Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

In Minnesota for example, all one needs is another registered voter to vouch for them.

My thoughts on this are old school. Like 1700's old school.

A person's right to vote exists with or without documentation. A piece of paper, an entry in a ledger, or a row in a database has no bearing on whether that right exists, or should be exercised.

In many of the states where I've lived (13 so far), all that was needed to vote in the absence of identification was to sign an affidavit stating that I am who I say I am. The people at the polling station could ask for ID, but they couldn't require it. It's up to the people who handle the vote (often the county clerk or county board of elections) to decide later if my vote was valid or not.

A lot of that is changing these days as the concept of being constantly tracked, monitored, and tabulated becomes normalized in America.

Just a generation ago we made fun of the Soviet Union and various totalitarian regimes for having police stop people for no reason and demanding, "papers, please." Now there are people who think it's perfectly OK to require domestic passports ("Real ID" and similar) just to walk down the street.

I wonder if two generations from now people will think we're old and crazy because we don't think it's OK for the government to require a chip be implanted in our brains so our thoughts can be monitored by bureaucratic minders.

It's sounds like tinfoil hat sci-fi slippery slopism, but so would today's facial recognition in airports to people just 50 years ago.

View on HN

Your thoughts are not old school at all. The Constitution initially left it up to the states to determine who was eligible to vote and most states restricted voting to white, male, property owners - thus requiring a deed of property to register. NJ was pretty progressive allowing women to vote if they had property.

Identification and Soviet papers are two completely different things. In the Soviet Union and in China until very recently even your travel was restricted by your papers. They weren't just identification, they literally defined where you could go. There is no comparison with a simple, national ID system like the one used in India.

Our voting system was largely based on community to enforce voting rights. Meaning you live a small town, everyone knows who you are, and if you aren't supposed to vote you won't get away with it because everyone knows everyone. Today even in small towns many people have no idea who their neighbors are.

Your notion on voting rights runs contrary to the concept of citizenship in general, is quite recent, and radical. There is nothing old school about it.

I believe the minimum criteria to vote is citizenship. To ensure that only citizens are voting, some paper, ledger, or row in a database must exist somewhere and a means to check that criteria must exist.

Oh and letting politicians decide after the fact whose votes count is recipe for disaster.

What changed such that nobody knows anybody anymore, even in small towns?

There are way more people nowadays than there used to be. To make things harder, people can easily move from one place to other very far ones in a short notice, nearly instantly, and with no quarantine period when they will be distrusted by everyone.

Speed of transportation and speed of communication - when ideas and capital move at light speed instead of horse speed, society changes in correspondingly massive ways.

Umm the 1700's in America were the era of needing to have land ownership to vote (more than half of white men couldn't vote), poll taxes, exclusion of blacks, native Americans, and women, religious tests, and so on. The 15th Amendment that changed some of that wasn't even passed until 1870.

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

However, that's orthogonal to the issue; documentation of your right to vote is not one of the requirements of possessing that right. (as parent said, "A person's right to vote exists with or without documentation.") It is a dramatic improvement that the people with the right to vote has been expanded since the 1700s, but what you said doesn't actually speak against the basic idea that documentation is not relevant to the exercise of ones rights.

As an aside: once documentation is required, we enter a position where we do not have our rights until proven otherwise.

It's orthogonal, but if you don't see how the shift in (the orthogonal) political power structures has affected the exercise of basic rights, then you probably won't see future violations of rights coming as effectively because you're not fully alert for them.

> However, that's orthogonal to the issue; documentation of your right to vote is not one of the requirements of possessing that right.

According to whom exactly?

As others have pointed out in this discussion, that's not how the US system was designed. There is no inalienable right to vote.

Amendments to the constitution have establish the right.

As a society, we decided that tenants, people of non-white races, women, and 18-20 year olds should be allowed to vote. We also eliminated odious standards like counting then-slaves as 60% human.

I'm no expert and could be missing something. But it doesn't look to me like we have an "inalienable" right to vote. Various amendments do say that our right to vote can't be revoked for certain specific reasons, e.g.,:

- The 15th amendment prohibits denying the right to vote on certain grounds (race, color) but doesn't go beyond that. - The 19th prohibits denying the right to vote based on sex. - The 24th prohibits denying the right to vote (in certain federal elections) based on outstanding tax bills. - The 26th prohibits denying citizens over 18 the right to vote based on age.

But this seems like a weirdly specific list. If the reason isn't on the list, is it still fair game? For instance, AFAIK some states don't let convicted felons vote.

I identify strongly as an advocate for democracy.

We have a second amendment that talks about well-regulated militia broadly interpreted to mean all sorts of things, some I agree with, some I do not.

Likewise, we have multiple, progressive amendments to the constitution with a clear goal of enabling voting to the broadest possible scope.

I live in a state that requires that you be a citizen, age 18, and not be in prison or on parole. I think that’s a fair compromise over disqualification of felons, as you create 2nd tier of citizen by denying that right.

According to whom exactly?

The 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution.

How do you prevent fraudulent voting without being able to tie a vote back to a real, documented person?

How do you tie a vote back to a single human (I’m unaware of what an unreal person is) without denying another’s right?

Indelible ink or similar, perhaps? Maybe some fancy crypto scheme?

How is it irrelevant to their point? Property deeds and literacy tests are documentation, yes?

Yeah, "old school" was very much for extensive voter qualifications like assets and literacy tests.

In fact, that's the whole purpose of the now-awkward electoral college: state legislatures choosing knowledgeable electors to vote for president/VP.

---

This an unpopular opinion, but I honestly think there's something to that.

My state political party operates on a caucus system, where I don't directly vote for local, state, or federal candidates in the primary (ironically, president is the exception to this); rather I elect a district representative to attend the convention, speak with the candidates, and vote the best one. I don't have time/choose not to have time to do this same level of diligence, and like in many other areas, I am happy to delegate it to one of my known, trusted neighbors. I believe it produces a better, more intelligent, less hysterical media outcome.

This is also why I'm not necessarily against non-pathological obstacles in voting. In 2018, my county did a (inexpensive) mail-only election. I wouldn't be surprised is the deadlines, etc. proved to be an obstacle. But....is it really that bad to have that small hoop for people to participate? I don't think so.

---

P.S. You know poll taxes aren't taxes at polling stations, right? It just means "flat (non-proportional) tax".

Poll tax in context of this topic refers to one of the barriers in the Jim Crow south used to prevent black people from voting.

It’s not unusual among modern democracies for voters to provide proof of identity. We’re (and the UK?) the outliers in that, so no, I think it’s unrelated to authoritarianism. It’s got more to do with ensuring integrity of votes.

India, Mexico, Argentina, Germany, Taiwan, Brazil, Iceland, Costa Rica, etc, require it. Among Americans all major demographics show majority support for voter ID reqs.

Other modern democracies have different traditions with respect to documentation; we don't have a national identity card either, nor do we require people to carry identification with them. Lots of voters, particularly elderly voters, don't have formal identification.

Instances of voter fraud in the US are vanishingly rare. It's a really dumb crime; stiff penalties, lots of legwork, and an infinitesimal likelihood of influencing outcomes.

I was a Cook County election judge in the last cycle and will be one during the next cycle as well. We don't require identification, though judges can challenge a check-in and ask for identification, and the vote will get cast provisionally if none is provided.

it is really interesting that in US and countries like that where voter fraud is relatively easy it's almost nonexistant, but in Russia, for example (where you need your passport to vote and where you can't vote just anywhere, but on a particular station in the region you have a stamp of residence in your passport, and yeah, there's a list of voters everywhere, in advance)... Well, bussing exist there.

Buses with "voters", who have "out of home voting permit" papers on them, are coming to the "problematic" voting stations, to tip elections for the "proper candidate". Usually it's organized by managers of political indifferent or loyalist workers of government institution.

Where voter fraud happens it isn’t random people deciding to vote 3 times. Why would anyone bother?

Actual vote fraud is about political machinery. Now in the US the real election shenanigans are much cheaper and more effective... the big pools of black money and gerrymandering are the tools of modern political machines.

That's not called 'voter fraud' though - 'voter fraud' is a more narrowly specific term than 'election fraud' and 'election shenanigans'.

“Voter fraud” in that context that is at best a boogeyman and at worse code for “poor and brown people voting”.

This is your bit:

"Actual vote fraud is about political machinery".

That's not 'vote[r] fraud'. The meaning of the term is independent of whether this type of fraud is common or not, how the threat of it is misused politically, etc.

That's because election fraud in Russia is driven from the top down. In a country with more-or-less functioning rule of law, and where you won't get into police trouble for documenting this sort of thing - these attacks would not work - and those sorts of restrictions on voting are not necessary.

Hence, the voter fraud boogieman in the US remains just that - a convenient boogieman.

Australia doesn’t require voter ID either. Voter ID is a vehicle for voter suppression (and generally called for by the politically conservative).

You’re right. I forgot Australia and NZ. Never the less even left leaning or liberal countries out there require ID to vote: Brazil (was left), Sweden, Spain, Greece (Syriza), but then you have truly poor countries with truly poor people who still pull it off, like The Gambia, Ukraine, Libya, etc. Ukraine and The Gambia are made up of many ethnicities and they manage to do it.

None the less, we're down the list at no. 26 when it comes to voter integrity[1]. This is from 2014, so it's not encumbered by today's politics.

Ahead of us: Norway, Germany, Netherlands, Iceland, Czech Republic, Austria, South Korea, Slovenia, Israel, Cyprus, Lithuania, Australia, Rwanda, Japan, Chile, Italy, Grenada, Malta, Argentina, Georgia and Mongolia.

All except Australia req. Voter ID.

I (and everyone else) needs to present ID for cold medicine. I don't see this being burdensome.

[1]https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2014/11/study-ranks-...

Voter id is not required because by requiring it you shift voter demographics away from poor/minority/elderly people who don't have an id. The cost for an id should be zero if it is required to vote.

It normally is in Voter ID states like my (for a couple more days) home state of Wisconsin. The problem is that a lot of people can't provide supporting documentation, i.e. a birth certificate.

In Australia you simply attest that you are eligible to vote, repeat your name and address as per the electoral roll, and you're good to go — ballot in one hand, sausage sizzle in the other. You don't even have to demount from your skippy.

I've never heard anybody suggest that an election outcome has been affected by any part of this. And we vote on paper too, no computer fuckups.

the other thing that makes Australia an outlier on these kinds of lists is that it enforces compulsory voting, which tends to counter-effect attempts at voter suppression

To which I can only think, "So what?"

Why does the United States need to be like other countries? The whole reason people settled this land was because they didn't want to be like other countries.

It's OK for countries to have different systems. In fact, it's better because the diversity allows for experimentation. France is awesome because they do things the French way there. Germany is awesome for all its Germanity. If all the countries are the same, then there's no point in having more than one country or ever going anywhere.

I wouldn't ask Americans to give up their system any sooner than I'd ask the French to give up wine.

Among Americans all major demographics show majority support for voter ID reqs.

Again, "So what?" There's a vast difference between doing what is popular and doing what is right. Keeping it in the political realm, you imagine the mess the nation would be if we just went with the popular vote and let people vote directly for the president? It would disenfranchise 273 million people who don't live in New York, California, Texas, or Florida.

This is getting tangential, but opinion polls on voter ID aren't comparable to opinions on a national popular vote. Replacing the electoral college with a popular vote is the entire policy. Voter ID is complicated - we don't have a required ID nationally, lots of people don't have drivers licenses, state IDs cost money, how are we going to get gov't-issued IDs to people that don't already have one - do we make it any easier/cheaper or do we just tell them "you've got 4 years, figure it out"?

Also disagree on the comments on the popular vote being a mess - why should the population of someone's state factor in to how much their vote matters? Disenfranchisement is someone who lives in California's vote mattering less than a voter in Wyoming. Especially problematic is the winner-take-all way of determining electoral votes. Having a state pledge all of its electors to one candidate when 49% of its citizens voted for the other is an absolute failure of representation.

I'd say that the 2000 election coming down to 540 votes in Florida is a much bigger mess than the idea of a popular vote.

I dunno. 30 years ago there was hardly any ID theft. It was very rare. Today, it's widespread and a daily occurrence. Things change. We need to lock doors. It's not the world it used to be.

Authoritarianism always claims to be about ensuring the integrity of something or other. The question is always: is that the right goal, and is the proposal really the best way to accomplish that goal? Making election day a national holiday, for example, would do more to allow citizens to accurately express their voting preferences than any removal of non-citizen votes could ever do.

I think it would probably be best if we did both: statutorily mandate that employees have an opportunity to vote, even if the polling stations are only open during working hours; and also require that voters show the kind of ID we ask for when somebody tries to purchase a beer or a pack of cigarettes.

Neither is a bad idea.

Yes it is. I don't smoke any more but I resent having to produce my ID for common purchases. It's none of the retailer's or the state's business. Corporations typically cover their ass for legal liability against selling booze or cigarettes to minors by requiring everyone to product ID. I have no wish to live in a permission society where everyone is constantly having to get approval for everything, and am opposed to the construction of same. That attitude extends into the political sphere.

tl;dr mind your own business.

> It's up to the people who handle the vote (often the county clerk or county board of elections) to decide later if my vote was valid or not.

You'd really rather have your vote nullified behind your back rather than just be told you can't vote? That sounds like a recipe for a lot of abuse doesn't it?

If votes weren't anonymous, maybe. But they are.

Wait, you're assuming anonymity and the ability to "decide later if my vote was valid or not"? How would that work?

The process will vary by jurisdiction, but one approach is to identify if a voter has questionable eligibility when they arrive to the polling place, allow them to fill out a ballot, have them seal it in an envelope, and then label the envelope with the voter's information. You can then take the time to verify the votes validity before the envelope is reopened and the ballot is counted with the other votes. And just like with traditional ballots you can have the process observed by representatives of multiple candidates/political parties to ensure both transparency and that no vote is maliciously discarded.

Oh I see. That makes sense if you can get the government to use paper ballots everywhere (best of luck in the US). It does make me wonder how well it would work out in practice though. If verification happens at the same time as the vote, then you can try to correct any issues that come up right then. (Maybe bring additional documentation right then? I don't know.) Whereas if you introduce a delay in between... how many people are actually going to go through the hassle of dealing with it later (especially imagine having to take days off work) to work through the legal bureaucracy and have their votes counted? I feel in the US it seems a little bit too optimistic that it would work out fine, but maybe I'm just pessimistic...

There is zero reason a voter can’t be given a provisional paper ballot in a jurisdiction with electronic ballots.

You don’t want to verify eligibility before voting because it slows the process down. The longer it takes to vote, the fewer people vote. You just collect the voter’s information and then the responsibility for the rest of the verification is on the government. It occupies the government’s time to verify the vote and not the voter’s time.

> My thoughts on this are old school. Like 1700's old school. A person's right to vote exists with or without documentation. A piece of paper, an entry in a ledger, or a row in a database has no bearing on whether that right exists, or should be exercised.

How do we ensure non-citizens aren’t voting? We accept many visitors - refugees, H1B, tourists, F1/I-20, etc. None are granted voting rights.

We make it a felony.

"“She can own property; she can serve in the military; she can get a job; she can pay taxes. But she can’t vote, and she didn’t know that.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/us/illegal-voting-gets-te...

In case it was not obvious: the vote is for adult U.S. citizens; not for permanent resident aliens, not for visitors, not for illegal aliens, not for children.

It is a tragedy that this was not made abundantly clear to this woman, assuming she truly believed that she was permitted to vote.

NB: Non-citizens have historically been allowed to vote in local and regional elections.

Consider that there are towns in rural California with majority noncitizen residents. In cases upwards. of 90%.

See:

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

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/noncitizens-are-gain...

If you’re physically in a jurisdiction, you are subject to its laws. Isn’t the supposed point of democracy to give people a voice in the government that rules over them?

Democracy is also an expression of self-determination of a people. Meaning they don't have to let anyone who visits their country sway their decisions.

Who decides what “a people” is? You have a bunch of people in a geographic region, and some of those people get to decide that they are “the people” and that only they get to vote? Sounds pretty blatantly undemocratic.

> a bunch of people in a geographic region

You make it sound as if they just happened to wind up there at random, and have nothing else in common.

Geographic proximity is incidental to belonging to a group. The land they live on is merely one of their possessions. Allowing visitors does not mean they must share their sovereignty with them.

To answer your question, in democracies, each person can vote to influence their own nation - their demos, even while abroad. You think demos should be decided purely on current location, but most countries disagree - they use mostly jus sanguinis, with the exception of jus soli in the Americas.

I understand the historical reasoning for some of this stuff, but as long as the laws apply to everyone in a physical location, I think the only way to claim to be democratic is to let everyone in that physical location vote to influence those laws.

They clearly said that was someone else’s problem, to be handled at some later point in the processing where options for deciding the question are more limited.

Do we need to do more than we already do? Despite the baying of certain political hounds there is no evidence that this is an actual problem.

Do you think voting should be limited to citizens of the country? Or that each person should only get 1 vote? If so that seems impossible to implement without requiring identification, if not that seems tantamount to infringing on people's right to vote, if someone can vote twice against me while I only get 1 vote because I'm following the rules then that means my vote effectively wasn't counted.

Voting across the United States is registered, and voter registration requires identification. In Cook County, where I vote and election judge, voters are assigned to relatively small precincts, which track votes during the day on paper and electronic ledgers. If Judy Blue comes in and votes in the morning and you try to come in and vote for her later, you won't be able to check in. If the reverse happens, Judy makes a stink and there's a process for going through the ledger and checking identification. In practice, neither thing ever actually happens: "retail" voter fraud in the United States is practically nonexistent. It's an expensive crime with stiff penalties that is extraordinarily unlikely to impact the election.

The people who object to voter ID laws don't also object to voter registration ID laws? I thought they were worried about people who never had ID, but how would they register?

It varies widely by state but registration is typically not limited to 'show up at place X on day Y with a photo id in hand'.

Instead of just assuming that requiring ID leads to better representation, shouldn't we objectively analyze what choices lead to the best representation?

Requiring ID has the obvious tradeoff that it prevents some people who should be allowed to vote from voting. Furthermore, it can potentially lead to a system where people's votes are unfairly discounted because of administrative "errors" (e.g. interstate cross-check). From the evidence I've seen those problems are more significant than double voters or non-citizen voting.

> Or that each person should only get 1 vote?

What’s wrong with just dipping someone’s finger in ink?

Many districts vote over multiple weeks and/or offer absentee voting by mail.

> Do you think voting should be limited to citizens of the country?

Oddly, I’m not aware of any state that requires you to prove citizenship to register to vote.

The voter ID requirements gather enough info so that a person can be identified, putting them at risk of fines, prison and deportation if their citizenship is challenged later on. That's not perfect but it creates an incentive to not vote fraudulently.

> A person's right to vote exists with or without documentation.

All rights exist independent on the government, because the government doea not grant rights.

The government infringes on rights for the purpose of governing, and the limits to what it is allowed are the US constitution.

None of that means that there isn't a legitimate interest, of the government and public at large, in ensuring that elections are conducted fairly.

Parent is a factual statement about how the Anglo-American legal system works. Other systems may work differently.

Walking down the street and voting are not the same thing.

ID's are common, the vast majority already have a passport or driver license. You need this much to even be employed so bringing it with you for an election is not an onerous requirement, it's actually completely reasonable.

EDIT: It seems HN has rate-limiting for comments now.

In most countries where an id is a requirement for voting they have systems in place where you can easily get a national id card. In the US Republicans make it as hard as possible for poor people to get an id then are asking to make it mandatory as they are aware most poor people don't vote for them. If they want to enforce id checking for voting then they need to make sure people can easily get an id.

Difficulty should not overrule importance when it comes to federal elections.

> " need to make sure people can easily get an id"

I agree. I don't think it's as simple or generic as a single political party preventing it though. Is there a clear example of what is stopping people from obtaining these IDs?

When a single political party has the most involvement in curtailing voting hours number of voting booths the opening hours when a person is able to get an id etc. Then it paints a picture. Though I agree its not as simple as that and there are multiple reasons apart from the above but the major reason is the peoples distrust of the government in the US which results in inadequate funding to fix the above problems.

Sure, I think major federal elections should be a federal holiday to ensure time availability. I don't see how that's the same as requiring identification though.

In the US Republicans make it as hard as possible for poor people to get an id then are asking to make it mandatory as they are aware most poor people don't vote for them.

While the Republicans take heat for it on the national level, when you examine the issue at state and local levels there's plenty of it on both sides.

What disappoints me is that the Democrats rarely push back on these proposals, and when they do it's half-hearted.

Republicans used to be the party of freedom as in pioneer guy with a cabin and a mule. Democrats used to be the party of freedom as in ACLU. These days neither is willing to stick their necks out in any tangible way for freedom.

If you're voting on matters of public policy, you should be in a position where the outcome of that policy affects you as if you are part of that community. Part of that is being... part of that community. Having an ID is a pretty good proxy for that.

Having an ID is a pretty good proxy for that.

Having an ID doesn't show someone is part of a community. All it does is provide a way for systems to exclude people.

Then communities should be able to decide who's eligible to vote rather than having that decided at the top and promulgated downwards.

Hopefully we get self driving cars you don't need a license for ASAP, so the expectation of every adult constantly carrying around an ID decreases.

> Hopefully we get self driving cars you don't need a license for ASAP, so the expectation of every adult constantly carrying around an ID decreases.

I'm sorry but how would I get into a self-driving car? I'd probably not own one. I'd ride in a Waymo, Uber, or some other provider's self-driving car which would mean they'd need to be authenticate who I am and check to see if I am authorized to get in the car...

> authorized to get in the car

I don't know what you mean. In the U.S. you don't need a drivers license to ride in a car. Uber does not currently require any state issued ID for riders and I'm not sure why they would in the future.

You might need the Uber app but that isn't tied to any government ID.

Not if you want to buy cold medicine, get a library card, get some beers, buy some legal pot, air b&b, zip car, U-Haul , getting a job, etc. So, you will still need to carry it --unless you want to risk having to go back home in order to do any of the above.

You need to have it for those things. You don't need to "carry" it for those things. Nobody does all of those things all the time every day. Going to buy some beer? Bring your ID. Going to walk the dog? Feck off, cop. I'm a citizen minding my own business.

You don't need an ID for many of those things, and you shouldn't.

I like your thought framework but only as it exists within the electorate system. Without that system, a single city in a single state can jeopardize the entire system.

> In many of the states where I've lived (13 so far), all that was needed to vote in the absence of identification was to sign an affidavit stating that I am who I say I am. The people at the polling station could ask for ID, but they couldn't require it. It's up to the people who handle the vote (often the county clerk or county board of elections) to decide later if my vote was valid or not.

And this is precisely the problem I have with people who jump up and down screaming that it’s “impossible” for non-citizens to vote because “they have to register.” Clearly there is potential to exploit the system — it’s just the plain old honor system, after all. Maybe it’s just the software developer in me, but I would never ship software that I knew had a critical vulnerability but then rationalize away that it’s so unlikely that anyone would ever exploit it.

And yeah, states could follow up on invalid voter registrations, but will they really? One state in particular prides itself on being a “sanctuary state”, yeah I’m sure they’re right on top of making sure illegal aliens aren’t slipping through the cracks and voting after the DMV automatically registered them to vote upon issuing them a license.

I also find it funny how the same people that rationalize things the US “should” do because “every other country does it” conveniently ignore that “everyone else” requires ID to vote, but for some reason we’re a special case that can’t possibly accomodate that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com