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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

Because this is HN and you're probably young-ish: When you're older and you've set down roots the last time you updated your voter registration was probably a few decades ago. Chances are your polling place hasn't likely changed either. So you know when elections come, you go to your usual polling place, give your name, get your ballet and "pull the lever" so to speak. You're not thinking "Oh I better double-check my voter registration!" because you haven't needed to do that in ages because your address and party affiliation hasn't changed in years.

The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.

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> The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.

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.

>The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.

Hint: the people wringing their hands and the people making it more difficult to vote are not the same groups.

> It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.

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.

Are we sure it's lower-income? Because if that were the case, then these Republican shenanigans in states like Ohio and Michigan would focus on rural areas. But we don't see that, we see them focusing almost exclusively on urban areas.

> The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.

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.

Very similar in Washington (state) too; when you get a driving license or state ID the voting registration is built right in.

There's also mail in ballots by default, at least in King county (Seattle/Bellevue, much of the suburbs). (I think the whole state)

In Canada, we get mailed a Voter Information Card [1] a month or two before the election. This basically just has your name and your polling and advanced polling location(s). It of course goes to your registered address.

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&...

(In Chicago) I get almost the exact same thing.

I update my voter registration sometimes twice a year to match the party I most like at the time, It's always been online - easy peasy. I expect to get downvoted to hell but I also don't get why showing an ID to vote is such a big deal. After all, I have to look up the numbers in my drivers license 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.

US history is why its a big deal to show your ID to vote.

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...

If only the southern racists during Jim Crow promoted voter suppression tactics as a way of reducing voter fraud like today.

Maybe voter fraud is "vanishingly rare", but that statement in the wikipedia article only links to a NYT article which says:

> 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.

I want to point out that there is no citation for this straw-man thought experiment.

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.

I can't tell what the "straw man" argument you're referring to. Could you clarify?

> I update my voter registration sometimes twice a year

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.

> Also, how is it hard to vote? Absentee ballots are totally easy to get.

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

Because generally it is very hard to commit voter fraud and adding an ID check does nothing but add an additional hoop for poor people to exercise their constitutional right.

10% of households don't have a computer and 15% of adults don't have a driver's license. Maybe your experiences don't generalize to the rest of the population.

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.

> 10% of households don't have a computer

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?

> 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.

Sure. Let's strike that shit down. Make sure ID requirements are even across the board. Seems like a pretty tractable problem.

Designing a system where people in power take actions that cause them to be less likely to remain in power is probably one of the most intractable problems in political science. It's why the U.S. has first past the post, why gerrymandering is a problem, and why voter ID laws are racist.

So to be clear, we can’t have common sense non-racist voter ID laws because the Republicans won’t allow it (and defeating entrenched interests is hopelessly intractable, so why bother), but somehow there will be more political will for no voter ID requirements at all?

No the point is that there are other voting reform laws that will have an actual effect on improving representation and don't have the practical effect of preventing black people from voting. I'm suggesting the problems we have with voting rights in this country are not caused by failing to require ID at polling stations. I'm not opposed to voter IDs in a theoretical sense, it just seems like either a unimportant or disingenuous thing to do first.

Of course, they don’t have the practical effect of preventing blacks from voting. Can we stop conflating abuses in the US with the same system that works uncontroversially all over the world? I’m not arguing it’s the most important thing to do, only that it’s ridiculous that we have a debate about whether or not it’s a problem and the solution is cheaper than investigating.

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