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Comment by karatestomp | Hacker News Reader

Oh, I thought the headline meant remote voting for, you know, voters, not Senators, and was very surprised to see an R next to one of the sponsor's names. The bill's just to let the Senate vote remotely. I'd imagine most of the interesting nuance is about "presence" and quorum-making. This is not about expanding remote/by-mail voting in elections, which Republicans have generally been strongly against, including and especially since the Covid-19 crisis started.

[EDIT] correction: it's not a bill, either, it's (as the headline correctly notes) a resolution to change Senate rules.

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I used to be wowed by this kind of hypocrisy, but lately I've concluded that these things are happening so frequently because the voters have proved to them sufficiently that they will take no heed provided it "hurts the other team."

Everything on the news looks ironic now because the political class has realized there's almost no limit to what they can get away with.

>Everything on the news looks ironic

I was born and grew up in Scotland. I remember the first time I watched Fox News after moving to the states - for almost fifteen minutes I genuinely thought I was watching some (honestly pretty funny) satire.

I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in the same sentence. There are people on Fox who are good, I.E. Chris Wallace. I mean he's my only example, but Jon Stewart did a skit with him and the quote that got me was, "how many times have you seen your show on my show?" It was a nod to the fact that Chris Wallace does actual news not opinion pieces. I'd actually say he's better and less opinionated than Don Lemon (CNN).

This is not me defending FOX. It's more of me railing against other forms of news that I also don't like but sometimes get a presumed pass. I see them as the opposite side of the coin.

EDIT: I know this is going to get down-voted. But if you disagree I'd really like to know why. I am someone who listens to others, and am curious why you disagree with this sentiment.

> I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in the same sentence.

I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Why would I add “CNN/MSNBC” to the sentence when I didn’t watch those channels?

Nowadays, outside of a couple of notable exceptions (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS and Perhaps one or two others) all of the stations are absolute total garbage. They are only worth watching when a live, raw feed of a major event is occurring and I turn it off when the commentary starts.

>I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me.

Fair enough. I infrequently get situations where I have to watch Fox/CNN or at least it's on in the background. But I find them both to be aggravating in similar ways.

I comment because a lot of people use this to justify their side by attacking the other. I've been leaning into other sources a lot. I find Bloomberg still has issues but I like them more.

My current "quick" source of news is NPR's five minute reports that get updated many times per day, I mostly listen on Amazon's Alexa while I make coffee.

The BBC also has a similar short "headlines" podcast that is worth listening to that is updated hourly.

For long-form stuff, I find a lot of the finance-focused news sources to be about the most reliable/ spin-minimizing. Stuff like The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Marketplace (NPR) generally get the facts correct and are generally fairly clear when expressing an opinion versus stating a face. Their biases (e.g. The Economist is pro-free market) are clearly stated up-front.

Le Monde Diplomatique is a solid addition, as is the English version of Al Jazeera (the Arabic version is supposedly much more biased but I can't confirm that).

Der Speigel is good but I rarely read it. Kommersant.ru is also decent (I use Google Translate). Again, even in. countries with authoritarian regimes, the ruling-classes need a way to roughly understand what is going on and usually this means the financial publications are closer to "the truth" than other sources.

Channel Four news from the UK is a solid TV News show, with journalists that hammer home on tough questions, but I haven't watched it regularly for a decade and it may have changed a lot.

Thanks for your input! I'll try some of these.

Also, I just saw Fareed Zakaria the between your first comment and today interviewing Bill Gates. It was really well done. A great recommendation. I remember seeing him before but he hadn't registered as an individual to watch out for.

> But if you disagree I'd really like to know why.

I'll take a stab at it. I agree with you that Fox actually does have some decent news output at various points in the day (dearly departed Shep...), but I simply don't think that CNN has any equivalent to the Fox opinion programming. MSNBC comes closer but it still doesn't have hosts spouting outright disinformation on a regular basis.

Who do you like on CNN? Any specific shows you like over there? I named Don Lemon, but I also really dislike a lot of what Anderson Cooper talks about. Shep was awful. What alternate news sources do you like to go to for unbiased news?

What forms of disinformation have you found? And I'd like to classify disinformation as a situation you feel they are being purposeful about misinformation. I believe we're both going from the same definition but it's always good to be clear upfront.

> What forms of disinformation have you found?

One example is the remarkably-common “mistake” of putting a “(D)” after the name of an obscure congressman or senator caught committing some crime or other, when the person in question was a Republican.

Or the recent coronavirus coverage e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/media/4907...

On the topic of COVID-19 I can do nothing but agree with you. My biggest complaint about reporting at CNN on this topic is that they use Total numbers sometimes and Per-Capita others. Stick with one please.

For example. We have done more testing in the USA than in Italy, we also have more deaths than Italy. When you look at Per-Capita the opposite is true. When you mix and match you can say, no we do more daily testing but THEY have more per capita deaths.

All of this is when I looked a few days ago, it's possible that there will be a period that we have the highest per-capita in one and not the other etc. But all of that tells a story when you look at it holistically.

Fox seems to be instead trying to balance Economics with the health implications. Which is a very important thing for us to consider and we as a world do with things like the seasonal Flu etc.

Mislabeling is ridiculous. My frustration came from their treatment of Yang and Gabbard. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/476951-cnbc-uses-wrong-ph.... Yes I know CNBC not CNN, but I've spent 30 minutes writing this and I've seen similar things at CNN.

Anyway thanks for your reply.

I'm left leaning so it might just be bias from where I'm sitting but I dislike Fox, CNN & MSNBC but I feel like Fox is the greatest evil of those since Fox has an immense number of syndicated stations that pipe their message over local markets and since the media alternatives on the right are so few - go past Fox and you're getting into Brietbart and Daily Stormer pretty quickly, while as there are several left leaning alternatives - my problem with that is that Fox seems to capture nearly all of the right wing folks while the left-wingers are more fractured and have a less unified bubble... MSNBC and CNN are both biased, but they're different biases and a lot of folks also tune into NPR, PBS[1] and independent local news sources.

1. Yup - the News Hour is where like 90% of the MSM consumers I know get their news now.

I can get behind that. I really have a problem with Fox being the single source of truth for right wingers. But that's been changing a bit as the right moves further to the right.

Another interesting albeit anecdotal thing I've notices is the progressive portion of the party moving so far left that they have started classifying some democrats as conservative. I don't think this has played out in the MSM yet but it's going to.

I can (as someone who now leans more left than right) say that if I had to pick I'd choose CNN over FOX/MSNBC. But I'd still have blindspots. If you listen to any of the networks in isolation you can't see the counterpoint. I'd also argue that our modern algorithms are more harmful in this way. If you watch one leaning show, it recommends that over others for a while.

This is prime r/enlightenedcentrism material.

What's your point? I see you've posted this to anyone commenting on CNN/MSNBC.

Ah there's nothing better than waking up early in some US hotel and watching stupid tv shows at stupid o'clock. I distinctly recall realizing that I had been watching some insanely offensively stupid advertorial for hunting rifles interrupted by advertisements for erectile dysfunction pills every few minutes for the last 20 minutes or so at some point and reflecting on why the hell I was actually watching that. In my defense, I was pretty jet lagged. Later landed in some morning TV show that was clearly targeting early risers even more tired than me looking to get a head start on rush hour.

In any case, I stopped watching broadcast TV a decade ago; especially news shows. The signal to noise ratio is just unacceptable to my brain these days. I get more information out of a 5 second glance at my news feed in the morning and magnitudes more information by doing that for a bit longer. They really dumb down everything on tv until even the most retarded vegetable still watching can grasp the basics and that apparently takes ages and endless repeating of things in 3 word sentences. People with a functioning brain stopped being part of the target audience ages ago.

In all fairness, people complaining about how retarded the news is is nothing new and was a popular pass time in 16th & 17th century British press as well as in Roman times even. People, like me, complaining about the quality of reporting is as old as the concept of publishing information in pretty much any form. Information is power and manipulating the masses through any of the channels information spreads is part of the game. And knowing that is the game has been the way to move up in society for just as long.

Wait till you watch Indian news. Fox news will look serious next to it.

I was quite confused on my first read as I've always really trusted Indian Country Today[1] even though it's a much much more specialized news source.

1. https://indiancountrytoday.com/

Same here - Fox news is on a whole new level. It is like the onion, except it stops being funny after about 30 seconds.

Also wasn't this the same channel that argued that they are allowed to present false news (or something similar)?

Fox News is classified as entertainment in Canada, rather than a news agency.

All the big stations are news entertainment state side, mega editorializing everywhere.

You were. Satire marketed as news.

Satire, by definition, aims at the top of the societal ladder. Fox News, Russian state media, "alternative news" blogs? They aim at the very bottom of the societal ladder (i.e. immigrants, Muslims, poor people) instead. That's not satire, that is inciting hatred.

As if CNN, MSNBC are any different.

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

r/enlightenedcentrism

Remote voting for senators and remote voting for the presidential election are very very different animals.

Remote voting for senators is an easy fix, probably (hopefully) temporary with a very low risk of foreign interference.

Remote voting for the general public is fraught with complexity due to voting being the jurisdiction of the states, as well as rife with opportunity for foreign governments to mess with the results.

I mean, we literally saw hacking attempts from the intelligence services of Russia on election reporting servers in 2016. Enabling remote voting for the general public needs EXTREME vetting before going live.

Not doable for 2020.

Washington and Oregon only have remote voting. It works extremely well, is less open to voter suppression and tampering, and lets you sit down and research what you're voting for in comfort. A ballot is mailed to you, you fill it out, seal it up, and mail it back or put it in one of the many ballot drop boxes.

Electronic voting? Absolutely not. But it's hard to have cyberwarfare campaigns against paper trails.

Paper by mail voting should be our standard in the US. There is absolutely no need for real-time efficiency when it comes to potentially changing political office seats. There usually is a month or two before the successor takes office so we don't need to know that night, it could be a week later.

Sometimes technology introduces more potential problems.

It will be hard to walk back from the election night hysteria we've developed as a populace.

Oh darn - will our elections be less of a circus? Will news channels be unable to milk election momentum coverage for nine straight months during the primaries?

How will we ever survive? /s

I moved up to Canada from ye olde US and their elections are so nice and simple. There are limits on the amount of time you can advertise as a campaign so no four year presidential campaigns up here. Additionally it's considered generally distasteful to excessively advertise during campaigns and, while you'll certainly get lots of phone calls from Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP - it's for a short window and then you're done.

The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.

This is exactly it. Elections have the same tone of reporting as the NBA draft. Look at how they butchered the debates. The first televised debate with Nixon was a deep dive into the inner workings of public policy, you practically had to have a polysci degree to keep up. Now it's just whoever is the loudest. They actually used to cut mics if it wasn't your turn to speak. Now they keep them open because a mean-spirited debate where everyone is cutting each other off to get their soundbite, and tearing each other apart on anything but policy is better for ratings.

It was a complete joke to have that many Dems on the stage, only joe and bernie turned out to be the only viable candidates out of that crowd once primaries started happening, and it became clear who actually had voters and who just had smoke and money for airtime on major networks. It's all for the ratings now, not to educate the public on policy. So shameful, but at least I can still just read the policy positions myself instead of watching a debate produced by Jerry Springer.

>The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.

You might get downvoted for the snark but you're not wrong at all. I remain convinced that entertainment value is the most important qualifier for a President in modern times, and that probably goes back to JFK. Americans no longer trust government and don't believe in political leadership but they love celebrities and a good show.

Postal voting undermines the secret ballot. People in your life with power over you can demand to see your ballot.

I'd rather have postal voting along with an investment into education and enforcement of the secret ballot rights of citizens then have a polling place open for a single day with a six hour line - then again there's a lot of things the US government could do to improve the voting process, they just choose not to. Bear in mind that one party in the US doesn't like democracy and voter accessibility[1] - and please do recall Trump's specific, straight from the horse's ass, quote here:

> They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...

People have cell phones in their pockets 24/7. Someone could demand photographic proof of your ballot regardless of mail in or voting booth. Sure you could doctor the photo, but you can doctor paper too. Neither are such common skill sets that there's a real difference between mail in and a booth.

So have both.

Sure you don't have cyberwarfare, but you do have old-fashioned vote selling and coercion. Postal voting denies many women a free vote.

> Postal voting denies many women a free vote.

How many? Is it more than the number of people who can't vote in person on election day due to work or inability to travel to voting places? If it's not, vote-by-mail still wins in aggregate. If it is, then it sounds like there's a serious domestic abuse issue in the broader society that needs to be addressed.

I'd also expect womens' rights organizations to be strongly against vote-by-mail, then. Are they? If not (for, say, political conflict-of-interest reasons) and it's a real problem, I'd expect some of their spokespersons to have had to answer questions about that at some point, and their responses not to have been very convincing. Has that, at least, happened?

Agreed.

What are you saying is the vulnerability introduced by mail-in voting, a method that has been working successfully in Oregon for years?

It may be relatively easy to commit a single act of mail voting fraud, but if it's not scalable, it doesn't really matter.

You mention election reporting servers being hacked, but that has nothing to do with mail-in vs. in-person voting.

Sounds like FUD to me.

Remote voting for senate and congress should be the norm. It create less corruption. Just imagine a special interest group needs to travel to 535 offices to get their message heard.

There was a comment on:

> Absolutely. America is internally fractured enough now to make any resistance movement useless. Most people are content to attack each other while the political/managerial class makes further extractions and the world moves beyond American hegemony.

> It's sad, really. This country pulled in generally the same direction for a long time. We don't have that strength anymore.

Which was deleted but raised some interesting points about the unification and cohesion of resistance movements and revolutions by my reading and I wanted to delve into movement fracturing even if that comment has been removed.

I don't think change movements are ever unified with the possible exception of those against hard force backed governments. Unless someone is literally beheading people to stay in power the revolution (or just political shift) will happen long before there is a unified and majority based embraced of the new order. Revolutions and resistance seemed eternally relegated to the fringe and exposed to excessive fracturing. This may possibly be due to the zealotry of those on the fringes or the academic origins of most political movements, but I'm quite uncertain as to the definite cause.

That said most political movements happen in stages where political ideals are embraced over time, in 2016 a 15$ minimum wage was decried as crazy and extremist and universal healthcare was viewed as an albatross, in this election round even Klobuchar had a plan that leaned toward universal healthcare.

Lastly, if by resistance movement you meant some sort of armed uprising - that's never going to happen in the US without it being a full blown coup which doesn't seem to fit the framing of "resistance movement" very much. The military far outclasses private individuals - even while the US might be the most armed populace, the US military is even more excessive.

>even while the US might be the most armed populace, the US military is even more excessive.

that didn't help against insurgents in Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam

Dropping millions of dollars worth of ordnance on a structure built from sticks and clay by hand (or, a tent...)isn't a "sustainable" strategy. Insurgents get several advantages that make asymmetric warfare a truly brutal experience beyond just the cost.

1. Use of women and children as weapon delivery systems, or shields. (Former US Navy Seal Jocko Willink once described a reoccurring situation whereby his team would be clearing homes in a contested territory and the families would act "strange" until they realized that one of the "family members" was not actually a family member at all.)

2. There are no laws. They can deploy whatever weapons and tactics they wish against both our forces and civilians alike. We are bound by rules of engagement (which aren't as obvious or straightforward as they might sound) which severely handicaps our ability to just "go get the bad guys" even if we know exactly where they are.

3. Extremism. Whether it is religiously motivated or not, extremism leads to predictable results. It's easy for propaganda to spread and to vilify anyone, but it's much easier when there's an actual "enemy" you can see. That effect is multiplied further when we inevitably make mistakes.

War is hell. War should always be the absolute last resort. Unfortunately, the people who decide when we go to war aren't the people who actually have to put their lives and limbs on the line to fight it.

As far as I can tell a lack of public and/or political will to commit mass murder (yes, a fair bit happened in Vietnam particularly, to put it mildly, but nothing like systemic mass murders, incarceration, depopulation, and retaliation your average authoritarian regime is OK engaging in to win a fight) or foreign intervention to neutralize the advantages of armor and air superiority (see: Syria, Iraq) plus foreign materiel support are necessary for scrappy underdogs with rifles to win wars against a modern military. Truly evil regimes only seem to get into trouble if foreigners interfere in a major way, or (obviously) they lose support of the military. Private small arms are barely a factor, regardless.

[EDIT] my point being that resistance against one's own government, which has turned evil & brutal but still has the support of its military, is not exactly a case in which I'd expect private small arms per se to turn the tide of battle, or have much effect at all compared with other factors, really.

Interestingly enough, a significant majority of Republican Voters (~65%) actually do support mail in ballots. The opposition largely stems from the RNC and senior party leadership. In any case I am glad that the US senate is taking public health seriously, and I hope that they will take similar precautions in protecting their constituents by passing the Klobuchar-Wyden bill to allow mail in voting: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/natural-disaster-and-e...

> "Interestingly enough, a significant majority of Republican Voters (~65%) actually do support mail in ballots."

What people want is sadly irrelevant as long as they keep voting blindly for the same people.

The right supports mail-in ballots with voter-id, and voter-id in general. The left doesn't support that, why?

> The left doesn't support that, why?

Because it's a transparent attempt to reduce the ability of some groups of people to vote. The right pushes for voter ID while simultaneously doing everything possible to reduce the availability of ID.

Put the Federal Election Commission in charge of voter ID, make the cards free and make it the mission of the FEC to track down and ensure every qualified citizen has one. Then I support voter ID.

Voting services are the responsibility of the states. The Feds can require states to implement certain regulations, but it's up to the state to provide the enforcement.

You don't need a separate identification card. You can register to vote for free electronically or via mail, some state even allow in-person enrollment on the same day as the election.

In most states, the county maintains the voter registration. They should be removing people through a fair process as they become ineligible (die, move, felony, etc). They could track down most eligible people, but at what cost? As a citizen, it's not just your right to vote, but it is also your duty. The individual should apply, not be tracked down. This a how a democracy is supposed to work - citizens doing what's best for their country instead of waiting on the government, a government which is supposed to be a body of the people.

If you are concerned about the rights and freedoms of people without a photo ID being trampled, then you should be opposed to TSA since you need a photo ID to fly, or even ride a bus. You should be opposed to the ATF since you need a photo ID to buy a gun. You should be opposed to the DMV because you need a photo ID to drive. Even many states require the addition of photo ID when fishing to validate it against your fishing license. The fact is, you need a photo ID for literally anything you do. Your neighbor could even wrongly claim someone is breaking into your home and when the police show up, you have to prove you live there and are not a burglar. This lack of photo ID argue is soooooo old. Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost, usually much less than even a driver's license.

Now, I'm not saying that political games aren't being played. Both sides play them on various issues, especially concerning timing, wrongfully expanding power, or botched implementation. But the trickery of the individuals involved should not be used as a defense against the underlying concept.

Believe it or not, there are people who don't drive, take long-distance buses, or buy guns, and therefore don't have valid photo ID.

> Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost

It's not just the cost of the license. There's also the opportunity cost of going to the DMV and potentially spending all day in line, which can mean missed work and lost wages, or childcare costs. And if you don't already have a driver's license and don't live someplace with good public transit, how are you going to get to the DMV in the first place?

> trickery of the individuals involved should not be used as a defense against the underlying concept.

Why not? If the intent is voter suppression rather than rooting out fraud (which hasn't been found to be widespread), then the crafting of the legislation would reflect that intent. A good voter ID bill would also mandate that the IDs are free and easy to obtain.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16767426/...

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21222084/kentucky-voter-id-cor...

So just because they don't exercise those privileges/rights means they should be legally barred from doing so? If that is a valid argument, then you could use that same line of thinking against your position to say that who people who haven't voted impacted by the voter ID laws.

Sure, there's opportunity cost to everything. Take the kid with you. What do you suggest we do about it? And not just on this issue, but filing taxes, marriage licenses, etc.

If you think we should hold the actions of a few bad people as parts of debates, then I don't think I should pay taxes because of misappropriation, or because criminals use them to travel.

Again, (because I don't think you got it) my position is that I don't see the issue with requiring photo ID because it is required for many other aspects of life, including other rights. The law should be congruent in that respect. If there are implemetion issues, then that is a different story. If you wanted to advocate the removal of ID requirements in other areas of life, then I'd be open to that too.

I'm not against the idea of voter ID. But a well-intentioned voter ID law would make ID easier and cheaper to obtain. It would set up ID registration at banks, post offices, libraries, courthouses, city halls, senior centers, college campuses, churches or other religious/community centers, workplaces, school gyms, supermarkets and convenience stores, gas stations. Make it as easy as buying Girl Scout cookies. Heck, let Girl and Boy Scouts get merit badges for volunteering to take pictures - with adult supervision even a 10-year-old can handle a camera well enough to take an ID picture. Maybe even have a person who comes to your door to take your picture, if you're physically disabled - contract it out to Uber or something.

> Sure, there's opportunity cost to everything. What do you suggest we do about it?

When it comes to voter ID...reduce it? Make it as close to zero as possible? Is that really so crazy? If we care about free, fair, and secure elections, they're worth investing in, right?

> And not just on this issue, but filing taxes, marriage licenses, etc.

Ditto. Tax filing shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars and hours of work.

In this case a common Republican position is that voter fraud is a big problem worth devoting serious resources to, and that a good solution to that problem is a voter ID program, and (leaving the Republican position now) very clearly the best and fairest solution for that is just to issue an official ID for every citizen (and god knows that'd make a ton of other stuff less prone to problems/fraud, more convenient to citizens, and cheaper), but they also really don't want a citizen ID program, so even if they were well-intentioned in their calls for voter ID they'd end up coming off as incoherent and disingenuous once you put those two positions together. And that's if.

You mention having that service at many places, including sending individuals to homes. What about that opportunity cost? You could use that budget for other community services. With voting as a part of your civic duty, one should be willing to incur small costs like spending a day getting a license every 4-7 years. My experiences have been fairly convenient, much better than other government agencies like the sheriff's office, county treasurer, etc. It should be seen as a service to their fellow citizens of not having to pay another government employee salary, benefits, and retirement. The DMV handles the same ID services for drivers licenses, so they are a logical choice to be efficient (if there are no political games with availability).

I was going for a more general approach to reducing opportunity cost. What about the opportunity cost of reducing this opportunity cost? It's a tradeoff for what to tackle. Should we spend effort and money here, or on education, etc. I'd rather they just modernization the process or address the tax situation.

Yep, thanks to turbotax etc lobbyists.

> one should be willing to incur small costs

Only in time and convenience, and even then, when it becomes egregious it could be a legal problem. The Supreme Court ruled almost a century ago that poll taxes on voter registration were unconstitutional.

If it were actually about fraud, then I think it is an easy problem to solve. But since it has nothing to do with fraud, I expect the debate to continue indefinitely.

> What about that opportunity cost? You could use that budget for other community services.

In a democracy, few community services are as fundamental or essential as those that allow people to vote universally and securely. Because without that you don't have a real democracy.

> It should be seen as a service to their fellow citizens of not having to pay another government employee salary, benefits, and retirement.

Who said anything about hiring more full-time employees? What I was proposing is manageable with contractors, volunteers, and some already-existing employees working overtime on weekends (e.g. to catch the people at church or out shopping), or evenings. Surely many citizens would be happy to discharge their civic duties by volunteering to help their fellow citizens get voter ID?

> With voting as a part of your civic duty, one should be willing to incur small costs

Another way of looking at it is as an additional, backdoor tax. And a regressive one at that, since it disproportionately affects the poor.

A day's wages is a pretty heavy tax.

> Another way of looking at it is as an additional, backdoor tax.

Yep. And it's got a name, too. Poll tax. Unconstitutional.

It can both be true that it seems pretty reasonable that people put in some effort to acquire an ID to vote, and that if you require said effort, fewer people will vote and the ones who don't will disproportionately support one party or political ideology over another, meaning voter ID laws in fact favor one of our two viable parties over the other. If it also turns out there's little proof of an extant problem voter ID laws solve, one might suspect the primary motive driving support for them is exactly that tendency to skew the electorate.

If we don't have comprehensive audits, how do we know it is not a problem? Eg. How do you know your server is secure if you don't have an IDS? You can say it isn't a problem, but even the supreme court has acknowledged the longstanding and still relevant issue of voter fraud, which is why voter ID is still legal.

I can't remember the source but one study said there are about 3 million extra people registered in the US (people who are eligible - people actually registered). They may not be acting fraudulently, say if they moved from one state to another, or a different precinct in the state. The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes. Another study that I can't remember estimate that the same people without ID are, in general, the same people who are not registered to vote.

> If we don't have comprehensive audits, how do we know it is not a problem? Eg. How do you know your server is secure if you don't have an IDS?

A few politicians with strong motivations to find any evidence of significant election fraud they can, and holding positions that give them the authority and, indeed, responsibility, to go looking for it have done so, and so far as I know they've all found little enough that I think it'd be fair to round what they've discovered down to "nothing". All evidence I'm aware of is that there's a vanishingly small amount of not-particularly-well-coordinated honest-to-god deliberate voter fraud, plus a somewhat larger but still small amount of accidental illegal voting (I gather this is somewhat easy to do unintentionally if one might claim residence in more than one state) and bad book-keeping or clerical errors. If deliberate voter fraud were a significant problem I would expect these efforts to have turned up far more, even if they didn't find the full scope of it.

> I can't remember the source but one study said there are about 3 million extra people registered in the US (people who are eligible - people actually registered). They may not be acting fraudulently, say if they moved from one state to another, or a different precinct in the state. The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes.

I take your broader point, but do note that the 3,000,000 -> 500 here is comparing apples and oranges, due to the way our Presidential elections work (it wasn't decided by 500 votes nationally)

Actually, the investigation was not completed because most states would not reveal their voting data.

Yes, 500 votes in a couple precincts of a state.

I mean state level officials. IIRC Kobach was very serious about tracking down all the voter fraud he was sure existed in Kansas (and everywhere else, but that's where he could look), and came up with so little—and ~all of it accidental, not some kind of intentional scheme to change the outcome of elections—that it was, truly, comical. If others have gone on similar crusades and come up with contrary results I'd (honestly) be interested to know.

> This lack of photo ID argue is soooooo old. Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost, usually much less than even a driver's license.

If it's not a big deal, then why does the right actively try to make getting valid photo ID more difficult? Things like closing all the DMV branches in poorer areas, or allowing them to be open just a few hours every couple weeks, etc.

The right makes this a big issue, not the left. If the right didn't try so hard to suppress people's ability to get ID, then I'd be tempted to think requiring ID for voting wasn't a bad idea.

I never said it was the right or the left making anything a big deal. I think many government agencies have inconvenient hours (sheriff's office, marriage license, etc). In my experience the DMV has better hours than most. I'd be interested in your examples of the right making ID harder to get.

So they shut down the DMV in the poorest area. Where's the next closest one?

As you can see in my other comments, I'm not a fan of political game playing. But using that as an defense against the underlying principle of validating voter identity is not a valid argument.

Do you think with 10+ million undocumented immigrants - a not insignificant portion of the population, but not citizenry - that people should not be concerned about ensuring only valid citizens can vote?

You're absolutely right. There's a vast potential for very real problems.

When those problems manifest, we should deal with them. To try to address problems that don't actually exist is absurd overregulation and government overreach. It certainly is wasteful to expend resources on solving problems that don't need solving because they don't exist, isn't it?

Is there evidence of voter fraud by undocumented migrants that suggests we have a problem and should act?

> When those problems manifest, we should deal with them

I think this is one of the key problems with a hyper-conservative government.

If your default position is "don't change it" on every issue, then you have a very difficult time solving problems.

More liberal governments that frequently change the rules are like startups vs very large corporations. They are more agile and better able to quickly deal with problems as they arise. They are "responsive" in a way conservative government is not.

Look at recent statewide rent control measures in California. There was a lot of hand-wringing about what it could mean in this scenario or that scenario, but in the end the response is

> When those problems manifest, we should deal with them

Which I think is the sentiment of a people who really feel like they have a handle on their government and that it responds to their will.

Personally, I have found that engaging in political conversation with people in a framing they find comfortable and familiar makes it possible to change minds. Doing so makes it possible to address the position at hand without also trying to reorganize a person's worldview. Your experience may differ, but I've generally found that task a daunting prospect. Perhaps you are simply far more skilled than I at getting people to reorganize their worldviews - certainly not a high bar here.

Unfortunately, the results of this sometime goes over poorly with people outside the target audience. Such people are often reacting negatively to a framing they find problematic or otherwise objectionable. At times they prefer challenging the framing to advancing a particular position.

This is a very valuable thing to do! It's critically important to a functioning liberal democracy. It's just perhaps not always the most impactful thing to do in a given moment to advance the goal of swaying someone's position.

I could see that being true in some cases. The iterative process can work quite well if done correctly. You certainly don't want to solve problems that won't exist, but you also need to put a reasonable amount of forethought into the possible consequences of the changes so that you don't create more problems (push new bugs in with that code fix).

The problem with elections is a bit different. If the elections were manipulated either through people voting who shouldn't have, or foreign governments, do you think the people who benefited from that who are now in power will fix that issue? Probably not, especially when there is most likely close to 50% of the population who feel the person was their preferred candidate anyways.

Please cite any study that validates this ridiculous claim.

Have you ever voted? Are you even registered to vote? Reading this makes me think you have not and have never... Registration requires verification, address, name, etc. You dont just show up and cast your vote.

The problem is in many rural and poor communities. Many people do not have a birth certificate, many do not have a DL and believe it or not, it costs money and requires significant travel for many people to get these things.

You must live in or near a large city, be from a wealthy family and have never been outside of your geo-bubble. Most of this country is rural. Some people have to travel 100's of miles to the nearest government agency. But you knew that, right?

While I agree with your point, and this doesn't change that, saying most of this country is rural is misleading. Rural areas cover 97% of the nation’s land area but only contain 19.3% of the population (about 60 million people). And only 9% of that 19.3% live in what is classified as very rural, meaning their entire county is rural. [1]

[1]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210...

Many places let you register when you cast your vote. That's usually how I change my voter registration when I move. It should be far more widespread. I'm of the opinion that if you are given a social security card that you should be automatically registered to vote.

Has it been an actual problem in states that allow mail-in voting without also having voter ID laws? If it's a real issue, it ought to already be causing problems.

It has not. Oregon has had vote by mail exclusively for over twenty years and, in the 2016, with over two million votes cast, 54 problematic votes (according to an audit done by the then-republican secretary of state.)

54 across the state is good. In Philly, we have about 6k dead people voting in presidential elections.

I can't find any evidence of this with a search. Was this a joke? I can't tell.

It's not that they are fraudulent, but that people are voting as someone who may have the same name as them. The 6k article was probably a decade ago. This is a 2k article more recently. Maybe that's progess?

https://www.phillyvoice.com/6abc-reports-it-found-dead-peopl...

For those who don't want to click through, this is the thesis of the article:

> People with similar names — often a relative of the deceased voter — signed the poll book in the wrong spot, Schmidt said. In no case, he said, did the living voter then cast another vote under his or her actual name.

> Such mistakes most frequently occur when a deceased voter's name appears at the top or bottom of a poll book, Schmidt said.

That article doesn't appear to support 2k fraudulent votes, and may not even support a much smaller number. I gather a news organization put together a story claiming 2k maybe-fraudulent votes, then were asked to provide some examples for the election commission to look into, selected 20, those 20 were investigated, and zero were found to be related to election fraud.

Like my comment said, it's not that they are fraudulent. The voting system is inaccurate (leaving dead people on the roll and letting others vote as them accidently). We should modernization the voting system to reduce these inaccuracies. Photo ID is a cheaper bandaid.

Here is a non-comprehensive list that show a number of the know offenses. Keep in mind that most places don't do much monitoring for voter fraud (why else would they have thousands of dead people still listed).

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

No.

I live in a vote-by-mail state. You can only cast a ballot after you have registered. It is validated against your own registration. So at the time of voting, there is a hard limit on how much fraud is possible.

To have an undocumented immigrant casting a vote, they'd have to register to vote and not get caught. Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens are on them.

It is unnecessary to require ID every time you approach the ballot box. Invalid registrations are caught well before then.

  Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens are on them.

They can't. There's no mechanism by which a state can take just a name and verify US citizenship for people not born in that state.

Don't forget there are also tens of millions of felons who are not eligible to vote as well.

Which is a whole different problem altogether. I honestly have never understood what the purpose of even letting people out of prison was. Really, think about it.

Here you are, you've been 'punished' for a time the state has deemed appropriate. Now you're out. Very little support. No real integration plans, at least not formal ones. No oversight to see whether or not you fall into patterns of behavior from before. Undercut, actively, via loss of certain rights (gun ownership, voting as examples) in your attempts at integrating to society. And it's almost impossible to get anything but the most entry level, low paying jobs.

The US really has a hard on for kicking people when they make a mistake. It's almost a sport, it seems.

Yep, and it seems like more and more felony crimes are added to the law books, or lower crimes elevated to felonies. I knew a guy that gave a 20 year old alchohol, got caught, got a felony for it. He killed himself due to some of the stuff you listed above.

I currently work at a community college; one of my programs is a re-entry program. The ones that kill me are the people who have marijuana charges and can't get a job.

They're extremely brittle and bitter now that people are being celebrated as geniuses and business leaders for doing exactly what the felons were doing.

California already has vote by mail and a higher than normal share of undocumented immigrants. If this would be a problem nationwide, then there must be evidence that it's already a problem in CA (and other vote-by-mail states). I haven't seen any evidence that it's a problem. There's no need to speculate. So no, people shouldn't be concerned. There seems to be precedent for doing it right.

Do you think the government as it is setup right now is highly responsive to the will of voters?

Do you think that adding non-citizen voters will change the answer to the above?

If non-citizen voters made the government more responsive to the will of voters, do you think the will of non-citizen residents is significantly different than the will of citizen residents? How is it different?

Do you think will be inundated by immigrants who want sharia law? Is that where you're going with this? Do you think there could be enough immigrants to enact such a thing? Do you think that's possible given the basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution?

In theory maybe but from a practical standpoint this is not a serious problem for the country. Voter fraud is a serious crime and most legal and illegal immigrants are trying to avoid commiting federal crimes that are highly visible. Voting by mail creates a paper trail, making it easy to audit and detect fraud (more so than checking a piece of plastic). All the research suggests that mail in voting has a neutral partisan effect (with a potentially slight win to conservatives since it favors rural and elderly populations). Ultimately questions of fraud detection could be framed according to the cost of false positives vs false negatives. The reason that people on the left get upset over vote ID laws is that they create a lot of false negatives, for a very small decrease in the number of false positives - this is structural to voter turnout (~40% of people don't vote, vs. <1% voter fraud (0 convictions)).

No.

We already have cards like this given to every citizen at birth.

Voter id is often very selective about what counts as a valid ID and it's often coupled with legislative changes and executive policies that selectively make it much harder to get a valid id for a few demographics.

Closing down DMVs depending on the district, reducing their working hours, excessive bureaucracy for non-drivers license IDs, charging excessive fees, etc.

Voter ID laws are often used to disenfranchise poorer voters by creating bureaucracy mazes or DMV-like conditions to stop voters from acquiring the necessary credentials.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/chal...

Anecdotally, as someone who was living in poverty before I got into this line of work, I did not have a state-issued ID and did not have time to waste or even the inclination to get one (my state does not have voter id laws).

Sure many will go out of their way in order to acquire credentials, but much like email scams, the value of voter suppression is in the marginal success.

Lastly, the amount of real voter fraud (well below 10% last I checked) seems minimal vs the amount of people who don't have credentials (about 10% according to the above).

I will leave you with this quote:

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

Isn't that the meaning of "justice"?

I'm genuinely curious. How did you handle identifying yourself to the police? Also, was this when you could still get a greyhound bus ticket without photo ID? Where you ever asked for ID when cashing or writing a check? It seems like ID is required for EVERYTHING these days, so I'm interested in some of these points.

> How did you handle identifying yourself to the police?

I never had the opportunity to find out

> Also, was this when you could still get a greyhound bus ticket without photo ID?

No clue

> Where you ever asked for ID when cashing or writing a check?

I don't really remember, didn't have much opportunity to cash checks anyway

I guess you couldn't buy tobacco or alcohol either?

The whole world besides Anglo countries is using photo ID to vote. The article basically says people don't have a way to get it in 10 mile radius which is ridiculous. You really think you get ID in Germany everywhere in 10 mile radius? No, you take a bus to nearest city that offers these services.

What you're forgetting is that Germany actually has functioning public transit, while the US doesn't.

If you don't have a car, you're out of luck if the DMV is 10 miles away.

Whole world? Seems that there are plenty of locations that simply mark your thumb to vote, no ID needed. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink

False, in South Africa you have to pre-register to vote at a precinct with a photo ID, then on election day you have to show your photo ID to vote at the place you pre-registered for. After you've voted they mark your thumb with the ink as a secondary (or tertiary) security measure.

I'm honestly not going to check every country on the list, but it's blatantly false in South Africa where I've voted before. And I'm going to bet it's false for a lot of other countries on that list too, like India.

Unless we are also cutting off hands for felonies, I don't think this will provide the same level of utility here.

I thought it's obvious on the context of America we talk about countries that well developed.

I think your objections are already addressed by the comment

The left doesn't support that because it disproportionately disenfranchises minority voters. Which is the same reason why the right DOES support it.

Because IDs aren't necessarily easy to get and cost money, disenfranchising the poor and those without any other reason to get one.

I don't know, does it takes a lot of effort to look up the talking points of the people you disagree with? It implies your viewpoint was achieved without ever having come in contact with an alternative, which is concerning.

My voter registration says "Mike Smith" and my driver's license says "Michael Smith".

Would you let me vote?

I got married and took my husband's name. I've got mix of paperwork during transition.

Would you let me vote?

I voted at the same polling location for 30 years. I've never driven a car. The only photo ID I have is my medical card from the VA.

Would you let me vote?

For the record, what The Left demands is modernizing our voter registration infrastructure, like every other mature democracy, mooting this entire debate.

Universal automatic voter registration, issue photo ID for all voters, proper audit log for all VRDBs.

Which would also be cheaper to admin and nearly error free.

I agree we need modernization. Do you have any links to how we can provide vote tracking/verification and voter eligibility while maintaining anonymity? It seems this type of system would work well for some other subjects.

IIRC, Brookings Institute had a handful of studies. (I'll help you find some when I get back to my computer.)

My TLDR:

Ballots should be secret. It takes very specific procedures to protect voter privacy, especially with postal ballots.

Voter registration and participation (that you voted) are public records, by necessity, with some exceptions (judges, cops, victims, public figures).

Voter eligibility should be adjudicated as part of maintaining registration. The biggest flaws with our VRDBs would be fixed by simply adding an eligibility flag, with an audit log.

Currently, legally, VRDBs can only contain the most current record for eligible voters. No history. Leading to a lot of data quality problems. False negatives, false positives, purging, caging, and so forth.

If they can successfully keep judges and cops out of the public registry, then they should be able to to that for everyone - no second rate citizens.

I was hoping you had a system that could use something like public/private keys to verify the voter and the vote while remaining anonymous while providing furure result validation through your key.

Hi. Skim read your other replies. Am confident that you and I have enough common cause, overlap that we're pulling in the same direction. So this is a sincere response of my current worldview. My position has changed A LOT over time and I reserve the right to change more in the future. :)

I was an election integrity activist. I had some minor local victories. Like delaying the rollout of new gear (until 2009, a much less risky election) and prohibiting unique bar codes on our ballots (which were linked to voter id).

I've studied crypto voting proposals and other privacy preserving stuff like translucent databases and differential privacy. I'm just a simple bear, so I don't claim to be authoritative.

The core idea of the crypto systems I studied is to emulate the secure one-way hash of physical shuffle of the ballot box (Australian ballot) by inducing hash collisions. So there is no algorithm way to reverse the transformation.

Great in theory. Hard to implement in practice.

Over simplifying: you need simple (enough) ballots and large (enough) political jurisdictions (precincts) to ensure that each voter's ballot gets lost in the herd of ballots.

Otherwise straight forward brute force process of elimination (big data) allows trivial reidentification of each ballot's voter.

This is already a problem with our paper-based systems. Especially postal ballots. So us election integrity activists advocate very specific procedures to preserve voter privacy. Which are expensive and onerous, so rarely done.

For future, I will remain open minded about crypto voting systems. But it'll always remain a tough sell.

How this relates back to voter registration and eligibility? I don't know. Identity and authentication is very hard. My very best guess, per the translucent database strategies, is that once we issue everyone unique identifiers, such as Real ID, then we'll be able to technically unlock a lot of privacy protections.

Until then, because we have to link identifiers across heterogenous systems, we have to store PII as cleartext. Which defeats the purpose.

We need a new law - call it the Unequal Protection act. Senators/Representatives can't have benefits that exceed that of the general population for certain categories like voting rights, healthcare, etc.

Can't even have private healthcare. Must use the same systems that the general population has access to.

While I think the thought is nice this would just lead to those with excessive financial independence being the only ones able to take the hit of being a law maker. Someone like AOC would never be able to afford to maintain a residence in D.C. while folks like Pelosi and Feinstein would be able to trivially afford it.

The same issue arises whenever folks get antsy about Senatorial pay rates - sure paying them little feels nice but, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in developing nations, lower direct payment leads to more indirect payment through corruption.

See also: reducing congressional staff budgets, and congressional term limits, both of which, whatever their merits, tend to empower lobbyists.

That would solve a lot of problems. Senators enjoy socialized health care while preaching its dangers to the electorate. They receive all sorts of benefits that they deny to the general public.

> especially since the Covid-19 crisis started

I think you're underestimating how against this the GOP was before COVID-19. If you're hearing more about it, it's likely just because the idea is gaining traction.

The federal government does not have the jurisdiction to change how people vote in elections. That is determined by the states.

This is not completely correct

Article 1 Section 4 of the Constitution:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.

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

"Manner of Elections" certainly sounds like it would allow Congress to pass a law mandating the elections must be vote by mail, specifically for Senators and Representatives.

This does not apply to the President due to states having the jurisdiction to decide how electoral college electors are chosen.

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

So Congress has partial authority, the question is if Congress passed a vote by mail law for Senators and Representatives, would states have other ballot measures or positions (Such as the President) that would not be vote by mail in the same election.

Biennial November elections are a minority of elections overall.

This is true but only half the story. The federal government is able to incentivize vote-by-mail through federal funds. This has been the center of much debate.

Speaker Pelosi says she will push for these funds in any next round of stimulus.

Right, but it could have been an amendment, or (more likely) some incentive-based "we're not making you, you'll just get less money if you don't" thing.

Plenty of precedent for that sort of thing, too.

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

> States had to agree to the limit if they desired to receive federal funding for highway repair.

AFAIK Supreme Court has said that funding carrots have to be related to what you're trying to get them to do. Speed limits obviously translate to transit funding, I'm not sure you're going to find funding related to voting that is significant enough to convince states that don't have vote-by-mail.

Oh, and it can't be too significant, because the Supreme Court shut down the Medicaid expansion requirement (expand Medicaid or lose all related funding) in the ACA because the funding was too much of states' budgets.

It's a fine line to walk.

Yeah, there's precedent. There's precedent for everything that's ever happened already. That doesn't mean we should be doing those things

Tons of people on both sides of the isle agree that implementing things like the national speed limit and drinking age of 21 by withholding federal funding from the states that don't goose step in line is a backhanded way of enacting legislation and/or an end run around the constitution.

Sure you can do things that way, but you have to ask yourself if it's really worth it in the long run to normalize that kind of legislative behavior in exchange for getting whatever policy point you want a couple years sooner.

Edit: To reply to your comment below I guess you could say, "no the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction, but that hasn't stopped them in the past"

It's a response to "The federal government does not have the jurisdiction", not "is this a good idea?"

On a tangential note, these lawmakers failed to see the real consequence of a 55 mph speed limit: the invisible economic loss of longer commute times probably far outweighed any of the minor 0.5 to 1% savings in gas.

Those hours spent on the road are hours that people could be spending with their family, at work, or doing whatever else they like.

According to the Census Bureau, 128 million today commute daily in the US. Let's say they spend an average of 30 minutes on the highway at a top speed of 65 mph. If we raised the speed limit by 50% (to 97.5 mph), then the average commute would become: 30 / 1.5 = 20 minutes.

Each individual would save 10 minutes a day. With 252 working days a year, that's 2520 minutes saved a year -- which is a total of 42 hours saved per year. That's a lot of time. Across 128 million commuters, we'd save 5.376 billion hours per year. If people earned an average of $20/hour, that would be $107 billion of added economic activity per year. Whereas even 1% of gas savings would not be more than $2 billion saved per year.

People would just live farther away.

Don't you have construction sites or slower cars?

I'm regularly driving 150 kilometers on the fabled Autobahn, with no speed limit for the most part (and some 120 km/h speed limit sections), and the difference between "I feel great, let's drive 180" and "Let's take it slow and drive 100 or 110" is surprisingly small, because that top speed is only attainable for short stretches of time.

Obviously traffic varies by city, road and time of day but on the nominally 55-mph section of I95 around Boston traffic flows between 65 and 90ish if it's not precipitating with the exception being peak commuting hours when the choke points cause enough of a disruption to make most of the system flow well below that speed. Even if you knock 10mph off those speeds because older cars aren't quite as quiet and smooth at any given speed it still results in traffic speeds well above 55.

All the 55mph limit on that particular road does in my mind is give law enforcement a pretext to make fishing stops.

I can't recall a time I ever saw traffic go ~55 on a limited access road without the presence of inclement weather or severe traffic congestion. When you consider the kind of traffic conditions that are the norm in rural ares I don't think a national 55mph speed limit makes sense at all.

Edit: I'm curious to know how a comment that is simply stating my observations and opinions can be considered so wrong.

Imagine a DDoS attempting to prevent quorum or affect vote outcomes! Lots of edge cases to iron out.

I don't think this is really a legitimate issue that needs to be enshrined in law - there are 100 senators so as long as there is a continuation of understanding around physical barriers to present yourself to a vote within the electronic realm it should work itself out. How different would a DDoS be from, for instance, one party hiring a mob of protestors to violently prevent law makers from submitting their votes in the statehouse - I'm not super familiar with the laws around this but I'd be surprised if there were no contingencies in place.

Additionally the Senate does recognize vote assignment as legitimate so it'd be reasonable to support pre-registration of voting or the allowance of a voting window.

Mobs are highly visible. A senator's flaky Internet is less so.

I agree that new Senate conventions could cover these cases.

Or a nation state kidnaps a senator, and vpn their vote back through the senators primary residence. They create a fake room that looks identical to the senators house. Any bad guy that's seen Mission Impossible one too many times would be inspired.

This could be the new way to filibuster! /s

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