If you're trying to register in someone else's name, you have to pray that they don't register themselves or show up to the polls to vote. That's a gamble which prevents systematic individual voter fraud.
If you're trying to register in someone else's name, you have to pray that they don't register themselves or show up to the polls to vote. That's a gamble which prevents systematic individual voter fraud.
On the other hand, there are other ways for people to steal elections. For example, you can steal mail-in ballots from mailboxes, fill them, and covertly drop them in. It's particularly easy to do in states where all ballots are mail-in by default. The risk-reward calculation is different, because now one organized person can cast dozens, or hundreds of fraudulent votes, instead of just one.
In other states, you don't even need to steal them: you can just knock on the door, ask people for ballots (or buy them, many people will happily sell their right to vote for $20, because it's worthless to them), fill them in, and drop them off completely in the open. Of course, the stealing/buying and filling in the ballots is illegal, but since this happens in private, it's much harder to detect and prosecute. That's why most states disallow dropping off votes for third parties, but some states inexplicably allow it.
There are multiple recent cases, where people were convicted for schemes like that, e.g State of Arizona v. Guillermina Fuentes, Texas v. Monica Mendez, Michigan v. Trenae Rainey, U.S. v. Kim Phuong Taylor, and more. Since these are only the cases where conviction was secured, the true number is much higher.
(I was a bit concerned because the hospital I was born in had been razed and the whole area redeveloped 50 years ago, but there was no problem.)
A couple weeks ago I went to the nearest DMV and got a RealID. It took 15 minutes. (The RealID is proof of citizenship and residency.)
The DMV people and the people in the passport office are very helpful in how to get the necessary proof.
That's nice and matches my obviously-not-north-american experience. Have you considered that you are not the target audience of the voter suppression because of something ?
No. You register once and that applies to all future elections (at least until you update your registration for whatever reason, e.g. because you changed addresses).
> and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something?
Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
> What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place.
If the birth certificate is from somewhere within the US, then validating the birth certificate is usually just a matter of contacting the county clerk where you were born. If it's from somewhere outside the US, then you ain't eligible to vote anyway unless you've gone through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen — in which case you'd have more appropriate identifying documents that you'd use in place of your birth certificate.
It's nitpicking, but you can be a citizen by birth without either having a birth certificate from a country you are citizen of and without naturalizing, but you will have some other document in that case too.
>Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
Isn't it circular? To be in the database you are checked against the database?
It's turtles^Wdatabases all the way down.