They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Wherever you are, it's probably easy to sign up (I did online) and they'll likely pay you to do it.
For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof, as there's no guarantee that the ballot in the photo is the same as what was submitted.
I like that, and I think it's an important property of voting systems that people who want to implement online voting overlook. But isn't it undermined by absentee voting, or is there a similar mechanism for that?
(The Cook County Sheriffs police our vote, but there aren't that many of them, so if they're going to show up, it's because a judge called them out.)
But then I guess the buyer just waits til the deadline, and buys the live video of you establishing credentials and casting your vote for them, so you can't fraud them... seems a lot more convoluted though.
For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates. Democratic legitimacy can be very nuanced and delicate. A well-publicized example of voter coercion could destroy trust in the existing system, but then the well-publicized problems of lines and poor voting hours eroded trust in the previous system too.
It occurs to me that there's a fairly obvious way to get the benefits of both: require voting in person, but make voting mandatory.
But the idea has never gotten very far. In general, the idea of a collectivist state that is underpinned by citizen responsibilities has been subsumed by the idea of the state as service supplier, and the citizen consumer.
You could write in a name, or hand in an empty ballot. Mind, nothing will come of this even if it's the majority pick, but you're never actually forced to choose a candidate.
If voting is mandatory than any impediments to being able to vote (like not giving employees time off) is quite limited by the fact that such impediments are illegal, in the US voter suppression sort of skates by on BS and lots of talking heads explaining how unmotivated millennials are.
This is only feasible if employers are legally required to allow employees time off to vote. In many countries, election days are holidays, but attempts to follow suit in the US haven't gone anywhere.
How can you do that without an amendment? As I understand it, states are free to choose the methods for elections (which is why there is such variety in the US).
From the whitehouse.gov site:
> Federal elections are administered by state and local governments, although the specifics of how elections are conducted differ between the states. The Constitution and laws of the United States grant the states wide latitude in how they administer elections.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/elections-v...
I will say that the system we have goes to some annoying lengths to try to maintain this particular kind of integrity. For instance, if you have vision problems and want your husband to help you read the ballot, we need triplicate signatures confirming that the assistance wasn't coercive. We had to stop people from helping family members, as if they were doing something wrong, which felt weird.
There are routinely 10+ candidates in each constituency. That makes it easy to encode a highly-likely to be unique voter signature in the lower order numbers, which would make it possible to sell your vote.
To combat this, when the votes are unfurled from the ballot boxes in public, tallymen (independent checkers of the vote) are expected to record only the first preferences, and if you start marking any more, you can expect a conversation with the returning officer. They are keeping an eye out.
If you are a scrutinizer of potentially invalid ballots, which I've done a few times, you're also not allowed to bring or take any notes.
Any system will have trade-offs, though—since ballot access (getting time off from work, childcare, transportation) appears to be a much more pervasive problem than coercion, it seems like the sacrifice would be worth it.
The worry is that, if everything works this way, some of the indicators used to discover this sort of thing are diluted. E.g. the first indicators in the NC 9th case were that one county in this district had a lot more absentee ballots than elsewhere, and the absentee ballots favored one candidate by an implausible margin. If all ballots are absentee, the former measure becomes useless and the latter becomes a much weaker signal.
Many larger jurisdictions use high speed image scanners for their postal ballots and adjudicate voter intent electronically (no paper record).
Election integrity types consider postal balloting and touchscreens roughly equivalent.
The gold standard is poll sites where the ballots are tabulated onsite immediately after the polls close. Anything else compromises public voting, private counting, or both, in some way. Though sometimes the tradeoff is worthwhile, eg enfranchising voters.
Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping,...
It's fairly straightforward to google this for the specific elections. Depending on the country, you can even do so as a foreign national, sometimes on the day of.
Seriously, what does it say about our society that it is harder to deploy a slot machine in Reno than a voting machine in Peoria?
I work in healthcare. We have a much higher regulation burden on how care is paid for compared to how it is actually delivered.
There are two parties are a double standard. If the Republicans thought votes were being stolen by Democrats, there would be swift and strong action.
Jeb! was supposed to lose to Clinton. Bush Sr. referred to Bill as his son. They vacationed with the Bin Ladens.
Our system here in Oregon works pretty well: you vote by mail with paper ballots and there's automatic voter registration.
But it does have the upside of making participation easier (especially for people overburdened with work or other responsibilities). And the physical paper auditing trail makes it immensely better than all the electronic systems without that record.
Now we just need more ranked choice voting.
There's a dark money documentary about this.
These companies funnel thousands into an LLC, print thousands of fliers and they arrive 2-3 days before the election (https://deadline.com/2018/11/dark-money-kimberly-reed-pbs-in...)
> Can I change my mind after I've returned the ballot?
> No. Your ballot has been cast as soon as you deposit it in the mailbox or at a drop site. After that, you cannot receive a new ballot to re-vote.
It is not a chain, however, more like a tree/web. And anyone can inspect the tree and re-verify its validity.
What is on the tree, however, is decided by me, the webmaster-operator. If there are troll comments that I want removed, they're gone. But I cannot forge something by another user, because I do not have their private key.
And anyone else can fork the forum and append to the tree in their own way, and I cannot stop them.
Also, blockchains are fun - they are not a magical salve.
That's it.
most other comments in this thread confuses blockchain with cryptocurrencies.
There just wouldn't be any mining.
"Blockchain" in this context just means that everyone cryptographicly signs messages in a public database.
With blockchain based databases you can have entities that store massive amounts of data encrypted, but they cant read it or access it. The blockchain controls access to it. The data itself doesnt need to be replicated, just the access control. This resolves the issue of very slow blockchain databases.
The storage providers can charge the blockchain for storage and access.
blockchain disintermediates access control, storage, and display.
With open protocols for data, you could use any number of reader clients to access your (and other) data.
Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "for performance reasons".
Blockchain voting doesn’t mean you can then vote over the Internet — you’d just have a better type of system in place at the voting locations.
Edit: undo auto'correct'
Secrecy is also what makes it possible to stuff the ballot box with fake votes.
See the paper "Backpage and Bitcoin: Uncovering Human Traffickers" which talks about using timing based reconciliation, relationships between wallets, and superficial metadata within Bitcoin to deanonymize human traffickers:
http://www.sysnet.ucsd.edu/sysnet/miscpapers/backcoin-kdd17....
This has the same problem. Didn't waive your right to privacy and provably vote for the right candidate - you're fired (or worse). That's why taking photos of a ballot isn't allowed, you can't have any way to show who you voted for.
Somewhat related, it reminds me of this anecdote about hand-warming handlebars on bikes: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...
This all takes time, tight tolerances, and automation to a happen at an impactful scale, which minimal oversight would mostly prevent.
Compare this to an SQL statement to change a whole states worth of votes in a few hundred milliseconds.
You can always recount the paper.
Whatever solution, it require the limitation of involving something physical and difficult to manipulate.
A blockchain voting system would enable us to detect vote tampering, and then law enforcement would or would not do something about it.
What's the difference?
IMO, 99% of the people wont understand a blockchain system. To them it will just be "X won because a computer said so". So the question is do we want society to be filled with people thinking "I know those votes were made with pen on paper and were counted by my neighbors and trusted friends" or do we want society filled with people who think "it must be true because a computer said so"?
It’s easy to tamper with one ballot, but the level of coordination required to tamper with a large number of them quickly enough trends into the impossible category. Especially if you’re trying to keep such an operation a secret.
Now they do not come with who the individual voted for which is probably how they get around this.
So many times when you would call someone and say, "Records show you are a registered as a democrat/republican, is that correct?"
Rebuttal, "How do you know what I'm registered as isn't that illegal?"
Candid response, "Knowing who you voted for is illegal, I do not have that information, however your registered party is public information and any questions about who you voted for you can refuse."
Most of the time they didn't like that and hung up but meh throws arms up in the air not caring
So, yes, it is quite different - an employer has no way to validate that an employee has voted a specific way. Any proof is not indicative of the final vote, unlike the proposed Blockchain solution.
Like mandatory armbands for your religion, a public record of your voting activities is a terrible and dangerous idea.
None of those things you mention should be something employers can act on. In many states it would be illegal to factor those things into decisions about hiring, retention, compensation or promotion.
However, your "or worse" note still applies. E.g. a local gang could do the same thing, and they are unlikely to be stymied by illegality.
This isn’t just a theoretical concern - there are various real-life allegations of it happening, in Southeastern Europe and other places.
Plus such coercion isn't impossible now, like you said it can be done with a camera. Presumably if you're being coerced by threat the "illegal" doesn't really help you at all.
It seems obscene to me to pass up such an obvious improvement like a verifiable record over such a theoretical concern.
Paper.
1) Coercion is literally the biggest concern within elections. You put a big guy with a pair of brass knuckles outside of the polling location and he beats up everyone who comes out without a picture of his ballot with the right vote in place.
Theoretical? Lol. This WAS and IS common. This is why we have international election observers.
2) There's no integrity loss with paper if things are done right. Every ballot given out at a voting booth is recorded - you can't stuff the box as a voter. The only way you can do so is if election officials from all parties collude to fudge the books together, which they would need to do in view of the public as they man the voting desks, or under the supervision of the locale manager during the end-of-night count.
Thanks.
Not likely. Social stigma means the "acceptable" candidate would have a larger proportion of the public votes than total votes. For example, the Democrat candidate in Chicago.
This key can be used with a personal computer, or public voting computer, each using the same open-source, audited software, to produce a printed ballot with a 2D barcode on it, and a printed voting token with a 2D barcode on it.
The ballot printout can be scanned and verified independently, before casting it, that all the choices are correct. Again, all using the same open-source, audited software as the public vote-recording computers. This printout contains a hash of the voting token. This is so a party can't just print out a bunch of pre-filled ballots, and then hand them out for voters to cast, and also useful for recounts and audits.
A separate printout encodes the voting token. It cryptographically verifies that a registered voter is voting now. The voter registration system associates a different hash of the voting token, a voter hash, with the voter. The voting system can associate the ballot hash of the voting token with the voting choices. If you have a voting token, you can compute the voter hash, look up the registered voter on the voter site, compute the ballot hash, and look up what their votes were on the vote-counting site. You can't tell whether that particular ballot is the one that counts for that voter.
Because up until the end of the election, the voter can also request a new token, which invalidates their previous ballot, and cast a new one. That token will also be associated with their votes and their name, but the official election system knows to count that one, and not another one. Or they can request a "provisional", "test", or "decoy" token, which can be used to cast a ballot that will never be counted.
Anyone that attempts to coerce a voter into voting a particular way, or who tries to pay for votes, can be given a genuine token that is later cancelled, or a dummy token that was never valid to begin with. They have no means of validating if the token represents a vote that counts until after the election is over. At that time, an audit or recount might show that it was a decoy vote. You can't work backwards from a ballot to see who cast it. You can't work backwards from a public voter registration to see how they voted in any election. You can only start from the set of tokens, verify that one belongs to a registered voter, verify that it was used to cast a ballot, and if you also have privileged access to the voter registration system, determine whether or not that token is the single authoritative voting token for that voter in the current election.
In a recount or audit, the voter registration authority consults its database, finds all the tokens valid for a given election, computes the ballot hashes for each, and prints out all the ballot hashes, including machine-readable barcodes. A sorting machine could be loaded with the list, and automatically spit out a pile of ballots to be counted, and a pile of ballots that don't count. Or a human could sort them by hand, by consulting the list of valid ballot hashes, and crossing out the one printed on the ballot they are looking at. Any ballot not on the list, or already crossed off of it, goes in the "don't count" pile. Then, once again, by machine or by human, the ballots in the "valid" pile can be independently counted for the office or issue in question, and compared against the original automated count.
The secret part of this voting system is the secret kept between the voter and the government with respect to "does this specific ballot count or not?".
Now explain how that works to non-programmers. You may not hand-wave, you may not ask them to trust a black box, and they must truly understand and trust your system.
And then you can compare that explanation to the explanation for paper ballots, envelopes, and voting urns.
The public's trust in a voting system is a very important feature of that voting system. That the public can participate in voting is also a very important feature. If voting is relegated to a black box that everyone should trust, because, pinky promise, a very clever person designed the black box, then people will stop trusting voting.
I believe a foolproof computer system could count votes perfectly, but it may make our society less stable in the process. Our current population is not ready to understand a fancy computer voting system, and are not capable of distinguishing between a foolproof system and `print "I win!"`.
I currently have to trust a black box whose inner functions are hand-waved away such that I cannot understand it even if I wanted to. Established systems of voting have equally established attack vectors.
If someone cannot understand what a cryptographic hash function does, even if they don't need to understand how, they cannot function in civil society without trusting someone else who can. Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them, with no complaints, and yet while voting once every two years, one of the simplest concepts in all of cryptography is suddenly a problem? It's simpler than Bitcoin. The public can handle it.
They are absolutely part of the voting system currently in use.
I strongly suggest that you follow tptacek's advice in the top comment and volunteer as an election worker a couple of times so you get a feel for how the process actually works.
> Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them
Most people have no idea why or how that is more secure than HTTP, they can't tell the difference, they don't need to know the difference. But the biggest difference is that in online banking or whatever, there are humans who can check if something's gone wrong, if your account has been hacked, you can call your bank and ask them what happened, and you can usually trust them to know what's going on and what went wrong, and you'll get your money back. Or not, and then you can sue them. Either way, it's fixable.
Voting has no authority that can fix things if something went wrong. The voters are the authority, which means that all the voters need to understand and trust the entire system for it to be authoritative.
The black box I am referring to specifically is the optical scan vote tabulator machine that sits between me and the ballot box, in my current polling place. I have seen it multiple times, and examined it to the extent that I am able. When I lived elsewhere, there were different machines. Every one of them has been a black box to the voting public.
I very explicitly do not trust those machines, because I know how the grey boxes that build the black boxes typically work. The publicly available information about them does not inspire trust. They are defective by design, and stink of corruption.
Some places do have trustworthy elections, using publicly-observable hand-counted paper ballots, like in Minnesota; or slightly less trustworthy vote-by-mail for everyone, like in Oregon. Good for them. I have never voted in those places. Bad for me.
And voting does have an authority that can "fix" things. It's usually the secretary of state for the state, then the supreme courts for that state and for the US. I remember when the SCotUS threw the PotUS election to GW Bush by interfering in Florida's lawful elections process. They didn't back up the voters' authority in that instance. I have felt the frustration of statewide elections where I had a sense that someone was dicking with the results, and there was nothing I could do about it without putting so much effort in that I'd be turning elections activism into an expensive, thankless hobby.
I have zero trust in the current US elections process, and never believed that my vote actually counted for anything. I honestly don't know why I keep voting--gesture of defiance, maybe. I think the voting systems in every place I have voted have all been broken, from the enabling legislation all the way down to local procedures at the polling place. First-past-the-post is broken mathematically. Ballot access laws are cheating. Gerrymandered district boundaries are cheating. Restricted primary voting is cheating.
I can't do anything to fix the systemic flaws without spending 20 years becoming the controlling authority of a single-issue political bloc and fundraising it all the way to actual significance, but encryption math and open, publicly-auditable software is a lot less work, and could still help with the local procedures. Of course, we'd also need a trustworthy compiler that can produce bitwise-identical binaries of different machines, and a trustworthy computer to run the compiler on, and some way for the public to verify that the software running during the election is the same software that was compiled at the public ceremony. And then also assume that an attack on integrity might still succeed, and proceed under the assumption that the system is compromised, whether by intentional act or accidental mistake, by auditing the final results in a non-predictable way.
Buuuuuut... it's not really my job to restore trust in the system. That's up to the ones profiting from it. I have named a system that I, personally, could possibly trust. But it will probably not be adopted, because the trust comes from the tamper-resistance, and elections tampering is a feature desired by those currently holding elected office. In my estimation, voting in the US won't be fixed within the next 5 years, because there is currently profit to be taken by keeping it broken.
Oregon has had vote-by-mail for more than two decades; there are present-day voters who were born after Oregon dropped polling places entirely.
Vote coercion is not a concern, after 20 years of practical experience with the system. Neither is voter fraud (something like 54 fraudulent ballots cast, out of 2+ million, in 2016; the vast majority of those were people voting in Oregon and in another state.)
The benefit, however, comes in the form of increased turnout; no need to rush to a polling place on a day that's very likely not a holiday for you.
I wish everyone would switch to vote-by-mail the way Oregon does it.
Otherwise the reason we don’t have that is because there’s no money in it. Maybe if we allow the voting machines to also mine cryptocurrency when sitting idle...
Voting is already complicated enough. There are way too few people who fully understand all of the security implications of the Blockchain and all of the implementation details you need to get correct to make this a workable solution on the national level.
All of the crypto systems I've studied try to accomplish the same with hash collisions. So that individual ballots get lost within the herd. Unfortunately, due the complexity of our ballots and the small size of our jurisdictions (elections are administrated per precinct), those hash collisions don't happen. One remedy may be to split complicated ballots into many simple ballots.
As of yet, I've not seen an electronic voting system proposal which states under which circumstances it will (likely) preserve the secret ballot and public count. A failing I consider to be gross intellectual malfeasance, willful ignorance, or both.
https://voting.works/2018/11/votingworks-better-voting-machi...
What kind of "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" nonsense is this? Why doesn't this article talk about how DHS was caught red-handed hacking into GA election systems?
https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/339734-investigatio...
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/prob...
Steal This Vote [2005]
https://www.amazon.com/Steal-This-Vote-Elections-Democracy/d...
As an (burnt out) election integrity activist, I'd say not much has changed.
Current bill to do just that:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1946...
Every time they were blocked by Bush, or the Republican Filibuster, or Trump.
Election security is not a "both sides" issue. Democrats want more of it, Republicans want less of it, and this is bourne out very clearly in their voting record.
https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6brytw/justice_departm...
It's possible to talk about the politics of this on HN, but if we apply one level of generalization ("people in power for whom free and fair elections do not serve their interest"), we can have a less inflamed discussion.
My rejoinder to the grandparent is, "some states are better than others". This is well known, and the correlation with party is well known as well.
Election reform is a major piece of the Democratic party platform, and has been for a very long time.
Whenever it comes up in Congress, the vote is party-line: all Democrats in favor of more secure and less money-influenced elections, all Republicans opposed.
Don't be so silly as to believe their spin about "getting money out of the election"; such reforms are not hypothetical things that may happen in the future, reforms have been passed are in effect, and, lo, money is still in politics.
You are a bit off on that.
The census is supposed to count everyone resident in the US, regardless of citizenship status or legality of their presence here. It's been that way since the Census Act of 1790. (And it does not count US citizens who are not resident in the US, except for Federal employees and their dependents).
The issue with adding a question about citizenship is that it might discourage some people from responding to the census, reducing the accuracy of the count. The Census Bureau estimates that about 6.5 million people will not respond if the question is included.
There are legitimate reasons for the government to want to know how many citizens are resident in the country, and how they are distributed, but they already have that data from the American Community Survey which does include a citizenship question (in fact, I believe, the same question they are trying to add to the census).
The experts at the Census Bureau unanimously recommended not including the question (as did six former directors of the Bureau, both Republican and Democrat). The Commerce Secretary overruled them, claiming that the Justice Department said it wanted the question added to somehow better enforce the Voting Rights Act. (Emails between the Secretary and the DoJ that were introduced in one of the trials over this show that this is not true--the DoJ told him that the question was unnecessary).
Here's a recent article that covers most of this [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/23/705210786/a-decade-of-implica...
Don't forget that Maryland remains one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the nation, either - and that gerrymander was carried out by the Dems, and is currently being defended in court by the state admin.
I'm also not convinced by their stance on counting non-citizens for the purpose of representation. I am not a citizen, and I cannot vote - but the effect of the present system is that a vote is effectively allocated to me, but then handed over to whichever side is first past the post in any election in my district, amplifying their voting power without my consent. Supposedly this is because they still "represent" me - but it's about as meaningful as the representation that the American colonies ostensibly had in the British parliament prior to the revolution. If voting power irregularities that stem from the electoral college are bad - and they are - this is no better. So why are Dems supporting it? The cynical answer is that it gives disproportionate voting power to areas with large immigrant non-citizen populations, which are mostly urban and lean strongly Dem. I'm not sure what a non-cynical answer is; I can't come up with one.
On the whole, I believe that it is correct to say that Dems are much more often in favor of less money influence on voting and broader franchise. But given situational examples to the contrary, it seems less like a principled stance, and more like the party interests being in alignment with those goals more often than they are for GOP. Which makes sense for a party that relies on a broader, larger coalition of diverse voters, rather than a monolithic key support group.
One's identity and eligibility to vote is verified upon registration.
One's identity is confirmed when being issued a ballot.
The current system works so well, until recently [1], that there have been very few cases of voter or registration fraud.
If you are you unhappy with forms of identification accepted to be issued a ballot, then you should advocate that all voters are issued a government issued identification for free. Which is pretty much standard practice in most other developed countries.
Requiring government issued ID to vote that is not free is called a poll tax. And that's unconstitutional.
> If you are you unhappy with forms of identification accepted to be issued a ballot, then you should advocate that all voters are issued a government issued identification for free. Which is pretty much standard practice in most other developed countries.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
The question is, why aren't Democrats doing that? Where is a bill that would package voter ID together with free and easy to get government-issued identification? Put it on the table, then let GOP vote it down and explain themselves.
> Requiring government issued ID to vote that is not free is called a poll tax. And that's unconstitutional.
Agreed. Do you feel the same way with respect to other rights, though? For example, with respect to various licensing and permitting schemes on gun ownership and carry?
Because universal federal ID is unpopular and also potentially constitutionally problematic. Then Social Security numbers were introduced, there was a lot of opposition that had to be overcome, including two supreme court challenges that were decided by one vote. Whenever Republicans propose voter ID and Democrats attach universal ID to make it equitable, the bill dies because universal ID is a sticky topic.
> Do you feel the same way with respect to other rights, though? For example, with respect to various licensing and permitting schemes on gun ownership and carry?
There are no such schemes in the United States. Anyone over the age of 18 can buy a gun in all 50 states unless disenfranchised by some other action, like a felony conviction. Some types of guns and some types of carry require special licenses, like concealment and handguns, but there is no general-purpose "gun license": you can always buy long arms for better or worse.
(Side note: I'm not opposed to a mandatory federal ID, personally. Given the existence of SSN, driver licenses etc, it's just codifying the status quo in a way that allows it to be implemented far more efficiently. If the feds are going to track me anyway, I'd rather them at least use that information to provide services to me in a more efficient way.)
As far as guns, for starters, it's a right to keep and bear arms, so we have to talk about licenses to carry as well, not just licenses to possess. These licenses aren't free in any state that has them, and can be extremely expensive in some, to the point of hundreds of dollars. And note that handguns in particular are the one type of firearms that was specifically cited as protected in Heller, so this can't be justified on the grounds that they're somehow exotic and outside of the scope of 2A.
But there are also jurisdictions where mere possession requires a license - for example, FOID in Illinois, or the NYC permits. Those apply to long guns as well. And they also come with fees - in NYC, you have to pay $140 just to make an application, and then another $90 on top of that for fingerprinting, just to own a long gun.
Then there are indirect fees imposed by various requirements. For example, most states with universal background checks implement them by requiring an FFL transfer with the usual NICS gate. But those are carried out by private dealers, who charge essentially arbitrary fees for them. Most laws do not set any limits on those fees. And since the check is mandatory, there's no way to avoid them, effectively requiring paying money to exercise the right to own. (There's some obvious irony here in those laws effectively subsidizing local gun stores, by letting them get a cut on every private sale, but it's a separate issue.) Same thing with mandatory training.
To be clear, I don't think that universal background checks or carry permits are bad, or even that licenses to possess are bad. As a gun collector, I'd actually personally prefer license to possess to the current NICS arrangement - it would certainly make my life easier! - and it's also more efficient at enforcement. The point, rather, is that charging for those checks and permits amounts to limiting a constitutionally protected right only to those who can pay for it, effectively turning it into a privilege. And in that regard, it is very similar to a poll tax, and I can't see how one can be opposed without opposing the other on the same grounds. I oppose both, and other similar arrangements (e.g. funding the justice system via court fees).
Because IDs are a State thing? States issue IDs (except for Passports, which the Feds issue). The Feds can't make the States issue IDs to everyone.
One of the big oppositions to ID laws is that it unfairly hurts poor voters more than rich ones. If you look at the demographic without IDs, they're mostly poor, rural or a marginalized community like native Americans.
But you're right, "federal" was an unnecessary qualifier. I would also be interested in any such bills on state level.
> One of the big oppositions to ID laws is that it unfairly hurts poor voters more than rich ones
That is only so because the voter ID laws you usually see in US are intentionally designed to do just that. But, as I wrote in my initial comment in this thread, most developed countries have some form of voter ID without those issues.
Hence why I don't buy the argument that voter ID is inherently discriminatory. And, logically, if your opposition to voter ID is on those grounds, then there should be a reasonable compromise here in form of implementing it, but in a non-discriminatory way. Hence my question about whether Dems have tried that anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
Translucent Databases 2nd Edition http://www.wayner.org/node/39
--
"...permitting schemes on gun ownership and carry?"
Ha. I almost fell for your trolling. Nice try.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=licensing+fees+poll+tax
https://www.michiganadvance.com/2019/02/19/gop-lawmaker-appe...
FWIW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax#Poll_tax
"Often in US discussions, the term poll tax is used to mean a tax that must be paid in order to vote, rather than a capitation tax simply. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote on payment of a poll tax or any other type of tax."
Why do you consider my point to be trolling? Yes, it's an argument often brought up in discussions of gun rights and reasonable gun regulation (long before this one guy you referenced mentioned it). That's because there's an obvious analogy here. Both are constitutional rights. In both cases, governments effectively do not allow to exercise those rights without paying. And in both cases, the payment isn't connected to any rational objective by the state - if it did, all the fees would be strictly what's necessary to cover the administrative costs to issue them. You don't need to be a Republican politician, or even right wing, to reach the conclusion that both are wrong in the same fundamental manner.
In fact, it's a much stronger argument from the left perspective, because it discriminates on economic class, turning 2A a privilege for the rich. And it might surprise you, but there are actually quite a few pro-gun people on the left who genuinely care about such things. You just don't hear about it much, because the media spotlight is always on NRA and co, which oblige by providing plenty of extreme right-wing red meat for the headlines. If you go by those headlines, it's not surprising to feel like the right owns the topic entirely - but this ignores groups like NAAGA, Black Women's Defense League, Liberal Gun Club, Pink Pistols, SRA, Redneck Revolt etc.
I also have to note that, while the 24th Amendment did ban poll taxes for federal elections, it didn't apply to state elections. It was a separate SCOTUS ruling that banned them there as well, and they reached that conclusion from the 14th Amendment alone, without referencing 24A at all. On the other hand, there's Murdock v. Pennsylvania, which specifically said that "a state may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the Federal Constitution" - the case itself was about freedom of religion under 1A, but the principle is obviously more broad than that.
But supposing that such protections do require an explicit amendment to implement - if you agree that 24A was a necessary amendment with a good rationale behind it, why would the same rationale not apply to other protected rights in principle, regardless of the current inconsistent state of affairs in practice?
Recall that you started this subthread with the thoroughly, repeatedly rebutted "Democrats oppose voter ID" talking point, which is also trolling.
I provided a bunch of evidence over two decades of Democrats uniformly supporting election reform, and Republicans uniformly opposing. If what you say is true, it should be trivial to provide examples of the opposite, so why don't you?
The Democrats believe Citizens United hurts them and benefits Republicans. It does not challenge my core thesis.
"If what you say is true, it should be trivial to provide examples of the opposite, so why don't you?"
Republicans have, for instance, supported Voter ID laws consistently, while Democrats have vigorously opposed them.
You have two basic choices here. You can either agree this is an example of the Republicans attempting to improve voter security. Or, you can repeat the standard accusations that Voter ID laws are simply intended to hurt minorities and suppress their votes, in which case you're basically agreeing with my thesis that the party's interests in these matters are driven by their interests rather than their stated principles.
(The idea that voter ID is some sort of unmitigated atrocity is a peculiarly American one not shared by the rest of the world, which is why I infer it's a political position and not a logical one.)
If, of course, you attribute to the Democrats all their stated reasons and goals, but every time the Republicans open their mouths they're lying every possible way and have every possible bad motive, of course you'll end up with the result that the Democrats are just awesomesauce and the Republicans stink, but it's not an interesting result. The conclusion is entirely described by the measurement metric. At least if I apply an action-based interests-driven theory equally to both parties, I end up with a potentially-consistent result. And in the scientific sense, I can tell you, it's a very highly predictive theory. I sit up and take notice when a political party makes what lawyers would call an against-interest admission, because it does not happen often.
Democrats only opposed to Voter ID as long as IDs cost money to get. It is a poll tax, and poll taxes are unconstitutional.
The accusation that Voter Id laws hurt minorities is not baseless, it is literally the intent of these laws. Communications that were revealed during the discovery phase of the NC Voter ID suit show that NC Republican legislators commissioned studies to discover what forms of IDs are disproportionately relied on by black people and poor people, like welfare cards, military IDs, student IDs, employee IDs, etc. so that they can be excluded from voting with them.
Know what actually does increase election security and auditability? Paper backups, which Republicans in Congress are unanimously opposed to.
Couple of points. 1) "getting money out of elections" and "secure elections" are two entirely different problems. By grouping them into one, the Democrats make sure that there's a lot of opposition to it. And 2), for 2 years (2008-2010?) Democrats had full control of the Congress and Whitehouse. Why didn't they try then? I can tell you why: because then it would have become law! And then no more rallying your troops with the whole "elections are being stolen! elections are being stolen!!" cries.
I am mostly a Democrat, but I'm not willing to give them a free pass just because they're Democrats.