Voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement

We could have them be issued by town halls and police departments?

I don't see why not. There's nothing terribly difficult about printing stuff on plastic cards.

Yes, but wouldn't it be difficult to regulate the identification, then? Wouldn't it be quite easy to get multiple identifications and use them to vote multiple times in the same election?

I mean, I guess the way I'd do it is to have some kind of database. If you have an ID of any kind that's recognized for voting, the database ticks the "yes" box. If not, it ticks the "no" box. IDs are free, and held to somewhere near the same standard we hold money, when it comes to checking for fraud.

When you vote, you swipe the card, and the database ticks the box for "yup, this person voted in this election." Somebody else tries with your (stolen?) card, or with an illegitimate one, and it rejects them and flags it for authorities.

And... that's it.

Um, no, not really.

You'd need a tracking system, but that's all. Not even a particularly complicated one.

And the easiest place you can get it is any Department of Revenue/DMV or state courthouse, the same places you conduct a lot of citizen to government business. Really there is no excuse for you not to have one. Don't give me the inconvenient crap, there's no excuse.

The nearest courthouse is two and a half hours from my home. If my parents didn't have a working car (and one of ours broke, so thank goodness for small miracles) I wouldn't be able to get there. Because that's 2 1/2 hours by driving, not on foot.

Well, in Wisconsin at least, the Republicans seem to want to have this law and close down a bunch of DMV locations due to lack of funding/wanting to balance the budget, which doesn't strike me as fair at all.

I'm not even sure the nearest DMV that I know of (all the way in Allentown, which is a full county down from where I live) is still open or not.

Regardless of whether or not it will work, this is still a pretty obvious attempted power play. I'm not going to blame "The Republicans", since I doubt this is a unilateral thing, but it's still a pretty transparent, and solely political move.

edited 19th Oct '11 5:23:54 PM by BlixtySlycat

Get a ride from a neighbor or a friend with a car. I highly doubt you live friendless many miles from anyone.

Really, there's no excuse.

My signature is relevant here. Just because there's no excuse for someone who has a car or has friends who have a car, and who's capable of taking 2 1/2 hours off from work to go to the DMV during business hours, doesn't necessarily mean there's no excuse for anyone.

(Of course, I don't personally know anyone for whom there would be an excuse, but like I said earlier, when this many people are complaining, I tend to assume they have something to complain about.)

edited 19th Oct '11 5:37:19 PM by feotakahari

The fact that I have to do that at all is telling.

Don't get me wrong, I will, because I am going to vote, goddammit. But the process of signing up to register should be as simple as possible so you get the maximum number of voters. There is no reason I should not be able to get a voting ID at my town hall, which is ten minutes from my house on foot.

edited 19th Oct '11 5:37:44 PM by BlixtySlycat

But why should I be expected to spend two hours getting identification if I'm not going to vote because of personal disagreements with the philosophy of democracy?

ATC, if you're not going to vote, than you don't need to get a voting ID.

@ATC

Though you might want an ID anyway so you can get a bank account or a job, admittedly.

@Tom:It is small enough that it can be ignored, and quite easily and safely at that. Also, I'm not sure this'll stop the dead from voting, which I believe they have been known to do, especially for the GOP.

How can you ignore the other things (shortening early ballot turn-in periods, removing the rights of non-violent offenders who had previously had their right to vote reinstated, and encouraging their constituents to tell people to vote on the wrong day)?

edited 19th Oct '11 5:54:53 PM by Balmung

^ Not really. One fraudulent vote is one vote too many. It's a disgrace to tolerate it at all.

How many more Acorns do we need to realize that? How many more times must Mickey Mouse appear on a list of prospective/registered voters? How many more times do we allow normal, law-abiding Americans to get their civil rights and their votes trampled upon by a fraudster?

edited 19th Oct '11 6:20:24 PM by MajorTom

I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure the whole Acorn thing was shut down fairly quickly.

Well, I agree with you, principally, Tom, but at a certain point the cost and problems associated with attempting to stamp out a problem outweigh the benefit of stamping out the problem.

I.e. at a certain point, legitimate votes lost greatly exceed fraudulent votes cast, thus rendering the effort for naught.

Tom, you're reminding me of the hypothetical candidate who proposes that since the IRS doesn't know who cheats on their taxes and who doesn't, it should just audit everyone—regardless of how much time and money is lost in doing so. Our goal in matters like this is seldom to get every offender, just to get enough of them that it's not worth the risk to cheat. Your link makes it sound like a lot of people are cheating, but other posters' links contradict that, and some of the other links seem more reliable than yours, so I'll trust that voter fraud isn't currently as major an issue as people being denied the right to vote.

Tom, ACORN didn't commit any voting fraud. Registration fraud is not voting fraud. Mickey Mouse never actually got a vote.

Now, I would argue the best solution to disenfranchisement would be a corps of volunteers or part-time workers heading to disenfranchised neighbourhoods and communities, and helping people register, know the correct date, and where and how to vote. Bring it to them.

Tom, if a couple of fraudulent votes slip through, how is that such a big deal? If theyre affectuing elections, then we have a problem. but I cant say I personally give a shit if Joe Q Hornswoggle pretends his dead grandmam, really wanted to vote in Mitt Romney or Obama from beyond the grave.

besides, the one big problem with Voter ID is that some states only have DM Vs open during the hours you're stuck at work, same as voting itself.

As I said before, There's no way that duplicate votes have a bigger effect on election results than other things that potentially effect the outcome of elections, things such as differing margins of error for the same voter pool, poll access issues, opportunity cost differentials,

Different margins of error by itself probably can affect an election by 1-2% on its own. If you truly want an accurate result, there's the place to start. But, by and large people pushing for voter ID don't want accurate results. They want results that go in their direction.

Explanation of the above: Different voting methods have different margins of error, and different spoiled ballot rates (which is included). If say a heavy Democratic voting area had a relatively high Mo E/SBR compared to a heavy Republican area, the Democratic area would be at a distinct disadvantage.

Considering that I've heard of SBR's at about 3-4% (that's insane, really), the impact of this would drastically overtake any other known potential factor in terms of affecting the reliability of an election result.

That said, I actually think that the effect of differing poll access/opportunity cost factors, although impossible to measure might actually be vastly greater. Every election there's some urban locations in which there are huge line-ups when the polls close. Do they get to vote? There are always legal fights on this, every election. If you go to your poll and you see a huge line, and you have to go home and make dinner for your kids, what do you do? Probably just head home. This drives down voting rates.

People with more upper-class jobs are often able to take time off of work to go vote, and usually in areas which have less poll access issues.

I did a LOT of study on this a decade ago when Bush v. Gore was going on. The electoral system in the US is a complete and total disaster. (Note. The problem with the Bush v. Gore decision wasn't the decision itself. It actually was a reasonable decision. The problem with it is that it didn't give the power of precedent to the decision, and it didn't apply it across the board. Applying it across the board would have forced a second election for most races nationwide. There are exceptions, where electoral processes are kept equal state wide..Oregon is the textbook example, but in most cases, election results are incorrect to some degree)

But wait, how does Moe affect voting methods?

@Tom: How long are you going to go on about "widespread voter fraud" and "ACORN" ignoring the fact that those are iin fact, non-issues. Read the study I linked.

And you'd rather have zero fraudulent votes than a few thousand votes from legit, but ID-less voters? That's kinda messed up for a democracy. Bit like the Florida case; they blocked convicts from voting, but also people who had simmilar names or social security numbers to convicted felons. Foolproof. Never mind the people who didn't get a vote, at least no bad votes got in.