What Americans lost when we abandoned the secret ballot
galioninquirer.com
galioninquirer.com
You have to have a id to drive a car. You have to have an id to buy alcohol. Is it such a crime to ask for id when you vote?
https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/
The info here seems to contradicts your statements, so if you don’t agree, don’t yell at me, talk to the site.
And yet... how does a population convince itself that elections are conducted fairly?
Any change proposed in good faith is distorted by anyone who needs things to stay the way they are. Fear, uncertainty, doubt.
And people can vote as many times as they want, in as many districts as the like?
All of these are current state controlled processes which restrict the population from voting.
Is the argument that if country X does Y then Y isn't bad for the US?
Belgium requires people carry id with them all the time. Does that mean the US should be like Belgium and require everyone carry id?
Sweden requires either an id or someone with an id who can vouch for you, which is less strict than some of the US states.
Most of those countries have a national id system. Why wouldn't that be a prerequisite for the US?
Ultimately I am against anything requiring IDs, but so long as I need to show my ID and vaccine card to get seated at a restaurant in SF, it doesn't seem outlandish to me at all that elections should require IDs.
Regarding national IDs, I'm not sure what you think this would look like but frankly that is the whole point of the REAL ID initiative which began in the wake of the Patriot Act reauthorization in 2005. Perhaps you have objections in light of the changes brought on by the REAL ID Modernization Act wherein the SSN requirements were significantly defanged, but IMO the point still remains.
That doesn't explain how readthenotes1's comment is relevant.
The amount of fraud in mail-in-voting is astoundingly low.
Mandatory voter id doesn't seem to provide any benefits except for calming an artificial fear that was hyped just to pass mandatory id laws.
I don't know why you say "focus on race" when the history shows that voter id requirements are there to elect Republicans, of which race is one correlated factor.
Why can a gun license be used as valid id, but a state college id cannot? College students tend to vote for Democrats. Gun owners tend to vote Republican.
Why do DMV offices (where you get ids) tend to close down in poor areas when there are cutbacks? Poor people tend to vote for Democrats.
Now, if we really do look to other countries, we can ask why the DMV is in charge of issuing id. In at least some of those other countries, it is the police which are in charge of ids.
So if we follow readthenotes1's suggestion see what other countries do, my point is that perhaps doing that correctly requires certain prerequisites that don't exist in the US.
> so long as I need to show my ID and vaccine card to get seated at a restaurant in SF
I didn't realize that getting seated at a restaurant was a constitutional right.
That's quite the conspiracy theory. Here's a more reasonable explanation: the identity verification that you go through to get a college ID is way more lax than it is to get a gun license or basically any other government-issued ID.
Ahh, I see you've never had a transit id then. Here's the Transit Discount Photo ID Application for Roseville, CA - https://roseville.ca.us/government/departments/public_works/... . Only need a city utilities statement for that one.
That gotcha answer aside ... since the existing amount of in-person voting fraud is something like a few dozen cases per decade - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_impersonation_(United_St... - what justifies the need for higher strictness than a college id? Or even a city transit id?
Or, you know, no id it all.
The number of cases we've caught might be low, but when your safeguards are so lax that it's easy to get away with fraud without a trace, that doesn't mean much.
After the 2020 election people searched high and low to dreg up examples, finding only a paltry few.
If it's so lax, how would you go about doing it?
There's places in the US where you need to bring an ID and your vaccine card everywhere. If we're not willing to require ID to vote, then we should definitely ban that.
> Most of those countries have a national id system. Why wouldn't that be a prerequisite for the US?
Why aren't you counting any of passport books, passport cards, or REAL ID-compliant IDs (which are finally available nationwide) as national IDs?
Showing id to vote therefore won't improve things in any meaningful way. While the negatives are easy -- what do you do if you lost your wallet the day before voting day and have no other accepted form of id?
If there are no benefits, why have it at all?
By comparison, from what I read, lots of people cheat the vaccine card system, so an id that helps verify that the vaccine card is indeed for the person presenting the card. The benefits are supposed to be the reduction of the infection rate, the ability to have an alternative to having business shut down either by order, or because of consumer reluctance.
Maybe you disagree with the conclusion of that cost-benefit analysis, but it's far more substantial than the benefits of having voter id.
> Why aren't you counting any of passport books, passport cards, or REAL ID-compliant IDs (which are finally available nationwide) as national IDs
Because it's a de facto, ad hoc, and incomplete system that isn't comparable to at least some of those countries.
In some of those countries which require voter id, you can get a valid id from your local police station, or from your bank, or the tax office. While the US ones seems to be centered around a much smaller number of DMV offices.
In Belgium, everyone is supposed to have an id. In the US, something like 9% of the population doesn't have an id which would be acceptable for voting. (Eg, don't drive because of age, illness, poverty, or live in a place with good mass transit.)
As a reminder, double voting (voting in more than one district) is also a form of voter fraud. Though, oddly, it isn't always illegal! - https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/double... . Even when illegal, it is NOT solved by presenting photo id. One solution that does solve it is to set up a nation-wide registry of where people live, with the legal requirement that if you move you inform the authorities. That's what some of these countries do, as part of their national ID system. This also updates your voting location.
And those are reasons why the US system isn't easily comparable to an actual national ID system, as well as helping highlight how the emphasis on in-person impersonation voter fraud over other forms of voter fraud is artificial.
(As a reminder, four people from The Villages, Sumpter Counter, FL have been arrested for suspicion of casting multiple ballots in the 2020 selection - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/resident-of-the-village... - so it's probably more common than in-person impersonation. ... but I'm having a tough time tracking down those numbers!)
In any case, these sorts of voter fraud are paltry compared to wholesale gerrymandering practices.
Someone can be registered to vote in multiple precincts. This is pretty common, as when someone moves between two states and doesn't notify the old state that they are no longer a resident for voting purposes.
This is not illegal. While voting some place where you are not legally allowed to vote is illegal.
2) "ID" is broader than "state-issued photo id"
When I registered to vote, I had to present proof that I was a resident. There was a list of options, like showing utility bill, which sufficed.
It's a lot of work to set up a fake rental agreement, fake power bill, fake whatever, and show up in-person to register. How much more does a fake id cost?
Remember, the fake id can be reused. I could travel around to 50 precincts and register my pseudonym in each one.
3) The list of registered voters is public
This gives a way to check for false registrations. And people have done these checks, when investigating in-person impersonation voter fraud.
4) You know what is more effective at stopping this sort of fraud? A nation-wide registry of where people live, with the legal obligation to update it when you move.
This seems far more effective at reducing fraud than showing id. With additional benefits, like only needing to update your address once, for all government services.
Yet people focus on requiring people to show id, with its minuscule benefits and clear negatives.
Why is that?
What if your car broke down on the way to the polling place, and by the time you got alternate transportation they were closed? What if you send in your mail-in ballot but it gets lost in the mail? What if you suddenly end up hospitalized on voting day?
> from what I read, lots of people cheat the vaccine card system
Lots of people get caught cheating the vaccine card system. When you have stricter security measures, you catch more of the people who break the rules.
You do realize that's one of the reasons why the two major political parties set up call lines where you can get a ride to the polling station, right?
Because that scenario happens.
Doesn't happen to me - my polling station is within walking distance.
> Lots of people get caught
Where is the evidence that the existing non-state-issued-photo-id system is insufficiently strict?
How much stricter does the system need to be? Should we also check blood types? Should we also have genetic testing?
As I've pointed out, double voting appears more common than the types of fraud that can be detected with an id check.
Why aren't people pushing for a nation-wide registry of where each person lives, with a legal obligation to keep it up to date, would reduce more fraud?
That's what some other countries do.
Voter fraud is a serious crime, and unlike other similar crimes (like a fake credit application), the perpetrator doesn’t stand to make $$$$ for each act. They need to commit the crime at scale to change the result.
If this form of fraud were happening en masse, surely there’d be tons of evidence of it?
If campaign workers were going around trying to bribe people to vote, some of the people they are trying to bribe might unexpectedly be supporters of the other candidate, and would have a strong incentive to collect evidence of the bribery attempt and report it. It would make for some very interesting hidden camera videos and would be explosive news in the modern political environment.
I’m not saying it never happens, but rather that it’s easy enough to discover that people who do it have a decent change of getting caught. That constraints how widespread the issue can be.
And political parties have access to records of who voted. If bunches of dead people were voting, someone would have both the information and the incentive to make hay about the readily available concrete proof, most notably, political parties pushing voter ID requirements. Since they aren't doing that, it's pretty clear that isn't happening.
It's not a crime, but the US government has proven that it can't be trusted not to be virulently racist when the opportunity to disenfranchise minority voters presents itself, particularly at the state level. ID requirements for voting are the equivalent of tempting a drunk with a shot of whiskey.
The phrase "is possible" is so wishy-washy. It allows all sorts of movie plot scenarios which might have only 1-in-a-trillon odds.
We've long experience with vote-by-mail. Including 20+ years of all-postal voting in Oregon.
It's clear there is a very low incidence of fraud. We know this because there's a handful of cases where, say, one spouse filled out the ballot for a dead spouse. These can be detected by, for example, checking signatures.
There is also a very low incident of fraud in in-person voting, as when someone own two homes and votes in two districts. So it's not like in-person-only voting is free of fraud.
In neither case is the fraud significant - far less than Bush's FL lead of 537 votes over Gore in the 2000 election.
Can we make up examples of how fraud might occur? Yes! The sergeant of overseas-deployed National Guard troops may require the soldiers to vote a certain way, and be able to verify the ballots before mailing them in.
Now that you know fraud is possible that way, do you want to prevent overseas soldiers from voting?
> any fraud would be immediately and obviously apparent.
Open voting leads to a different type of fraud. "I don't rent to people who voted for X". "Anyone who doesn't vote for Y is fired."
Just look at the history of the open ballot in American history to see how easy it is to corrupt. From A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Australian_B...
] The failure of the law to secure secrecy opened the door to bribery, intimidation, and corruption.
] Money, or “soap,” as it was called, with increasing frequency was used to carry elections after the Civil War.
] It was charged that the bribery of voters in Indiana in 1880 and 1888 was sufficient to determine the result of the election.
] Intimidation was just as rife as bribery
] According to a report of a committee of the Forty-sixth Congress,[94] men were frequently marched or carried to the polls in their employers’ carriages. They were then supplied with ballots, and frequently compelled to hold their hands up with their ballots in them so they could easily be watched until the ballots were dropped into the box. Many labor men were afraid to vote and remained away from the polls. Others who voted against their employers’ wishes frequently lost their jobs. If the employee lived in a factory town, he probably lived in a tenement owned by the company, and possibly his wife and children worked in the mill. If he voted against the wishes of the mill-owners, he and his family were thrown out of the mill, out of the tenement, and out of the means of earning a livelihood
The fraud was indeed so 'obviously apparent' that it "fill[ed] thoughtful citizens with disgust and anxiety. Many electors, aware that the corrupt element was large enough to be able to turn the election, held aloof altogether."
Surely that's far worse than even nation-wide all-postal voting.
No, because we don't know how much fraud people got away with.
So either everybody is really, really good at fraud, or the numbers are really, really tiny.
False dichotomy. The system is set up such that it's comically easy to commit fraud and incredibly difficult to detect it. Imagine a take-home multiple choice math test that says no calculators are allowed. Would you believe that almost nobody used a calculator on it just because almost nobody got caught doing so? Of course not, because you don't have to be really, really good at cheating to get away with it on a test set up like that.
How would showing id fix the problem?
So I'm not going to get sucked into it. If you have a point to make, make it on the original question, not on one you've tuned to give you the answer that you want.
How is this fraud supposed to occur?
Is the ballot to citizen A intercepted, filled-in, signed with a reasonable facsimile of A's signature, and returned?
Without A asking noticing the ballot never came, so asking for a second ballot? Do you think receiving multiple ballots purporting to be from A would go unnoticed by the elections office?
And the list of who voted is in the public record, so if A didn't vote, and finds that there was a vote in A's name in the last election - or if someone contacts A to double-checks if A actually did vote - then that will stand out too.
Must have been ninjas. Only ninjas are that good.
This is news to me, and I'm having a hard time searching for information about it. Can you link me to where this record is?
> so if A didn't vote, and finds that there was a vote in A's name in the last election - or if someone contacts A to double-checks if A actually did vote - then that will stand out too.
Has there ever been an election at any level that you didn't vote in despite being eligible to? Did you check this public record to make sure nobody voted as you? Has anyone ever contacted you to ask if you actually voted in an election that you did vote in? These things are all possible, sure, but they're rare enough in practice that there's plenty of gaps for fraud to slip through.
It's public record, but it's usually available on request with agreements as to legitimate use. The exact contents differ by state, and the application may be through the state or county election office. There is a rough summary here: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/access... but it's not entirely accurate (e.g., it doesn’t indicate vote history—whether, not how, a voter voted in particular past elections—is available in CA, but it definitely is. e.g., the Sacramento County request form has a box to check to include it https://elections.saccounty.net/Documents/Application%20to%2...
How can you be so sure that the current system is so insecure when you don't know how the current system works and what safeguards are in place?
https://www.votebrevard.gov/Statistics-and-Data/Request-Vote...
] Voter registration information is public record in Florida with a few exceptions. Information such as your social security number, driver’s license number, Florida ID number, signature, where a voter registered to vote, and where a voter updated a registration cannot be released or disclosed to the public. Other information such as your name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, and when you voted is public information.
"Looking Up Your Voting Record Is as Easy as Opening an App" - https://news.yahoo.com/want-look-voting-record-options-03222...
] If you're interested in looking up your voting record, there are a few ways of doing so online. Your voting record contains your voter registration information and voting history as maintained by your state, and is publicly available.
Download NC data from the state, at https://www.ncsbe.gov/results-data/voter-history-data
] Current Voter History Data / What’s included? Files contain a data entry for each election in which a voter participated in the past 10 years. Voter registration number, NCID, party affiliation, county, and precinct, as well as voting method (e.g., in-person on Election Day, absentee by mail) are included.
The details of what you can get, and how public things are, depends on where you are. What state do you live in?
> Did you check this public record to make sure nobody voted as you?
You know that's not the way statistics work, right?
It's not "I didn't vote and therefore X could impersonate me."
It's "X is going to impersonate me but doesn't know if I'm going to vote."
It takes only a few mistakes for X to be detected.
And it requires more than a few votes to change any but a few rare close elections.
> Has anyone ever contacted you to ask if you actually voted in an election that you did vote in?
Again, that's not the way statistics works.
I know people have contacted voters to verify they voted because I've read articles about people doing that.
If impersonation fraud is rampant and systemic then it can be identified by a small random sample. Which is unlikely to include any specific person.
If it is rare, then it's unlikely to affect any election. While still risking legal consequences if caught.
And indeed, it's rare, and people are indeed caught.
I see no reason why country with long tradition in subverting democracy around the planet wouldn't engage with this type of activity locally. After all it is clear that they have no respect for democracy elsewhere so why at home where profits are even greater.
That sort of fraud isn't unique to mail-in voting.
In 2016, several states, including the largest, had either universal mail-in-voting or on-demand permanent-without-special-excuse absentee status, and that number had gone up for 2020 even before the response to COVID prompted some temporary and other permanent changes.
So, what exactly do you mean by “restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016”?
There's always a bureaucratic apparatus involved in processing an election and mail voting doesn't strike me as particularly exceptional. Why does the author trust that the French civil service is non-partisan enough?
Here in Germany mail voting works exactly like described, outer ballot verifies identity, inner ballot contains the vote. There are always, I believe nine people required to be present when the envelops are separated to check on each other. To believe there is a systemic, effort across countless of voting regions with different demographics seems kind of conspiratorial.
So, no, this should not have been flagged!
Actually there's editor's note in the end linking to the original RealClearPolitics article. Also the article I submitted says that it was first there, but less visibly and without link.
There seems to be no way to change the url in retrospect.