Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller.
I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controversial, but India, with more people, poverty and issues seems to have managed it. Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day?
> The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September [...] voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people
But that means 200k some thousand should have been purged. If they died, and a death certificate was issued, doesn't some government database know about it and say, "yeah, person is dead purge their voter record". It's 2020 almost, we flew people to the moon, there is a Tesla roadster in Sun's orbit, self driving cars, but somehow managing a few hundred million voter records is an impossible task and I don't understand why.
It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in the US.
The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like college students.
These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political tool to alter turnouts.
In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved.
I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc).
If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.
The problem comes when we start trying to purge the rolls and there are false positives. The bigger problem is when those false positives are disproportionately citizens of color. Similarly, voter ID cards are not problems philosophically as much as these ID laws disproportionately affecting poor people and people of color.
If you want an ID law, you make IDs free, you account for many of the edge cases like elderly people who don't have birth certificates yet are clearly citizens, and you bend over backwards to make sure everyone who can vote gets one regardless of it costing a little more.
And you believe it's the Republicans who are hating on immigration enforcement? The proposal for tracking everyone's residence not going to fly(coincidentally another thing you need id to do) with those people.
If you are a farmer who uses undocumented workers, same thing. Put the onus on wealthy citizens for doing the wrong thing and have real consequences. Have sting operations. Yes, there's a basic underground economy of labor like maids, but that's a small portion of the undocumented economy.
Then, create a Real immigration system that does not have 15 year wait systems. (http://www.openlawlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMmigra...) Fix the H-2A guest worker program. (See https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/advocacy-and-programs/gues... ) Provide pathways to citizenship. Replace the H1-B program with one that is not exploitative. (permission to change jobs? Immediate deportation if you lose a job and don't immediately have another?) Accept that grocery and dining prices will rise.
Oh, and don't put kids in cages. Treat asylum claimants as human. Provide pathways to legal status.
The problem is that every Republican solution is based on punishing those who are poor and turns a blind eye to those who are wealthy.
Don't let that get in the way of actually responding to the objection regarding tracking of the residents of the US. But tell us how you really feel.
We already lost that battle. And we are tracked when we register to vote.
1. The people can keep track of a card for 10 years. 2. They can afford to pay 20-30 Euros for something they only use for voting, since apparently they aren't involved in any other part of civic life that involves having an id.
It so happens that active voter suppression is actively practiced by republicans, because we have their emails from people in state legislatures to researchers asking questions in two key areas: what forms of ID are minority voters not likely to have that 'our' voters do, so that we could block them for registering [0]. And the second thing is picking your voters, which used to be in both parties but today is pretty much also used by one party. Also doing things like cutting early voting and other extended voting which predominantly let people with low-wage jobs have time to vote on weekends. Another cool one, preventing kids from pre-registering, cause those kids are of course not so conservative [1].
Also we have conservative conferences including ALEC talking about how to suppress voters [2].
Today there is no question that republicans use these tactics to actively suppress votes and voter registration for people that are likely to vote against them. It's not in question, it's not just a few bad apples.
[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-north-carolin...
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/north-carolina-wont-stop-s...
[2] https://www.mediamatters.org/american-legislative-exchange-c...
One of 2 major parties in the US has made making it hard for people to vote a central strategy. This has happened in the past as well.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...
And then there's just the standard phone survey stuff, where you up-multiply based on (once again, self-reported) attributes to match population demographics, causing everything to be wildly out of whack.
This level of obfuscation of methodology is pretty high even by the standards of regular polling.
Millions of these people do exist. I've had family members in this boat. Renewals, name changes (especially for women), DUIs, homelessness (which encompasses much more than literally not having a roof over your head), lack of mobility, a DMV that's 30+ miles away, and the simple fact that successfully voting isn't exactly high on the list of priorities for people facing these issues--these are just a few of the myriad random barriers that conspire to hold back people from voting. I've personally seen them among acquaintances; if you haven't, consider yourself fortunate.
I don't see why it needs to be denied. The level of effort the state should expend to address these issues, what sort personal investment and initiative we should expect of people, and such burdens relative to the risk of fraud--these questions are worthy of debate. But nobody wants to argue these things fairly because, for better or worse, the facts are uncomfortable, especially if you cling to the principle of universal suffrage, which we're all expected to do. And maybe that's unfair--it is difficult for certain political perspectives, such as that we should recognize some aspect of voting as an earned privilege requiring some modicum of initiative, to be voiced these days. But that's no excuse for denying facts.
What you typically see is a Voter ID go into effect, and then whoops, the state budget is too tight this year so we're closing down a whole bunch of DMV locations and restricting hours on the rest.
In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.
I'm not a Republican, and I'm not advocating for a legislative majority for any party. You're not participating in good faith.
> In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.
Maybe. It's probably an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to implement some basic voter ID reqs (you know, like so many Europeans enjoy) than to continually validate that voter fraud is a non-issue _and_ persuade the country that it's a non issue. The idea that these laws only exist to "suppress [legitimate] voting blocks" is absurd; many countries have them, including those enviable European countries. How can securing our Democracy be a bad thing, any way? Recall which party was paranoid about foreign meddling in the last election, after all.
Someone is posting this link about one dmv being opened only 4 days a year for some reason but the population of that place is ca 3000 people. In Europe you don't have a dmv in a village and you get it done after every ten years at some bigger city or town.
[1]] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/24-things-that-require-a-... Almost every single one of which is either illegal, or very difficult to do without an ID.
There are a lot of people for whom the 'small' barrier to entry of dealing with state bureaucracy is much larger than it is in your world.
Voter ID would be important, but unfortunately, the Republican Party has repurposed the concept as a tool of oppression rather than a way to secure the vote. People are rightly wary of the idea because of this, and will continue to be wary of it until free and no-hassle IDs are available to everyone first.
> However, for most people in America I would wager that this is not the case at all
Most? Probably. But "most" doesn't matter. Voting is a fundamental part of the democratic process, and "most" still leaves millions of people in the lurch. Make it "all" and then I'll stop being upset about it.
From TSA's website[1]:
>In the event you arrive at the airport without valid identification, because it is lost or at home, you may still be allowed to fly. The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name, current address, and other personal information to confirm your identity. If your identity is confirmed, you will be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint. You will be subject to additional screening, to include a patdown and screening of carry-on property.
[1] - https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
On the other hand, unless you are one of the 538 electors, you don't have a constitutional right to vote for the president.
So if "constitutional rights" is the determining factor, it's the ID requirement for guns that you should be fighting against.
Also this topic isn't limited to presidential elections, so that Electoral College logic loophole doesn't apply to all elections.
Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote.
For an example direct quote from a court case: https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280
Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. Also, your source is not substantiated.
I'd be happier if proof of citizenship was required to vote, not just photo id. Don't know of a practical way to do that except to check passports, but the passport office would be overwhelmed.
Let me put it into computer terms: when your program isn't fast enough and you've got a nice profile trace, do you start your analysis with the functions using up a lot of time? Or do you start among the functions that aren't using lots of time?
Why approach vote fraud any other way? The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted.
Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
None of those things make any sense. A church is more than welcome to only accept people with a passport. I can't imagin that will be going on for long. The post office is a service, and they will sell to whoever can pay. Sending a letter to your representative - you'd probably get a bigger impact if you somehow managed to convince him you voted regularly for different parties. As for "access to a free press", I don't know what you mean. They want your eyeballs as long as they can make some dosh there.
The rest of your post doesn't make sense. The computer analogy breaks down as you don't have a nice evidence log for voting and possible illegal voters, so you start trying different things.
> The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted
That's begging the question. You're asserting the point you're trying to prove, which is what "begging the question" means.
> Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
Yes. First, the plural of anecdote is not data. Second, just because something helps in that situation, doesn't mean it will help in the problem you want to solve right now. You _can_ do both. Nuance and stacked solutions are important.
It's a court ruling that shut down North Carolina voter ID and early voting laws, in part because the defense of those laws included that that literal quote about it making harder for black people to vote.
> All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases.
When 'some' is enough to control a state legislature, and similar things happen across the country (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su...), it's a logical conclusion.
> Also, your source is not substantiated.
It literally links directly to the court judgement.
I don't see how it follows that a state legislature's cupidity directly translates to a national party's intentions. That's a bridge too far. If there's a smoking gun, such as a leaked internal memo, I would agree totally. People are scumbags and are biased to try to make their side win in most situations.
>It literally links directly to the court judgement.
Yes, for closing the polls early, not for voter id laws.
What about a variety of direct quotes from the heads of different state Republican parties? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...
>Yes, for closing the polls early, not for voter id laws.
The judgment is on a law that affects both.
That shows no evidence that they are willing to make their views public or that they are shared by republicans on a national level. There is absolutely no evidence for that. > The judgment is on a law that affects both.
That is not in evidence. The article you cited did not link the court decision mentioned. The court decision is only speaking to the decision to close polling spots on Sunday because it will suppress black, and majority Democratic voters.
1. 4 times Alec was caught talking with republican lawmakers about how to suppress the vote (Montana, Alabama, Phoenix, Omaha : https://www.mediamatters.org/american-legislative-exchange-c...
2. North Carolina suppression tactics https://www.thenation.com/article/north-carolina-wont-stop-s...
3. More on N.C. voter id law to suppress voting: https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-north-carolin...
It's not just some scattered occasional thing of a few bad actors. There are state by state actions and national conferences making this happen.
What measure of proof do you require?
Ah, so we are still acting like Republicans aren't the legacy bearers of Jim Crow.
Democrats enacted Jim Crow laws (0). I see no evidence that Republicans have enacted any laws that systematically discriminate against black people, in fact Trump has tried to reform the criminal justice system (1). He pardoned Jack Johnson posthumously, and has been handing out pardons like candy to wrongfully accused blacks.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/3100-inmate...
Today the jim crow defenders, the people that say slavery wasn't so bad, some people were even better off. Those are republicans.
They switched.
> They switched.
A lot of them switched for reasons unrelated to race. "Many white southerners switched to the Republican Party, some for reasons unrelated to race. The majority of white southerners shared conservative positions on taxes, moral values and national security. The Democratic Party had increasingly liberal positions rejected by these voters.[20] In addition, the younger generations, who were politically conservative but wealthier and less attached to the Democratic Party, replaced the older generations who remained loyal to the party.[20] The shift to the Republican Party took place slowly and gradually over almost a century.[20]"
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_Southern_Unite...
The other problem is there's never been a real effort to establish a universal ID in the US. Which means you can't fairly do voter ID, since a lot of people don't have ID for various reasons. The lack of voter ID doesn't turn out to be a big problem; there's basically no voter fraud in the US. But it means there's no proper role of eligible voters, either.
The politics of this can't be ignored. The Republicans have a deliberate strategy of making it difficult for people to vote, and employ that strategy every time cleaning up voter roles or enacting voter ID comes up. They do not operate in good faith.
In a very real sense: because that would make it easy to vote.
Free IDs are directly inimical to the effort to prevent people from voting. That prevention is a major effort of one major American political party because it's seen as the only way they can win in an increasingly diverse country.
The folks who are against free IDs--who want it to be hard to vote--also get very weird about "databases of people", even though they already exist and corporate entities compile them right alongside governmental ones every day.
I get the desire to assume good faith in this, but we literally have the receipts.
I always frame the argument like this to my family when they complain. "I'm not opposed to the government maintaining a database of everyone's current address and related information, but if they are going to do that, they should provide free IDs and encourage everyone to participate."
https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712
The GOP learned a long time ago that if you win it doesn't matter how dirty you are. You're not going to prosecute yourself after all. By the time the leadership changes hands everybody will have forgotten about it.
If you add in some of the requirements for getting a valid State ID, it can be even harder for people to get. (Many poor people don't have ready copies of their birth certificate, marriage license to show the change in name, etc)
It's not an accident, it's designed to be this way, for the last 15+ years, at least. People in certain states, in a certain party, know their way to victory is to disenfranchise a certain other party's members.
> "Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?"
> I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters.
> "The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It’s done for one reason and one reason only."
I think most Americans have a problem with the government keeping lists about them. How that makes sense in the modern age of driver's licenses, SSNs, and the Patriot Act, I'm not sure, but as long as people here are so against the idea, it's kind of dead-in-the-water.
Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency to the process (as long as the mistakes are corrected).
Besides, if those checks showed that a large number of people were included in the purge for demonstrably wrong reasons, it would be prudent to assume that a lot of additional purges would also be suspect.
Transparency and community engagement (through advocacy groups) helps ensure that valid voters are kept on the voter rolls. Don't knock Ohio for trying to take steps in the right direction.
While it's true that we should have voting roles and ensure only people who are in the state should vote etc, that's absolutely not what people are doing or talking about when implementing voting systems. When the Republican party talks about these ideas, the end goal is skewing the voter turnout in their favor.
The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Republicans and has been around since forever.
The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. Those thousands can _easily_ be achieved, however, with sloppy aggressive and unnecessary purging.
I wish there existed the political will to issue "citizen ID" cards (or other mechanisms) to all citizens, like they do in civilized countries. These could be used for residency and authentication for voting, banking, taxes, and other functions. This authentication mechanism would instantly remove the phony concern of voter fraud amongst republicans while not disenfranchising voters.
You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered.
I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2].
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu... has a good set of articles attempting to debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on "credible allegations"
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d... -- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology, and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.
If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best).
No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.
To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place.
Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.
Edit: this kind of ties back to the allegations of massive voting fraud in the 2016 elections. Lots of people looked into it and found no significant level of improperly cast votes. That leads to either a contention that it did not happen or a contention that all of the people investigating it were either corrupt or incompetent.
Voter ID is verified during registration. Generally, voter ID is then confirmed when a ballot is issued in person. In most jurisdictions, many forms of identification are accepted to be issued a ballot.
The stricter voter ID laws reduce kinds of identification permitted. Further, they'll do stupid shit like insist on exact matches, so "Mike" vs "Michael" would be rejected. Generally, these laws insist on perfection while injecting errors into the system, for explicitly partisan reasons.
Tellingly, postal ballots are issued without confirming identification. Which are a much greater source of errors. But there's no partisan food fight over postal ballots.
The fix is simple. Eliminate data quality problems with universal automatic voter registration. Moot the ID confirmation kerfuffle by issuing government ID, such as the upcoming Real ID.
Then voila, the USA just joined all the other mature democracies by adopting time proven reasonable best practices.
We call them passports :)
The problem is they're out-of-reach financially to many people ($145~) and they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
I am thinking of something akin to the Chinese Resident Identity Card, which does track enough info to determine voter eligibility, I think.
We also have passport cards, which is the credit-card sized version of the passport, and only works for travel to Mexico/Canada (but is still a national ID).
>they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
You know, I can Google my name and get my current address out of public databases (TruePeopleSearch, etc).
I can also see my current address on the voter record from the website by entering the VoterID number.
The passports have numbers. These can be used to pull/check the address from a voter record database. It's less than trivial.
The address itself doesn't have to be on the ID.
TL;DR: issue passport cards for free to all citizens, force the states to let anyone with such a card to vote with a federal law.
It's doable, but it's certainly not trivial. And no, it's not just "a slip of paper" it's far more than that when you consider all the human, bureaucratic and technical infrastructure, systems and support that would have to be behind it.
Sure, there are trashy and unreliable online aggregators like mylife and their ilk that can provide all kinds of dubious info. I am talking about something much more rigorous and reliable.
There are steps in the right direction occuring now (like Real ID) but even these half-measures have been years in the making and have years to go.
I've considered that, and nope, still trivial
SELECT address FROM voter_addresses WHERE passport_number = {number}
If you were referring to the cost of the passport itself - yes, it requires infrastructure, and this is exactly what the taxes are for. It's an essential component of being a citizen, the extra fees are highway robbery.
> SELECT address FROM voter_addresses WHERE passport_number = {number}
It means that nobody has found errors... Yet.
A reasonable process would do a spot-check, discover that they are horrifically off, and then implement a second-level check.
Aaaand there it is.
Edit: ok, 2/5ths isn't most but it's still a lot. Chill with the down-votes, it was an honest question, not an attack on your ideology.
> The rates of rejection vary widely across the states, with some states counting all or nearly all provisional ballots while others reject more than half.
I would expect maliciously executed voter purges to be accompanied by malicious rules on provisional ballots.
[1] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-da...
https://www.rockthevote.org/voting-information/election-date...
> As of June 30, 2019, a total of 21 states plus the District of Columbia have enacted same day registration (SDR), which allows any qualified resident of the state to go to register to vote and cast a ballot all in that day.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-da...
And, same day isn't necessarily the best solution. For example, Oregon does vote-by-mail. This process would make it difficult to allow for same day registration. But, Oregon also has nation leading voter turnout. No polling places, no hassle, just an envelope in the mail.
* Oregon also does automatic registrations when interacting with the DMV.
The precise rules of voting don't really matter: as long as the anti-vote group gets what they want, they'll suppress the vote and strengthen themselves politically.
Edit: The down vote to reply ratio indicates that what I am saying is factually correct yet inconvenient.
In my mind, the difficulty to do both should be equal, as making either more difficult than the other is suppressing the rights of a group to do which ever is more difficult.
In addition, penalties are highly asymmetric. Denying an eligible voter their right to vote is virtually risk free. Casting a vote while being ineligible is subject to harsh punishments. Even with the current, political, process, government officials would think twice about illegally purging 20,000 voters if the penalty for that would be equivalent to the one for illegally casting 20,000 votes.
The state has a sort of pretty solid idea of where they live...
You can connect the dots on why groups like these are disenfranchised by the state.
Millions of college students do it every year. The last move I made was in September so I hadn't changed licenses or filed income taxes yet, so they had no awareness of me yet.
Luckily I'm in a fairly permissive state and was able to register with a couple utility bills without any hassle.
Some sort of voter registration is a necessity when you can move 3000 miles in a weekend. Unfortunately it's often used to disenfranchise voters, but a significant subset of the population does not have up-to-date records. Registration is a way to fix that.
But... driver's licenses or state IDs aren't the end all be all. If I keep real property in another state, I could potentially qualify for a license or state ID there as well, but that state would not be my main residence and I could not be a citizen of that state unless I actually intended to move there permanently. If I lived a more transient life, I would be able to freely choose which state I wanted to be a citizen of. Like if I spend 73 days exactly in each of five states and received mail there, then I would be able to choose which state to register in. There's no way for states to know or to control my movement without imposing arbitrary and illegal restrictions.
Why? Ballots can and do vary by district. Different districts have different representatives (on both state, county and town/city level)
Different districts have votes for different issues (state amendments, county amendments, town/city amendments)
Different districts have different local offices (county officers vs city/town officers)
Registering also locks a person into voting only once.
It's sort of ridiculous that some of your rejoinders are basic civics.
The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.
Also, how is it hard to vote? Absentee ballots are totally easy to get. If I was blind, I might have to plan ahead to get the help to do it. Otherwise, no biggie.
Wikipedia has a great summary of the racist policies voter ID laws were made to enforce, and that voter fraud is "vanishingly rare" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
> Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that fraud at the ballot box — the sort that photo identification requirements might reduce — is already vanishingly rare.
With no citation.
Anyway, "vanishingly rare" could mean that fewer than 1% of votes are fraudulent, but those fraudulent votes could be concentrated in a handful of key counties thereby having a big impact. I'm not arguing in favor of tougher voter ID restrictions but rather in favor of educated discourse.
Even the Heritage Foundation, which is incentivized to dig up as much voter fraud as it possibly can, has only found fewer than 1250 individual cases in what seems to be the last decade. This is overwhelmingly lower than the preposterous 1% presented in the above straw-man. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
Indeed my point was not just about voter fraud, but the racist history of Voter ID laws in the US. My overall point was that there is overwhelming and easily accessible evidence that voter ID laws are racist and that voter fraud is not an issue.
Well, almost nobody else behaves that way.
As someone else who does things that are not common, my advice would be to recognize that you are way off the curve and don't universalize your experience.
Certain political factions put a lot of work into making it actively more difficult to use absentee ballots. For example: https://www.apnews.com/ae1c8f1af38f4b4fb0187553be7a6e72
Also, many states require you register to far ahead of time and will arbitrarily purge you from the voting roles. So I guess my point is this is more of issue than you're making it seem.
Does this include smart phones? Seems like percent of people with Internet access would be more relevant. I would think public libraries would also provide a lot of coverage here.
> 15% of adults don't have a driver's license
What's the statistic for adults with any kind of government issued identification? Surely that's more relevant for this debate than the driver's license statistic?
A factor to keep in mind here is that it's an established tactic for Republicans to specifically allow alternative IDs used by whites for voting purposes, while banning alternative IDs used by blacks for voting purposes. A North Carolina law was struck down in 2016 specifically for this reason, for example.
Hint: the people wringing their hands and the people making it more difficult to vote are not the same groups.
The republicans generally would prefer that lower-income folks don't vote because they generally vote for democrats, so of course they would like to see voter turn-out to be low.
It's not strange, it's divided. One group is worried about low voter turnout. Another group is actively making it more difficult to vote. There is virtually no overlap between the two.
This all varies by state, too. Here in Oregon all voting is done by mail, and registration is automatic. It's meant to increase turnout and make it easy to vote.
There's also mail in ballots by default, at least in King county (Seattle/Bellevue, much of the suburbs). (I think the whole state)
If you don't get this card, you know you're not registered (or are registered with the wrong address) and can fix that. You can even register at (what should be) your polling location on election day.
This isn't a hard problem to solve.
[1] https://www.elections.ca/content2.aspx?section=vote&dir=vic&...
However now that i can see the article the 20k is actually 50% of the set of 40k folks that shouldn't have been on the list, which of course is a different story.
1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document
2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office ("Meldebehörde") where you live, and you have to prove this with a copy of your rent contract or property deed
3) everyone getting a document ("Wahlschein") by mail a couple of weeks prior to election date. If you don't get one but should have gotten, you can contact the election authority to investigate, and if you lose/misplace it you can easily look up where your voting place is, go there and have them locate you on the voter roll.
4) if any piece of official mail goes returned by the post as "undeliverable", the Meldebehörde will investigate and de-register you (thus also removing you from the voter roll)
The only real vote fraud in the last years was from a politician who had seasonal workers register at a company and apply for mail-voting, but that's it.
The other piece is that the constitution, written before direct elections were common, explicitly leaves the execution of elections to the states, which makes it hard for the federal government to set standards or require this kind of registration. And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in the constitution.
For example, in 2015, North Carolina's Republican state legislature literally looked up the forms of ID statistically most likely to be used by black people for voting ID in the state and banned those for use in voting, while leaving the forms of voting ID most used by white people as valid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...
Which is why I had originally hoped not for Warren or Sanders to end up as Democrat candidate but Biden (which is very unrealistic at the moment)... the general idea was having a left-moderate candidate like Biden get enough votes in 2020 to have a strong Congressional majority in order to fix voter suppression, gerrymandering, electoral college, campaign finance and media ownership (e.g. breaking up Sinclair, re-establishing something like the Fairness Doctrine).
Then in 2024 a proper leftie candidate could compete on fair and even terms against whatever the Republicans put up.
But since Biden is pretty much toast now thanks to the Ukraine scandal it will probably be Warren who ends up as Democrat candidate and I fear that the Republicans will launch an all-out anti-communist war campaign, aided by Fox, Sinclair and "conservative" rags - pitting 'Trump vs "Communism"' in the 2020 elections may yield a victory for Trump in the current situation...
https://wahlen.sachsen.de/LW_19.php?wahlkreis=51&_cp=%7B%22t...
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State elections in saxony this year. Look at the table underneath the map:
Wahlberechtigte -- eligible to vote -- 1 722
Wähler -- voters -- 2 083 -- 121,0 %
Additionally, Ohio voter ID laws themselves can be regressive in harming poorer populations. Many don't have access to a nearby BMV bureau to get an ID, aren't aware of the registration deadline which has already passed, lack utility bills in their name, or can't get a stamp for an absentee vote to be mailed. For the the current and next ballot cycle it's important to allow citizens to voice their opinion at the box and to register with a party for primary votes as well.
#1 Our VRDBs only contain eligible voters. Ineligible voters are removed. This is very hard to verify, audit.
The Correct Answer is to list everyone, with a flag for eligibility, with a separate audit log for changes. aka standard DBA best practices.
#2 We already have virtually complete rosters of every person, living or dead, updated in near realtime. Commercial data brokers, facebook, law enforcement, national security. We should license or repurpose these readily available data sources for both voter database and the census.
#3 States administer elections. Feds make the rules. Anyone who opposes nationwide standards should also oppose currency, weights & measures, intra-state trade, the entire American experiment, etc.
FWIW, some states already share data, to better track people who move, students, overseas voters (registered at home), deaths, etc. I haven't been active for a while, so don't know how far along those efforts are.
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Now about this article. Purging (caging) is the weaponization of normal data quality efforts for partisan reasons.
Option 1: Send verification mails to inactive (but still eligible) voters. Some sizable fraction won't be returned. USPS's UAA rate is %1, more for high density areas. Many people just don't response (eg looks like junk mail). Then aggressively, silently remove anyone who doesn't respond.
Option 2: Any official communication sent by election admin which is returned (recall USPS UAA 1%) is used to purge.
Option 3: Ignore or inject data quality problems. Match voter roll against other demographic databases, eg DMV. Purge any records for any error whatsoever. eg Mike vs Michael. Missing commas, hyphens. Whatever works.
This is from memory, I'm sure there's other strategies used, but these are the big ones.
Note that The Correct Answer above moots the entire problem. And would be both cheaper and nearly error free.
>And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections.
and
>The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged.
>“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Ms. Kulina-Lanese, who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me was terrifying.”
Trapped behind the paywall.
While the site it loading, just hit the escape key.
Edit: Also I was slightly impressed that they found my current mailing address. I've moved like 6 times across several states, since I left Ohio.
Ohio is a state where the GOP holds 75% of federal House seats despite winning only 50% of the vote. Similar effect holds for the state legislative offices
Voter fraud is a non-existent issue and these mass-removals serve no basis except as cover to remove voters that don't support their party.
Um, no they're not. Simply wanting to maintain a clean record is a personality difference that it is unreasonable to get suspicious over given the varying personalities of the various secretaries of state (the one who ultimately decides such policies).
The other half the story is that the Dems object to every cleanup and always claim the Republicans are trying to suppress votes, but never have any suggestions on how to do it better, only "don't do it now" or "do it after the next election" in perpetuity. That's how blue states like Michigan end up with court orders requiring them to do cleanups (court orders which Michigan is violating).
Both houses of Michigan's state legislature have been Republican-controlled since 2011. Not much of an example of the Dems controlling voter rolls at the state level there.