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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

I argue that it's clearly racist. The intent is to disenfranchise one the poorest communities in America. The GOP knows that the more people who vote, the worst their results are.

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I think you missed his point. Requiring ID to vote is not inherently racist, what is racist is requiring ID while knowing IDs are hard to obtain for some groups.

Most countries require ID to vote, but in those countries almost everyone has an ID.

You still need to renew it every 8 yrs or so, pay a small tax and no you can't get it from a small rural place. Talking of Europe here, I believe both types or Americans have distorted view how things are arranged here.

Honest question - because the same ID requirements are in place for purchasing a firearm, are those requirements racist as well?

Slightly off topic but I always found the fact you are required to add race and ethnicity to the federal firearms transaction record 4473 surprising.

The official reasoning is to aid law enforcement tracing firearms in crimes. https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/why-does-atf-form-4473-ask-r...

That's a bit of whataboutism in my opinion. A vote isn't a lethal weapon.

If the underlying intent of requiring an ID for a firearm purchase from a gun dealer was to limit or discourage minorities from buying, then yes it would be racist.

How so?

I would argue that because government is predicated on force, a vote is nothing more than an act of delegation - asking others to use force on your behalf.

Less complex would be the legal argument, though: in the US, personal possession of arms is an enumerated Constitutional right. There is no such enumerated right to vote. From a purely legal perspective, why would it be racist to place an ID requirement on an act that is merely generally understood to be a right but not racist when applied to an act that is explicitly protected by the state’s charter itself?

Both the 14th and the 15th Amendment enumerate voting rights.

No they don’t. The 14th gives consequences for disenfranchisement, and the 15th restricts the reasons someone may be disenfranchised.

There’s also the 14th’s “Privileges and Immunities” clause, but that has been weakened greatly through case law.

To my knowledge, there is no legal barrier to passing a law stating that only landowners can vote, or only people who are employed, or only people who have a net worth of greater than some arbitrary threshold.

There are lots of instances where a person may legally vote in one state, but not another. Virginia’s recent changes with regards to felons is a good example of this.

As a compromise, require IDs. And pay everyone $10 to vote.

What do IDs solve? Voter fraud is negligible. And getting an ID, even if it's free is a pain for some people. Plus the ID of paying everyone to vote is a non-starter.

It would remove a lot of bureaucracy by having one ID which can be used almost everywhere. In my country we do not have to register to vote.

That doesn't scale well for a country the size of the US, where local voting is determined by residency. For national elections, sure, no registration would be fine. But how would you keep people from voting for elections outside of their region?

This is not really a hard problem to solve as is evidenced by literally every other country. Moreover, in almost every country it is possible to vote even outside of the country.

I can't comprehend why people try to insist that ID is racist and impossible to implement. It is so bizzare my only explanation is propaganda.

The US, unlike many other countries, doesn't have a national ID card issued to citizens. So to obtain an ID, citizens need to usually have either a passport, which costs $85, or a certified birth certificate, which can cost up to $45. And ironically, you often need valid ID to request a birth certificate.

So for lower income citizens, the cost can be prohibitive. This then becomes the equivalent of a poll tax, which historically was used to disenfranchise minorities.

So I'm not saying it's impossible to implement. If the Federal government wants to start issuing free national ID cards, then that would be acceptable in my opinion. However, this would trigger a huge part of the population that doesn't want government tracking etc.

>Voter fraud is negligible

Well, how do you know this if there are no IDs?

Most studies of voter fraud have shown it's negligible. Compared to the disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor caused by requiring voter ID, I'll take that risk.

This is the same argument being wielded against Vote by Mail. Yet fraud in VBM is rare as well, and VBM works extremely well for servicemembers deployed overseas. And Trump even votes by mail...

The GOP just knows that if more people vote, the GOP candidates will do worse.

>Most studies of voter fraud have shown it's negligible.

Source? If I were going to commit fraud I sure as hell wouldn't do it while taking part in a study. Curious how that is dealt with.

Of course I know about the related talking points of the other side, I just think it's curious that people regard "double spending" votes so casually.

I regard it casually because it's statistically negligible. I usually post this link in threads about vote-by-mail where people bring up fraud, but it applies here too:

https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2017/09...

The (elected, republican) secretary of state audited the 2016 election and found 54 cases -- out of 2+ million votes cast -- of what's generally called "voter fraud," most of which were people voting in Oregon and in another state.

Oregon is entirely vote-by-mail, so there's no way to show an ID.

Remember, how you voted is anonymous, but who voted is known to the government agencies. They can and do analyze that. Voter fraud is not a meaningful problem.

http://voterfraudfacts.com/ has a pretty extensive list of sources and explanations.

Not even an American but this number is convicted people for voter fraud. It's not even a study or some intelligence agency estimate, so you're dishonest here.

Did you mean to reply to a different post? The link I included has reports from the Department of Justice, as well as by numerous independent sources.

You're talking past the point. How exactly do these "studies" determine it's negligible when it's undetectable without IDs?

It's not undetectable. There are many ways to determine if a vote is fraudulent. In person voter fraud (the only type that would be prevented by Voter ID) is the most difficult, and unlikely fraud to pull off. It doesn't scale well, is easily detected due to signature cross-checking, and according to the Dept of Justice, only 13 cases occurred between 2000 and 2010. In that time period, there were over 649M votes cast in the US.

Again, you're talking past the point.

Signature cross-checking just checks the signature with the voter registration. It doesn't tell you if the registration is fraudulent. Don't you recall the articles about thousands of people being allowed to register in California that shouldn't have?

>and according to the Dept of Justice, only 13 cases occurred between 2000 and 2010

Again, how would they know? You appear to think voter fraud is only a mismatch signature on the ballot and signature in voter registration.

No, I don't recall the articles you mention. Do you have any links?

You're asking me (and the authorities for that matter) to prove a negative.

Can you show me any evidence that supports your fears of voter fraud in the US? Other than a few rare cases, I haven't seen any evidence.

The reason I believe the system is working fine without Voter ID is that voter fraud just doesn't scale, either with manual paper ballots cast in person, or via absentee ballots and VBM. It's just too much work, too high a chance of being caught for the reward.

Now what does worry me in regards to vote integrity is electronic voting systems. I will never trust those.

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