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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/noncitizen-voting-us...

> There is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas are voting in significant numbers, despite some claims that “millions” of noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. In fact, audits by election officials and numerous studies reflect that voter fraud by noncitizens is extremely rare.

> A [Heritage Foundation database](https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search?combine=citizenshi...) of election fraud cases identified just 23 instances of noncitizen voting between 2003 and 2022.

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It’s great that those organizations say it’s uncommon. But this shouldn’t even be an issue. It doesn’t take many votes to tip a close election. Requiring ID like every other country is the common sense thing to do. And it helps build confidence in the election process without the need for organizations to try and demonstrate that the election was legitimate after the fact.

Common sense isn't saying "oh there's no ID required at the polls? Illegals must be tipping elections", it's recognizing that there are armies of people auditing these elections each cycle. Irregularities are caught and people challenge results in court all the time. In practice, if you tried to commit voter fraud, I think you'd find it very hard to accomplish (especially if you're trying to change the outcome)

Even in your ideal scenario where ID is a hard requirement and nothing should slip through the cracks, you could still introduce doubt somewhere in the chain (e.g. did the poll worker actually check your ID?)

If ID is required, then your whole “Illegals must be tipping elections" argument just goes away. People keep making this debate in the US of “we need ID to prevent election fraud” vs “we can’t have ID required because ID can be hard to obtain”. It’s just silly. If you take a step back and make it easier to get an ID than the whole things resolves itself. The pro-ID people are happy Because only registered voters can vote and the non-ID people are happy because voting is accessible. The real question is, why are they not doing that? Every other country can do it, why not the US? Why do we have to be stuck in this silly debate forever?

And I don’t believe the whole “the mean republicans won’t let us!” narrative. Democrats controlled the executive branch 12 of the last 16 years and control half the states. If they care about voters rights, why haven’t we tried to fix this?

The lawmakers that demand ID for voting also work to reduce access to ID. The most obvious way is just closing facilities that issue IDs, but also through fees and documentation requirements.

> Every other country can do it, why not the US?

American exceptionalism is a real thing, unfortunately. And what I've found is that when confronted with a flaw or aspect of their society that could be improved, Americans tend to work backwards from the problem and try to explain away the problem, while inventing ridiculous hypotheticals for why other countries implementations won't work.

See: this thread and voter ID, any kind of firearm laws, gerrymandering, lack of public transport, etc.

Apart from the fact that you are basically disregarding all of the detail explanations on why the US is in fact different when it comes to voter ID, all of the things you mentioned are primarily decided by states, with relatively federal authority beyond the ability to withhold funding conditional on states adopting certain policies, which is a very crude instrument that is only used in a handful of circumstances like establishing a nationwide minimum drinking age. And what you will find is that there is a tremendous amount of heterogeneity across states in all of those categories.

I don't disagree. My comment has little to do with that.

Let's take the fact that sales tax isn't baked into the price in the US, a common criticism of the US. I understand the sales tax is different per state. Not having the sales tax baked in is an annoyance, and I believe almost everybody would agree having it baked in would be an improvement.

I don't understand why Americans work backwards to try and explain it away. I've genuinely seen comments such as:

"What if the sales tax changes often? Then they have to reprint all the labels" (does this actually happen that often?)

"They have to print different labels for each state" (Many stores already print different labels for regional pricing, or use e-ink)

"It's not that hard to just compute +X%, just get better at math" (It's not hard but what's wrong with transparency and clarity with the price?)

It's that kind of discussion that my comment is referring to.

I'm not sure if you've ever voted, but States without ID requirements (about 15 of them total) don't just let you walk in and cast a ballot anonymously. If you were trying to commit fraud, you'd need to know a combination of things about the person you're pretending to be and sign the poll book or an affidavit[0]. Now try scaling that process up enough to change the outcome... you can't.

Your assumptions about lack of ID = easy fraud is misguided.

> Every other country can do it, why not the US?

Elections are handled by the States themselves and so trying to tackle this on a federal level through the executive or Congress probably wouldn't go over very well considering it'd go against the constitution[1] (although that doesn't seem to be that big of a problem these days)

0: https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-verificat...

1: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S4-C1-2/...

You basically just disregarded the comment you replied to and doubled down on your original idea.

You are saying that the problem would be a non-problem if only we had voter ID was. However the evidence before you (and that includes evidence collected by conservative organizations that generally align with politically motivated voter suppression) is that the problem is effectively already a non-problem, due in part to the many other controls in place around voter registration and vote counting. Meanwhile there is quite a bit of evidence showing that your favorite solution to the non-problem is itself problematic, measurably so in the historical record.

You are of course welcome to continue believing whatever you want to believe. But it's hopefully obvious by now to anyone reading this thread that your beliefs are not aligned with facts.

It's like arguing that Python is bad because it has dynamic types, and if we all just adopted static types in Python then all type errors in Python would go away. Even if that is true, it's a ridiculous position to hold.

If you want voter ID to be a thing, then you need to first establish a nationwide ID system that is equitable in terms of access. Until that exists, voter ID is a bad idea in the USA.

I think I have been convinced by this thread that risks of no-ID voting is fairly low. Certainly not nearly as big of an issue as I thought when I first posted.

I still maintain that this should be a non-issue. ID’s are issued by the state, and they are the entities responsible for voting and voter registration. You don’t need a national database to fix this.

Triage, you work by priority to maximize impact.

Look at the problems in this country

23 instances. 23.

As an analogy, let's say I'm triaging a broken neck, a burn, a gunshot wound, a compound fracture, a stab wound, a broken toe, and a hangnail.

If Voter ID were to be placed somewhere on here, it would be below hangnail.

This is smoke and mirrors nonsense that is using minorities and trans people as a scapegoat and distraction.

How much fucking richer are people getting? Poor people have been convinced by rich people that their problems are the other poor people. It's insane. You can pull this pattern out of every modern fascist government and yet people are lacking on to it like a bunch of suckers. It's embarrassing. We should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.

That's a specious argument because the voter ID problem requires basically zero resources. Just mandate voter ID, problem solved. Practically every other first-world country does, including progressive European countries.

Back to the triage analogy, there is a person with a compound fracture that is losing blood. The gsw needs care. We need pressure on that artery.

We're arguing over the color of the bandaid for the hangnail.

That's why I don't give a fuck about voter ID, because the people that give a fuck about voter ID have been fucking duped, and I don't know how to reason with that human, so I just have given up trying and scream into the void.

If somebody will streamline the process and actually fund some DMVs to get this done I'd be all for it - but they won't, because it's not the point, they'll just mandate it as a form of voter suppression without doing anything to fix the infrastructure problem.

deep sigh

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