One in 10 ballots rejected in last month’s vote-by-mail elections in New Jersey
njspotlight.com
njspotlight.com
There are some real concerns with vote by mail.
One particular issue I noticed when canvassing was that the voter roll was incorrect. It was not uncommon to go to a rental unit, and have 3 or 4 families registered at the address - all having moved out years ago. Another issue was dead voters. Another issue was no one was registered at the address.
The voter rolls not dependable. It's not by design, but its a hard problem to solve. Its worth listening to the concerns "of the other side" so that we have fair elections.
Largely their "concerns" seem to be that vote-by-mail will circumvent the large amount of effort they've spent to make it harder for poor people to vote.
The president has literally said that he doesn't like vote-by-mail because it makes it impossible for him to win and called it a coup. How do you even begin to work with that?
Genuinely interested, as the comment seems to be accurate based on a handful of Google searches I just did.
The argument that Republicans want to "make it harder for poor people to vote" is a red herring regarding the voter ID debate.
Similarly, Trump's position on mail-in-ballots, as far as I can tell, is that that the expected ease of large scale voter fraud by relatively few bad actors will make it impossible to win. I have no clue if that's true or not, but to frame the stated claim without also acknowledging the underlying potential issue seems misleading.
Based on the comments in this thread it's pretty clear why: People move all the time, and the state does not necessarily have a current address for everyone.
If someone was to try and vote twice from 2 addresses they simply shouldn't be able to because of the unique identifier.
I mean, if they were registered to vote in 2 separate places, they could just drive to 2 different polling stations and vote twice anyway, right?
That's part of the whole signature verification thing that isn't working well.
Officially the post office is supposed to do return to sender if the name doesn't match, but I suspect in apartments with frequent turnover they can't realistically do that.
Having the voter request the ballot gets rid of all of that trouble.
Any kind of double voting shenanigans should be pretty straightforward to detect. So when it happens, you [at least] invalidate the second attempt, and forward the details over to the police for investigation and prosecution.
The thing about voting is that most of the legwork in verifying voters is done in advance of any election. By the time you get to ballot-casting, the hard part is done.
You need to find a systemic vulnerability, otherwise the risk is much too high and the odds of success much too low. Vote-by-mail isn't actually a worry unless you have an ideological position based on the current election, you should really worry about the electronic voting machines used in many places that have in-person voting. The potential for systemic fraud there is much, much higher.
There is a lot of power in leaning on existing online resources for performing this work, where your identity and address verification has already been performed (or it can rapidly be performed in a way that is both inexpensive to government and so frictionless it does not disenfranchise the disadvantaged). You just need competent government leadership and technology practitioners who can rapidly glue it together (I know, crazy high hill to climb).
Census is "actual Enumeration” of “all persons", so you'd need to join/filter the data to remove people who are not citizens. Doing so would cause some folks to be afraid/unwilling to fill out the census.
2020 census is especially difficult because they haven't done as much (any?) door-to-door canvassing that usually happens during a census.
Any others apart from the voter roll problem?
In my state (RI), I have to affirmatively send in a mailed request for a ballot, so the voter roll thing doesn't really enter into the picture.
Question: if I register to vote by mail, am I taking away the ability of this to be effective for someone else, i.e. using sacred resources or anything? I personally won't have a problem going to the polls on election day. Guess this is a long winded way of asking, is voting by Mail more/less reliable than going to the local station?
Looks like I'll send this in anyway and at least have the option.
The difficulty here is that elections in many places are organized so that it is very inconvenient for less desirable citizens to cast their vote. Find a way to make it equitable for everyone, and there may be truth to your assetion.
Mail-in voting has no such problem. Unless artificially created, of course, by hamstringing the USPS. Fortunately in Oregon we have those metal boxes you mention and vote-by-mail. So I can vote from the comfort of my living room at a time convenient for me.
Coercion is certainly a potential issue, but if it were a legitimate problem we'd probably have more evidence for that by now.
The parts about running it efficiently, on Sundays, with voting places everywhere with no queues also solves that. But I know there's no will in the US to have reasonably run elections. As an outside spectator to your elections for many years it's baffling how badly run they are.
> Coercion is certainly a potential issue, but if it were a legitimate problem we'd probably have more evidence for that by now.
Election systems aren't designed for the median election. They're designed to still be reliable when things are iffy and your democracy is at risk. The fact that you only know of a few cases of that very thing happening 2 years ago in your last big election shouldn't be of much comfort. Particularly with your shaky system being under active attack by external powers.
In my experience they are run very well, like clockwork, and very reliable. The problem (not everyone agrees it is a problem, however) is that the states control the election, so there are 50+ ways it gets accomplished.
> Particularly with your shaky system being under active attack by external powers.
I personally think the electronic voting machines are a much bigger risk for that kind of attack, compared to vote by mail; but even then, there's no real upside for external powers to take the risk of trying to actually muck with the ballots. In all regards it is easier, more effective, and less risky to just poison people's minds. And I hope you don't believe it's only happening to the United States.
Not to mention the groups who fight against using any form of identification at all during voting.
Someone with some sort of identity and address should be able to withdraw your bank account until proven guilty?
I think that's what people are suggesting maybe voting should have.
We certainly could have decently secure elections without ID. Like this: You show up to vote in person, a good photo is taken, and you say who you are. That info is then made public. Political parties and other interested groups can sift through the photos, maybe with an AI, to find any crime.
It's almost perfect. The main trouble is that fraud detection happens after the voting, so a person who doesn't fear prison can do as desired.
There are two possible kinds of voter fraud (both extremely rare), "retail fraud" (i.e. individual voters) and "wholesale fraud" (i.e. bulk fraud). Voter ID laws mostly "fix" a non-existent problem of individual false votes with the express intent of discouraging votes. The real problem you want to fix is "wholesale fraud" which means securing the whole system from voting machines (which should be open-source and paper-audited) to how votes are tallied. Think about it. If you were going to steal votes would you go to all the trouble to forge or hijack individual votes or would you bribe someone to flip a couple of digits at a county office?
Of course, a trustworthy system includes how mail-in votes are tracked and verified but that is a well-understood problem working well for thousands and thousands of absentees, military personnel and whole states full of people who have voted that way regularly for decades.
EDIT: I am being hyperbolic here, but the second reply to my first comment was doing exactly this. We can't have this database because of the Nazis.
Also I'm not asking for a database including every possible detail about a person. I see no reason why something like race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or an number of other traits should be recorded. But a simple database with names, DOB, most recent address, a national id, etc would be extremely helpful.
"Both Mayor Karrer and Bishop Chrysostomos were quickly summoned to appear before the German Commandant, where they were ordered to immediately prepare the list of all the Jewish residents of Zakynthos. ... In a great display of courage and defiance to the powerful occupiers of Greece, the mayor and the bishop handed a simple piece of paper to the Nazi commander. On that scrap of paper, only two names were written: Mayor Loukas Kerrer and Bishop Chrysostomos."
https://greece.greekreporter.com/2020/01/25/the-unimaginable...
"In the book, published in 2001, Black outlined the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data."
I always find it strange how people consider the possibility of certain events far-fetched to the point of irrationality that have already happened.
Would the Holocaust have happened without IBM's participation?
Would the Holocaust have happened if punch cards were banned?
Would the Holocaust have happened if the Nazis didn't have census data?
The answer to those questions is an obvious yes. These logistical obstacles would have been nothing but a mild inconvenience for the Nazi death machine.
This guy ran France's database for that when the Nazis invaded. They wanted a list of the Jews out of the database.
The problem with tracking all of us is trusting the next administration
Then again I prefer a more robust solution than hoping someone refuses to run a SELECT query.
Facebook - without checking the specific details - can probably tell the locality and religious position of most of their users; certainly enough to direct the Neue Gestapo to arrest you. But they also have raw address and religion details, which makes it somewhat easier.
Anything beyond that is just market research.
Take Germany for example, or France as much as I can tell: You move, you register a new primary residency, where you vote. Your residency is also you voter registration (not sure why separating the two makes any sense). You leave the country permanently, you declare it, when your French, you can register at the consulate in the new country of residency. Guess what, you get your ballot by mail to that address.
Carrying passports or ID cards, check. No unidentified residents.
Dead voters, no problem. Registered residencies are constantly updated with birth and death certificates.
Voting by is, as is voting in general, a solved problem. Including paper trails and enough voting places for everyone. Voting happens on Sundays.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-id/
[1] Again generally opposed by Republicans because it would mean more voters which demographically isn't good for them.
You could make the literal exact argument in reverse with at least as much credibility.
I notice that you say you could but you actually didn't...
It doesn't really have the same ring, does it.
Homelessness and generally transient residency statuses come to mind. Still workable w/ ID cards though
What you suggest is actually illegal in the US since the 1980s by federal law and before that it was customary for us states not to track that information. On the public side it is illegal because requiring identification for almost any kind of state service must hinge on there being a specific reason inherent in the public service why the state government needs that information to provide a service. Only the federal government can require the kind of information that would commonly fall under what is required in an EU country.
Private businesses are actually indirectly forbidden by federal law from asking for any kind of information like this. If in the course of asking for such information the private business discovers or deduces the 'immigration status' of the person that business now has to explain the reason why it discovered that fact and the burden mostly falls on the business almost every conceivable case. Therefore, most businesses are certain never to ask about such information. The only information transmitted to the federal government (by federal law) is essentially a self-certified form filled out by an employee only in the course of seeking employment. The business is directly forbidden by law from asking anything about the immigration status of the person. The state can't do anything about this or indirectly require a private entity to act based on such information.
One can quickly see that there is no workable way under current federal law to make any kind of system you would see in the EU or most of the western world workable. You couldn't directly collect useful information about a person in almost any way and any information you could collect wouldn't be useful.
Here is the politically incorrect fact: It makes immigration enforcement almost impossible if you can't restrict access to private employment or public services. It stands to reason that lacking such enforcement would induce large amounts of illegal immigration.
This isn't really a side effect either. The political economy of federal immigration law has something to benefit both parties. Conservative Republicans disproportionately benefit from cheap(er) labor and democrats/libertarians get to reduce the power of the federal government in ways that they see as politically desirable. There is a reason most immigration laws until the 2000s were overwhelmingly bipartisan.
This doesn't have anything to do with voter suppression at all. Any plan to require or give out ids for voting runs into the issue of how to handle these legal issues. One solution is for the government to only require the id for voting and nothing else at all. In other words, the government will get to have access to personal information but: 1) can not make using the id service convenient(as covered above) and 2) cannot use that information for any other public reason(unless federal law is changed) finally, 3) only the federal government can make such information useful which means you rapidly start approaching a centralized database which most european /western countries do not need to have.
> No one thinks that.
> "Voter ID requirements limit the number of people who are able to cast a ballot."
Ref: https://www.aclu.org/facts-about-voter-suppression
The first page of results for "id laws voter suppression" turned up similar statements from the WaPo, Atlantic, Wired, Vox, and quotes numerous politicians. Your "no one thinks that" is not in line with reality.
That said, the Republican path of establishing voter ID laws is often part of a pattern of "let's make it hard for the poor and working class to get proper ID, and to vote".
Reducing early voting, not making ID cards free, etc. Voting should be a universal right in this country. The government should be putting in maximum effort to assist everyone who wants to vote, to be ready when the time comes, and enable early voting as much as possible.
Just about everyone I know who leans even slightly left here in the US believes that requiring ID to vote is defacto voter suppression.
Also it seems like states are making it easier to get an ID [0]
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16767426/...
Texas being a fine example: https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
There are free options that are easy to aquire. Not sure why there are so many myths about this.
They at least offer the alternate forms of ID, but those still eliminate people. A homeless person is probably not going to have any of those documents on hand, but they have every right to vote. There is also the inherent problem of singling out people without ID for further scrutiny. This added "security" has notoriously been used as a method to suppress the vote over the course of US history. The simple act of requiring someone to state on a government form they can't "reasonably" obtain an ID is going to scare some people off from voting. What is "reasonable"? Am I going to be charged with voter fraud if I simply didn't want to spend the money on an ID? Will I end up in jail for voting? There is a chilling effect here.
[1] - https://www.dps.texas.gov/driverlicense/electionid.htm
The Texas Election Identification Certificate ID is free.
>and all the federal IDs require money.
Wrong. Military and veteran IDs are federal IDs that are free of charge.
>They at least offer the alternate forms of ID, but those still eliminate people. A homeless person is probably not going to have any of those documents on hand, but they have every right to vote.
They wouldn't have been allowed to vote under the previous system either. This is a red herring.
> There is also the inherent problem of singling out people without ID for further scrutiny. This added "security" has notoriously been used as a method to suppress the vote over the course of US history.
There is no "further scrutiny". You either have the documentation that proves your eligibility to vote in your locality, or you don't. Studies showed that Voter ID laws have little to no effect on turn out.
> The simple act of requiring someone to state on a government form they can't "reasonably" obtain an ID is going to scare some people off from voting.
No doubt, but in Texas and in many other states, they are reasonably attainable, and have no fees. Somewhat of a straw man here. Again, studies showed that Voter ID laws have little to no effect on turn out.
> What is "reasonable"? Am I going to be charged with voter fraud if I simply didn't want to spend the money on an ID?
No, you just won't be allowed to vote. You won't be charged with any crime. Also, you don't spend money on fees, the above ID mentioned is free.
> Will I end up in jail for voting? There is a chilling effect here.
This is all conjecture. There is no chilling effect on requiring a free voter ID according to the studies.
Which itself requires ID to acquire defeating its purpose as an alternative ID for people without ID.
>Wrong. Military and veteran IDs are federal IDs that are free of charge.
I was referring to the IDs available to the general public. A military ID being free is irrelevant to a huge majority of the US.
>They wouldn't have been allowed to vote under the previous system either. This is a red herring.
How is that a red herring? A flaw existing in both the old and new system doesn't mean it isn't a flaw. Do you think disenfranchising homeless people is acceptable?
>There is no "further scrutiny". You either have the documentation that proves your eligibility to vote in your locality, or you don't. Studies showed that Voter ID laws have little to no effect on turn out.
It takes added time and requires further documentation. The time it takes to vote has been shown to have an impact on voter turnout. Also I don't know what studies you are talking about. Here is one from a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that says the exact opposite[1].
Your other points all rely on something refuted in the above points.
[1]- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/09/ga...
You need documentation to prove you're eligible to vote in your locality in order to be able to vote in your locality. The is the same logic behind any type of identification/registration, Voter ID or not.
>I was referring to the IDs available to the general public. A military ID being free is irrelevant to a huge majority of the US.
You specifically stated "all the federal IDs require money", which is patently false, QED.
>How is that a red herring? A flaw existing in both the old and new system doesn't mean it isn't a flaw. Do you think disenfranchising homeless people is acceptable?
It is by definition a red herring because being a flaw or not is immaterial to the discussion at hand since it is not specific to Voter ID laws. You asking the question is a textbook logical fallacy.
>It takes added time and requires further documentation. The time it takes to vote has been shown to have an impact on voter turnout.
Sometimes it takes time to leverage your rights. Gun background checks is an example of that, as are voter ID laws. There is no conclusive study that has shown voter ID laws impact turnout.
> Also I don't know what studies you are talking about. Here is one from a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that says the exact opposite
You linked a piece from a laughably biased news source. It even states opposite of your claim: "That change wasn't entirely due to voter ID, of course, but the GAO report suggests it played a part."
"In a 2014 review by the Government Accountability Office of the academic literature, five studies out of ten found that voter ID laws had no significant effect on overall turnout, four studies found that voter ID laws decreased overall turnout, and one study found that the laws increased overall turnout."
"Studies of the effects of voter ID laws on turnout in the United States have generally found that such laws have little, if any, effect on turnout."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_...
From our Constitution (24th Amendment, Section 1)[1]:
>The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fourth_Amendment_to_the...
Numerous services exist to provide free rides to polling places including some publicly owned transportation options.
The right to vote does not excuse you committing crimes in order to vote and being naked is generally illegal is most of the US which would probably be what prevents you from voting without clothes.
Imagine a state completely waives their fees for a State ID (usually only $10-20 anyway) in exchange for Voter ID laws. Do you think progressives could support it then? Would you?
It sounds like your criticism is of government (or at least DMV) complexity/ineffectiveness in general, not the ID laws specifically.
This was my first result searching for "us constitution voting" https://www.votefortheconstitution.com/voting---what-does-th...
Constitutional protections for voting are far more limited.
Voting is not defined as a "government service" and voting itself is barely defined at all in the Constitution or any Amendment. The Amendments assert a right to vote but the means, methods, and even timing are left heavily up to the discretion of the Legislative branches (Congress or State).
Therefore, the vast majority of existing election law can be changed as easily as legislators pass any other law versus the complexity+effort+time of a Constitutional Amendment.
Beyond that, I'm still not sure your point. We aren't debating the means, methods, or timing of voting. We are debating who has the right to vote. As far as the Constitution is concerned, that seems to be everyone but felons.
Providing ID or not is quite literally the means and methods aka the process to vote. I haven't referenced "who" in any way, shape, or form.
> As far as the Constitution is concerned, that seems to be everyone but felons.
Again, check your sources. That's not in the US Constitution and is left up to the States. Here's the full text so you can check yourself: https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/full...
No, when you require ID anyone without ID is prevented from voting and therefore you are dictating who can vote and not the means or method of voting. This is no different than a poll tax which is also unconstitutional.
>Again, check your sources. That's not in the US Constitution and is left up to the State
My source is the 14th Amendment, Section 2. It specifically calls out a lack of voter protections for people who had any "participation in rebellion, or other crime". A lack of protections does not mean felons don't have the right to vote. It simply means it isn't federally guaranteed.
As for your question, supporting or not supporting voter ID is less about how difficult the IDs are to get, but rather that it is creating a requirement that makes both the act of voting and the preparation for voting much more time intensive. And this is all to solve a problem, voter fraud, that nobody has any evidence occurs at any appreciable volume.
But I'll just say, if a system existed where I could get a photo ID with no fees and no wait times, and I could do it on election day, then I'd be much more willing to support voter ID laws.
My guess would be because an LTC (like a driver license) clearly indicates if you are a state resident whereas a UT student ID does not?
The student IDs can certainly be modified to contain that info, but until they do it makes sense that they aren't a strong enough ID for voting.
And of course, it's a state run university. If the state really cared about making voting accessible to people with valid IDs, they would update the UT IDs to meet whatever requirements they deemed necessary. They've had 6 years. Why haven't they done it? Students actively want the change.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that a Texas Handgun License requires citizenship.
https://www.dps.texas.gov/rsd/ltc/faqs/index.htm
> 12. Can non-US citizens obtain a License to Carry a Handgun? > Yes. Subject to the requirements of federal firearms law, and if not otherwise ineligible, resident aliens and certain nonimmigrant aliens who are lawfully present in the United States may obtain the license.
Amusing how quickly the requirements grew.
Ref: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-d...
[1] https://www.campusvoteproject.org/student-id-as-voter-id
I see that 10 states will accept student ID, but there are restrictions on which IDs. For example, it has to have your signature on the card, etc.
Whenever voter license legislation is proposed, there are no efforts to make sure every eligible voter is able to exercise their right to vote.
> The real question is why voter license proponents are against the idea of giving a free voter ID to every eligible voter on their 18th birthday
Why is it that voter license proponents are against the idea of giving a free voter ID to every eligible voter on their 18th birthday?
It's frequently brought up in response to voter license legislation, but it is never incorporated into their proposed legislation. Why is that?
A good compromise would be free ID's for everyone, but neither side wants this and would rather keep fighting the id battle, because like most battles, its only purpose is to keep the people divided and easy to manipulate.
With voting license legislation enacted, in order for a citizen to vote, they must have a government-issued license. It can't be just any government-issued license, either, it needs to be one of the specially designated licenses that you need to jump through hoops to get beyond being just a citizen.
For many people, obtaining such a license is both a monetary and time expense that is only necessary to participate in elections. A citizen living in a city might have little reason to have a driver's license, but they'll need one if they want to vote, and they'll need to renew it every few years at their own expense.
A solution to this problem is making sure every citizen receives a voting ID on their 18th birthday. For whatever reason, voting license proponents never seem to want to implement such a program.
> The ugly truth is democrats know that sloppy voting tends to fall their way and republicans know that voter id laws tend to fall their way.
And yet voting fraud is nearly non-existent, and there are numerous examples of courts finding that voting license legislation disenfranchises voters.
If you want to take issue with the methodologies used to determine that, you're free too, but right now what your post amounts to is denial of scientific evidence.
[1] Here are dozens of independent and government studies, and court rulings on voter fraud: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/02/low-rates-o...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/minuscule-number-of-...
And none of those speak to my point, and the point of many others who study this in detail, is there were over a thousand recorded criminals cases of voter fraud over in recent elections. When you couple that with many elections having no way to audit a vote, then we have a huge problem, because without auditing tools, only the most stupid and egregious incidents of fraud will be caught.
If you agree that a fraudulent election would be catastrophic for our democracy, and that we currently have no tools to audit the integrity of our votes (which we can't without voter ID), then voter ID, free or whatever, is an obvious solution.
I'm betting Belarus wishes they had a way to audit their elections about now.
Again, you insist that the methodology to audit isn't there, yet there are dozens of studies, audits and case law examples that disagree with your opinion.
Again, if you want to disagree with the methodology, you are free to, but please be specific about what you disagree with.
Ok I sort of am lying since vote by mail is pretty much the only system I support and voter ID laws make no sense for that.
It would be a step in the right direction, but the concept of a universal ID requires everyone (well, except outlaws in hiding) to have it - if it's mandatory, then it becomes legally reasonable to require it for receiving all kinds of services as you can answer "How do I do X if I don't have a valid ID?" with "Step 1: Get the ID renewed/replaced/made" and "How do I do X without ever getting an ID" with "Sorry, that won't be possible, not ever getting an ID is not a valid option", like it is currently the case in many other countries.
In essence, if instead of "just" making it easy to have ID even for poor and disenfranchised people you go out of your way to ensure that it's weird for them to not have ID, then ID requirements won't suppress voters.
No, it's not. Many people have difficulty finding the documents that will get them an ID. There are plenty of people working illegal jobs who are trying to figure out how to get a birth certificate, social security card or prove residence. This was even more common when more people were born at home.
I had a hard time getting ID when I was a teenager, and I needed it for migrant agricultural labor (to work on a legal crew doing corn detasseling.) Luckily, I got arrested a week before we were scheduled to leave, and I was able to con the DMV into issuing an ID based on my jail papers (although the clerk at the jail wrote down whatever I told them.)
The reason requiring ID is a problem is because there's no widespread voter fraud, and declaring that you're someone else is very difficult without that person agreeing not to go vote. It's a requirement whose administration cost dwarfs by orders of magnitude any benefit. The intention is to exclude people who have ID problems, not the people who don't believe it's possible that anyone could possibly have ID problems.
Also, just let felons vote. Put voting booths in prisons. If your population is so prisoner-heavy that they make a significant difference in the outcome, your society is broken.
For whatever historical reason, we've entrusted the DMV with validating everyone's identity. The one which is open 9-4 M-F in the best conditions, and has been basically shuttered since Coronavirus.
In some states, you can go to 'third-party offices' which are privately run and offer longer hours, but it's still a several hour endeavour (and then you're paying $30 extra for their services).
The countries of the eu are much closer to the Republican party in terms of nationalism than they'd like to admit.
Fifty different ways ;-)
However, I think your parent is describing what happens when the previous resident at your address doesn't register a new address. The Elections Department doesn't know if they died, emigrated, moved residences, or they now co-habitate at your address.
The right solution is to identify all of the sinks and sources (all of the events which allow a voter to be added to or removed from voter eligibility) and work to integrate automated systems in a web. Birth recordings, death recordings, change of residency (at DMV, credit bureaus, tax bodies, etc), change of citizenship, change of felon status, etc. Anything short of this will bias voting for or against "the other side".
I'm particularly frustrated by watching some states batch remove names from roles by using substring wildcards and also prevent same-day registration -- together these mean that people are unable to vote with no notice and insufficient time to restore their name to the roles.
I grew up in a republican town in New York. The lack of voter id didn’t hurt the local politicians. We should be happy that anybody tries to vote.
I've called out Amazon before, and I stick to my stance that that company is going to boom and bust because it is so automated. Just ponder what the current top complaints are from Amazon customers, regardless of what service they use...? Well, let's head on over to https://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/amazon.html?#sort=hel... ...
> I contacted customer service through chat on TWO separate occasions ... Well, it was never fixed.
> To make matters worse, when you call they are not very helpful ...
> Merchandise more often doesn't arrive on guaranteed delivery time and customer service is rather disinterested on resolving any issues.
Those are the side effects of depending too heavily on automation. So, the charge that "anything short of [a web of automated services] will bias voting" is itself an insurmountable conflict. 1 in 10 mail-in ballots being rejected is an example of how automation isn't a solution in and of itself. States batch removing names with regex is an example. The same-day voter registration automation having a conflict with the purge of expired voter registrations is an example. Is it ever a smart idea to pour more salt on a wound if the sting is already unbearable?
The right solution is a system with enough automation to make the various key election services meet 80% of expected use, and to have people independent of the election provide the necessary checks and balances to resolve anomalous scenarios. Whether that's citizens who surrender their right to vote, or a code that substitutes for the names and PI of candidates and voters, I don't know. But I do know that the sting is already unbearable. Can we just please put away the salt?
Where I live, you request a ballot and it gets mailed to you, so there is some controls in terms of people registered at old apartments. The voters vulnerable to shenanigans (nursing homes, etc) are equally vulnerable.
Personally, I think vote by mail is driving more turnout and is ultimately a good thing. I’m surprised that the GOP is so against it, as it will benefit them in local elections imo.
I'm not sure why it has to be such a hard problem? If I file taxes in tax year N at a given address, and then file taxes in tax year N + 1 at a different address, then it's pretty clear that I am no longer a resident and should be removed from voter rolls. I'm aware that this doesn't cover everybody, but if you combine a few different such datasets that the government already keeps track of people moving, then you should be able to easily assure that most stale entries are removed in timely (<1 year) fashion.
That being said, it doesn't seem like it would be hard to have a national voter database that shows each voter and where they are registered, with the ability to notify districts when someone shows up elsewhere, combined with a national registry of death certificates.
Is the eligibility wrong though?
There has been a sort of reverse Gerrymandering [1] in the UK where voters are instructed where to vote to have the most effect, people with second homes (which can include students but otherwise would seem to be exclusively rich people) might qualify this way in the UK.
Generally this indicates to me the need for electoral reform. But perhaps tighter regulation about where one may vote (restricting eligibility when one is eligible elsewhere) is also needed in some places?
If I don't update my driver's license, the DMV wouldn't have my new address either.
If I move in with roommates and I pay my roommate for utilities, the utility company wouldn't know my new address either.
Just a few reasons why it is a hard problem.
If someone eligiable tries to vote but can't then that _is_ changing outcomes.
New York State still has me on the voter rolls there. I tried to find a place to have myself removed but I couldn't even find directions on what to do so I gave up and continue to get spam from candidates in my old district.
My driver's license lists my address when I lived in San Francisco. I don't live there anymore and just haven't been able to update it yet, so that wouldn't work either.
Utilities are typically registered under one person's name from the household. So in theory if I have roommates and I'm the name on the utility bill, the utility company wouldn't have the names of all my roommates at my address.
Is the problem with vote by mail itself, or just a bad implementation?
This is especially true in foundational processes where, in some cases, the slow rate of change & large involvement of many competing groups is part of its institutional legitimacy.
Oregon's system was incrementally expanded for additional, and larger, elections over 15 years: https://multco.us/elections/brief-history-vote-mail-oregon
Where I am in IL you don't need to show photo ID to vote, so the level of verification that occurs in person vs by mail is the same.
Generally it seems like you want the voter rolls to err on the side of being overly broad than vice versa, so long as it doesn't enable fraud - i.e., it's better to leave someone on the voter rolls who has moved/died (who is overwhelmingly unlikely to actually cast a vote) than to disenfranchise a voter by erroneously purging them.
At least in WA state, a signature is required on the exterior of the envelope, and it is validated against the signature on the voter registration form.
I'm a Washington state resident and because I sign a lot of checks I have two forms of my signature: My 'fancy' signature that has every letter of my name and my check signing signature that is a scrawl of simple squiggles.
I used my fancy signature for voter registration and accidentally used my squiggle signature for my fist mail in ballot and did't get any kickback. I've used it for six years and King County elections still has never questioned it.
About five years ago I decided to change my signature. The first ballot I mailed in after changing my signature was rejected for having a non-matching signature, and I had to prove my identity and update my signature on file with the King County elections in order for my ballot to be counted.
For example, in an election with 100 votes cast. If 10 signatures are suspicious, you only do extended validation and open them if the election was won by a margin smaller than 10.
I was offered a tablet to sign on when I offered up my card. So I took back my card and signed it on the back and then loosely repeated that same signature on the tablet thing.
I'd had that card for around two years. I never sign them these days because it doesn't really mean anything around here any more in the UK. Bear in mind I am old enough to remember signing cheques for "To cash".
Let's keep in mind, depending on where power lies post-election, that doing something illegal, even if caught, doesn't necessarily means one would be punished for it.
So ballots go to the wrong place, fine. The probability of random person there being interested and then finding any of this information is low.
If a close match were demanded, people would complain of disenfranchisement. People don't sign the exact same way every time.
Realistically, the workers are tired and they don't care. If they do reject anybody, it's probably because the vote comes from an area that tends to vote in the undesired way. In other words, this human element is a problem. It would be especially easy to bias the election by rejecting based on name.
An imperfect signature of the desired ethnicity (more likely to be a "correct" vote) gets a pass. An imperfect signature of the undesired ethnicity is a fail. That's all it takes to quietly flip an election, with no evidence trail at all.
For vote-by-mail though, how could anybody go to jail? The ballot shows up. It is accepted or rejected. If rejected, then what? Are we going to pick fingerprint DNA out of the paper fibers for this? There is no reasonable way to ever determine who attempted to cast the vote.
It'll be fraud, but never part of the official statistics. It can't be proven without using the level of resources normally reserved for famous murder cases.
There just isn't a deterrent. Severe punishment means nothing if the criminal thinks he has no chance of being caught. The fraud can be done in bulk, and it is, via ballot harvesting.
Also, what about the corrupt verifiers? Being prone to rejecting some names more than others can change an election, and there would be no way to prove it. If the signature verifier has a preference between Cohen and Abdul, or between Garcia and Washington, what can anybody do?
With the mail-in voting, the person isn't present. You can't possibly find the person. No matter how obvious the fraud, there is nothing to be done about it. The person is certain to avoid arrest. No charges will ever be filed, and some people will then conclude that fraud doesn't happen.
In the one case, the criminal faces a small risk that is easy to dismiss. In the other case, there is no risk at all.
We also don't need to sit around speculating about this because the data we have on voter fraud already tells us that it's incredibly rare.
What we should focus on is the 1 in 10 voters here who had a ballot rejected for primarily UX reasons that could be fixed. That's a problem which is supported by facts and could be fixed. Instead the current administration is gutting the USPS and making voting even more difficult in the middle of a pandemic. My ballot application is already taking twice as long to get in as it did last year. How is that OK?
This would create a record that could then be used to examine the signature on the ballot and charge the person with voter fraud.
Note: not many states have changed their laws on vote by mail this year, so theoretical VBM fraud could have been done by submitting fraudulent ballot applications in most past elections too. The main difference this year is more voters are expected to use the no-excuse absentee ballot that was already available to them in other years.
A few hindered ballots from a [left/right] leaning district going missing can be enough.
Don’t even need to have individual fraud, just some stats on how likely one area is to vote then “wrong” way.
Hell nursing homes or others could easily swing lots of votes by a single staff.
I’ve dealt with plenty of high officials that have negative documents go missing. It’s just routine for many.
No, they would not be considered acceptable in a computing application. But in computing, it’s considered acceptable to discriminate against users for the sake of security.
I’m unaware of any major democracy that uses computerized voting with a username, password, and 2FA to replace the traditional ballot box, for obvious UX reasons. (Never mind that computerized results might actually be easier to forge than paper ballots).
Regardless of what is “acceptable” it is a fact that widespread voter fraud using the mechanisms proposed would be detectable.
We’ve had voting for centuries, and done it without ID requirements.
Not sure how ID requirements would work in the several states that have done all-mail-in ballots for decades successfully.
It's not quite the same. If you go in person, you fill out a piece of paper and sign it. You turn in that paper to get your ballot, and they compare the signature. But, if the poll worker says that your signature doesn't match, you have the opportunity to verify yourself with ID, etc. And there is supposed to be Democrat and Republican election judges present to agree and consent to giving you a ballot.
If you vote by mail and there is an issue, you have no opportunity to resolve any problems.
Illinois 10 ILCS 5/19-8 Voters are notified by mail of rejected ballot within two days of rejection. Voters have until 14 days after election to resolve issue with county election authority.
Why are you making up reasons to question the accuracy of voting by mail if you haven’t read the basics or even tried it?
-Generate fictional registered voters at real addresses
-Elections office dutifully sends out ballots
-Rely on actual residents to toss those ballots. Or maybe they vote with them - if it's in the right district, they're likely to vote for the right person anyway
-Send in copies of their mail-in ballots come election time
This would work if you keep the numbers low. And the numbers of dead/moved voters would help camouflage it.
You could use a SSN from a person residing in another state. Or, according to this form: https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/Feder..., "If you do not have a current and valid driver license or non‑operating identification license or a social security number, please write “NONE” on the form. A unique identifying number will be assigned by the Secretary of State."
I'm guessing there isn't much verification, as I've heard of immigrants accidentally being registered to vote because they checked "Yes - I'm a US citizen" on a driver's license form.
You cannot see how they voted, but you can see that they voted.
This is how all political campaigns know which people always vote, which people usually vote, which people sometimes vote, and which people never vote.
For example, in Washington State there is a voter registration database. These are public records that can be requested from the state (https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/vrdb/default.aspx). In them, the date that the person last voted is listed (see "lastVoted" in column 36 https://www.sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/vrdbdatabasefields....).
In addition, King County ballots come with a unique identifying code that you can look up on their website to see if your ballot was received or counted (https://info.kingcounty.gov/kcelections/vote/myvoterinfo.asp...).
Most common is allowing the inspection of the list of absentee requestors, like in North Carolina: The chief election judge of each precinct is required to post one copy of the precinct absentee ballot list “in a conspicuous location in the voting place.”
That said, there are other states that do not allow this, so it's less widespread than I originally thought, and when it is allowed, it's usually either just the absentee requestors, or the list is made available after the election, not during. Sorry.
Identity and location are closely linked.
And being somewhere specific carries a high opportunity cost: it precludes being elsewhere. In-person vs. remote mechanisms (mail, phone, electronic) reflect this.
Except that voting in-person requires traveling to public places where you're seen by others, and likely walk past at least 1 security camera along the way (not to mention pinging every cell-tower while traveling). That's pretty daunting compared to filling out a bunch of voting forms and dropping them in a mailbox.
Oregon has had mail in ballot the default and it's been fine.
At least there is a damn paper trail with the vote by mail. All the swing states were using Diebold machines that were deemed INSECURE by california over a decade ago. And they don't have backup paper trails. We should IMHO be burning those with pitchforks and what not and going mail in voting over that.
We have more issues with people NOT VOTING than actually doing extra ballots.
I wonder if it’s too many CSI style shows or what, but conspiracy theories are getting popular at a startling scale.
http://ballot-access.org/2008/06/01/cnn-re-publicizes-accoun...
We should also look at the lack of voter fraud on any widepsread level before we "solve" the wrong problem and disenfranchise a lot of people.
I suspect, from trying to find evidence on people unable to vote and people voting illegally, that we disenfranchise far more people than we allow errorenous votes.
It's simple to sample who voted, compare to actual people, and conclude there is no where near a voter fraud problem. (Most states let researchers do just this, and decade in and out, no fraud).
"Most commonly, officials did not count ballots because the signature on the ballot did not match the one on file, the ballot arrived too late or the required certificate was not enclosed."
If you set up the system correctly it'll work just fine.
I'd bet a large sum of money that Ohio secretaries of state have been very, very on top of purging the official ones whenever they can.
Where rights are concerned, America typically errs on the side of potentially allowing an illegal action, with the threat of our notorious criminal justice system as the deterrent.
For example, we are willing to allow people to carry (without a license) long guns into grocery stores and restaurants under the presumption that they will act responsibly. We don't mandate speed regulators on vehicles. We let people pay bills with checks. Wall Street polices itself. We allow a lot of conduct that could lead to crimes. We aren't in the pre-crime business in America.
So to reframe: voting is not a lesser right than being able to carry an unlicensed rifle into a restaurant (which is legal in large parts of America). Let people vote by mail, punish them if they commit voter fraud. The burden is on those who seek to restrict voting to show why voting by mail warrants a much higher level of advance scrutiny than other areas of civil regulation.
When they can't be bothered to show up to vote but have 150 days a year to golf, I'm not sure how they can tell someone working two minimum wage jobs that they should stand in line for 6+ hours to have the "priveledge" to vote.
For this to be an effective attack surface, a significant number of people who get someone else's ballot would have to be willing to commit felony fraud to cast one lousy extra vote. On my ballot, it even says that you will go to jail for X number of years if it isn't you. I just don't believe people are doing this en masse and the data we have on voter fraud supports the idea that it's incredibly rare.
I also want to improve our elections, but the scary thing is that we're talking about fraud and not poor ballot UX which is what the article shows is the vast majority of the problem. If I was in charge then I would start there. The reason it's scary is that we have a sitting president who has been claiming against all facts that the last election was rigged and that voter fraud was rampant and that he would have had a landslide victory otherwise. His faction has been spreading misinformation about the current election and polticizing voter fraud (which seems to only happen in the states that don't support him...).
In addition, instead of doing anything about all of this alleged fraud, he has appointed a political postmaster to gut the USPS before a historic mail in election. My ballot application is taking twice as long to go in this year conpared to the last. That is scary! How is any of that OK?
It's pretty clear what is happening here and we're being set up and narratives written so that if Trump loses in November he can blame it on fraud. That is terrifying. It is literally the core of our democracy being attacked. Whatever happens this November is not going to be good and Trump is driving a lot of that.
I don't buy the argument that it disenfranchises voters. Even the poorest in my country are able to vote despite having these voter ID restrictions. India also has some form of voter ID too, and their population is almost triple the American population and substantially poorer.
I can't help but think that there is some kind of malicious intent behind the opposition to voter ID, but it is unfortunately very difficult to prove.
It is not malicious inasmuch they are pushing for it solely because they think they will benefit from this process. If it were the other way around they would oppose it.
If it costs $15 to get an ID and you need an ID to vote, then it costs $15 to vote. Poll taxes are illegal.
Texas being a fine example: https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
The Social Security Card is a free document. They mail it to you without you having to present yourself anywhere. There would be far less objection to voter ID if this type of system was being proposed by proponents of voter ID.
I'd say it's the opposite. Employed middle class working 9-to-5 with 2 kids have less time and means. There's a Hitchen's quote somewhere here...
Voter ID laws have not been show to reduce turn out.
>To add to that, states like Alabama strategically place offices to make it even more difficult for e.g. people who do not have access to a car to get said ID.
That's not a problem with voter ID laws though. This is a red herring.
>The Social Security Card is a free document. They mail it to you without you having to present yourself anywhere.
This is patently false. I just personally went through this. You absolutely have to show up to a SSA office and bring documentation.
"Employed middle class" typically reads as "mobile" and "9-5" frequently reads as "white-collar". Those folks feel time constrained, but they are also very likely to have e.g. PTO/flexible work schedules and access to transportation.
It's worse for (say) unemployed people with no transportation. This is to say nothing of the disabled, bedridden, etc. There are significant numbers of people for whom this is an unnecessary burden.
And again -- this burden is significantly higher than the requirement placed on residents who wish to carry shotguns into restaurants.
> Voter ID laws have not been show to reduce turn out.
Voter ID laws have not been shown to reduce voter fraud. At best, they add cost and bureaucracy without any proven benefit.
> That's not a problem with voter ID laws though. This is a red herring.
A common argument against voter ID laws is that they are of a lineage with historic disenfranchisement mechanisms in the US. Strategically making it difficult to get a newly-required voter ID is a direct descendant of the voter suppression schemes our parents fought against. It's absolutely relevant to bring in recent history.
> This is patently false. I just personally went through this. You absolutely have to show up to a SSA office and bring documentation.
Did you lose your card, or need a replacement in a hurry? For decades, newborns have been able to be issued cards without anyone showing up at an SSA office. (Yes, I have personally done this for an infant. I can confirm that you fill out a form and they mail you a card, just like you'd expect.) SSA also has a site where residents of many states can request a replacement card online if they have state ID: https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/replacement-card.html.
[Edit: The SSA forms indicate that even replacements for adult citizens can be done via mail. It would be fair for you to mention that you had an atypical situation that required you to go in to get a card, but that this is not required.]
If voter ID proponents start advocating for Social Security cards or other 100% free-by-mail IDs as voter documents, a lot of the opposition would go away. But then, so would the perceived partisan benefit, so that's not in the cards.
Not really, no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class
"In 2005, sociologists William Thompson and Joseph Hickey estimate an income range of roughly $35,000 to $75,000 for the lower middle class and $100,000 or more for the upper middle class."
That encompasses the likes of 9-to-5ers, licensed electricians, oil field workers, etc.
>It's worse for (say) unemployed people with no transportation. This is to say nothing of the disabled, bedridden, etc. There are significant numbers of people for whom this is an unnecessary burden.
It's probably even easier. With unemployment benefits, additional stimulus, and lots of time on their hands, it's a perfect time to get their voter ID. Disabled and bedridden were equally disadvantaged under prior systems; this is a red herring.
>And again -- this burden is significantly higher than the requirement placed on residents who wish to carry shotguns into restaurants.
Categorically wrong. You need a photo ID to purchase a firearm, and some states require a license to carry long guns. Other states outright ban open carry of long guns.
>Voter ID laws have not been shown to reduce voter fraud. At best, they add cost and bureaucracy without any proven benefit.
Voter ID laws have been shown to reduce and/or prevent certain types of voter fraud, though indeed voter fraud is rare. At best, they prevent voter fraud, speed up the actual voting process at poll sites, reduce certain types of errors, etc.
>A common argument against voter ID laws is that they are of a lineage with historic disenfranchisement mechanisms in the US.
It's a common argument, but it's more of a conspiracy theory without any hard numbers to back it up.
>Strategically making it difficult to get a newly-required voter ID is a direct descendant of the voter suppression schemes our parents fought against. It's absolutely relevant to bring in recent history.
It's not difficult, nor do voter ID laws suppress voter turn out. Unproven conspiracy theories have nothing to do with recent history.
>Did you lose your card, or need a replacement in a hurry?
I needed to change my name, which most married females do. Nonetheless, if you lose your voter ID card and you don't have to make a change, you can similarly get a replacement without showing up to an office. This makes your entire point moot.
>For decades, newborns have been able to be issued cards without anyone showing up at an SSA office. (Yes, I have personally done this for an infant. I can confirm that you fill out a form and they mail you a card, just like you'd expect.) SSA also has a site where residents of many states can request a replacement card online if they have state ID: https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/replacement-card.html.
That website specifically outlines that you need a "driver's license or a state-issued identification card from one of the many participating states.", so, again, that absolutely negates your point.
>[Edit: The SSA forms indicate that even replacements for adult citizens can be done via mail. It would be fair for you to mention that you had an atypical situation that required you to go in to get a card, but that this is not required.]
Changing your name is not an atypical situation. About 80% of married females end up changing their name. Also, the SSA form literally outlines that you need a state issued ID... like a driver's license that you can use for voting!
>If voter ID proponents start advocating for Social Security cards or other 100% free-by-mail IDs as voter documents, a lot of the opposition would go away.
As I posted above, voter ID proponents are almost universally for 100% free IDs as voter documents, Texas being a fine example: https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
The opposition is still there though.
>But then, so would the perceived partisan benefit, so that's not in the cards.
There is no effect on voter turn out, nor is there a partisan benefit. One of the supposedly most "at risk" groups to be suppressed by voter ID laws are the elderly. They overwhelmingly vote Republican.
People keep buying into this nonsensical argument about voter id suppressing poor people, minorities etc but all they do is patronize and virtue signal. Why don't you admit the real reason - that Democrats won't be able to cheat if there were voter ID? Just like now they are trying to even remove signature verification from the mail in votes. It's all for cheating to gain as much power while calling the other side names. It's so obvious but people keep lying.
| if it were the other way around they would oppose it.
?
If the US wants to remain an actual representative democracy/republic [0] we have to treat attempts at keeping voters out of the polls as the threat they are. These voter ID law pushes never come with a commensurate program to find, ID, and register groups without IDs and I think that gives the game away even before the emails came out explicitly saying these were targeted attacks at legitimate voters.
[0] Just heading off the pedantic "ThEy'Re NoT a DeMoCrAcY" crowd
When the US implements voting licenses, they shut down DMVs and make people buy in to their right to vote.
If you think the Republicans are pushing for a national ID and the Democrats are blocking them, you also don't understand the US political parties.
Seems like you aren't in the US so maybe you don't know the history. Basically the US has a very long history of white supremacists protecting their own power and wealth at the expense of non-white people through disenfranchisement. This continues today. I'm arguing from the point of view that this is bad and should not be a basis for policy.
It's not that it's impossible for some practical reason, the problem is that the republican party (which still holds a huge amount of power at the federal, state, and local level even when they don't hold the presidency) actively wants to deprive people of their voting privilege because they suspect those people might decide to vote against them.
In America, when voting license legislation is passed, the government shutdown DMVs making it difficult and expensive to get a voting license.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
Meanwhile Republicans are very into requiring ID to vote, and a free Federal ID is a great way to allow for that while also solving a bunch of other problems that amount to a bunch of extra work, risk, and stress for normal people, but there's no way they'll join the (AFAIK) minority of Democrats supporting it to get it through, because they like ID to vote but hate, like, good, efficient ID systems, at the same time.
Opposition's mostly fear of government misuse, with overlap with a minority of people really certain it's a sign of the end times and marks us as servants of the Devil or something (I guess it's not when it's in other countries, or maybe those people are all servants of the Devil now, IDK). Democrats fear Republicans will use it to target minorities or set up rules effectively non-personing parts of the citizenry by denying them IDs, after they're (the IDs) made super-important. Republicans are afraid they'll be used to round up guns or track militia members or something. Basically a bunch of people on both sides are afraid of it, so it's a dead issue.
Five figures a year for another five figures of risk exposure, and none of it even applies except at about (optimistically) 1/3 of providers in one state—wrong hospital a mile from your house, you're uninsured. Travel out of state and get in a car wreck without getting some kind of travel insurance ahead of time which'll probably also find a way not to pay in the fine print anyway, like you're going to f#cking Colombia, you're uninsured. Ugh. This friggin' country.
(for those outside the US, you can translate "you're uninsured" to "you are definitely going bankrupt if you actually need a hospital for anything. If you're very lucky you'll still manage to get sufficient care before they realize you have no money left. And then if you also lose your job as a result of the health issue it gets really bad but at least you might get government insurance then, after it's too late to save you from permanent poverty.")
[EDIT] oh, and yes, that's about as good as it gets in my state—that's not, like, the worst option, that's ~ every option. Almost every insurance provider has left the individual (i.e. non-employer-provided) market, leaving bottom-feeders who've figured out new ways to deliver nearly-useless coverage while technically complying with the ACA, plus a few "non-compliant" coverage options that, aside from being crap (but at least cheap crap, instead of expensive crap) expose you to tax liabilities, if the Feds ever decide to start enforcing those again.
Knowing hospitals you'd end up with five debts from different companies from one uninsured post-heart-attack stabilization in one room at one ER. This also makes it nearly impossible to actually know you're covered for anything—one of those entities might not "take" your insurance, and now all that money you paid is useless and you're screwed anyway.
Navigating US healthcare feels like performing voodoo magic and tea-leaf-reading with some combination of your physical and financial health on the line, trying to balance it so if something goes wrong both are only badly harmed rather than catastrophically harmed.
[EDIT] on the plus side if you start off poor there's a decent chance the government does cover your health care, though it makes sure to make maintaining that super stressful—it's just that it's all set up so the health care system eventually gets a huge chunk of everyone's money, if they have any, and often all of the money, sooner or later. May not apply to the super rich but otherwise you're either poor and covered, or not-poor-but-not-rich and hoping you get the right roll on the dice so the healthcare system doesn't find a way to take all your money. And it is in all cases incredibly stressful even when you're not sick.
Hint - it's not.
Are there tax liabilities that depend on one's citizenship?
A $40 poll tax that "99.99% of people can afford" is still a poll tax.
And if you can't pay for it, the government give it for free anyway.
Wouldn't that be possible in the US? Most people would happy to spend the (like) $40 to get a drivers license?
> This isn't a difficult problem to solve but it seems like the Democrats are trying to stonewall it any chance they get.
You miss the entire bigger picture when you don't mention that Republicans have been consistently against federal ID laws of any sort, not Democrats. That shows the real motives in play.
I'd love to see required ID for voting and federal ID laws (together, all at once), as would most left leaning people. It'd be chump change to implement in the scheme of the US government. The fact it has not been done for as long as this issue has been talked about (at least a decade now) makes it clear what's actually going on.
You also have to look at the history. To have the stance of pro voter ID laws but anti-federal ID is just a modern day extension of Jim Crow.
So the government could automatically issue every voting age person a passport, and it becomes mandatory to vote.
Doesn't seem too painful to me.
1. Passports requires a picture which the government does not have.
2. The government requires an up to date address to send the passport to which the government does not have.
3. The government needs an up to date list of eligible voters which it does not have.
I'm sure there are more issues but it wouldn't work and would be quite painful.
In the USA this generally disenfranchises minorities, people from lower socioeconomic status, or those for whom English (and navigating complex information in English) is not a primary language.
If the government would MANDATE voter ID but then also gave 4 years for everyone to get one and made it nearly free, then I think much of the opposition would be gone.
I'm not worried that my position is going to change anytime soon.
The context is that certain populations in the US are known to be disenfranchised from getting ID. Here's an example from the Washington Post in 2016: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...
I actually really like the process that Elections Canada uses. They verified that most Canadians have ID (86% have Driver's Licenses). They identified the most common issue (proof of address) and added a mitigating process (mailing Voter Information Cards). And finally, they have a fallback: as a third option, a person's identity can be vouched for by a person who does have ID. https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=med&dir=c76/id... https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=poli/r...
So on the one hand we have a solution to fraud that doesn't happen vs explicit and intentional voter disenfranchisement.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-id/
I'd suggest reading through the ACLU's article on voter ID laws to learn how the disenfranchisement is targeted in practice.
https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
Edit: I'll put two of them into Swedish context.
First, some rural areas in Texas are 170 miles from the nearest location they could apply for an ID. That's about the distance from Stockholm to Karlstad, which is much more difficult to travel without a train infrastructure like Sweden's.
Secondly, the cost of applying for an ID can range from $75-$175, or ~650-1500 krona. I noticed in another thread you mentioned Swedish voter IDs cost 350 crowns. Our voter IDs cost 2-4x as much in absolute terms. Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage, but for reference ours is $7.25/hr ($14,500 pre-tax annually, assuming a full-time 40hr/week job) and our 10th percentile household income is about $14,000 annually (~$122k SEK). So a voter ID can cost a low-income worker about 3 days of pre-tax income, likely 3.5 or 4 post-tax.
Texas being a fine example: https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
There are free options that are easy to aquire. Not sure why there are so many myths about this.
The WaPo article has some glaring falsehoods. Of course in Texas you can vote with your concealed handgun license, it's the hardest one to get.
Politics. And not every place is Texas. Also, because there are precious few examples of voter fraud while there is ample evidence of voter suppression.
India with a 900 million eligible voters in 2019 elections had the biggest turnout - 67%. Aka over 600 million votes were cast and counted. They have strict voter ID laws. Despite having a large disenfranchised population.
This is just a talking point without any basis in facts.
Also, if I am not mistaken, is an ID not mandatory when using public transport?
I lived without an ID for quite some time.
You mean outside of the Schengen area, right? Are you sure that "everybody" does that?
It sure did back in Alabama in 2015: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16767426/... (ctrl-f for "But the stories getting attention were almost all from 2015".)
> Even the poorest in my country are able to vote despite having these voter ID restrictions.
Good for them, but I'm not sure what bearing that has on the poorest in an entirely different country.
There is already significant voter disenfranchisement in the United States. Adding an additional requirement (which likely costs money and time) surely will not reduce disenfranchisement. What do you not buy?
The whole concept of a federal personnummer/identitetskort - in their Swedish incarnations - and any benefits/conveniences offered by that sort of system is ideologically abhorrent to a (large?) portion of the US population.
[0] As in we have emails where they talk about specifically eliminating Sunday as an early voting day because it's heavily black and disproportionately Democratic.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-id/
In Sweden, are there limited protections for worked so that many poor workers won't have any paid days off they can use for such a trip, so it will cost them a day or two of pay to get their ID, and perhaps their job if their boss doesn't approve of them taking time off from work?
In Sweden, are the politicians who instituted the voter ID policies the same politicians that have drastically reduced the number of polling places per capita in minority neighborhoods so that actually voting there can require hours of standing in line (and missing work if your employer doesn't give you a paid day off to vote), while not cutting or even increasing polling places per capita in white neighborhoods so that it is a breeze for whites to quickly and easily vote?
Have they cut back early voting programs that opened the polling places during the weekend before election day, so people could vote on their days off?
If the answer to all of the above is "no", then what you see in Sweden is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to understanding voting in the US.
The fact is that the people enacting voter ID laws in the United States (1) are generally the same people who have been working hard to limit minority voting, (2) cannot demonstrate that it solves any actual problem, (3) try to make it hard for poor and minorities to get the ID that they pick for their system while making it easy for white people.
That's why there is plenty of opposition to voter ID--the politicians pushing for it are not acting in good faith. If someone proposed a voter ID system in good faith--one in which it was free to get ID, could be obtained quickly and without the need for a lot of travel, and was easy for minorities to get as for white people, there would mostly only be objections from those who oppose national ID system in general.
I've never really come across this phrase in UK politics. If it was to come up, I'm certain it would be met with extreme outrage. Why is it just accepted in the US?!
I've not seen "extreme outrage" to any of these examples:
"It could lead to a repeat on the mainland of the Northern Ireland experience where the introduction of individual registration led to a 10% drop in registrations and many eligible voters effectively being disenfranchised."[0]
"The government trialled voter ID in some local authorities during the 2018 and 2019 local elections. It was disturbing to see ministers describe it as a “success”: we know that hundreds of people were denied a vote for not having ID. In 2019, according to official figures, more than 700 people were turned away from polling stations across just 10 council areas."[1]
"A large software company whose shareholders include Brexiter and former Conservative Cabinet minister Peter Lilley has been given a lucrative contract by the Cabinet Office without competitive tendering to revamp the management of the electoral register in extraordinary circumstances."[2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/sep/15/new-voter-r...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/queens-speech-voter-id-...
[2] https://bylinetimes.com/2020/01/07/why-did-cabinet-office-ru...
https://www.nps.gov/articles/anti-suffragism-in-the-united-s...
It's been a continuous process since the country's founding to enfranchise all citizens with the right to vote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...
Even you can get a new passport or ID at Amsterdam airport and some municipalities while living abroad. Even here in the UK there is an evening opening hours to get your ID (5-7 pm) or open on Saturday morning.
Personally, this sounds the US government is trying to make it unreasonable hard to vote.
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/312055-feds-closin...
The disenfranchisement argument is one of the worst-sourced claims floating around the public sphere. And it's transparently bogus. Photo IDs are essentially mandatory for participation in civic life in the US. Everyone has them.
* https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/08/voter-id-laws-wh...
* https://www.npr.org/2012/01/28/146006217/why-new-photo-id-la...
* https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-har...
Voting is enshrined in the constitution as a fundamental right. Not everyone can get a photo ID, especially when the state doesn't want them to.
That's such an asinine and patronizing comment. People need to stop treating us minorities as some stupid and incapable people. Every single adult is capable of getting a photo ID - if they can be bothered to vote, they can be bothered to spend a few minutes getting a photo ID.
The real reason people oppose voter ID is because democrats won't be able to cheat. Voting is enshrined in the constitution as a fundamental right but cheating is not enshrined.
Also interesting how all 3 sources you linked are from radical left to left leaning sources.
Some people may genuinely care about voter suppression, whether you think it's a non-issue or not. I wouldn't be so quick to assume malice.
1) about 1/2 of them are due to plain ol' User Error (not that there isn't room to improve the "UI" so that happens less) like not signing, not including required parts, simply leaving the ballot out of the envelope entirely(!), and so on,
2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match" (most of those are probably false negatives and should have counted, I'd bet, but given other issues I wouldn't be surprised if people in the same household accidentally signing one another's ballots or something else silly like that is some measurable part of the problem) and,
3) 1/4 are other :-/
[EDIT] looks like most of the "other" category is probably a couple towns in one county having a vote so screwed-up that 3,200 ballots were rejected en masse. That's about 20% of the rejected ballots, or about 2% of the total vote, right there.
Some / all of those could've been intentional no-votes, just like leaving your ballot blank would be in an in-person vote.
Is that good? Bad? At the very least, if there are fraud attempts, it's good that they're being caught?
It's just lame that at least 5% of ballots, and probably more, are being rejected due to ballot UX issues or a broken verification process.
Anyone know what the rejection rate for in-person paper ballots is, in the US, typically? It's hard to judge how much worse this is at successful voting than in-person with paper. My gut tells me increased participation would dwarf even a hard 10% rejection rate, assuming no improvement could be made, and if the in-person rejection rate's not near-zero then it's really a big win, but maybe not.
Meanwhile stories like this are making me really nervous about the public perception of November's vote, regardless how well they're actually run.
I've always felt that matching signatures was a terrible way of authenticating voters. The person doing the matching is not a trained handwriting expert. Also, like many people, I have subpar handwriting and I highly doubt my signature today looks anything like what it did when I first registered to vote 25+ years ago.
Plus, it has a way of working out that people with names like Lakisha or Jamal might find themselves stuggling to match their signatures more than people with names like Chris or Alice.
If this was a factor in allowing someone to vote, I'd never be allowed. The only time i use cursive is the once or twice a year I have to sign something (new card, paperwork, etc) so my signature never looks the same as other signatures.
How does this work afterwards? Are the voters notified? Seems like bad design to silently drop votes just because some guy arbitrarily decided your signature "didn't match".
Definitely this. I live in NJ and found the mail-in ballot instructions to be somewhat confusing: multiple layers of folding and envelopes, a perforated piece which you were explicitly NOT supposed to detach, an additional section that that only applied if you were mailing it on behalf of another person, etc.
Pretty sure I filled it out correctly, but I mean, I had to re-read the instructions three times and I'm a former FAANG engineer.
Every time I have to sign something that might be verified against a signature record I get nervous and I bet my signature reflects it.
When making a purchase, you can do a different signature each time. You can doodle, draw a straight line, write your name, mix it up, whatever. The only value of the signature is that if you don't recall making a purchase, they can send it to you and it can help trigger your memory or make you trust whether or not the purchase was actually you. So it's not for them to use in the verification process. It's for us to help trigger our memories.
When I was living in the UK (which wisely uses a more sensible PIN system instead of signatures) I was shocked the first time someone asked to see the back of my card. I don't think it's ever happened to me in the US. Culturally we've collectively decided to ignore the whole "signature verification" thing, but when using your card abroad you sometimes are reminded that it's supposed to happen in theory.
The fact that you can put any doodle you want in there is because the vendors have decided it's cheaper to absorb the fraud than to check the signatures.
So clearly, that's not how the signature is actually used. What matters is how it's actually used, which is to help prevent good faith actors from accidentally reporting purchases as fraudulent. That's a valid use, but noteworthy.
I still don't understand how voting in person is supposed to be any more problematic than e.g. buying groceries in person. Wear a mask, stand six feet apart etc., what's the problem?
Grocery stores don't have checkout lines that are hours long where you are standing around near the same group of strangers for an extended time.
Worse, the states with the longest, slowest voting lines also tend to be the states with less stringent mask requirements, less diligent enforcement of the requirements they do have, and more people who ignore the requirements.
So you are suggesting that the major political parties would sanction, even informally, having people go out to houses to illegally harvest ballots, or throw out ballots they don't agree with? To get one nearly worthless vote at a time, with a very possible multi-year prison sentence for each. That is utterly ridiculous.
There have been irregularities as a result.
I can't imagine many votes have been discarded, that sounds more like a conspiracy theory. It wouldn't take long to get caught, since voters can easily verify their own vote was recorded.
The ballot goes into an envelope. You sign the envelope. That envelope goes into a regular postal envelope. When the ballot is received, the signature on the inner envelope is compared to the signature on file, and, if accepted, the envelope is opened and the ballot is transferred to a box to be counted.
Then the ballot is placed in the same hoppers that the in person votes are put in and they are commingled.
The outermost envelope is verified and opened, and the innermost envelope is collected with all of the others in a different area for counting.
My town has a bunch of dropboxes which are picked up by election volunteers if you still don't trust the mail. An election volunteer could "lose" a box of ballots but that seems like it would be pretty easily detectable as well.
Since mail tampering is a federal crime maybe Trump could pledge to pardon every mail carrier who throws away ballots from likely Biden voters. Seems pretty unlikely, but I don't know how to counter that.
To do the correlation in person you would have to do it in the polling place, on election day, in front of election monitors and the voter, during the 30 seconds between when the person fills out their ballot and when they drop it into the box.
If your name is on the envelope, now it can be done anywhere between your mailbox and the polling place during the period of days or weeks between when you put it in your mailbox and when it gets counted. Wouldn't we then need independent election monitors guarding the incoming mailboxes 24/7 for several weeks?
For reference, here is how it works in Washington state: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx
Yes, the mailman could commit a federal crime and figure out how you voted for. So if you're worried about that, drop the envelope in the actual ballot box.
The mailman sees even more. If you live in a condo and drive a Prius with a "Coexist" sticker, you probably voted one way. If you live in a single-family home with a big yard and you drive a pickup with a "Blue lives matter" license plate holder, you probably voted the other way.
Your party affiliation is already public record, no need to attempt to infer your preference from your name or address.
This process keeps your vote anonymous.
Also, I'm under the impression that signature verification isn't a very sturdy science. I'm curious what the false positive/false negative rates are and what variables are likely to affect them.
There's 2 weeks to early vote for me so I'll just vote in that period.
These are mistakes that are caught and resolved with in person voting.
I'm not in the camp that thinks mail in voting is impossible but these are real problems that need to be solved before November. For our country this is an unprecedented election, it deserves more respect than being explained away by partisan politics.
https://www.myoregon.gov/2020/06/19/vote-by-mail-works-espec...
There is a difference between a system that has been running for years and evolved to work, and one that is put together in an emergency. Some things of note.
1) They check signatures and the election workers have training in forensic handwriting analysis.
2) They use unique barcodes to prevent duplicates
3) They have a way to make sure your ballot was received and counted.
I bet that for a lot of states ramping up mail in voting, they are missing one or more of the above.
I don't really understand this argument. You list some things that we should do to have a secure vote-by-mail election, but you seem to be phrasing your argument as if it's an argument against vote-by-mail elections.
It's crazy to me that things like temperature checks aren't more common, it's a relatively easy way to get control and open up more safely, but then the US isn't great at collective action. We're individualistic and contrarian to a fault.
The worst part about paper ballots (mail-in, ink, or hanging chads) is that the intent must be re-interpreted by someone other than the voter at a time after it's too late for the voter to fix any issues.
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/84000-mail-in-ballots-disquali...
Big American tech companies know when you’re pregnant before you do, but the government doesn’t know who lives in a specific house. So weird.
This seems to me a feature, not a bug.
I wonder if there's a solution in there though... maybe landlords should have to report tenants on their federal taxes or something?
We need to move to a unique ID per person with password, that you can link to email(s), phone(s) or both. And then we can have on-line voting.
It’s just exhausting. Just have an account with the government, fill out your ballot, hit submit, post the votes publicly that are counted and let people find their ballot by some ID number if they want and call it a day.
I’m willing to bet that more people than not are more than willing to use this system.
And if your boss or landlord or spouse or cult leader hints that you should show them you voted the correct way, what do you do?
I admit that's not a perfect system, but it might skew the outcome of the vote less than a system where governors can selectively reduce the number of polling locations, and staff working at them, to produce hour-long lines of people risking catching a potentially deadly disease from each other.
For all the benefits it would bring, that's a silly reason to throw it all away.
How do you decide which elections a person is eligible to vote in? There are district, city, county, state-level polls and your residency determines which elections you're eligible to vote in
It does require some sort of system to register citizens of course. But almost all our public IT does that and we’ve had it since before IT became a thing. Which is easier in a small country, but there is no reason it couldn’t scale.
There are two possible kinds of voter fraud (both extremely rare), "retail fraud" (i.e. individual voters) and "wholesale fraud" (i.e. bulk fraud). Voter ID laws mostly "fix" a non-existent problem of individual false votes with the express intent of discouraging votes. The real problem you want to fix is "wholesale fraud" which means securing the whole system from voting machines (which should be open-source and paper-audited) to how votes are tallied. Think about it. If you were going to steal votes would you go to all the trouble to forge or hijack individual votes or would you bribe someone to flip a couple of digits at a county office?
Of course, a trustworthy system includes how mail-in votes are tracked and verified but that is a well-understood problem working well for thousands and thousands of absentees, military personnel and whole states full of people who have voted that way regularly for decades.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/texas-pollin...
- 704,016 voting cards sent out (2% of registered voters)
- 614,662 cards received back (87%)
- 593,205 cards valid (84% of sent / 96% of returned)
I thought that 10% is a pretty high number (and obviously should be worked on), but for context, 4% seems to be a "normal under covid" number if the rules are pretty simple (2 envelope layers + signed slip).
What we don't have for comparison a similar breakdown for elections in physical polling places. Politicians engage in all sorts of squabbling and shenanigans every election in attempts to knock votes off of opponent's tallies. I'm sure the difference between votes cast and votes counted is pretty substantial in any election.
If the rates are similar then this is not much of a headline at all.
Looks like someone sold some hand writing similarity software in the name of fraud detection. Also, for the children!
/Comments my own, not my employers.
Social distancing over time instead of space.
However, it’s time to admit that vote-by-mail has huge problems and it’s more prone to fraud.
I said, taking full responsibility for it, that vote-by-mail is more prone to fraud.
Why should I leave my political views at the door? Is because they don’t align with yours?
>vote-by-mail is more prone to fraud.
That is simply not supported by any evidence.
Never tried to do so, you must be mistaken.
> That is simply not supported by evidence.
It is.