've seen estimates as low as .3-.6% of registered voters lack a photo id (in states that have instituted an affidavit-based exception to voter id laws); this seems like a small enough number to make me comfortable with voter id laws.
[1] https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...
I can't help but notice that you completely ignored my last paragraph. Do you really believe that nobody has ever attempted what I describe above? And if so, do you really believe it's wise to be passing these laws without doing the research first?
If you're aware of any research, I'd love to see it. I've seen lots of research into the rate of convictions and prosecutions for detected voter fraud, but never anything as comprehensive as what you are suggesting. If had I had to guess, selecting 1,000 voters from the rolls would result in 900 solid "yes I voted", and 100 failures to validate, everything from not answering the phone to refusing to participate to incorrect records to faulty memory to they've moved away since the election, thus making the resultant study kind of worthless because the error bars are so large.
Trying to track a cohort with a good response rate is hard in any sort of study, but if your cohort is not selected by your team based on initial response (where you have some prior belief that they are not utterly opposed to participation) then I suspect that the response rates are so terrible as to make the research useless.
(As a note, my failure to reply to your last paragraph is not through any desire to avoid the question, but just because my post had already gotten too long)
I'm proposing to actually put some real effort into this. If they no longer live in the area, find out when they moved. If they don't answer the phone, track them down. If they're dead, find out when and where they died. For the difficult cases, get some boots on the ground and figure it out. Let's take your numbers and say that 900 of the cases are easy, and 100 are tough. If you dedicate $10 million to the study, then you can spend almost $100,000 to figure out each of the tough cases.
This is well within the resources of a university research team or a lobbying group. If a major political party is convinced that voter fraud is a big problem and needs to be addressed, they could easily front the money needed to come to a definitive conclusion. An electoral commission could do it on a non-partisan basis.
I'm not aware of any such research either. If it's been done, the result has been too boring to report on. If it hasn't been done, then my question remains: why do you want to enact such a major law without doing the research first?
An individual here or there might manage to vote more than once by, say, impersonating someone they know won't vote (deceased, moved away, etc), but that's unlikely to make a difference.
To make a difference, it would need to be coordinated and large scale. So how do you round up a sufficient number of people, convince them all to vote illegally, and then keep quiet about it? How do you get them to all the different polling places? How do you ensure that whomever they are voting in place of on the voter rolls is both eligible to vote and hasn't already voted?
Now I'm only going by my voting district. Here, you either absentee vote, early vote, or vote in your precinct. Regardless, you have to give your name, address and signature. They then check you against the voter rolls and record that you've voted. Presumably if I tried to vote again, they'd know I'd already recorded a vote, when and where.
To prevent conflicts, you'd have to in addition commit large scale registration fraud.
Maybe I'm just not sufficiently clever, but whenever I've thought through this, I haven't figure out how it could work.
[1] http://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2019-01/fraga...
I'll make you a deal. Let's do away with voting machines that don't produce a physical receipt, make voting day a national holiday, and setup automatic voter registration. As part of all that, I'm willing to concede a feel good voter ID measure.
Voting machines and physical receipt, times a million.
Voting day a national holiday -- I think it's a mixed blessing given that this is a burden on families, and I'm not sure what exactly a nation holiday entails (restaurants and stores are open on various national holidays, for example, so I'm not sure that all voters would benefit). I'd be willing to give it a try and measure the effects. Weekend voting seems a little easier to manage for a similar effect.
Automatic voter registration I'm not as familiar with; it looks like it's an expansion of motor voter laws, which seems pretty reasonable. If you're a living person eligible to vote you should not really have to do anything except show up. I guess you have to specify a party for states that have party affiliated primaries, but I'd be in favor of making primaries a private function of political parties rather than making them government run.
I'd also be in favor of mandating simplified ballots (the ballots in New York are organized by party rather than candidate, which makes them a mess) and requiring that states distribute a voters guide that enumerates all the ballot options, with statements and candidate information and full text of ballot measures if applicable (Washington state had this when I lived there, and living in New York it's like trying to pull teeth to figure out what they hell your ballot is even going to look like, and ballot measures, forget it -- even getting the full text is often nearly impossible, all you get is the executive summary, no statements for or against or the full text).
How do we get this done?
Still satisfied with your argument?
You are not automatically registered to vote just because you have a WA driver license. I moved here from Australia, got my DL, doesn't mean in any way shape or form that I can vote as a permanent resident, nor can I register.
> You are not automatically registered to vote just because you have a WA driver license.
I find it interesting you didn’t actually critique what I said.
In my experience, that’s common with people who hold your position.
There was also no attempt to reply with actual facts: just more fallacious arguments when they were called out about making an unsupported claim and ad hominem —
> Because there’s no significant amount of fraud occurring that ID requirements would fix, and ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups.
That’s what HN groupthink is: unsupported facts and ad hominems in support, downvotes and strawman responses to people who disagree.
> issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship
Washington state doesn't "offer to register you to vote based on you getting a Washington Driver's License". WA DOL on Voter Registration:
"You will be required to show that you are:
- A citizen of the United States.
- A legal resident of Washington State and have lived at your address for at least 30 days before the election.
- At least 18 years old when you vote.
- Not under Department of Corrections supervision for a Washington felony conviction.
and
- Not disqualified from voting due to a court order."
So your statement that Washington is "offering to register people to vote "sans additional proof of citizenship" is factually false.
So, absolutely did I critique what you said. It's wrong.
Washington's Drivers License does not meet federal standards because it doesn't require citizenship or residency _to be issued_, not because they're registering or offering to register non-citizens to vote (because the Fed governments solution to that would be to ignore that actual issue, and just say it doesn't meet Fed ID requirements, sure).
"Fallacious arguments" - I quoted the WA DOL. Where is your source that the refusal to accept the state DL federally is due to "voter registration of non-citizens"? As it is, Washington ALSO offers the Enhanced Drivers License which _does_ meet federal requirements, showing citizenship proof, primarily used for land travel to Canada.
It's interesting to hear what those "certain groups" think about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odB1wWPqSlE
You're conflating a scientific study on who does and does not have a valid ID with what people think about people assuming they have no ID because of their skin color. They're orthogonal concepts.
All of the black people interviewed in that video found it ignorant and offensive that people assume that because they're black, they likely don't have ID or know how to get ID, and the white liberals had no problem making broad, negative assumptions about black people, if it supported their political views. That's the point I'm trying to make.
11/11 black people thought it was offensive, of a pop size of 37M, at a confidence level of 95% that gives a MOE of 30%, so as few as 70% of black people also think it's offensive at a 95% confidence.
I’ll go ahead and answer that one for you: no, it was not the case. The odds of selecting 11 black Americans at random and ending up with all 11 living in Harlem are infinitesimally small.
Common sense tells me that a political video consisting of eleven interviews with people picked off the street in Harlem is very unlikely to be representative of the nation except by accident. I haven’t watched the video and I don’t plan to. I’ve never seen a video link in an online argument that was worth watching and I see no indication that this one is any different.
No, I'm 100% not. You haven't been paying attention to any of my responses. And you just made it clear that you wish to stay ignorant about the point I'm actually making, so I don't see the point in continuing with someone who will not communicate in good faith.
In any case, that’s not strictly relevant. The intent to suppress voters is there even if it doesn’t work.
If you search for “voter ID DMV closure” or “voter ID vote suppression” you’ll find plenty more examples. Another tactic is to tailor the set of acceptable forms of ID to favor certain groups. A court ruled that North Carolina recently did this to target minorities “with almost surgical precision.”
So I looked up AL: https://www.dmv.org/al-alabama/id-cards.php (and got SEO'd)
4 years. And it's expensive. Bad. Seems like it's a reason for federal innovation at least on the fee and access side. ID's are difficult to copy, I haven't heard an arg to make them expire in such a short window.
That said, I would rather fix that problem than not have voter ID, some courts appear to agree it's a problem as you mentioned and have rightly intervened.
It definitely does not ridiculously poll a handful of able-bodied people on the street to get their opinions.
However, the article talks about "election systems" which encompasses much more than just voting machines. Voter registration records are a prime target and those are usually (always?) connected to the internet. You don't need to actually alter any votes to swing an election. Just delete or alter the registrations of some people who you know will tend to vote the other way.
However, what happen in North Carolina was 1) ballot harvesting 2) alteration of the harvested ballots. They picked up the ballots and then changed the ballots they collected
Did that happen in California?
The results in NC-9 are also incredibly suspicious even back down to the Republican primary.
How do you know?
And moreover, why should I know that?
Elections have no purpose if nobody trusts the results afterwards. That dominates all other concerns about elections, because if you don't have that, your election with all the other desirable characteristics is still just so much wasted time.
We could always verify the ballots after the fact if you're really concerned that every absentee ballot is being forged.
No, it's perfectly sensible stance to take. The stakes are enormous and the idea that everyone's just so peachy-keen on fair play that we don't have to structure the system to be robust against hostile modification is refuted merely by stating the case. Just bring up whoever are your political bogeymen and ask yourself if they're that moral. The answer is no, obviously. They're the bad guys.
(Besides, didn't we just spend two years agreeing that the Russians were deeply involved with our elections in all sorts of nefarious ways? Now suddenly elections are all totally safe and anyone who questions it is obviously racist and just wants to keep the brown people from voting. You'll pardon me if I can't keep up with all the shifts in the Official Opinions. I'm sure no Russians have looked at our remote ballots and thought about what they could do with it. Or whomever else you like.)
In addition to the first-order security concerns around getting a fair ballot count, there's also the second-order concerns that elections must not just be fair, but have all the appearance of being fair. They don't appear fair when the ballots are filled in, and then disappear from the pipeline for arbitrary periods of time, only to re-appear somewhere else. Even if the system is stipulated to be entirely fair, when the loser (who could be the Good Guys, you know, because obviously the Bad Guys are waaay more likely to cheat than the Good Guys) says "Hey, the vote may have been manipulated!", how do you prove them right or wrong?
Personally, I have my own conspiracy theory which is that it rather suits our Powers that Be that the increasing number of absentee ballots and similar voting "options" makes the elections easier to forge, and citing "oh, what if poor suffering people don't get to vote?" is a rather convenient cudgel for them to pick up and hit anyone who wants to ensure security in voting with.
It's simply not acceptable to sacrifice accessibility on the altar of 'election integrity', especially when we don't have enough evidence to prove it's necessary.
I agree that making elections not only fair but visibly fair is important. If anything, lowering accessibility like this might reduce faith in elections.
I'm not arguing in favor of e-voting or un-validated ballots here. It's simply unreasonable to disenfranchise that many people on what is basically a (in all fairness to you, very plausible) conspiracy theory. We have too much of that going on in 2019 as-is.
After all, it's not fraud if it's law. How convenient if the law only affects people that vote for the opposite party, too. Security is in many ways used as a buzzword. Not in attempt to actually improve election security, but to appeal to people's fears of illegal immigrants somehow showing up in the millions to vote illegally and what not.
There are other kinds of fraud that are pervasive (like harvesting absentee ballots and modifying/discarding them) and those should be policed, but voter ID laws historically do literally nothing except punish people who don't have access to ID - like people whose birth certificates burned up in a fire, or people whose nearest DMV office is hours away.
We have decades of evidence that voter ID is a waste of time and money. It has one very obvious reason. It also seems to be pretty close to illegal, if not illegal.
Both will easily flip on war, justice, tax reform, voting, etc. as needed.
Part of the problem is it's easy to complain and spitball ideas when you're out of power, it's a lot more complex to gain consensus and implement policy when you're in power.
Whether it's removing polling places where demographics work against them [0], purging voter rolls with a heavy bias against black voters [1], placing polling places in gated communities [2], cutting down polling places in cities, onerous requirements to obtain a voter ID [4](essentially becoming a poll tax), or refusing to renew and update the Voting Rights act, it's clear the Republican party is not interested in allowing every legal citizen the right to vote.
[0] https://lawandcrime.com/civil-rights/gop-removes-sole-pollin...,
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/georgia-black-voter-regist...
[2]https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/politics/elections/south-f...
[3] https://www.texasobserver.org/election-identification-certif...
[4] https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Amendment-4-Former-Felon...
[5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-have-a-secret-weap...
When I try and dig in, their opinions seem very shallow and self serving. I don't think their idea, in concept, is entirely without merit. Senators used to be elected by the state legislature because the intention was they represent the state's interest, not necessarily the voter's. Things like capping the House has really skewed representation and the Electoral College...which has undermined any "genius" that might have been intended by the EC. These otherwise well-read people don't seem interested in these problems, they're just supportive of the approaches you describe.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693...
In its current state it's not fine and shouldn't be pushed.
0) Many states that require ID to vote are moving in the direction of permit less carry for firearms. (I think GA, where I live, has the condition that a permit is required but officials are not allowed to request it.)
An unbiased system would recognize that if permitless is sufficient for carrying firearms, it should be sufficient for voting.
0') Recognize that filing other official documents does not require ID. Notably, tax filings do not require any kind of ID, yet the information contained in them is considered extremely sensitive (e.g. knowing the AGI from a form is considered sufficient authentication in some government interactions).
Recognize that many citizens of voting age simply do not need an ID. If you don't buy alcohol, fly on a plane, or drive, your need for ID becomes vanishingly low. If you just do basic stuff like go to the grocery store, physician, and park, you may find that you never need an ID.
So again, do not require ID for this fundamental exercise of participation in government.
1) Accept all federal and state-issued IDs. States have a habit of cherry-picking, for example by accepting firearms licenses and not student IDs. That means accepting student IDs from public universities, among other things.
2) Make the provision of ID the responsibility of the government. That is: IDs should be free to acquire and free to replace. Acquisition of IDs should not be biased against the homebound by e.g. requiring a citizen to present herself in a government office at any time to obtain one. Social Security cards function according to these rules, so our government has known how to do this for generations.
3) Grandfather existing citizens. The last slave in the US died barely 40 years ago; there are likely millions of people born in situations where birth certificates may not have been issued. Pre-computer records were destroyed from time to time. The onus is on the government to track citizens, not the other way around (ref: US Constitution). So there needs to be a way to (transparently, without effort on the citizen's part) get ID to people like my uncle, who has lived in the same place for ~70 years no matter whether he can produce his birth certificate.
The basic problem is once you do all that, you defeat the goals of the modern voter ID project. So there's no reason to aim for an unbiased ID system here. Either aim for the real goals (which require bias) or don't implement voter ID.
If they are not eligible to vote, then obviously we do not them voting. It's one of the few situations where identity really matters.
Historically, representative government has been one of the most effective tools to defend life in the US.
> If they are not eligible to vote
ID checks do not verify eligibility at the time of voting. I can show up with a perfectly valid driver's license and be ineligible to vote for any number of reasons (I am a convicted felon, I am not eligible to vote in this county because I moved and my new license is still being processed, I renounced my citizenship this morning, etc.)
Going the other way -- a person who becomes eligible to vote just in time to cast a legitimate ballot may have trouble producing a valid picture ID confirming this status in time for the election.
This is a really important goal.
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to enforce this at the schema level of the vote database?
Building 50 (different, incompatible) state-level infrastructures to fairly distribute IDs according to principles like those above seems like the one of the harder of all possible ways to accomplish this goal.
You could not enforce anything at a schema level without having a way to authenticate who is who, which is accomplished by a human verifying their IDentity.
We already have a 50-state ID system, and it works well. Anyone can get a ID. Centralizing it would make it less reliable because it's easier to attack one system than 50.
You could enforce precisely the goal of only one vote per registered voter.
> We already have a 50-state ID system
That's the point -- we don't, and we don't use what we have very well. The closest thing we have to universal ID cards is the Social Security card, and advocates of voter ID don't want to use it. (In fact, no combination of the source documents used to prove identity for official US business are valid for voting in many states.)
But we definitely do not have a 100% free 50-state ID system that makes it anywhere near as easy to get an ID as is the case for e.g. a Social Security card or passport.
And that's basically the entire sticking point: is it okay for it to be easy for 80% of the populace? 90%? Or does it need to be 100%?
Without ID? How?
What state makes it difficult to get an ID?
> Without ID? How?
At the schema level, by only allowing one vote per voter ID. In theory, that voter could have been impersonated, but that's a different problem than ensuring only one vote per registered voter. Perhaps, like in most things, we could have a procedure for handling conflicts when a voter determined her voter number had been used twice during an election, instead of clumsily pushing a pre-resolution onto every potential voter.
(The legal cases seem to turn on the fact that the pro-ID folks haven't been able to show any substantial evidence that voter impersonation happens at any scale where it warrants a legislative response. So preventing dupes should be sufficient.)
> What state makes it difficult to get an ID?
I don't know about all of them, but when I have lived in (GA, MA, TX, NY) you had to physically present yourself during business hours for an unspecified and unpredictable amount of time to get the type of ID that satisfies a voter ID law.
As a relatively well-off, generally healthy person who tends to live in the parts of states where they put these offices, the burden on me usually boils down to losing a few hundred/thousand dollars of my time going to an office during business (work) hours to "prove" I'm me.
None of this would be easy if I were less healthy. Or didn't have a car. Or control of my schedule. Or lived in a rural area. Or absolutely needed the money I would earn during the part of the work day when the offices are open. Or could only afford to lose the earnings from making one trip to the office, but it was too full that day so I couldn't make a second. Or a combination of these. Basically: this is our government, why is it trying to tell us when we can and can't get a say?
Designing a system so that it works for people like me doesn't mean it works.
but here we are... apparently suppose to pretend that your suggestion would even remotely prevent people from voting multiple times, or prevent ineligible people from voting.
"physically present yourself"
You say that like there is some other way to verify identity from first principals.
Unfortunately there is no way that Republicans would agree to it. I don't know if Democrats would or not.