I used to run campaigns in Ohio. I was also an elected HRC DNC delegate from 2008.
There are some real concerns with vote by mail.
One particular issue I noticed when canvassing was that the voter roll was incorrect. It was not uncommon to go to a rental unit, and have 3 or 4 families registered at the address - all having moved out years ago. Another issue was dead voters. Another issue was no one was registered at the address.
The voter rolls not dependable. It's not by design, but its a hard problem to solve. Its worth listening to the concerns "of the other side" so that we have fair elections.
What is the actual attack vector here for taking advantage of incorrect voter rolls? Just that it's easier to vote more than once by mail than in person?
Where I am in IL you don't need to show photo ID to vote, so the level of verification that occurs in person vs by mail is the same.
Generally it seems like you want the voter rolls to err on the side of being overly broad than vice versa, so long as it doesn't enable fraud - i.e., it's better to leave someone on the voter rolls who has moved/died (who is overwhelmingly unlikely to actually cast a vote) than to disenfranchise a voter by erroneously purging them.
Surely sending half a dozen ballots to the same address, for all the previous tenants from the last half decade, "enables fraud" if the person living there is so inclined.
I don't think any scheme that requires people to be willing to commit felony fraud en masse is very likely. They would need to open other people's mail, forge their signature (on my ballot it clearly states that you will go to jail for this) and send it back in. They would need to risk all of that for one extra vote since they are only accidentally receiving an extra ballot.
We also don't need to sit around speculating about this because the data we have on voter fraud already tells us that it's incredibly rare.
What we should focus on is the 1 in 10 voters here who had a ballot rejected for primarily UX reasons that could be fixed. That's a problem which is supported by facts and could be fixed. Instead the current administration is gutting the USPS and making voting even more difficult in the middle of a pandemic. My ballot application is already taking twice as long to get in as it did last year. How is that OK?
You don't know how common voter fraud is. When it's easy to do and you can't be caught, as in other people's ballots coming to your mailbox, many will do it. They do it. I know someone who voted on behalf of another in California because ID is not necessary. There must be many more others doing the same.
If that happened regularly and widely it would be quite obvious because 40-50% of eligible voters vote. So there could be as much as a 40% chance that the person whose ballot you forged also tried to vote and is either turned away or submits a provisional ballot or complaint.
This would create a record that could then be used to examine the signature on the ballot and charge the person with voter fraud.
Note: not many states have changed their laws on vote by mail this year, so theoretical VBM fraud could have been done by submitting fraudulent ballot applications in most past elections too. The main difference this year is more voters are expected to use the no-excuse absentee ballot that was already available to them in other years.
This being a hacker forum, would such security measures as you believe in and propose be acceptable in any computing application? In finance? Medicine? Anything really?
This is how the system has worked, oftentimes for decades past.
No, they would not be considered acceptable in a computing application. But in computing, it’s considered acceptable to discriminate against users for the sake of security.
I’m unaware of any major democracy that uses computerized voting with a username, password, and 2FA to replace the traditional ballot box, for obvious UX reasons. (Never mind that computerized results might actually be easier to forge than paper ballots).
Regardless of what is “acceptable” it is a fact that widespread voter fraud using the mechanisms proposed would be detectable.
If the person living there is so inclined and successfully forges the signatures on the ballots.
At least in WA state, a signature is required on the exterior of the envelope, and it is validated against the signature on the voter registration form.
Signatures are a lousy form of validation for voting in my opinion:
I'm a Washington state resident and because I sign a lot of checks I have two forms of my signature: My 'fancy' signature that has every letter of my name and my check signing signature that is a scrawl of simple squiggles.
I used my fancy signature for voter registration and accidentally used my squiggle signature for my fist mail in ballot and did't get any kickback. I've used it for six years and King County elections still has never questioned it.
About five years ago I decided to change my signature. The first ballot I mailed in after changing my signature was rejected for having a non-matching signature, and I had to prove my identity and update my signature on file with the King County elections in order for my ballot to be counted.
My signature ended up changing over time and I had to update my signature with the county elections office in Washington to stop my ballots from being rejected. So really not sure how you're slipping by.
Election officials could assign "strict" signature validators to certain targeted districts, so approx 10% of ballots get thrown out, and "loose" validators elsewhere, so only 2% of votes get tossed.
That would be illegal. See the “Bush v Gore” decision which was about a similar idea but applied to counting hanging chads, etc. rather than signatures.
Of course it is illegal. The discussion is about how anti-fraud measures (like signature verification) could potentially be flipped to actually assist in cheating/fraud.
Let's keep in mind, depending on where power lies post-election, that doing something illegal, even if caught, doesn't necessarily means one would be punished for it.
And even if they did...most of the time their opinion would be "yeah, looks OK". You'd like that to just be stage 1 and call for further scrutiny if it turns out it would affect the result - but you can't, if you keep the evidence longer to revisit it during a recount, you lose the secrecy of the ballot.
You can do it the other way around. If the signature seems fishy, you set it aside unopened, and only do further validation before opening it if the election is close enough for it to matter.
For example, in an election with 100 votes cast. If 10 signatures are suspicious, you only do extended validation and open them if the election was won by a margin smaller than 10.
I’m confused.. do you think it’s likely that someone forges the signature of a person they’ve never met within a believable margin of error? Seems the burden of proof is on the people claiming that happens a lot
A few years back me and the wife went on a cruise that disembarked in NOLA. We had a lovely time and at one point went to buy some new luggage cases: one of ours had fallen to bits and the other had suffered somewhat (my fault.) We took the tram out of town to a mall on the outskirts and hit a decent sized department store.
I was offered a tablet to sign on when I offered up my card. So I took back my card and signed it on the back and then loosely repeated that same signature on the tablet thing.
I'd had that card for around two years. I never sign them these days because it doesn't really mean anything around here any more in the UK. Bear in mind I am old enough to remember signing cheques for "To cash".
How much validation is actually done in practice? In the UK, I sign something about once at year _at most_ - I can't remember the last time I signed something without going back a few years, and I've no idea how I signed it.
There is no such thing as large-scale signature verification.
If a close match were demanded, people would complain of disenfranchisement. People don't sign the exact same way every time.
Realistically, the workers are tired and they don't care. If they do reject anybody, it's probably because the vote comes from an area that tends to vote in the undesired way. In other words, this human element is a problem. It would be especially easy to bias the election by rejecting based on name.
An imperfect signature of the desired ethnicity (more likely to be a "correct" vote) gets a pass. An imperfect signature of the undesired ethnicity is a fail. That's all it takes to quietly flip an election, with no evidence trail at all.
There doesn't need to be. I feel like we're failing to recognize that this is a soft solution, not a tech solution. The signature is there so that you go to jail for felony fraud if you forge it. Then with simple detection schemes the cost of trying compared to the benefit of like one extra vote doesn't make sense.
That argument is weak, but not insane, for in-person voting.
For vote-by-mail though, how could anybody go to jail? The ballot shows up. It is accepted or rejected. If rejected, then what? Are we going to pick fingerprint DNA out of the paper fibers for this? There is no reasonable way to ever determine who attempted to cast the vote.
It'll be fraud, but never part of the official statistics. It can't be proven without using the level of resources normally reserved for famous murder cases.
There just isn't a deterrent. Severe punishment means nothing if the criminal thinks he has no chance of being caught. The fraud can be done in bulk, and it is, via ballot harvesting.
Also, what about the corrupt verifiers? Being prone to rejecting some names more than others can change an election, and there would be no way to prove it. If the signature verifier has a preference between Cohen and Abdul, or between Garcia and Washington, what can anybody do?
In theory, a bad signature at in-person voting could be cause for arrest, and we could actually do it.
With the mail-in voting, the person isn't present. You can't possibly find the person. No matter how obvious the fraud, there is nothing to be done about it. The person is certain to avoid arrest. No charges will ever be filed, and some people will then conclude that fraud doesn't happen.
In the one case, the criminal faces a small risk that is easy to dismiss. In the other case, there is no risk at all.
There's no police officer hanging out at the polling location to arrest someone for signing their name incorrectly on the voter roll. At least in California, signatures on the rolls are only verified after the fact. At least with mail in ballots you have the recourse of not counting the vote if the signature does not match. For the in-person roll you can't even do that!
Not meant to sway the argument either way, simply an anecdote - in Pennsylvania when you vote you sign your name next to the signature on file. I've seen people be given a hard time when the signatures are wildly different.
The attack vector for voter fraud is obvious but not really scalable. Ballot fraud is a bit more scalable because you could request absentee ballots on other people’s behalf - signatures aren’t a huge deal b/c even w/ a 50% success rate you are achieving your objectives. All of that said, fraud is simply not very prevalent in either case.
At a 50% success rate you go away to federal jail for a couple of years. How many people are willing to throw away their lives for a few extra votes? That doesn't make sense to me.
> you don't need to show photo ID to vote, so the level of verification that occurs in person vs by mail is the same
Except that voting in-person requires traveling to public places where you're seen by others, and likely walk past at least 1 security camera along the way (not to mention pinging every cell-tower while traveling). That's pretty daunting compared to filling out a bunch of voting forms and dropping them in a mailbox.
So your argument is basically "Big Brother" makes in person voting more secure?
Oregon has had mail in ballot the default and it's been fine.
At least there is a damn paper trail with the vote by mail. All the swing states were using Diebold machines that were deemed INSECURE by california over a decade ago. And they don't have backup paper trails. We should IMHO be burning those with pitchforks and what not and going mail in voting over that.
We have more issues with people NOT VOTING than actually doing extra ballots.
Though concerns over vote-by-mail fraud seem greatly overstated, truth is that where you are at a given moment says a lot about who you are.
Identity and location are closely linked.
And being somewhere specific carries a high opportunity cost: it precludes being elsewhere. In-person vs. remote mechanisms (mail, phone, electronic) reflect this.
I know in Georgia if you move from one County to another there could be duplicate voter registrations. If you die or move out of state your voter registration may not be terminated. Either could allow duplicate votes. Another vector for mailed ballots is simply stealing them. If I know the state mailed them all two days ago and I received mine today, chances are my neighbors also got theirs. I could just steal their ballot, mark down who I want, and drop them all at a random blue mailbox.
I am not an expert, but I imagine this could work:
-Generate fictional registered voters at real addresses
-Elections office dutifully sends out ballots
-Rely on actual residents to toss those ballots. Or maybe they vote with them - if it's in the right district, they're likely to vote for the right person anyway
-Send in copies of their mail-in ballots come election time
This would work if you keep the numbers low. And the numbers of dead/moved voters would help camouflage it.
I have never needed a birth certificate to register to vote.
You could use a SSN from a person residing in another state.
Or, according to this form: https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/Feder..., "If you do not have a current and valid driver license or non‑operating identification license or a social security number, please write “NONE” on the form. A unique identifying number will be assigned by the Secretary of State."
I have no idea what verification is done on the back end, but registering as a voter in CA is as simply as filling out a postcard and sending it in.
I'm guessing there isn't much verification, as I've heard of immigrants accidentally being registered to vote because they checked "Yes - I'm a US citizen" on a driver's license form.
I think there needs to be some form of authentication to at least publicly show IF someone voted or not. i.e. this way, we could log on to make sure a vote wasn't cast from our dead Uncle Albert or w/e...and maybe even voters could be given an encrypted private key upon voting to so they could verify their vote whenever.
It generally is public information in which elections a voter has voted.
You cannot see how they voted, but you can see that they voted.
This is how all political campaigns know which people always vote, which people usually vote, which people sometimes vote, and which people never vote.
It's actually even more than that. The list of people who have voted is available for public inspection on election day itself. In close races, campaigns will send people out to review the list(s), note which of their likely voters haven't voted yet, then call them to offer a ride or otherwise help them get to the polls so they can vote. It's not that common at the presidential level, but for city council or the like, it can make a real difference.
Do you have a source for this? I tried to find the laws on this but don't really see anything that discusses accessing a list of who voted during an election. I feel this this should be inaccessible until after the election.
Most common is allowing the inspection of the list of absentee requestors, like in North Carolina: The chief election judge of each precinct is required to post one copy of the precinct absentee ballot list “in a conspicuous location in the voting place.”
That said, there are other states that do not allow this, so it's less widespread than I originally thought, and when it is allowed, it's usually either just the absentee requestors, or the list is made available after the election, not during. Sorry.
> Where I am in IL you don't need to show photo ID to vote, so the level of verification that occurs in person vs by mail is the same.
It's not quite the same. If you go in person, you fill out a piece of paper and sign it. You turn in that paper to get your ballot, and they compare the signature. But, if the poll worker says that your signature doesn't match, you have the opportunity to verify yourself with ID, etc. And there is supposed to be Democrat and Republican election judges present to agree and consent to giving you a ballot.
If you vote by mail and there is an issue, you have no opportunity to resolve any problems.
Incorrect, I vote by mail from Illinois and they send you confirmation of both your ballot being received and that it was properly counted.
Illinois
10 ILCS 5/19-8 Voters are notified by mail of rejected ballot within two days of rejection.
Voters have until 14 days after election to resolve issue with county election authority.
Why are you making up reasons to question the accuracy of voting by mail if you haven’t read the basics or even tried it?
It is amazing how many problems in the US exist simply because the government lacks knowledge about its people. From the census, to maintaining voter rolls, to mail in voting, to general voter fraud, to stimulus checks going to dead people, to identity theft caused by overuse of SSNs, it could all be solved by having a central database that is updated whenever one of us is born or dies.
Especially amazing as I know of no EU country that has the same problems (of course some of those cases happen, but there we talk about single digits in absolute cases).
Take Germany for example, or France as much as I can tell: You move, you register a new primary residency, where you vote. Your residency is also you voter registration (not sure why separating the two makes any sense). You leave the country permanently, you declare it, when your French, you can register at the consulate in the new country of residency. Guess what, you get your ballot by mail to that address.
Carrying passports or ID cards, check. No unidentified residents.
Dead voters, no problem. Registered residencies are constantly updated with birth and death certificates.
Voting by is, as is voting in general, a solved problem. Including paper trails and enough voting places for everyone. Voting happens on Sundays.
There's a lot of reasons but the number one one is because there's only a two party system here in the US and the Republican one by it's policies and histories is almost entirely reliant on non-white voters not showing up in the electorate. It's not quiet, in NC they've explicitly targeted voting days and locations that are predominantly Democratic and non-white [0]. Second is just our whole system, the states are independent and run their own voting so tracking movement between states is harder in places that having intentionally done something like motorvotor (where ID and voter registration happen together). [1]
You had the chance to do just that and ended up not making an effort. It seems far fetched to think anyone could become president without a sizable chunk of white voters in the US just based on the census demographic data.
Well given that whites are a majority of the population, it makes sense that the president would need a sizable chunk of that populace. What am I missing here?
It would be factually incorrect to say the Democrats have a history or desire to disenfranchise white voters. You can not become president without a chunk of the majority demographic’s support. Hopefully that helps shine light on whatever you are missing.
You understand my point if you understand the two sentences I had the desire to type out on the topic. I wasn't responding to the full context of the grandparent's post. I was responding to the weak attempt at saying the Democrats and Republicans are the reverse sides of the same coin. Democrats have no desire to disenfranchise the same way Republicans do as it doesn't benefit them. They may try other ways to skew the results towards them but this tactic isn't used by them.
Sure, let me make it here: better watch out for those Democrats encouraging traditionally poorly represented groups to get out and have their voices heard. /s
No, the idea is that Democrats are doing the opposite, which (if true) is just as bad.
Republicans shouldn't be locking out people who are eligible to vote, but at the same time Democrats shouldn't be enabling the submission of fraudulent ballots (ineligible, dead persons, etc), which common sense says is easier if you don't require ID verification at polls or if you allow mail-in ballots for all.
Ugh, this is both-sides-ism at its worst. The impact of actual fraud on elections is nil, whereas the impact of subtle disenfranchisement is easily election-swinging. Both are anti-democratic, but that doesn’t mean they are equally bad.
That's just false. In what universe does fraud not have an impact on anything it touches, much less voting?
I can point to many occasions when voter fraud had an impact on outcomes (but was caught so it did not in the end). But the problem with this is that voter fraud is only heard about when it fails. You obviously have no idea how much actually successful fraud has occurred. This is generally true for all crimes, except voter fraud is an actual victimless crime (at least in terms of the victim being able to know that a crime was perpetrated against them), so you can't even estimate scale by victim reports like you could with something like assault or robbery.
“At the time of the election, (Robbins) was suffering from kidney infections which impacted his cognition,” said Oregon Department of Justice spokeswoman Kristina Edmunson. “He does not remember voting two ballots, but acknowledges that he did and is extremely remorseful.”
Regardless, the main point still applies. That's only the fraud we know about. The amount of fraud we don't know about that people are getting away with is an unbounded number that we literally can't even estimate given the nature of the crime. Again, this isn't identity theft or robbery where there is a clear victim to tell you "hey a crime has been committed against me" even if you never catch the perp. In the case of voter fraud, there will never be a smoking gun if you don't catch them first.
Regardless, it's fairly obvious that less ID verification / policies that result in less of an audit trail make fraud easier to execute without getting caught.
> Republicans shouldn't be locking out people who are eligible to vote, but at the same time Democrats shouldn't be enabling the submission of fraudulent ballots (ineligible, dead persons, etc), which common sense says is easier if you don't require ID verification at polls or if you allow mail-in ballots for all.
There's no evidence of even minor amounts of voting fraud, the current administration spent months on a commission to find the claimed millions of fraudulent votes and came up with nothing to my recollection. In fact the biggest cases I saw that came out recently was a Republican operative in North Carolina packing mail-in ballots... and he was caught without voter ID.
One is actively anti-democratic, the other is hypothetically anti-democratic. You're trying to both sides a possibility against actually anti-democratic actions and policies.
If any of the voter ID attempts came with real attempts to increase voter turn out and make sure everyone had an ID I might give them the benefit of the doubt but it never does and the only side that wants it fights tooth and nail to make it harder for voters to vote.
> a Republican operative in North Carolina packing mail-in ballots... and he was caught without voter ID.
It's the Republicans that want voter ID and the Democrats that want to get rid of it.
And yet you're telling me that it's all just Republicans looking out for their own interests / voter suppression? Ok...
Points I have made:
1. Voter fraud exists (true)
2. Republicans support policies that based on common-sense (and actual examples) reduce fraud
Thank you for helping me make my argument.
And again, it takes two to tango. Why can't the Democrats run with voter ID and encourage people to vote / make it easy for everyone eligible to get an ID? Instead they say "no voter ID ever, it's always voter suppression!"
The problem with voter fraud is that it's obviously hard to detect at scale if it actually works. Unlike other crimes, there is no victim that you can use to count cases.
Ok I'll bite. This is a 200+ long thread and no one has got this right.
What you suggest is actually illegal in the US since the 1980s by federal law and before that it was customary for us states not to track that information. On the public side it is illegal because requiring identification for almost any kind of state service must hinge on there being a specific reason inherent in the public service why the state government needs that information to provide a service. Only the federal government can require the kind of information that would commonly fall under what is required in an EU country.
Private businesses are actually indirectly forbidden by federal law from asking for any kind of information like this. If in the course of asking for such information the private business discovers or deduces the 'immigration status' of the person that business now has to explain the reason why it discovered that fact and the burden mostly falls on the business almost every conceivable case. Therefore, most businesses are certain never to ask about such information. The only information transmitted to the federal government (by federal law) is essentially a self-certified form filled out by an employee only in the course of seeking employment. The business is directly forbidden by law from asking anything about the immigration status of the person. The state can't do anything about this or indirectly require a private entity to act based on such information.
One can quickly see that there is no workable way under current federal law to make any kind of system you would see in the EU or most of the western world workable. You couldn't directly collect useful information about a person in almost any way and any information you could collect wouldn't be useful.
Here is the politically incorrect fact: It makes immigration enforcement almost impossible if you can't restrict access to private employment or public services. It stands to reason that lacking such enforcement would induce large amounts of illegal immigration.
This isn't really a side effect either. The political economy of federal immigration law has something to benefit both parties. Conservative Republicans disproportionately benefit from cheap(er) labor and democrats/libertarians get to reduce the power of the federal government in ways that they see as politically desirable. There is a reason most immigration laws until the 2000s were overwhelmingly bipartisan.
This doesn't have anything to do with voter suppression at all. Any plan to require or give out ids for voting runs into the issue of how to handle these legal issues. One solution is for the government to only require the id for voting and nothing else at all. In other words, the government will get to have access to personal information but: 1) can not make using the id service convenient(as covered above) and 2) cannot use that information for any other public reason(unless federal law is changed) finally, 3) only the federal government can make such information useful which means you rapidly start approaching a centralized database which most european /western countries do not need to have.
The most frustrating thing is they seem to know—or be able to get if they want—everything about us until that information would help make life easier, then suddenly they're clueless and you have to go round up all the info for them, sometimes from other branches of government.
Progressives are against requiring voter ID because IDs are not ubiquitous and freely available. There would be no argument against voter ID laws if every American was guaranteed a free and easily acquired ID which would be more practical with this type of national database. It is usually conservatives that are against that policy of free and easy to acquire ID.
Imagine a state completely waives their fees for a State ID (usually only $10-20 anyway) in exchange for Voter ID laws. Do you think progressives could support it then? Would you?
I think you responded to the wrong person. I didn't take any position related to or even reference anything you describe here. Good luck finding your right thread though.
First, no one is for voter licensing, a person is 'licensed' by being a citizen. The two (honest) sides of the argument are: ID is required to keep elections honest and requiring ID's keeps people from voting by being too onerous to acquire. The ugly truth is democrats know that sloppy voting tends to fall their way and republicans know that voter id laws tend to fall their way.
A good compromise would be free ID's for everyone, but neither side wants this and would rather keep fighting the id battle, because like most battles, its only purpose is to keep the people divided and easy to manipulate.
> First, no one is for voter licensing, a person is 'licensed' by being a citizen
With voting license legislation enacted, in order for a citizen to vote, they must have a government-issued license. It can't be just any government-issued license, either, it needs to be one of the specially designated licenses that you need to jump through hoops to get beyond being just a citizen.
For many people, obtaining such a license is both a monetary and time expense that is only necessary to participate in elections. A citizen living in a city might have little reason to have a driver's license, but they'll need one if they want to vote, and they'll need to renew it every few years at their own expense.
A solution to this problem is making sure every citizen receives a voting ID on their 18th birthday. For whatever reason, voting license proponents never seem to want to implement such a program.
> The ugly truth is democrats know that sloppy voting tends to fall their way and republicans know that voter id laws tend to fall their way.
And yet voting fraud is nearly non-existent, and there are numerous examples of courts finding that voting license legislation disenfranchises voters.
You can't know if voting fraud is nearly non-existent because we have very little in the way of enforcement and auditing systems to even know if there was fraud. And yet people are still arrested all the time for voter fraud.
Please stop portraying your political opinions as fact. Independent and government research has been done[1][2][3], and courts[1] have found that voting fraud is nearly non-existent in the US.
If you want to take issue with the methodologies used to determine that, you're free too, but right now what your post amounts to is denial of scientific evidence.
First it is ridiculous to point at studies that say we don't have fraud when we can't know if we have fraud because most votes have no way to audit them.
And none of those speak to my point, and the point of many others who study this in detail, is there were over a thousand recorded criminals cases of voter fraud over in recent elections. When you couple that with many elections having no way to audit a vote, then we have a huge problem, because without auditing tools, only the most stupid and egregious incidents of fraud will be caught.
If you agree that a fraudulent election would be catastrophic for our democracy, and that we currently have no tools to audit the integrity of our votes (which we can't without voter ID), then voter ID, free or whatever, is an obvious solution.
I'm betting Belarus wishes they had a way to audit their elections about now.
> First it is ridiculous to point at studies that say we don't have fraud when we can't know if we have fraud because most votes have no way to audit them.
Again, you insist that the methodology to audit isn't there, yet there are dozens of studies, audits and case law examples that disagree with your opinion.
Again, if you want to disagree with the methodology, you are free to, but please be specific about what you disagree with.
Question: Why does Texas allow a Texas Handgun License as an acceptable form of photo ID but not a University of Texas Student ID? It seems if we are so concerned about voting being easy with those IDs, we should let all the students with state issued photo IDs use them.
As for your question, supporting or not supporting voter ID is less about how difficult the IDs are to get, but rather that it is creating a requirement that makes both the act of voting and the preparation for voting much more time intensive. And this is all to solve a problem, voter fraud, that nobody has any evidence occurs at any appreciable volume.
But I'll just say, if a system existed where I could get a photo ID with no fees and no wait times, and I could do it on election day, then I'd be much more willing to support voter ID laws.
A state should not let somebody register to vote unless the state confirms they are a resident of the state and otherwise eligible. As I understand the point of voter ID, it is to prove that the person casting the vote is who they say they are. If they are on the voting rolls, they are eligible to vote, that check has already been done. If the photo ID matches up with the person, they are who they say they are. All that matters should be the trustworthiness of the ID, and I see no reason why the state of Texas shouldn't trust the UT system.
Buying alcohol requires an ID with age information, as that is an age check. Voting does not require age information, as you cannot register to vote unless you are the proper age. Just a reputable ID that can match a photograph to a person, for which the UT student IDs are deemed good enough for the security and safety within the UT system.
And of course, it's a state run university. If the state really cared about making voting accessible to people with valid IDs, they would update the UT IDs to meet whatever requirements they deemed necessary. They've had 6 years. Why haven't they done it? Students actively want the change.
Not to mention I would be completely unsurprised to find that there were various forms of non-citizen immigrants attending the University of Texas and thus possessing such an ID.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that a Texas Handgun License requires citizenship.
> 12. Can non-US citizens obtain a License to Carry a Handgun?
> Yes. Subject to the requirements of federal firearms law, and if not otherwise ineligible, resident aliens and certain nonimmigrant aliens who are lawfully present in the United States may obtain the license.
This is literally just equalizing the hassle to states without voter ID laws. You are the one adding requirements for a citizen to exercise their right to vote.
Most states (29 of 50) don't have same day voter registration but of the 21 who do, they require Voter ID and proof of residency. Is your assertion that they're also suppressing the vote?
Merely that they establish that they are a particular citizen. It isn't that hard to do. You need ID to go to most doctors, buy tobacco and alcohol, yada yada yada.
The legend says green and yellow states accept student IDs. Stripes mean they only accept public student IDs. 27 states are green or yellow and only 2 have stripes.
Sure, just don’t make the waiver some joke that requires as many hoops to jump through as possible to discourage voters. Voter fraud isn’t as significant an issue as electioneering but if an ID makes one side of the fence happy I’ll support it so long as it remains free and universally available.
Waiving the fees isn't sufficient to make the ID ubiquitous immediately, so it won't remove that argument, at least not right away.
It would be a step in the right direction, but the concept of a universal ID requires everyone (well, except outlaws in hiding) to have it - if it's mandatory, then it becomes legally reasonable to require it for receiving all kinds of services as you can answer "How do I do X if I don't have a valid ID?" with "Step 1: Get the ID renewed/replaced/made" and "How do I do X without ever getting an ID" with "Sorry, that won't be possible, not ever getting an ID is not a valid option", like it is currently the case in many other countries.
In essence, if instead of "just" making it easy to have ID even for poor and disenfranchised people you go out of your way to ensure that it's weird for them to not have ID, then ID requirements won't suppress voters.
> Waiving the fees is sufficient to make the ID ubiquitous immediately,
No, it's not. Many people have difficulty finding the documents that will get them an ID. There are plenty of people working illegal jobs who are trying to figure out how to get a birth certificate, social security card or prove residence. This was even more common when more people were born at home.
I had a hard time getting ID when I was a teenager, and I needed it for migrant agricultural labor (to work on a legal crew doing corn detasseling.) Luckily, I got arrested a week before we were scheduled to leave, and I was able to con the DMV into issuing an ID based on my jail papers (although the clerk at the jail wrote down whatever I told them.)
The reason requiring ID is a problem is because there's no widespread voter fraud, and declaring that you're someone else is very difficult without that person agreeing not to go vote. It's a requirement whose administration cost dwarfs by orders of magnitude any benefit. The intention is to exclude people who have ID problems, not the people who don't believe it's possible that anyone could possibly have ID problems.
Also, just let felons vote. Put voting booths in prisons. If your population is so prisoner-heavy that they make a significant difference in the outcome, your society is broken.
Even aside from the fee, there's the time involved, which is an indirect burden on many people.
For whatever historical reason, we've entrusted the DMV with validating everyone's identity. The one which is open 9-4 M-F in the best conditions, and has been basically shuttered since Coronavirus.
In some states, you can go to 'third-party offices' which are privately run and offer longer hours, but it's still a several hour endeavour (and then you're paying $30 extra for their services).
I said free and easy to acquire. It wouldn't be enough for states to waive the fees if there are still hoops to jump through to acquire it. Getting an ID in many states requires spending hours at a DMV office that is probably only open during business hours and might be in the next county over from you. Voting should be an easy and seamless process. It shouldn't require hours of administrative prep work beforehand.
Voting is one of the few government services that is guaranteed to us by the Constitution. I can stomach complexities and ineffectiveness when it comes to something like acquiring a drivers license. I can't stomach anything that puts unnecessary obstacles between a US citizen and the ability to quickly and easily vote. If you want to require voter ID to vote, that is fine by me as long as you also take on the responsibility of ensuring every citizen has an ID.
I'm not sure your point here. The Amendments are generally included when someone refers to the Constitution. Several of the Amendments are directly related to protecting the right to vote.
This thread is already on the verge of being too political for HN. I'm not going to take the bait and get into a debate about something that is not even tangentially related to the topic of the link.
> Voting is one of the few government services that is guaranteed to us by the Constitution.
Voting is not defined as a "government service" and voting itself is barely defined at all in the Constitution or any Amendment. The Amendments assert a right to vote but the means, methods, and even timing are left heavily up to the discretion of the Legislative branches (Congress or State).
Therefore, the vast majority of existing election law can be changed as easily as legislators pass any other law versus the complexity+effort+time of a Constitutional Amendment.
I used the term "service" there to distinguish it from the more passive rights that we have. For example, freedom of speech is something that restricts government power while voting is something that the government organizes and must allow us to participate in. The former puts a passive restriction on the government. The latter requires action by the government.
Beyond that, I'm still not sure your point. We aren't debating the means, methods, or timing of voting. We are debating who has the right to vote. As far as the Constitution is concerned, that seems to be everyone but felons.
>Providing ID or not is quite literally the means and methods aka the process to vote. I haven't referenced "who" in any way, shape, or form.
No, when you require ID anyone without ID is prevented from voting and therefore you are dictating who can vote and not the means or method of voting. This is no different than a poll tax which is also unconstitutional.
>Again, check your sources. That's not in the US Constitution and is left up to the State
My source is the 14th Amendment, Section 2. It specifically calls out a lack of voter protections for people who had any "participation in rebellion, or other crime". A lack of protections does not mean felons don't have the right to vote. It simply means it isn't federally guaranteed.
Which of those IDs is available for free? I just checked the state website and they charge for drivers licenses and state IDs and all the federal IDs require money.
They at least offer the alternate forms of ID, but those still eliminate people. A homeless person is probably not going to have any of those documents on hand, but they have every right to vote. There is also the inherent problem of singling out people without ID for further scrutiny. This added "security" has notoriously been used as a method to suppress the vote over the course of US history. The simple act of requiring someone to state on a government form they can't "reasonably" obtain an ID is going to scare some people off from voting. What is "reasonable"? Am I going to be charged with voter fraud if I simply didn't want to spend the money on an ID? Will I end up in jail for voting? There is a chilling effect here.
>Which of those IDs is available for free? I just checked the state website and they charge for drivers licenses and state IDs
The Texas Election Identification Certificate ID is free.
>and all the federal IDs require money.
Wrong. Military and veteran IDs are federal IDs that are free of charge.
>They at least offer the alternate forms of ID, but those still eliminate people. A homeless person is probably not going to have any of those documents on hand, but they have every right to vote.
They wouldn't have been allowed to vote under the previous system either. This is a red herring.
> There is also the inherent problem of singling out people without ID for further scrutiny. This added "security" has notoriously been used as a method to suppress the vote over the course of US history.
There is no "further scrutiny". You either have the documentation that proves your eligibility to vote in your locality, or you don't. Studies showed that Voter ID laws have little to no effect on turn out.
> The simple act of requiring someone to state on a government form they can't "reasonably" obtain an ID is going to scare some people off from voting.
No doubt, but in Texas and in many other states, they are reasonably attainable, and have no fees. Somewhat of a straw man here. Again, studies showed that Voter ID laws have little to no effect on turn out.
> What is "reasonable"? Am I going to be charged with voter fraud if I simply didn't want to spend the money on an ID?
No, you just won't be allowed to vote. You won't be charged with any crime. Also, you don't spend money on fees, the above ID mentioned is free.
> Will I end up in jail for voting? There is a chilling effect here.
This is all conjecture. There is no chilling effect on requiring a free voter ID according to the studies.
>The Texas Election Identification Certificate ID is free.
Which itself requires ID to acquire defeating its purpose as an alternative ID for people without ID.
>Wrong. Military and veteran IDs are federal IDs that are free of charge.
I was referring to the IDs available to the general public. A military ID being free is irrelevant to a huge majority of the US.
>They wouldn't have been allowed to vote under the previous system either. This is a red herring.
How is that a red herring? A flaw existing in both the old and new system doesn't mean it isn't a flaw. Do you think disenfranchising homeless people is acceptable?
>There is no "further scrutiny". You either have the documentation that proves your eligibility to vote in your locality, or you don't. Studies showed that Voter ID laws have little to no effect on turn out.
It takes added time and requires further documentation. The time it takes to vote has been shown to have an impact on voter turnout. Also I don't know what studies you are talking about. Here is one from a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that says the exact opposite[1].
Your other points all rely on something refuted in the above points.
>Which itself requires ID to acquire defeating its purpose as an alternative ID for people without ID.
You need documentation to prove you're eligible to vote in your locality in order to be able to vote in your locality. The is the same logic behind any type of identification/registration, Voter ID or not.
>I was referring to the IDs available to the general public. A military ID being free is irrelevant to a huge majority of the US.
You specifically stated "all the federal IDs require money", which is patently false, QED.
>How is that a red herring? A flaw existing in both the old and new system doesn't mean it isn't a flaw. Do you think disenfranchising homeless people is acceptable?
It is by definition a red herring because being a flaw or not is immaterial to the discussion at hand since it is not specific to Voter ID laws. You asking the question is a textbook logical fallacy.
>It takes added time and requires further documentation. The time it takes to vote has been shown to have an impact on voter turnout.
Sometimes it takes time to leverage your rights. Gun background checks is an example of that, as are voter ID laws. There is no conclusive study that has shown voter ID laws impact turnout.
> Also I don't know what studies you are talking about. Here is one from a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that says the exact opposite
You linked a piece from a laughably biased news source. It even states opposite of your claim: "That change wasn't entirely due to voter ID, of course, but the GAO report suggests it played a part."
"In a 2014 review by the Government Accountability Office of the academic literature, five studies out of ten found that voter ID laws had no significant effect on overall turnout, four studies found that voter ID laws decreased overall turnout, and one study found that the laws increased overall turnout."
"Studies of the effects of voter ID laws on turnout in the United States have generally found that such laws have little, if any, effect on turnout."
I'm far from an expert in Texas election law, but here is what I found in a quick Google search[1]. In order to get an Election Identification Certificate you need to go to a DMV office during business hours with a proof of citizenship and a proof of identity. It sounds like the existence of this ID is redundant if you need ID to acquire it. It almost seems designed solely to counter people when they complain voter ID laws are the equivalent of a poll tax.
Why do you need to validate citizenship when issuing a voter ID if citizenship was already validated when registering to vote? That seems like a completely redundant requirement that is only put in place to make it slightly more difficult to acquire said ID.
I don't think citizenship is actually validated when you register to vote. I live in California and all I had to do was go on their website and check a couple boxes and fill out a form.
In several areas it is permissible for residents to be registered to vote in municipal elections etc. In some places, the local government has made efforts to get those who are neither legal residents not citizens registered for local elections. In those locations, enforcing a requirement to validate citizenship when availing onesself of the privileges thereof (e.g. voting in federal elections) makes sense.
It is very easy in the US, especially in either very urban or very rural communities. If you don't drive on public roads and are already established in life with a job or bank account, you probably don't actually need an ID for much in your day to day life. Even activities that we normally think of as requiring an ID like traveling on a plane are possible without an ID if you are willing to jump through some hoops.
Then it's even better than in Europe, you usually pay a small tax to get documents. Then what is this fuzz about having a proper documents to vote about? Republicans being suspicious about the fraud has merit.
Requiring any tax in order to allow someone to vote is expressly illegal in the US as it used to be abused as a form of voter suppression.
From our Constitution (24th Amendment, Section 1)[1]:
>The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Well you need a home too to vote? Or how do they send you the envelope otherwise? Isn't that a tax as well. I could count tons on items, where's the line? Transport to polling station? Clothes to show up?
You do not need a home or address to vote. You can setup your mail to be sent to a shelter, a social worker, or any number of other options. The US Postal Service has also been known to deliver to places that don't have official addresses so you might even be able to get something delivered to the "red tent behind the Walmart". You can also generally pick up whatever you need from the local elections office.
Numerous services exist to provide free rides to polling places including some publicly owned transportation options.
The right to vote does not excuse you committing crimes in order to vote and being naked is generally illegal is most of the US which would probably be what prevents you from voting without clothes.
No one thinks that. The fundamental problem is the recognition that the lack of a central database has led to citizens who have the right to vote being denied that right. Voting is a right, voting is a right, voting is a right. If the US government is going to deny a person that right, the burden of proof is in them.
The first page of results for "id laws voter suppression" turned up similar statements from the WaPo, Atlantic, Wired, Vox, and quotes numerous politicians. Your "no one thinks that" is not in line with reality.
Literally requiring some form of identification is not crazy.
That said, the Republican path of establishing voter ID laws is often part of a pattern of "let's make it hard for the poor and working class to get proper ID, and to vote".
Reducing early voting, not making ID cards free, etc. Voting should be a universal right in this country. The government should be putting in maximum effort to assist everyone who wants to vote, to be ready when the time comes, and enable early voting as much as possible.
I'm pretty sure some of the "ohmygod you're suppressing voters!" articles are about states with free IDs. (Or extremely cheap - for instance in Michigan an ID is $10)
ID cards are not free in Europe either and no you can't make them in each village. Every time this topic comes up here someone posts a vox article writing that you someone had to go to a bigger city to get documents because where he lives was 3000 strong population. Heck, there are places where you HAVE to vote by the law and yes it does take a small effort to get documents and keep them updated every 6-8 yrs.
Because in many cases the states make it difficult to obtain a valid ID to vote. For example, shutting down DMVs or limiting their hours. I'm against voter ID laws until IDs are easily accessible to every voter.
Well it is, but only archaic voting systems would require it and this becomes a nonissue if states shift to modern system like those used in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Utah.
ID requirements are a form of voter suppression in places (like USA now) where the IDs aren't universal. If it's ensured that everyone does have the ID (like many other countries), then verifying that ID instead of the current voter registries does not suppress the votes of any group.
Yes, and if you listen to many of the people arguing against it the reason we don't have a national database of citizens is because the one thing stopping the US government from turning into Nazis and committing another genocide is poor record keeping.
EDIT: I am being hyperbolic here, but the second reply to my first comment was doing exactly this. We can't have this database because of the Nazis.
The US Census has already been used to round up Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Post-9/11, the Census has handed over the locations and countries of origin of Arab-Americans to DHS/CBP.
The point isn't that the US government has never done anything evil or will never do anything evil again. The point is that you aren't going to stop someone determined to commit evil by making it slightly more administratively difficult. If we fear that eventual evil, let's work to prevent it. Let's stop allowing this potential abuse to be the sole deciding factor against us doing good work today. It didn't stop us when we built the interstate highway system, which was largely built to facilitate military transport, so why should it stop us now?
Also I'm not asking for a database including every possible detail about a person. I see no reason why something like race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or an number of other traits should be recorded. But a simple database with names, DOB, most recent address, a national id, etc would be extremely helpful.
> The point is that you aren't going to stop someone determined to commit evil by making it slightly more administratively difficult.
"Both Mayor Karrer and Bishop Chrysostomos were quickly summoned to appear before the German Commandant, where they were ordered to immediately prepare the list of all the Jewish residents of Zakynthos. ... In a great display of courage and defiance to the powerful occupiers of Greece, the mayor and the bishop handed a simple piece of paper to the Nazi commander. On that scrap of paper, only two names were written: Mayor Loukas Kerrer and Bishop Chrysostomos."
The paper with the two names on it makes for a great story, but it sounds more like that was their public proclamation of the community's actions. What really saved those people was their neighbors hiding them to the point that the article says they "disappeared". In that instance having some names on a piece of paper or in a database in meaningless. The important part is fighting the evil with direction action like this community did.
"In the book, published in 2001, Black outlined the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data."
I always find it strange how people consider the possibility of certain events far-fetched to the point of irrationality that have already happened.
I feel like I am repeating myself now. The point is not that these tools can't be used for evil. The point is that banning these tools does not prevent evil.
Would the Holocaust have happened without IBM's participation?
Would the Holocaust have happened if punch cards were banned?
Would the Holocaust have happened if the Nazis didn't have census data?
The answer to those questions is an obvious yes. These logistical obstacles would have been nothing but a mild inconvenience for the Nazi death machine.
I was being hyperbolic much as the people who are against this policy are hyperbolic, but the idea is true at any level of governmental abuse. If we fear government overreach, bad record keeping is never going to offer much protection.
Of course, and it's also completely unnecessary. We are innocent until proven guilty. If I show up at a polling place (or in this case, requesting or mailing a voting packet), show them some sort of identity and address, then I should be able to vote. If you're caught committing voter fraud, you should go to jail. It's simple, and has always been effective.
No they also ask for a unique identifier (bank number) and an access code (PIN) and a token (bank card). That's three-auth. Two things you have to know and one thing you have to have. That's pretty good.
I think that's what people are suggesting maybe voting should have.
That makes catching people impossible. We can't even determine the level of fraud, so faith in our voting system is eroded. Even if you believe that there is no fraud, you should be deeply concerned that many other people are losing faith in election integrity. Elections are considered fraudulent until proven otherwise.
We certainly could have decently secure elections without ID. Like this: You show up to vote in person, a good photo is taken, and you say who you are. That info is then made public. Political parties and other interested groups can sift through the photos, maybe with an AI, to find any crime.
It's almost perfect. The main trouble is that fraud detection happens after the voting, so a person who doesn't fear prison can do as desired.
There are two possible kinds of voter fraud (both extremely rare), "retail fraud" (i.e. individual voters) and "wholesale fraud" (i.e. bulk fraud). Voter ID laws mostly "fix" a non-existent problem of individual false votes with the express intent of discouraging votes. The real problem you want to fix is "wholesale fraud" which means securing the whole system from voting machines (which should be open-source and paper-audited) to how votes are tallied. Think about it. If you were going to steal votes would you go to all the trouble to forge or hijack individual votes or would you bribe someone to flip a couple of digits at a county office?
Of course, a trustworthy system includes how mail-in votes are tracked and verified but that is a well-understood problem working well for thousands and thousands of absentees, military personnel and whole states full of people who have voted that way regularly for decades.
And the very place where that happened now has a database again but without any of that information in it. The lesson that no database at all can exist seems like the wrong one. Pretty much every EU country has a database of citizens that is also then used to define who can vote where. It works fine. Those same places also do a census as a completely different effort for different reasons.
We are not Europe and modern society has existed for but a brief moment in the long history of the world. I have no desire to give the government any more of an advantage over me. There's no reason to think that it will never be used in the future.
I think your point stands as for why we don’t want such a database but between Social Security which is now tied to the new federal driver’s licenses, taxes, and the census I think it’s a tough sell that the government couldn’t assemble the same data.
Agreed, but surely the More Evil Government could just buy a marketing database - or have NSA download it - and know everything down to what size underpants people wear and which specific businesses and organisations they support.
Facebook - without checking the specific details - can probably tell the locality and religious position of most of their users; certainly enough to direct the Neue Gestapo to arrest you. But they also have raw address and religion details, which makes it somewhat easier.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there doesn't appear to be much evidence of widespread voter fraud. Election fraud and voter suppression on the other hand....
How would you expect the government to detect thr amount voter fraud? There have been cases of voter fraud in every state we just don't know the number.
Efforts to actively monitor/keep track of citizens are suppressed by the left. There is even an effort to stop the government from asking who is a citizen and who is not. If you think this is because of humanitarian reasons, you are sorely mistaken
I moved out of New York State two years ago. I registered in my new state and have voted by mail in my new state multiple times.
New York State still has me on the voter rolls there. I tried to find a place to have myself removed but I couldn't even find directions on what to do so I gave up and continue to get spam from candidates in my old district.
I live in Oregon where all voting is done by mail and it has been done that way for decades. We're not alone either, a few other states and local governments do this.
Is the problem with vote by mail itself, or just a bad implementation?
Oregon has had a lot of time to practice. Also, it's a fairly orderly & well-managed state overall. Places improvising mass mail-in voting for the 1st time, and with deeper histories of political-machine voting abuses, are going to have more troubles.
Virtually all states have some type of vote by mail systems already. They just need the funding to expand them. Something that should have happened long long ago.
There is no bureaucratic governmental labor-intensive process that "just needs funding" to expand instantly. They also need time & multiple experience/training/improvement cycles.
This is especially true in foundational processes where, in some cases, the slow rate of change & large involvement of many competing groups is part of its institutional legitimacy.
It's hard to take "the other side" seriously when every last one of them complaining about mail-in voting... vote by mail themselves.
When they can't be bothered to show up to vote but have 150 days a year to golf, I'm not sure how they can tell someone working two minimum wage jobs that they should stand in line for 6+ hours to have the "priveledge" to vote.
The fact that it's not secret and thus easy to buy/coerce is by far the biggest problem with it. It's a risky bet to hang your democracy on mail-in voting. Just run your elections with paper ballots cast into metal boxes. Run them on a Sunday in schools all over the country staffed by representatives of the candidates. That's done in many places and never has any issues. It's very cheap, you get results in just a few hours, and since plenty of representatives of the candidates are involved the whole way everyone trusts the results. The US in November is going yo get dicey with all the voter suppression, mail-in shenanigans and candidates claiming the vote is wrong.
> Just run your elections with paper ballots cast into metal boxes
The difficulty here is that elections in many places are organized so that it is very inconvenient for less desirable citizens to cast their vote. Find a way to make it equitable for everyone, and there may be truth to your assetion.
Mail-in voting has no such problem. Unless artificially created, of course, by hamstringing the USPS. Fortunately in Oregon we have those metal boxes you mention and vote-by-mail. So I can vote from the comfort of my living room at a time convenient for me.
Coercion is certainly a potential issue, but if it were a legitimate problem we'd probably have more evidence for that by now.
> The difficulty here is that elections in many places are organized so that it is very inconvenient for less desirable citizens to cast their vote.
The parts about running it efficiently, on Sundays, with voting places everywhere with no queues also solves that. But I know there's no will in the US to have reasonably run elections. As an outside spectator to your elections for many years it's baffling how badly run they are.
> Coercion is certainly a potential issue, but if it were a legitimate problem we'd probably have more evidence for that by now.
Election systems aren't designed for the median election. They're designed to still be reliable when things are iffy and your democracy is at risk. The fact that you only know of a few cases of that very thing happening 2 years ago in your last big election shouldn't be of much comfort. Particularly with your shaky system being under active attack by external powers.
> As an outside spectator to your elections for many years it's baffling how badly run they are.
In my experience they are run very well, like clockwork, and very reliable. The problem (not everyone agrees it is a problem, however) is that the states control the election, so there are 50+ ways it gets accomplished.
> Particularly with your shaky system being under active attack by external powers.
I personally think the electronic voting machines are a much bigger risk for that kind of attack, compared to vote by mail; but even then, there's no real upside for external powers to take the risk of trying to actually muck with the ballots. In all regards it is easier, more effective, and less risky to just poison people's minds. And I hope you don't believe it's only happening to the United States.
I just got mine today in MA, and I didn't know what this was for, since I've never voted by mail.
Question: if I register to vote by mail, am I taking away the ability of this to be effective for someone else, i.e. using sacred resources or anything? I personally won't have a problem going to the polls on election day. Guess this is a long winded way of asking, is voting by Mail more/less reliable than going to the local station?
The state of Massachusetts seems very likely to be able to process ballots by mail for essentially all voters in the primary (September 1!) and general elections. You will be doing your civic duty best by voting by mail rather than going to a polling place in person.
https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/eleev/early-voting-faq.htm has the official FAQs from the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth and says you can look up whether your ballot was accepted. It's not totally clear what reasons they might use to reject a ballot though.
Fortunately enough, those types of voter fraud are statistically insignificant. The bigger issue is large scale disenfranchisement, by unregistering voters days before an election.
Did you actually read the article? At no point does it actually state that 1/10 ballots were proof of voter fraud:
"Most commonly, officials did not count ballots because the signature on the ballot did not match the one on file, the ballot arrived too late or the required certificate was not enclosed."
My problem is rarely the diagnosis; it's almost always the prescription.
The right solution is to identify all of the sinks and sources (all of the events which allow a voter to be added to or removed from voter eligibility) and work to integrate automated systems in a web. Birth recordings, death recordings, change of residency (at DMV, credit bureaus, tax bodies, etc), change of citizenship, change of felon status, etc. Anything short of this will bias voting for or against "the other side".
I'm particularly frustrated by watching some states batch remove names from roles by using substring wildcards and also prevent same-day registration -- together these mean that people are unable to vote with no notice and insufficient time to restore their name to the roles.
Was it Isaac Asimov who pondered that man's goal is to automate itself out of existence? I don't get this lack of temperament with automation vs. direct labor.
I've called out Amazon before, and I stick to my stance that that company is going to boom and bust because it is so automated. Just ponder what the current top complaints are from Amazon customers, regardless of what service they use...? Well, let's head on over to https://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/amazon.html?#sort=hel... ...
> I contacted customer service through chat on TWO separate occasions ... Well, it was never fixed.
> To make matters worse, when you call they are not very helpful ...
> Merchandise more often doesn't arrive on guaranteed delivery time and customer service is rather disinterested on resolving any issues.
Those are the side effects of depending too heavily on automation. So, the charge that "anything short of [a web of automated services] will bias voting" is itself an insurmountable conflict. 1 in 10 mail-in ballots being rejected is an example of how automation isn't a solution in and of itself. States batch removing names with regex is an example. The same-day voter registration automation having a conflict with the purge of expired voter registrations is an example. Is it ever a smart idea to pour more salt on a wound if the sting is already unbearable?
The right solution is a system with enough automation to make the various key election services meet 80% of expected use, and to have people independent of the election provide the necessary checks and balances to resolve anomalous scenarios. Whether that's citizens who surrender their right to vote, or a code that substitutes for the names and PI of candidates and voters, I don't know. But I do know that the sting is already unbearable. Can we just please put away the salt?
It actually is sort of by design. There is no federal administration of elections, that falls to states and counties. It then follows from this that the voter rolls would be fragmented and difficult to consolidate when people move and/or die.
This is one thing I like about Germany, so you when you move you have to signed paper by the landlord that you're indeed living there. Then you take it to a government building and you "register." Every German is automatically registered and before a vote, maybe a month before hand will get a letter in the mail. They have to use this paper to vote or they can request a mail in ballot. You're assigned a place to vote(you have to go here). But they're always(from my experience really close to the place of residence.
However, I think your parent is describing what happens when the previous resident at your address doesn't register a new address. The Elections Department doesn't know if they died, emigrated, moved residences, or they now co-habitate at your address.
Was the roll count correlated to multiple votes from the same address?
Where I live, you request a ballot and it gets mailed to you, so there is some controls in terms of people registered at old apartments. The voters vulnerable to shenanigans (nursing homes, etc) are equally vulnerable.
Personally, I think vote by mail is driving more turnout and is ultimately a good thing. I’m surprised that the GOP is so against it, as it will benefit them in local elections imo.
Colorado has vote my mail as the default option and it works fine. If you want to vote, you register, get a ballot in the mail and return it. You can verify that it's counted by following it online and we haven't really had any issues.
If you set up the system correctly it'll work just fine.
> The voter rolls not dependable. It's not by design, but its a hard problem to solve.
I'm not sure why it has to be such a hard problem? If I file taxes in tax year N at a given address, and then file taxes in tax year N + 1 at a different address, then it's pretty clear that I am no longer a resident and should be removed from voter rolls. I'm aware that this doesn't cover everybody, but if you combine a few different such datasets that the government already keeps track of people moving, then you should be able to easily assure that most stale entries are removed in timely (<1 year) fashion.
There are too many cases where you might file taxes in one place but be eligible to vote in another. There are edge cases on pretty much all the datasets.
That being said, it doesn't seem like it would be hard to have a national voter database that shows each voter and where they are registered, with the ability to notify districts when someone shows up elsewhere, combined with a national registry of death certificates.
>There are too many cases where you might file taxes in one place but be eligible to vote in another. //
Is the eligibility wrong though?
There has been a sort of reverse Gerrymandering [1] in the UK where voters are instructed where to vote to have the most effect, people with second homes (which can include students but otherwise would seem to be exclusively rich people) might qualify this way in the UK.
Generally this indicates to me the need for electoral reform. But perhaps tighter regulation about where one may vote (restricting eligibility when one is eligible elsewhere) is also needed in some places?
Just need to look out for Republican police officers from Minnesota casting illegal ballots in Florida. How do people like that even get registered without suitable documentation?
How could you have 3-4 families registered at a single address? Can't you validate against IRS, or drivers license, or utility data to narrow it down? I know that my utility payment info was used when I went to register in a new state - I punched the address into the gov portal and it said "are you eyegor? This information provided by xyz power"
IRS would in theory only have the address listed on your most recent tax return. If have moved sometime in 2020, the IRS wouldn't have my new address by the time it came to mailing out ballots for the election in November.
My driver's license lists my address when I lived in San Francisco. I don't live there anymore and just haven't been able to update it yet, so that wouldn't work either.
Utilities are typically registered under one person's name from the household. So in theory if I have roommates and I'm the name on the utility bill, the utility company wouldn't have the names of all my roommates at my address.
This framing concedes a lot of ground to the folks who seek to make voting more difficult.
Where rights are concerned, America typically errs on the side of potentially allowing an illegal action, with the threat of our notorious criminal justice system as the deterrent.
For example, we are willing to allow people to carry (without a license) long guns into grocery stores and restaurants under the presumption that they will act responsibly. We don't mandate speed regulators on vehicles. We let people pay bills with checks. Wall Street polices itself. We allow a lot of conduct that could lead to crimes. We aren't in the pre-crime business in America.
So to reframe: voting is not a lesser right than being able to carry an unlicensed rifle into a restaurant (which is legal in large parts of America). Let people vote by mail, punish them if they commit voter fraud. The burden is on those who seek to restrict voting to show why voting by mail warrants a much higher level of advance scrutiny than other areas of civil regulation.
Is there any reason to believe that the issues you describe would unfairly benefit one “side” over the other? It seems like restricting vote-by-mail certainly could.
How are the records maintained in the US? In the UK every household gets a form every year on which they reconfirm who is eligible to vote at that address.
>Its worth listening to the concerns "of the other side" so that we have fair elections
We should also look at the lack of voter fraud on any widepsread level before we "solve" the wrong problem and disenfranchise a lot of people.
I suspect, from trying to find evidence on people unable to vote and people voting illegally, that we disenfranchise far more people than we allow errorenous votes.
It's simple to sample who voted, compare to actual people, and conclude there is no where near a voter fraud problem. (Most states let researchers do just this, and decade in and out, no fraud).
Census is "actual Enumeration” of “all persons", so you'd need to join/filter the data to remove people who are not citizens. Doing so would cause some folks to be afraid/unwilling to fill out the census.
2020 census is especially difficult because they haven't done as much (any?) door-to-door canvassing that usually happens during a census.
Unlikely, as the census can’t share granular census information with other parts of the government for decades. You need improvements in how voting rolls are updated and kept current (I’ve seen voting registration been done at the same time as acquiring a drivers license or state ID at a DMV, for example).
There is a lot of power in leaning on existing online resources for performing this work, where your identity and address verification has already been performed (or it can rapidly be performed in a way that is both inexpensive to government and so frictionless it does not disenfranchise the disadvantaged). You just need competent government leadership and technology practitioners who can rapidly glue it together (I know, crazy high hill to climb).
The reason these votes were thrown out was because of (1) user error (2) signature difficulties (3) "other" of which a tiny amount is going to be fraud. Ballots getting sent to the wrong place isn't the problem here.
For this to be an effective attack surface, a significant number of people who get someone else's ballot would have to be willing to commit felony fraud to cast one lousy extra vote. On my ballot, it even says that you will go to jail for X number of years if it isn't you. I just don't believe people are doing this en masse and the data we have on voter fraud supports the idea that it's incredibly rare.
I also want to improve our elections, but the scary thing is that we're talking about fraud and not poor ballot UX which is what the article shows is the vast majority of the problem. If I was in charge then I would start there. The reason it's scary is that we have a sitting president who has been claiming against all facts that the last election was rigged and that voter fraud was rampant and that he would have had a landslide victory otherwise. His faction has been spreading misinformation about the current election and polticizing voter fraud (which seems to only happen in the states that don't support him...).
In addition, instead of doing anything about all of this alleged fraud, he has appointed a political postmaster to gut the USPS before a historic mail in election. My ballot application is taking twice as long to go in this year conpared to the last. That is scary! How is any of that OK?
It's pretty clear what is happening here and we're being set up and narratives written so that if Trump loses in November he can blame it on fraud. That is terrifying. It is literally the core of our democracy being attacked. Whatever happens this November is not going to be good and Trump is driving a lot of that.
I would agree with listening to the concerns of "the other side", but thus far their concerns do not include good-faith attempts at solving problems.
Largely their "concerns" seem to be that vote-by-mail will circumvent the large amount of effort they've spent to make it harder for poor people to vote.
The president has literally said that he doesn't like vote-by-mail because it makes it impossible for him to win and called it a coup. How do you even begin to work with that?
The President is opposed to ballots mailed indiscriminately to everyone, and supports those requested by the voter.
Based on the comments in this thread it's pretty clear why: People move all the time, and the state does not necessarily have a current address for everyone.
Also the reverse problem: The current resident gets the ballot and tries to vote with it.
That's part of the whole signature verification thing that isn't working well.
Officially the post office is supposed to do return to sender if the name doesn't match, but I suspect in apartments with frequent turnover they can't realistically do that.
Having the voter request the ballot gets rid of all of that trouble.
> Also the reverse problem: The current resident gets the ballot and tries to vote with it.
Any kind of double voting shenanigans should be pretty straightforward to detect. So when it happens, you [at least] invalidate the second attempt, and forward the details over to the police for investigation and prosecution.
The thing about voting is that most of the legwork in verifying voters is done in advance of any election. By the time you get to ballot-casting, the hard part is done.
If you want to affect the outcome of the election, you will need to change a lot more than a single vote. Each ballot you steal, next to worthless all by itself, opens you up to detection, and vote tampering comes with heavy penalties.
You need to find a systemic vulnerability, otherwise the risk is much too high and the odds of success much too low. Vote-by-mail isn't actually a worry unless you have an ideological position based on the current election, you should really worry about the electronic voting machines used in many places that have in-person voting. The potential for systemic fraud there is much, much higher.
Ironically perhaps, but the GP's post is decidedly not in "good-faith" IMO.
The argument that Republicans want to "make it harder for poor people to vote" is a red herring regarding the voter ID debate.
Similarly, Trump's position on mail-in-ballots, as far as I can tell, is that that the expected ease of large scale voter fraud by relatively few bad actors will make it impossible to win. I have no clue if that's true or not, but to frame the stated claim without also acknowledging the underlying potential issue seems misleading.
I don't understand why voter ID is such a big deal in the United States. In my country (Sweden) you cannot vote without identifying yourself with a state-issued ID card or passport, no exceptions. If you for some reason lack both you need to have someone that can affirm your identity (and they need to show their own identification papers). Nobody complains about it because it is a necessary precondition for a fair and rigorous democratic system and everyone implicitly agrees upon this. If you don't like it then don't participate.
I don't buy the argument that it disenfranchises voters. Even the poorest in my country are able to vote despite having these voter ID restrictions. India also has some form of voter ID too, and their population is almost triple the American population and substantially poorer.
I can't help but think that there is some kind of malicious intent behind the opposition to voter ID, but it is unfortunately very difficult to prove.
I actually really like the process that Elections Canada uses. They verified that most Canadians have ID (86% have Driver's Licenses). They identified the most common issue (proof of address) and added a mitigating process (mailing Voter Information Cards). And finally, they have a fallback: as a third option, a person's identity can be vouched for by a person who does have ID.
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=med&dir=c76/id...https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=poli/r...
I can see why a tiny minority of people would be disenfranchised, but unfortunately compromises have to be made to have a fair and rigorous election system. Edgecases exist where people slip through the bureaucratic cracks but those exist here too and I see no one complaining about it. If you for some reason lack identification papers you'd try to fix it by going through the processes that we have to verify your identity. Nobody ever complains and says that the system is actively disenfranchising them as that is patently ridiculous.
First, some rural areas in Texas are 170 miles from the nearest location they could apply for an ID. That's about the distance from Stockholm to Karlstad, which is much more difficult to travel without a train infrastructure like Sweden's.
Secondly, the cost of applying for an ID can range from $75-$175, or ~650-1500 krona. I noticed in another thread you mentioned Swedish voter IDs cost 350 crowns. Our voter IDs cost 2-4x as much in absolute terms. Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage, but for reference ours is $7.25/hr ($14,500 pre-tax annually, assuming a full-time 40hr/week job) and our 10th percentile household income is about $14,000 annually (~$122k SEK). So a voter ID can cost a low-income worker about 3 days of pre-tax income, likely 3.5 or 4 post-tax.
Do you really think you can get your documents done in Europe in every rural area? No, you travel to a bigger city, often using a bus and whatnot. Part of life, being a citizen. Every single opposition to having an ID to vote sounds insane to Europeans (UK excluded but they call us mainland anyway), and I can promise you they would take Republicans side on the issue.
The distances in the US are so much larger and the public transportation infrastructure is so much worse the comparison boggles the mind. Consider 170 miles the distance quoted is roughly half way across the entire country of Germany.
The issue problem is it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. In person voter fraud is hard to do in large numbers and there's only a handful of cases where people have voted more than once. Trump tried to create a panel to find voter fraud and found either nothing or basically nothing.
So on the one hand we have a solution to fraud that doesn't happen vs explicit and intentional voter disenfranchisement.
> Not sure why there are so many myths about this.
Politics. And not every place is Texas. Also, because there are precious few examples of voter fraud while there is ample evidence of voter suppression.
India with a 900 million eligible voters in 2019 elections had the biggest turnout - 67%. Aka over 600 million votes were cast and counted. They have strict voter ID laws. Despite having a large disenfranchised population.
This is just a talking point without any basis in facts.
Disenfranchisement is a bad excuse. That's like saying you don't want to get an SSL cert for your webapp because it costs too much. What is the security and integrity of your elections worth to you?
It's hard to understand from other countries but voter ID laws and a lot of voting changes (eg: eliminating voting days and polling places) have been specifically [0] targeted at minority populations and by proxy at the Democratic party. [1] There's a long history of this happening and when the Supreme Court removed a law requiring some states (in the south) with a long history of extremely racist voter suppression to get approval for changes a few years ago there were suddenly large reductions in voting sites, days, and attempts at instating voter ID laws.
[0] As in we have emails where they talk about specifically eliminating Sunday as an early voting day because it's heavily black and disproportionately Democratic.
In Sweden, does getting your state-issued ID so you can vote require visiting a government office that is only open during business hours on weekdays, in a place very poorly served by public transit and far away from poor neighborhoods, so that poor people without cars will have to take a whole day off from work to travel there? Is the office understaffed so it might take two or three visits to actually get your ID? In Sweden, when the government reduces the number of places you can get ID or cuts hours under the guise of cost cutting, does almost all that cutting only come from offices that serve high minority areas?
In Sweden, are there limited protections for worked so that many poor workers won't have any paid days off they can use for such a trip, so it will cost them a day or two of pay to get their ID, and perhaps their job if their boss doesn't approve of them taking time off from work?
In Sweden, are the politicians who instituted the voter ID policies the same politicians that have drastically reduced the number of polling places per capita in minority neighborhoods so that actually voting there can require hours of standing in line (and missing work if your employer doesn't give you a paid day off to vote), while not cutting or even increasing polling places per capita in white neighborhoods so that it is a breeze for whites to quickly and easily vote?
Have they cut back early voting programs that opened the polling places during the weekend before election day, so people could vote on their days off?
If the answer to all of the above is "no", then what you see in Sweden is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to understanding voting in the US.
The fact is that the people enacting voter ID laws in the United States (1) are generally the same people who have been working hard to limit minority voting, (2) cannot demonstrate that it solves any actual problem, (3) try to make it hard for poor and minorities to get the ID that they pick for their system while making it easy for white people.
That's why there is plenty of opposition to voter ID--the politicians pushing for it are not acting in good faith. If someone proposed a voter ID system in good faith--one in which it was free to get ID, could be obtained quickly and without the need for a lot of travel, and was easy for minorities to get as for white people, there would mostly only be objections from those who oppose national ID system in general.
In The Netherlands the department which issues IDs have at least one evening opening hour, to allow people to do this after working hours.
Even you can get a new passport or ID at Amsterdam airport and some municipalities while living abroad. Even here in the UK there is an evening opening hours to get your ID (5-7 pm) or open on Saturday morning.
Personally, this sounds the US government is trying to make it unreasonable hard to vote.
I'm new to US politics, however I'm extremely surprised at how frequently the concept of voter suppression comes up. It seems completely anti-democracy.
I've never really come across this phrase in UK politics. If it was to come up, I'm certain it would be met with extreme outrage. Why is it just accepted in the US?!
> I've never really come across this phrase in UK politics. If it was to come up, I'm certain it would be met with extreme outrage.
I've not seen "extreme outrage" to any of these examples:
"It could lead to a repeat on the mainland of the Northern Ireland experience where the introduction of individual registration led to a 10% drop in registrations and many eligible voters effectively being disenfranchised."[0]
"The government trialled voter ID in some local authorities during the 2018 and 2019 local elections. It was disturbing to see ministers describe it as a “success”: we know that hundreds of people were denied a vote for not having ID. In 2019, according to official figures, more than 700 people were turned away from polling stations across just 10 council areas."[1]
"A large software company whose shareholders include Brexiter and former Conservative Cabinet minister Peter Lilley has been given a lucrative contract by the Cabinet Office without competitive tendering to revamp the management of the electoral register in extraordinary circumstances."[2]
AFAIK there are roughly zero documented instances of in-person voter fraud by Democrats over the last 20 years. There are, amusingly, a bunch of documented instances by Republican voters who said they were doing it to offset the (imaginary) Democrats doing it.
Democrats believe that people without an ID will vote for then since these people are most likely living off government programs hence Democrats ought to be (though not guaranteed) their choice.
It is not malicious inasmuch they are pushing for it solely because they think they will benefit from this process. If it were the other way around they would oppose it.
Poor people are the least likely to have the time and means to get any of these free IDs. To add to that, states like Alabama strategically place offices to make it even more difficult for e.g. people who do not have access to a car to get said ID.
The Social Security Card is a free document. They mail it to you without you having to present yourself anywhere. There would be far less objection to voter ID if this type of system was being proposed by proponents of voter ID.
>Poor people are the least likely to have the time and means to get any of these free IDs.
I'd say it's the opposite. Employed middle class working 9-to-5 with 2 kids have less time and means. There's a Hitchen's quote somewhere here...
Voter ID laws have not been show to reduce turn out.
>To add to that, states like Alabama strategically place offices to make it even more difficult for e.g. people who do not have access to a car to get said ID.
That's not a problem with voter ID laws though. This is a red herring.
>The Social Security Card is a free document. They mail it to you without you having to present yourself anywhere.
This is patently false. I just personally went through this. You absolutely have to show up to a SSA office and bring documentation.
> Employed middle class working 9-to-5 with 2 kids have less time and means.
"Employed middle class" typically reads as "mobile" and "9-5" frequently reads as "white-collar". Those folks feel time constrained, but they are also very likely to have e.g. PTO/flexible work schedules and access to transportation.
It's worse for (say) unemployed people with no transportation. This is to say nothing of the disabled, bedridden, etc. There are significant numbers of people for whom this is an unnecessary burden.
And again -- this burden is significantly higher than the requirement placed on residents who wish to carry shotguns into restaurants.
> Voter ID laws have not been show to reduce turn out.
Voter ID laws have not been shown to reduce voter fraud. At best, they add cost and bureaucracy without any proven benefit.
> That's not a problem with voter ID laws though. This is a red herring.
A common argument against voter ID laws is that they are of a lineage with historic disenfranchisement mechanisms in the US. Strategically making it difficult to get a newly-required voter ID is a direct descendant of the voter suppression schemes our parents fought against. It's absolutely relevant to bring in recent history.
> This is patently false. I just personally went through this. You absolutely have to show up to a SSA office and bring documentation.
Did you lose your card, or need a replacement in a hurry? For decades, newborns have been able to be issued cards without anyone showing up at an SSA office. (Yes, I have personally done this for an infant. I can confirm that you fill out a form and they mail you a card, just like you'd expect.) SSA also has a site where residents of many states can request a replacement card online if they have state ID: https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/replacement-card.html.
[Edit: The SSA forms indicate that even replacements for adult citizens can be done via mail. It would be fair for you to mention that you had an atypical situation that required you to go in to get a card, but that this is not required.]
If voter ID proponents start advocating for Social Security cards or other 100% free-by-mail IDs as voter documents, a lot of the opposition would go away. But then, so would the perceived partisan benefit, so that's not in the cards.
>"Employed middle class" typically reads as "mobile" and "9-5" frequently reads as "white-collar". Those folks feel time constrained, but they are also very likely to have e.g. PTO/flexible work schedules and access to transportation.
"In 2005, sociologists William Thompson and Joseph Hickey estimate an income range of roughly $35,000 to $75,000 for the lower middle class and $100,000 or more for the upper middle class."
That encompasses the likes of 9-to-5ers, licensed electricians, oil field workers, etc.
>It's worse for (say) unemployed people with no transportation. This is to say nothing of the disabled, bedridden, etc. There are significant numbers of people for whom this is an unnecessary burden.
It's probably even easier. With unemployment benefits, additional stimulus, and lots of time on their hands, it's a perfect time to get their voter ID. Disabled and bedridden were equally disadvantaged under prior systems; this is a red herring.
>And again -- this burden is significantly higher than the requirement placed on residents who wish to carry shotguns into restaurants.
Categorically wrong. You need a photo ID to purchase a firearm, and some states require a license to carry long guns. Other states outright ban open carry of long guns.
>Voter ID laws have not been shown to reduce voter fraud. At best, they add cost and bureaucracy without any proven benefit.
Voter ID laws have been shown to reduce and/or prevent certain types of voter fraud, though indeed voter fraud is rare. At best, they prevent voter fraud, speed up the actual voting process at poll sites, reduce certain types of errors, etc.
>A common argument against voter ID laws is that they are of a lineage with historic disenfranchisement mechanisms in the US.
It's a common argument, but it's more of a conspiracy theory without any hard numbers to back it up.
>Strategically making it difficult to get a newly-required voter ID is a direct descendant of the voter suppression schemes our parents fought against. It's absolutely relevant to bring in recent history.
It's not difficult, nor do voter ID laws suppress voter turn out. Unproven conspiracy theories have nothing to do with recent history.
>Did you lose your card, or need a replacement in a hurry?
I needed to change my name, which most married females do. Nonetheless, if you lose your voter ID card and you don't have to make a change, you can similarly get a replacement without showing up to an office. This makes your entire point moot.
>For decades, newborns have been able to be issued cards without anyone showing up at an SSA office. (Yes, I have personally done this for an infant. I can confirm that you fill out a form and they mail you a card, just like you'd expect.) SSA also has a site where residents of many states can request a replacement card online if they have state ID: https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/replacement-card.html.
That website specifically outlines that you need a "driver's license or a state-issued identification card from one of the many participating states.", so, again, that absolutely negates your point.
>[Edit: The SSA forms indicate that even replacements for adult citizens can be done via mail. It would be fair for you to mention that you had an atypical situation that required you to go in to get a card, but that this is not required.]
Changing your name is not an atypical situation. About 80% of married females end up changing their name. Also, the SSA form literally outlines that you need a state issued ID... like a driver's license that you can use for voting!
>If voter ID proponents start advocating for Social Security cards or other 100% free-by-mail IDs as voter documents, a lot of the opposition would go away.
>But then, so would the perceived partisan benefit, so that's not in the cards.
There is no effect on voter turn out, nor is there a partisan benefit. One of the supposedly most "at risk" groups to be suppressed by voter ID laws are the elderly. They overwhelmingly vote Republican.
The sheer amounts of non-factual talking points being spouted on this voter ID issue is outstanding. It's like people treat us minorities and poor people as some dumb and incapable population who can't even get a single ID for voting. I come from a country with over 900 million eligible voters where 600 million votes were cast and counted all with strict VOTER ID.
People keep buying into this nonsensical argument about voter id suppressing poor people, minorities etc but all they do is patronize and virtue signal. Why don't you admit the real reason - that Democrats won't be able to cheat if there were voter ID? Just like now they are trying to even remove signature verification from the mail in votes. It's all for cheating to gain as much power while calling the other side names. It's so obvious but people keep lying.
I think that decreasing disenfranchisement is good even if one political party might benefit from it. The other way of phrasing this looks a lot worse: that another political party benefits from policies which disenfranchise voters.
Or alternatively everyone should be able to vote, otherwise the government is an illegitimate joke, and we have the receipts from Republican groups intentionally trying to block targeted groups using voter ID and changing other voting conditions (polling places, early election days, etc). Insomuch as it will increase the number of Democratic voters those voters are entirely up for grabs if Republicans want to court them.
If the US wants to remain an actual representative democracy/republic [0] we have to treat attempts at keeping voters out of the polls as the threat they are. These voter ID law pushes never come with a commensurate program to find, ID, and register groups without IDs and I think that gives the game away even before the emails came out explicitly saying these were targeted attacks at legitimate voters.
[0] Just heading off the pedantic "ThEy'Re NoT a DeMoCrAcY" crowd
The malicious intent behind any Voter ID law is that they generally don't include enough funding or accessibility to get a Voter ID itself.
In the USA this generally disenfranchises minorities, people from lower socioeconomic status, or those for whom English (and navigating complex information in English) is not a primary language.
If the government would MANDATE voter ID but then also gave 4 years for everyone to get one and made it nearly free, then I think much of the opposition would be gone.
I would stop my opposition to voter ID immediately if everyone could agree that the FEC had a new job, to make sure every eligible voter had valid ID, it was free, and the FEC was properly staffed and funded to make it happen.
I'm not worried that my position is going to change anytime soon.
There is no federal id (except for DC drivers licenses). Drivers licenses are not proof of citizenship, Social Security card is not proof, university id card is not proof. Passports are expensive and time consuming to get
Then perhaps the federal authorities should push for federal ID cards so people can actually identify themselves when voting. It is beyond me how the State can enforce a non-voluntary tax liability on a citizen but has no way of reliably identifying said citizen - it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. ID cards in Sweden cost roughly 350 crowns, which is around 40 USD. If people can't be bothered to get one of those cards to vote in an election then I see no reason to accommodate them as the fee is so low and 99.9% of people can afford it. If they can't, they can ask a friend or election official to validate their identity at the election booth. I'm sure the government could provide ID cards free of charge cross-referenced with biometric data to avoid duplicates. This isn't a difficult problem to solve but it seems like the Democrats are trying to stonewall it any chance they get.
>ID cards in Sweden cost roughly 350 crowns, which is around 40 USD. If people can't be bothered to get one of those cards to vote in an election then I see no reason to accommodate them as the fee is so low and 99.9% of people can afford it.
A $40 poll tax that "99.99% of people can afford" is still a poll tax.
The cost in Argentina is of US$3, and it is not necessary to get a new one for each election. You get one when you are born, a new card at 8 yeas old and a new one at 14 years old.
And if you can't pay for it, the government give it for free anyway.
There's little use for a drivers license if you live in a city, like the majority of Americans do. Drivers licenses must be renewed every couple of years. That means for many Americans, that they will need to get a license just to vote, and only to vote. They will also need to renew it at their own expense if they want to continue to participate in elections.
This country has a bad racial history, including disenfranchising Black people by charging people money so they could vote. So basically that's a non-starter because we know where that road goes.
There are millions of eligible voters in the US for whom a $40 fee would be impossible to overcome. You don't understand how deep and how widespread poverty is in the US.
If you think the Republicans are pushing for a national ID and the Democrats are blocking them, you also don't understand the US political parties.
That last sentence is interesting. The state of things is that a few lawmakers, mostly Democrats, support a national ID, but then most Republicans and a bunch of other Democrats strongly oppose it. It's semi-bipartisan to hate the idea of national ID.
Meanwhile Republicans are very into requiring ID to vote, and a free Federal ID is a great way to allow for that while also solving a bunch of other problems that amount to a bunch of extra work, risk, and stress for normal people, but there's no way they'll join the (AFAIK) minority of Democrats supporting it to get it through, because they like ID to vote but hate, like, good, efficient ID systems, at the same time.
Opposition's mostly fear of government misuse, with overlap with a minority of people really certain it's a sign of the end times and marks us as servants of the Devil or something (I guess it's not when it's in other countries, or maybe those people are all servants of the Devil now, IDK). Democrats fear Republicans will use it to target minorities or set up rules effectively non-personing parts of the citizenry by denying them IDs, after they're (the IDs) made super-important. Republicans are afraid they'll be used to round up guns or track militia members or something. Basically a bunch of people on both sides are afraid of it, so it's a dead issue.
I think people outside of the US have a lot of difficulty imagining that conditions within the US could actually be as bad as they are. I think a lot of people within the US do as well.
Tell me about it. I'm shopping for non-employer family health coverage right now and I bet if people in the rest of the OECD knew what that looked like here they'd lobby the UN to send peacekeepers and relief aid. Country's great for making money, and also great at taking a bunch of it with little to show in return. And inconveniencing you for the privilege.
Five figures a year for another five figures of risk exposure, and none of it even applies except at about (optimistically) 1/3 of providers in one state—wrong hospital a mile from your house, you're uninsured. Travel out of state and get in a car wreck without getting some kind of travel insurance ahead of time which'll probably also find a way not to pay in the fine print anyway, like you're going to f#cking Colombia, you're uninsured. Ugh. This friggin' country.
(for those outside the US, you can translate "you're uninsured" to "you are definitely going bankrupt if you actually need a hospital for anything. If you're very lucky you'll still manage to get sufficient care before they realize you have no money left. And then if you also lose your job as a result of the health issue it gets really bad but at least you might get government insurance then, after it's too late to save you from permanent poverty.")
[EDIT] oh, and yes, that's about as good as it gets in my state—that's not, like, the worst option, that's ~ every option. Almost every insurance provider has left the individual (i.e. non-employer-provided) market, leaving bottom-feeders who've figured out new ways to deliver nearly-useless coverage while technically complying with the ACA, plus a few "non-compliant" coverage options that, aside from being crap (but at least cheap crap, instead of expensive crap) expose you to tax liabilities, if the Feds ever decide to start enforcing those again.
I would only add that, regardless of the severity of your condition, if a hospital discovers that you will be unable to pay they will simply send you home untreated.
Yep. An ER has to make sure you're not actively, immediately dying but after that you're cut loose and they don't have to do a thing. Good luck with that cancer or whatever. Plus if they do anything I'm sure they still send debt collectors after you even if they know you don't have money.
Knowing hospitals you'd end up with five debts from different companies from one uninsured post-heart-attack stabilization in one room at one ER. This also makes it nearly impossible to actually know you're covered for anything—one of those entities might not "take" your insurance, and now all that money you paid is useless and you're screwed anyway.
Navigating US healthcare feels like performing voodoo magic and tea-leaf-reading with some combination of your physical and financial health on the line, trying to balance it so if something goes wrong both are only badly harmed rather than catastrophically harmed.
[EDIT] on the plus side if you start off poor there's a decent chance the government does cover your health care, though it makes sure to make maintaining that super stressful—it's just that it's all set up so the health care system eventually gets a huge chunk of everyone's money, if they have any, and often all of the money, sooner or later. May not apply to the super rich but otherwise you're either poor and covered, or not-poor-but-not-rich and hoping you get the right roll on the dice so the healthcare system doesn't find a way to take all your money. And it is in all cases incredibly stressful even when you're not sick.
Seems like India does this well and they are the world's largest democracy and much poorer than the average American. Poverty is not an excuse for government incompetence (or even malice).
Trying to wrap my head around "Poverty is not an excuse for government malice". Poor people are to blame for Republicans trying to disenfranchise them? Certainly those who vote for Republicans I guess...
Seems like you aren't in the US so maybe you don't know the history. Basically the US has a very long history of white supremacists protecting their own power and wealth at the expense of non-white people through disenfranchisement. This continues today. I'm arguing from the point of view that this is bad and should not be a basis for policy.
It's not that it's impossible for some practical reason, the problem is that the republican party (which still holds a huge amount of power at the federal, state, and local level even when they don't hold the presidency) actively wants to deprive people of their voting privilege because they suspect those people might decide to vote against them.
In India, it is law that there must be a place to register for an ID every X miles from a village, and that the IDs are free of cost. The government even ended up building tons of registration building up in the mountains where nomadic herders live.
In America, when voting license legislation is passed, the government shutdown DMVs making it difficult and expensive to get a voting license.
From your article, it looks like you can apply online for voter ID in India, and mail in identity documents. It is also free to obtain. That's voter ID done right.
Congratulations. You have now instituted both a poll tax/at least obstacle to voting and a Federal ID card. You have pretty much managed to alienate the entire political spectrum in the US.
> Then perhaps the federal authorities should push for federal ID cards so people can actually identify themselves when voting.
> This isn't a difficult problem to solve but it seems like the Democrats are trying to stonewall it any chance they get.
You miss the entire bigger picture when you don't mention that Republicans have been consistently against federal ID laws of any sort, not Democrats. That shows the real motives in play.
I'd love to see required ID for voting and federal ID laws (together, all at once), as would most left leaning people. It'd be chump change to implement in the scheme of the US government. The fact it has not been done for as long as this issue has been talked about (at least a decade now) makes it clear what's actually going on.
You also have to look at the history. To have the stance of pro voter ID laws but anti-federal ID is just a modern day extension of Jim Crow.
The United States taxes its citizens globally regardless of residence, yes. One of the only countries in the world that does that (the other is Liberia AFAIK).
Is impersonating another voter a really an issue? It would be very trivial to catch if the real voter went to vote and couldnt because someone else had voted for them. But that doesn’t happen. What does happen is states require voter id and then shut down the DMV offices in minority communities making hard to get an ID.
Pretty much every sane country requires Voter ID. India has strict voter ID and just counted over 600 million (67%) votes in 2019. Anyone claiming voter id is somehow suppressing and racist etc is lying because they want to cheat. You can downvote me all you want but can't run away from the truth.
Voting licenses are free in India, you can get them online, and by law, the Indian government must have offices to register to vote for free every few miles from a village.
When the US implements voting licenses, they shut down DMVs and make people buy in to their right to vote.
> I don't buy the argument that it disenfranchises voters.
There is already significant voter disenfranchisement in the United States. Adding an additional requirement (which likely costs money and time) surely will not reduce disenfranchisement. What do you not buy?
There is strong opposition to any sort of national registry which might be used to "categorize" citizens for any purpose. That distrust is further compounded by general distrust in a strong federal government.
The whole concept of a federal personnummer/identitetskort - in their Swedish incarnations - and any benefits/conveniences offered by that sort of system is ideologically abhorrent to a (large?) portion of the US population.
In the Netherlands we also require ID. But everybody already has an Id card because you need it to travel abroad. In the US, a lot of people dont have a passport, especcially the less wealthy ones.
In NL, you are required to have an ID to be in the public space. Although there is no requirement to carry, there is a requirement to show under certain circumstances ( for non Dutchies, this is classical Dutch consensus, the Poldermodel ).
Also, if I am not mistaken, is an ID not mandatory when using public transport?
There's an amusing class of videos online in which conservative trolls ask young American liberals why voter ID laws are racist. The replies are invariably some version of "minorities can't obtain them." The troll will then play back these responses to random black passerby--who invariably have ID and are dismayed to find what liberals think of them.
The disenfranchisement argument is one of the worst-sourced claims floating around the public sphere. And it's transparently bogus. Photo IDs are essentially mandatory for participation in civic life in the US. Everyone has them.
I'm going with studies over anecdata, and also with the long-term track record that the South has earned of placing obstacles in the path of minorities voting.
> Not everyone can get a photo ID, especially when the state doesn't want them to
That's such an asinine and patronizing comment. People need to stop treating us minorities as some stupid and incapable people. Every single adult is capable of getting a photo ID - if they can be bothered to vote, they can be bothered to spend a few minutes getting a photo ID.
The real reason people oppose voter ID is because democrats won't be able to cheat. Voting is enshrined in the constitution as a fundamental right but cheating is not enshrined.
Also interesting how all 3 sources you linked are from radical left to left leaning sources.
1) about 1/2 of them are due to plain ol' User Error (not that there isn't room to improve the "UI" so that happens less) like not signing, not including required parts, simply leaving the ballot out of the envelope entirely(!), and so on,
2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match" (most of those are probably false negatives and should have counted, I'd bet, but given other issues I wouldn't be surprised if people in the same household accidentally signing one another's ballots or something else silly like that is some measurable part of the problem) and,
3) 1/4 are other :-/
[EDIT] looks like most of the "other" category is probably a couple towns in one county having a vote so screwed-up that 3,200 ballots were rejected en masse. That's about 20% of the rejected ballots, or about 2% of the total vote, right there.
I've always felt that matching signatures was a terrible way of authenticating voters. The person doing the matching is not a trained handwriting expert. Also, like many people, I have subpar handwriting and I highly doubt my signature today looks anything like what it did when I first registered to vote 25+ years ago.
When I lived in King County Washington half the time my vote was sent back due to mismatching signature. Heard similar stories from others. Maybe it stops fraud, but the high false negative rate is egregious.
Plus we're talking about "signature experts" as if there's a solid science there. From what I understand, it's a bit of a cargo cult where you just package up "do they look similar" in the trimmings of hard science.
Plus, it has a way of working out that people with names like Lakisha or Jamal might find themselves stuggling to match their signatures more than people with names like Chris or Alice.
It works well enough because all of the real authentication happens after you register and before you ever get a ballot. So there isn't really much fraud risk from you actually sending in the ballot, the signature is just the cherry on top.
The on site signature books are set up for right handed use. The helper has to move their hand shielding the printed signature so lefties can just copy what they wrote :)
So I guess we can say that at most 5% of the ballots were rejected for a "good" reason; that is, for a reason that might be related to actual fraud. But in reality it's probably much lower, since for #2 it's pretty much a given that a lot of those are false positives (as you suggest), and presumably not all of the #3 cases are fraud.
Is that good? Bad? At the very least, if there are fraud attempts, it's good that they're being caught?
It's just lame that at least 5% of ballots, and probably more, are being rejected due to ballot UX issues or a broken verification process.
Right: false positive from the perspective of catching fraud, false negative from the perspective of accepting good ballots, is what I mean, exactly. Same thing, different way of phrasing it.
Anyone know what the rejection rate for in-person paper ballots is, in the US, typically? It's hard to judge how much worse this is at successful voting than in-person with paper. My gut tells me increased participation would dwarf even a hard 10% rejection rate, assuming no improvement could be made, and if the in-person rejection rate's not near-zero then it's really a big win, but maybe not.
Meanwhile stories like this are making me really nervous about the public perception of November's vote, regardless how well they're actually run.
> not that there isn't room to improve the "UI" so that happens less
Definitely this. I live in NJ and found the mail-in ballot instructions to be somewhat confusing: multiple layers of folding and envelopes, a perforated piece which you were explicitly NOT supposed to detach, an additional section that that only applied if you were mailing it on behalf of another person, etc.
Pretty sure I filled it out correctly, but I mean, I had to re-read the instructions three times and I'm a former FAANG engineer.
>2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match" (most of those are probably false negatives and should have counted, I'd bet, but given other issues I wouldn't be surprised if people in the same household accidentally signing one another's ballots or something else silly like that is some measurable part of the problem) and,
How does this work afterwards? Are the voters notified? Seems like bad design to silently drop votes just because some guy arbitrarily decided your signature "didn't match".
They don’t drop. You can view your vote online to see if it got rejected. Also if your registered to a party, the party will track you down to fix the issue in a close race.
If this was a factor in allowing someone to vote, I'd never be allowed. The only time i use cursive is the once or twice a year I have to sign something (new card, paperwork, etc) so my signature never looks the same as other signatures.
> Still, the League of Women Voters and NAACP say the state’s signature-verification requirement is unconstitutional because it disenfranchises so many. Election officials are not trained in handwriting analysis to be able to properly determine whether the signature on a ballot matches the one on a voter’s registration, not to mention that a person’s signature can change over time and with age.
Every time I have to sign something that might be verified against a signature record I get nervous and I bet my signature reflects it.
I'm 100% sure my signature from more than a decade ago when I last signed paperwork for a new license doesn't match my current handwriting/signature.
Also, I'm under the impression that signature verification isn't a very sturdy science. I'm curious what the false positive/false negative rates are and what variables are likely to affect them.
We definitely need a better way to sign something besides wet signatures; mine certainly evolves over time as well as medium and instrument (pens, etc.)
I find the way it's used by credit card companies interesting.
When making a purchase, you can do a different signature each time. You can doodle, draw a straight line, write your name, mix it up, whatever. The only value of the signature is that if you don't recall making a purchase, they can send it to you and it can help trigger your memory or make you trust whether or not the purchase was actually you. So it's not for them to use in the verification process. It's for us to help trigger our memories.
Originally one point was that you signed the back of your card and the merchant would compare the signature on your receipt to the signature on the card to verify your identity. Another point was so the merchant has proof you intended to pay them.
When I was living in the UK (which wisely uses a more sensible PIN system instead of signatures) I was shocked the first time someone asked to see the back of my card. I don't think it's ever happened to me in the US. Culturally we've collectively decided to ignore the whole "signature verification" thing, but when using your card abroad you sometimes are reminded that it's supposed to happen in theory.
Yeah the problem is you can't really do that with elections. That's what makes them so tricky to do well at a distance (be it electronic voting or mail in though I trust mail in more than anything involving computers) it's hard to go back and fix any issues or audit and maintain anonymity. On top of just the sheer number of votes it's a lot of time and uncertainty to try to go back and forth trying to hash out votes.
That's not why you sign a credit slip. You sign it so the vendor can match it against the signature on the back of the card, because they are on the hook if you later claim fraud. If it matches the back of the card it is a lot harder to claim fraud.
The fact that you can put any doodle you want in there is because the vendors have decided it's cheaper to absorb the fraud than to check the signatures.
Their actions show that signatures aren't actually used in the way you describe. It does say to sign the back of the card, but I've never done so and it's never been checked. Not only do vendors not check, but there's no attempt by credit card companies at getting vendors to check. And they don't check on their end, either. The reason is not just because it's inefficient given the amount of fraud, but also because it's unreliable as a security mechanism.
So clearly, that's not how the signature is actually used. What matters is how it's actually used, which is to help prevent good faith actors from accidentally reporting purchases as fraudulent. That's a valid use, but noteworthy.
My bank bounced my rent checks for MONTHS. I went in, supplied a new signature sample, everything. Ended up having to do direct deposit because my bank decided there was no way I could be me.
Yeah it's silly but it's the only process we really have and it's the reason I'm not going to vote by mail this year. I have a reasonably consistent signature if I think about it but I'm not going to risk a random election official throwing it out because I'm younger and have a variable signature. That plus the screwballing that's happening at USPS right now I'm not going to rely on that.
There's 2 weeks to early vote for me so I'll just vote in that period.
Are you allowed to "print" (ie. not use cursive) your signature? If so that would go a long way to making your signatures more recognizable, especially if you don't normally write in cursive.
Have you seen Trump's signature? I've never heard of any requirement that your signature be your name in cursive. Your signature is whatever you want it to be.
The ballot goes into an envelope. You sign the envelope. That envelope goes into a regular postal envelope. When the ballot is received, the signature on the inner envelope is compared to the signature on file, and, if accepted, the envelope is opened and the ballot is transferred to a box to be counted.
How is that not a distinction without a difference when the ballot is in the envelope? So they look at the envelope to get your name and the ballot to see who you voted for. You would need some way to prevent these from being correlated by a person in possession of the thing you put in your mailbox.
In Oregon, the votes are received by teams of people that are required to have representatives from each of the major parties. They check signatures, then open the outer envelope and take out the secrecy envelope which has the ballot inside and toss that in another box. The person checking the signature does not do anything else with the ballot itself. Then the pile of ballots in their secrecy envelopes is given to another team and they open the envelope and process the ballot.
Yes, the mailman could commit a federal crime and figure out how you voted for. So if you're worried about that, drop the envelope in the actual ballot box.
Your address, or your name, will be enough to determine how you most likely voted.
The mailman sees even more. If you live in a condo and drive a Prius with a "Coexist" sticker, you probably voted one way. If you live in a single-family home with a big yard and you drive a pickup with a "Blue lives matter" license plate holder, you probably voted the other way.
The votes are inside another envelope. The complete ballot actually has two envelopes: the outer envelope has the signature and an inner one contains the votes.
The votes are counted in public. The envelope is verified and then put in a pile of verified envelopes. Someone else then removes the ballot from the envelope. In theory they do this face down so they can't see the name, which is verified by the other people watching them.
Then the ballot is placed in the same hoppers that the in person votes are put in and they are commingled.
That prevents you from doing the correlation after the vote has been counted but not before.
To do the correlation in person you would have to do it in the polling place, on election day, in front of election monitors and the voter, during the 30 seconds between when the person fills out their ballot and when they drop it into the box.
If your name is on the envelope, now it can be done anywhere between your mailbox and the polling place during the period of days or weeks between when you put it in your mailbox and when it gets counted. Wouldn't we then need independent election monitors guarding the incoming mailboxes 24/7 for several weeks?
There is an implied identification that is effective. Some neighborhoods vote one way, and other neighborhoods vote the other way. Postal workers can purposely misplace/delay/destroy the votes for a whole neighborhood.
I think the risk/reward would make this not worth it. You can check to see if your ballot was received. If a bunch of ballots are determined to be lost from the same postal route one assumes the postal inspectors would be having a word with that mail carrier. Tampering with the mail is a pretty serious crime, ballot or not, so there's a strong disincentive to try it.
My town has a bunch of dropboxes which are picked up by election volunteers if you still don't trust the mail. An election volunteer could "lose" a box of ballots but that seems like it would be pretty easily detectable as well.
Since mail tampering is a federal crime maybe Trump could pledge to pardon every mail carrier who throws away ballots from likely Biden voters. Seems pretty unlikely, but I don't know how to counter that.
It's possible the counters could be looking at ballots but noting and tracking who voted for who would be difficult to do in your head and you can't track it on paper because there are monitors from both sides watching the count happen.
They could also have any number of ways of secretly associating normal in-person ballots with the voter's identity. Perhaps the most obvious would be hidden cameras in the voting booths. There's no unique threat here.
It's not as if signatures are going to do that. Especially not any of the types of fraud that involve coercion or payment for votes. If you're paying someone for their vote they can still sign their name. One of the reasons it needs to be secret is to make it impossible for anyone to verify that you voted the way they want you to.
I still don't understand how voting in person is supposed to be any more problematic than e.g. buying groceries in person. Wear a mask, stand six feet apart etc., what's the problem?
It's not any more problematic for the voters, yes, but what about the poll workers? They stay there all day and skew older. The big concern is that reliable poll workers are going to skip this year because of COVID (not unreasonable) and we simply won't have people to facilitate the voting we normally do.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/05/894331965/wanted-young-people...
> I still don't understand how voting in person is supposed to be any more problematic than e.g. buying groceries in person. Wear a mask, stand six feet apart etc., what's the problem?
Grocery stores don't have checkout lines that are hours long where you are standing around near the same group of strangers for an extended time.
Worse, the states with the longest, slowest voting lines also tend to be the states with less stringent mask requirements, less diligent enforcement of the requirements they do have, and more people who ignore the requirements.
Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I'd like to know how I would go about committing fraud with my mail-in ballot. I only get one ballot, so I only get to vote once. I could try to steal someone else's and vote with it, but they might notice their lack of ballot and report it to the elections office. And if I voted and they voted, it would get flagged immediately and then the police would get involved. The penalties are pretty stiff considering how little value you'd think one little vote has. You need to figure out how to do it in quantity to offset that risk. Good luck.
Ballot harvesting. The party (or activists) can send people house to house collecting ballots. Two things can happen. The can get the person to sign a blank ballot which the harvester fills out, or the can simply thorw out ballots for the opposing political party.
A woman who thought she was allowed to vote (she was not, as she was a recently paroled felon) got sentenced to a five year prison sentence for it. Another woman voted illegally as a green card holder, sentenced to eight years.
So you are suggesting that the major political parties would sanction, even informally, having people go out to houses to illegally harvest ballots, or throw out ballots they don't agree with? To get one nearly worthless vote at a time, with a very possible multi-year prison sentence for each. That is utterly ridiculous.
It's not illegal in California. The major parties do send people out to harvest ballots. Nobody can tell what happens with the votes. Some people's votes are sure to be discarded. Some people hand over unfilled ballots, with or without signature.
If California allows unsigned ballots, then they have a legal problem to fix. Just because they do it wrong doesn't mean it cannot be done right.
I can't imagine many votes have been discarded, that sounds more like a conspiracy theory. It wouldn't take long to get caught, since voters can easily verify their own vote was recorded.
You sign the envelope containing your ballot. Then, when they receive it, they verify the outer envelope is proper (signature, etc.). If accepted, they open the envelope and dump your ballot into the box of accepted ballots. Finally, later, they open the box and count the ballots.
I keep seeing people say "user error" to these problems as if that's an acceptable answer to a quarter of submitted votes being rejected.
These are mistakes that are caught and resolved with in person voting.
I'm not in the camp that thinks mail in voting is impossible but these are real problems that need to be solved before November. For our country this is an unprecedented election, it deserves more respect than being explained away by partisan politics.
>There are many security measures to guard against fraud, including a signature line on the outside of the envelope that is checked against a digital signature on file. Every single ballot envelope signature is compared to the signature in the voter file to make sure it is a match. Our election workers are trained in forensic handwriting analysis to determine whether a signature matches. Each ballot return envelope contains a unique barcode that cannot be duplicated to make sure that voters can only return one ballot. Voters can even go online to track their ballot to confirm that it was received and counted. It is a system that costs less, is more secure, and has a paper trail.
There is a difference between a system that has been running for years and evolved to work, and one that is put together in an emergency. Some things of note.
1) They check signatures and the election workers have training in forensic handwriting analysis.
2) They use unique barcodes to prevent duplicates
3) They have a way to make sure your ballot was received and counted.
I bet that for a lot of states ramping up mail in voting, they are missing one or more of the above.
> There is a difference between a system that has been running for years and evolved to work, and one that is put together in an emergency. Some things of note.
I don't really understand this argument. You list some things that we should do to have a secure vote-by-mail election, but you seem to be phrasing your argument as if it's an argument against vote-by-mail elections.
It is not an argument against vote-by-mail elections, it is an argument against mail elections on a short notice, where we don't have the time to implement those things effectively.
Yeah, if only, but it was never going to happen with Trump in office. Everything is far too personal even beyond the gutting of institutions that's happened.
It's crazy to me that things like temperature checks aren't more common, it's a relatively easy way to get control and open up more safely, but then the US isn't great at collective action. We're individualistic and contrarian to a fault.
A larger figure (21%) was reported by NYPost[1] in a recent NYC election.
The worst part about paper ballots (mail-in, ink, or hanging chads) is that the intent must be re-interpreted by someone other than the voter at a time after it's too late for the voter to fix any issues.
There is no federal system, so it's left to the states. Unfortunately some states are good at some things and shitty at others. Take my state...we rarely have vote by mail issues (100% for at least a decade now), but we also gave hundreds of millions to Nigerian scam artists in unemployment benefits recently. All governments have very poor performance when they require scaling up a system quickly...so do many companies, but sadly they seem to have people who are better equipped and motivated to do so.
It's a very hard problem. I live next to a multi-family house in a college town and the tenants move in and out so frequently that I'm not even 100% sure who lives there... and I'm 10 feet away. Hell, I could probably only roughly estimate the total number of people that live there.
I wonder if there's a solution in there though... maybe landlords should have to report tenants on their federal taxes or something?
> Why are we tracking it via residency? If you're homeless, that doesn't invalidate your citizenship.
How do you decide which elections a person is eligible to vote in? There are district, city, county, state-level polls and your residency determines which elections you're eligible to vote in
I really don’t understand why there is so much opposition to online voting in the US.
I think people fetishize voting as this super hard problem whee it must be anonymous, must be verifiable that the vote was counted and was correct but in such a way that a person can’t prove to someone else their vote or even that they voted.
It’s just exhausting. Just have an account with the government, fill out your ballot, hit submit, post the votes publicly that are counted and let people find their ballot by some ID number if they want and call it a day.
I’m willing to bet that more people than not are more than willing to use this system.
Then you have to hope that the system allows you to override your absentee ballot with an in-person ballot, and that your boss or landlord or cult leader doesn't have people watching the polling locations (or watching your movements whenever the polling locations are open).
I admit that's not a perfect system, but it might skew the outcome of the vote less than a system where governors can selectively reduce the number of polling locations, and staff working at them, to produce hour-long lines of people risking catching a potentially deadly disease from each other.
Yeah, why don't people in exploitative cults and abusive relationships just leave? And why don't homeless people just buy a house? And why don't people without bread just eat cake?
We don’t have an issue using it in Denmark. You’re registered to a address and a place to cast your vote. Every election everyone gets a voting card (is this a ballot?) by mail. If you somehow don’t receive it, lose it or happen to be homeless, you can go to your voting place and have them print a new one for you that you can then use to vote.
It does require some sort of system to register citizens of course. But almost all our public IT does that and we’ve had it since before IT became a thing. Which is easier in a small country, but there is no reason it couldn’t scale.
There are two possible kinds of voter fraud (both extremely rare), "retail fraud" (i.e. individual voters) and "wholesale fraud" (i.e. bulk fraud). Voter ID laws mostly "fix" a non-existent problem of individual false votes with the express intent of discouraging votes. The real problem you want to fix is "wholesale fraud" which means securing the whole system from voting machines (which should be open-source and paper-audited) to how votes are tallied. Think about it. If you were going to steal votes would you go to all the trouble to forge or hijack individual votes or would you bribe someone to flip a couple of digits at a county office?
Of course, a trustworthy system includes how mail-in votes are tracked and verified but that is a well-understood problem working well for thousands and thousands of absentees, military personnel and whole states full of people who have voted that way regularly for decades.
I don't see why we can't just have in person voting, but require masks. Given that we didn't see any significant spike in COVID after the protests, when people were packed together and shouting, it is pretty clear that the virus doesn't spread significantly when you are outside with a mask. I think the risks of 10% of the votes being thrown out are far greater than the risk of a slight increase in COVID spread.
At the very least you need a universal option to vote by mail. There's a few good reasons: 1. People are going to make individual judgements about how high the risk is and you don't want people making the choice between safety and voting. 2. It is disproportionately more difficult for people to vote in some areas[1]- making the risk different. 3. What we're seeing more and more are localized outbreaks, where certain areas have a flare up of cases, in those cases you probably don't want to vote in person. 4. People who are self-isolating would be disenfranchised.
I was curious and checked the numbers from the last Polish presidential election where the postal votes are not super common, but also a normal occurence. The results are also split by the type of specific mistakes (card not signed, envelopes not handled properly, etc), but I'll ignore it here. The counts are:
- 704,016 voting cards sent out (2% of registered voters)
- 614,662 cards received back (87%)
- 593,205 cards valid (84% of sent / 96% of returned)
I thought that 10% is a pretty high number (and obviously should be worked on), but for context, 4% seems to be a "normal under covid" number if the rules are pretty simple (2 envelope layers + signed slip).
That headline isn't anything to be proud of, I'm not sure if 10% is supposed to sound significant or insignificant, but at any sort of scale 10% is enough to potentially change a close election.
What we don't have for comparison a similar breakdown for elections in physical polling places. Politicians engage in all sorts of squabbling and shenanigans every election in attempts to knock votes off of opponent's tallies. I'm sure the difference between votes cast and votes counted is pretty substantial in any election.
If the rates are similar then this is not much of a headline at all.
You know, that question can be answered by Googling right? It's run by The Economist Intelligence Unit, a for-profit company that does research and analysis, part of the company that sells "The Economist" newspaper. You could call it left-wing - as long as you're comfortable with people thinking you're an ill-informed partisan.
My signature has small variations each time I sign. Enough so that it currently does not match what's on my driver's license. I foresee many ballots thrown out depending if they require exact matches to how you signed your voter registration. I hope there is an easy way for me to check if my mail-in ballot is thrown out.
One of the key problems is in verifying citizenship. None of the existing identities work well for this. I remember when India introduced Aadhar card, it was explicitly mentioned that it is not a proof of citizenship and there was a "challenge" to come up with a good identity proof for citizenship.
I wonder if the signatures actually didn't match, or if someone bulk-challenged votes based on demographics (either perceived from the name or from an actual list of registered voters by campaign contributions or zip codes).
This is a good headline. Without reading anything else, there’s at least two assumptions to draw from reading it:
* they caught 10% of votes for being fraudulent
* they stopped 10% of voters from exercising their right
States need to open all in person polling places right away and keep them open to election day to prevent a civil war. This isn't going to be a normal election.
Just for context since nobody's mentioned it and it looks like a lot of folks here aren't reading the article or EAC surveys, the rejection rate in 2018 general elections was 3%.
I know everyone in certain social circles is pressured into saying that vote-by-mail is the best thing ever, because the Orange Man said that vote-by-mail is bad and you must be on the other side.
However, it’s time to admit that vote-by-mail has huge problems and it’s more prone to fraud.
There are some real concerns with vote by mail.
One particular issue I noticed when canvassing was that the voter roll was incorrect. It was not uncommon to go to a rental unit, and have 3 or 4 families registered at the address - all having moved out years ago. Another issue was dead voters. Another issue was no one was registered at the address.
The voter rolls not dependable. It's not by design, but its a hard problem to solve. Its worth listening to the concerns "of the other side" so that we have fair elections.