Voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement

Great editorial about the id laws and how bullshit they are.

But what caught my eye was an analogy by one of the comments, comparing voter fraud to terrorism, completely oblivious to the fact that terrorism has much, much more of an impact than voter-fraud does. People die from terrorism, while the vote is affected by less than a 10th of a percent, if the fraud statistics cited by the Republican in the article are accurate.

A vote suppressed is as big a blow to democratic process as a (deliberately cast) fraudulent vote.

Also, as for the voter fraud = terrorism guy, I would like to congratulate him on invoking the spirit of Godwin's Law without actually invoking Nazis. (which is to say that he made a horribly inapt comparison due to the severity of one aspect of it as compared to another.)

Indiana's top elections official could lose his job and his freedom after jurors convicted him of multiple voter fraud-related charges on Saturday.

Well, there's your fraud.

Personally, I am against voter IDs. If a person has a Voter Registration Card, that should be enough ID for them, even if they lost the card, since it should still be in their database. However, I do come from a family who stresses the importance of voting to the point where my dad would insist that he help my blind mother vote for which candidates she wanted instead of trusting any voting official to do so.

edited 4th Feb '12 10:03:45 PM by GameGuruGG

Department of Justice to monitor elections in Wisconsin to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act

Wow. This is a sad day.

Maybe it's different in my state, but getting a state ID instead of a DL is relatively easy. I think it's right to require some form of photo ID for the voting process. The idea that you can just walk in and vote by only giving your name and SSN is ridiculous.

We had people voting for veterans overseas some time back, they got caught and arrested because so many of us just vote with absentee ballots and the numbers didn't add up.

Besides, Fraud would disappear largely if it meant that you had to commit a felony(use forged ID) to commit voter fraud. Plus the dead would no longer vote, because birthdays are on that ID. A 24 year old college student working for a political organization can't walk in and vote as an 83 year old man.

edited 2nd Apr '12 2:19:09 PM by Barkey

the problem is, voter fraud barely exists as is statistically speaking. Not to mention usually the places with these laws have the least chances available to get an ID

As the post three posts above yours shows, that's not always quite true. However, I don't see how ID requirements would help with this kind of cheating.

? Did you mean Enkufka post ? Its about voter disenfranchisement not voter fraud.

I'd be all for voter ID laws if they put money into letting people know about the new laws and opened the DMV and other locations where you can get your ID for longer (and on weekends) so that people could get them. As is, I just can't support these laws. Before I left the state for college (I live in Texas), my dad had to take off work and drive me to the (nearly one hour away) DMV and wait for almost 3 hours with me so I could get my ID. Some people don't have the time/money for that stuff.

For the first time, A woman was disenfranchised by a law that wasn't even in place.

That's weird, most 87 year old ladies have ID.

If you're in your late teens or early twenties, perhaps I can understand, but who the hell doesn't bring their ID with them in a wallet/purse?

Morons?

Eligible voters. Though I repeat what was said in the prior post.

Derelict Vessel casts necromancy.

I've always felt that there was more likely to be (meaningful) fraud in counting votes than in casting them, myself, so it's seemed to me like it should be pretty clear that restricting the voting side would be far less effective.

I keep getting confused on how votes are counted. Like, there's no federal standard, it's different from county to fucking county.

Jesus, how hard would it be to implement and train the staff to do things one specific way all across the board?

Well, if you wanted to (literally) make a federal case about it, you'd probably have to push something non-partisan through congress.

...

So, yeah, pretty much impossible.

Impossible right now. *shrug* It's a matter of making it politically untenable. Politicians don't usually do big things like this without noise from the constituency.

So Rick Scott's voter purge is facing pretty heavy resistance.

And legal action.

So I want to jump in, after a bit of a thread hop and say something.

You know who commits voter fraud? Random individuals who really really like their party trying to skirt the super impressive voter ID laws? No.

Canada's elections were rigged by the Conservative Party of Canada through a deliberate and coordinated assault on the democratic system through a system of automated robocalls to misdirect people to wrong polling stations (in an effort to prevent them from voting), placed polling station agents who let Tory party brownshirts vote multiple times in several ridings as they were bused around (only thing voter ID laws prevented was eliminate all native voters because hey look, voter ID law prevented nothing here), and even attacked polling stations at known NDP/Liberal ridings where they went so far as stealing ballot boxes and unilaterally declaring a polling station "illegal" and attacking voters.

What do voter ID laws do? Empower the conservatives as they use this tool to eliminate ridings that don't usually vote tory which are primarily native individuals and the poor.

So, you'll forgive me for being highly opposed to voter ID laws as my country is being destroyed by an illegal government.

edited 12th Jun '12 12:25:21 AM by breadloaf

Then you won't like this, Breadloaf.

Tea party group sues Indiana, other states, to get them to start doing voter purges of their own.

I think that, as long as the DOJ counters this shit aggressively, it'll be a wasted effort on the party of the crazies who want to abuse these purges for their own goals. But the question is whether the DOJ is going to counter this bullshit aggressively enough.