Not really. Remember that news story a few years ago about Trump's "voter fraud expert" being registered to vote in three states? These schemes were why he would not, in fact, have been able to vote in the two states he wasn't living in - his other two voter registrations had been suspended via purges like this one. I wouldn't be surprised if there were news headlines out there counting the registrations removed from him as votes suppressed by the Republicans too...
"And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. These voters were in Franklin County, a Democratic stronghold in the state."
How hard is it really for a voter to reregister? You guys are making it sound like it they're taking away driver's licenses or something. All you have to do is hit the website. If you don't have internet access hit a library.
> The rates of rejection vary widely across the states, with some states counting all or nearly all provisional ballots while others reject more than half.
I would expect maliciously executed voter purges to be accompanied by malicious rules on provisional ballots.
> As of June 30, 2019, a total of 21 states plus the District of Columbia have enacted same day registration (SDR), which allows any qualified resident of the state to go to register to vote and cast a ballot all in that day.
And, same day isn't necessarily the best solution. For example, Oregon does vote-by-mail. This process would make it difficult to allow for same day registration. But, Oregon also has nation leading voter turnout. No polling places, no hassle, just an envelope in the mail.
* Oregon also does automatic registrations when interacting with the DMV.
And perhaps that is the real problem rather than the deregistration. Here in Canada you can register at the polling station on the day of the election.
The real problem is that one of our parties in the USA is passing laws to lower voter turnout.
The precise rules of voting don't really matter: as long as the anti-vote group gets what they want, they'll suppress the vote and strengthen themselves politically.
I think instead of framing this issue as "how easy would it be to re-register" we could instead ask "why should anyone have to register to vote at all?" In the US, voting is a right, which is something that cannot and should not be taken away. Invalidating voting registration, especially in a targeted way, is deplorable.
There would be an uproar if we regulated voting the same way we regulated guns. Imagine if everyone who smoked weed and voted was committing a felony (to name but one example). Imagine if states had laws saying you need to take a class, pay a hundred bucks and get the police chief's permission before you could vote. Imagine if there was a federal agency that could unilaterally make rules about voting. Imagine if polling places were required to keep records of who voted for what when. Imagine if certain cities and states all but required extensive political connections to get a voting license. Trust me, you really don't want to regulate voting the way we regulate guns. There's a reason people like to compare various gun laws to poll taxes.
Edit: The down vote to reply ratio indicates that what I am saying is factually correct yet inconvenient.
As we see from this very article, the outcome of making people register for their rights is to deny them their rights. Don't race to the bottom, we'll all just end up... at the bottom.
Yeah, my bad. I don’t have a strong position either way. It just is a very good way to illustrate the hypocrisy of holding one position but not the other.
Registering to have, not registering the actual item. Same way you register to have to vote but you do not register the vote itself.
In my mind, the difficulty to do both should be equal, as making either more difficult than the other is suppressing the rights of a group to do which ever is more difficult.
In most democratic countries, voters are registered automatically. Requiring a manual registration step and placing maintenance of voter rolls in the hand of political appointees is just an invitation for shenanigans.
In addition, penalties are highly asymmetric. Denying an eligible voter their right to vote is virtually risk free. Casting a vote while being ineligible is subject to harsh punishments. Even with the current, political, process, government officials would think twice about illegally purging 20,000 voters if the penalty for that would be equivalent to the one for illegally casting 20,000 votes.
From the article, it sounded like many of the people who were to be deregistered had no idea that it was about to happen, and they likely wouldn't find out until they showed up to vote on election day.
To make it more difficult for prospective voters who are perhaps not white, poorer, younger, are working multiple jobs, or are a single parent, just to name a few examples.
You can connect the dots on why groups like these are disenfranchised by the state.
That's a pretty strong allegation over something that is free. Voter registration costs the person registering nothing but time, and states make it as easy as possible to register. Anyone wanting to vote can register.
Not really. You can easily move without informing the new state.
Millions of college students do it every year. The last move I made was in September so I hadn't changed licenses or filed income taxes yet, so they had no awareness of me yet.
Luckily I'm in a fairly permissive state and was able to register with a couple utility bills without any hassle.
Some sort of voter registration is a necessity when you can move 3000 miles in a weekend. Unfortunately it's often used to disenfranchise voters, but a significant subset of the population does not have up-to-date records. Registration is a way to fix that.
Not everyone is eligible to vote. Heck, I had to correct my wife’s driver license application because she definitely isn’t a citizen, and the question was phrased to be very confusing....
Sure, it's done automatically when you apply for a driver's license or change your registration, by the Motor Voter Act. Registering to vote is incredibly easy if you keep your state documents up-to-date. We just moved states. When we got our driver's license, we checked a box to change our voting record. We received in the next week a letter from our old county asking us if we did indeed move and if we should be removed from their voter roll, as well as a letter from our new county informing us we will be voting there from now on.
But... driver's licenses or state IDs aren't the end all be all. If I keep real property in another state, I could potentially qualify for a license or state ID there as well, but that state would not be my main residence and I could not be a citizen of that state unless I actually intended to move there permanently. If I lived a more transient life, I would be able to freely choose which state I wanted to be a citizen of. Like if I spend 73 days exactly in each of five states and received mail there, then I would be able to choose which state to register in. There's no way for states to know or to control my movement without imposing arbitrary and illegal restrictions.
Because if you own ten houses in ten states, you only get to vote in one state, despite potentially being in residence in nine other states at various points of time. There are various criteria by which you qualify as being a citizen of exactly one state.
Right, but there's literally no good reason this has to be an a priori process anymore. We could easily have a system where you get to vote once in one place where you are eligible without having any preregistration.
Sure. Try getting 50 sovereign states to agree and get back to me. Its not like the federal government has any authority to decide how the states run an election
Because this is HN and you're probably young-ish: When you're older and you've set down roots the last time you updated your voter registration was probably a few decades ago. Chances are your polling place hasn't likely changed either. So you know when elections come, you go to your usual polling place, give your name, get your ballet and "pull the lever" so to speak. You're not thinking "Oh I better double-check my voter registration!" because you haven't needed to do that in ages because your address and party affiliation hasn't changed in years.
The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.
I update my voter registration sometimes twice a year to match the party I most like at the time, It's always been online - easy peasy. I expect to get downvoted to hell but I also don't get why showing an ID to vote is such a big deal. After all, I have to look up the numbers in my drivers license to vote.
Also, how is it hard to vote? Absentee ballots are totally easy to get. If I was blind, I might have to plan ahead to get the help to do it. Otherwise, no biggie.
Maybe voter fraud is "vanishingly rare", but that statement in the wikipedia article only links to a NYT article which says:
> Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that fraud at the ballot box — the sort that photo identification requirements might reduce — is already vanishingly rare.
With no citation.
Anyway, "vanishingly rare" could mean that fewer than 1% of votes are fraudulent, but those fraudulent votes could be concentrated in a handful of key counties thereby having a big impact. I'm not arguing in favor of tougher voter ID restrictions but rather in favor of educated discourse.
I want to point out that there is no citation for this straw-man thought experiment.
Even the Heritage Foundation, which is incentivized to dig up as much voter fraud as it possibly can, has only found fewer than 1250 individual cases in what seems to be the last decade. This is overwhelmingly lower than the preposterous 1% presented in the above straw-man. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
Indeed my point was not just about voter fraud, but the racist history of Voter ID laws in the US. My overall point was that there is overwhelming and easily accessible evidence that voter ID laws are racist and that voter fraud is not an issue.
> I update my voter registration sometimes twice a year
Well, almost nobody else behaves that way.
As someone else who does things that are not common, my advice would be to recognize that you are way off the curve and don't universalize your experience.
Because generally it is very hard to commit voter fraud and adding an ID check does nothing but add an additional hoop for poor people to exercise their constitutional right.
10% of households don't have a computer and 15% of adults don't have a driver's license. Maybe your experiences don't generalize to the rest of the population.
Also, many states require you register to far ahead of time and will arbitrarily purge you from the voting roles. So I guess my point is this is more of issue than you're making it seem.
Does this include smart phones? Seems like percent of people with Internet access would be more relevant. I would think public libraries would also provide a lot of coverage here.
> 15% of adults don't have a driver's license
What's the statistic for adults with any kind of government issued identification? Surely that's more relevant for this debate than the driver's license statistic?
> What's the statistic for adults with any kind of government issued identification? Surely that's more relevant for this debate than the driver's license statistic?
A factor to keep in mind here is that it's an established tactic for Republicans to specifically allow alternative IDs used by whites for voting purposes, while banning alternative IDs used by blacks for voting purposes. A North Carolina law was struck down in 2016 specifically for this reason, for example.
Designing a system where people in power take actions that cause them to be less likely to remain in power is probably one of the most intractable problems in political science. It's why the U.S. has first past the post, why gerrymandering is a problem, and why voter ID laws are racist.
So to be clear, we can’t have common sense non-racist voter ID laws because the Republicans won’t allow it (and defeating entrenched interests is hopelessly intractable, so why bother), but somehow there will be more political will for no voter ID requirements at all?
No the point is that there are other voting reform laws that will have an actual effect on improving representation and don't have the practical effect of preventing black people from voting. I'm suggesting the problems we have with voting rights in this country are not caused by failing to require ID at polling stations. I'm not opposed to voter IDs in a theoretical sense, it just seems like either a unimportant or disingenuous thing to do first.
Of course, they don’t have the practical effect of preventing blacks from voting. Can we stop conflating abuses in the US with the same system that works uncontroversially all over the world? I’m not arguing it’s the most important thing to do, only that it’s ridiculous that we have a debate about whether or not it’s a problem and the solution is cheaper than investigating.
> It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.
The republicans generally would prefer that lower-income folks don't vote because they generally vote for democrats, so of course they would like to see voter turn-out to be low.
Are we sure it's lower-income? Because if that were the case, then these Republican shenanigans in states like Ohio and Michigan would focus on rural areas. But we don't see that, we see them focusing almost exclusively on urban areas.
> The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.
It's not strange, it's divided. One group is worried about low voter turnout. Another group is actively making it more difficult to vote. There is virtually no overlap between the two.
> The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.
This all varies by state, too. Here in Oregon all voting is done by mail, and registration is automatic. It's meant to increase turnout and make it easy to vote.
In Canada, we get mailed a Voter Information Card [1] a month or two before the election. This basically just has your name and your polling and advanced polling location(s). It of course goes to your registered address.
If you don't get this card, you know you're not registered (or are registered with the wrong address) and can fix that. You can even register at (what should be) your polling location on election day.
Sure but the only two numbers I saw were 235k and 20k, indicating the set of users removed in Franklin county may have actually been underrepresented (<11%).
However now that i can see the article the 20k is actually 50% of the set of 40k folks that shouldn't have been on the list, which of course is a different story.
Electoral fraud, it's the common phrase and lets you easily distinguish between voters breaking the rules (exceedingly rare by all accounts) and state perpetrated disenfranchisement (happens all over; gerrymandering, poll closures, and mass purges to name a few).
I got the letters that my voter registration was going to be purged, but I left Ohio like 7 years ago at that point and hadn't voted since I left. I had actually looked into de-registering way back when but it required filling out a form and physically mailing it, so I didn't bother.
Edit: Also I was slightly impressed that they found my current mailing address. I've moved like 6 times across several states, since I left Ohio.
The Secretary of State is Republican, and surprise, the GOP pursues policies that restrict the ballot in a way that benefits them and disadvantages Democrats.
Ohio is a state where the GOP holds 75% of federal House seats despite winning only 50% of the vote. Similar effect holds for the state legislative offices
80% of 235,000 is 188,000. Your argument is that it is okay to keep 188,000 invalid voters on the books because otherwise the republicans might win? Don't you see how fraudulent or no-longer-active voter registrations may bring about questions of legitimacy? 188,000 is no small number of people. Trump won Ohio with a smaller margin.
You don't think removing dead or moved voters is important? This is not about voter fraud. This is just about keeping your records in order, and making sure no one can raise suspicions about your electoral mechanisms.
Unless the state has an effective mechanism that doesn't disenfranchise voters, and that those moved or dead voters aren't voting, the motives are suspect.
Um, no they're not. Simply wanting to maintain a clean record is a personality difference that it is unreasonable to get suspicious over given the varying personalities of the various secretaries of state (the one who ultimately decides such policies).
Can you explain why? If any voter is found to have voted twice (even by accident), then that voter will be disenfranchised. So -- as happened to me -- if a state mails your ballot to an old address and someone votes there (even inadvertently), the states may decide to void both ballots (even the valid one cast by you) to prevent double voting. This means it's incredibly important to get rid of old registrations and keep things up to date. Of course, care should be taken to ensure valid voters can vote, too. But, I mean, it looks like that's what happened here. At no point were the 235,000 voters identified banned from voting. The process seem to have worked as it should, and the valid voter registrations are preserved, while the old ones are being removed. Isn't that an example of things working?
Purging is a legal requirement in all 50 states. Dead voters, those who've moved, and those who are ineligible (felons) must be removed. Red states like Ohio are criminally over-zealous and remove poor people. Blue states like Michigan are criminally under-zealous and have more voters on the rolls than people living in the state.
I don't understand how this has turned into a political issue. Everyone should want expired, duplicate, or downright fraudulent voter registrations removed, while keeping those who are eligible on the books. What a sad state of affairs we are in.
It's a political issue because one party uses it as an excuse to remove active voters of the other party, and the other party rightfully objects to this.
The other half the story is that the Dems object to every cleanup and always claim the Republicans are trying to suppress votes, but never have any suggestions on how to do it better, only "don't do it now" or "do it after the next election" in perpetuity. That's how blue states like Michigan end up with court orders requiring them to do cleanups (court orders which Michigan is violating).
Both houses of Michigan's state legislature have been Republican-controlled since 2011. Not much of an example of the Dems controlling voter rolls at the state level there.
Well, my example pre-dates 2011, but that's hardly the point. The point is that Democrats object to legally mandated purging and cry foul regardless of whether or not the purging is fair. The Republicans sometimes deserve to look like the bad guys, but sometimes, they are just doing the proper legally mandated thing and get called the bad guys anyways.
I couldn't get past the paywall, but are there any independent watchdogs with real political sway about this, or do we need to rely on journalism and rights groups? The issue I have is that journalism could be intensely valid and yet also considered so politically biased that anyone on 'the other side' would dismiss legitimate corruption because of the source. And if a 'same side' media doesn't cover it, it could look like a complete fabrication because what someone understands to be legitimate news sources don't cover the corruption...
> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls.
> “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller.
I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controversial, but India, with more people, poverty and issues seems to have managed it. Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day?
> The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September [...] voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people
But that means 200k some thousand should have been purged. If they died, and a death certificate was issued, doesn't some government database know about it and say, "yeah, person is dead purge their voter record". It's 2020 almost, we flew people to the moon, there is a Tesla roadster in Sun's orbit, self driving cars, but somehow managing a few hundred million voter records is an impossible task and I don't understand why.
In Germany every person eligible to vote just gets a letter telling you the day of the vote and your voting station (and a list of stuff being voted on, local elections usually coincide with more important ones). At voting day (a Sunday) you go to your polling station with that letter and photo id and after five minutes you have cast your vote and are on your way.
It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in the US.
I mean, that's largely what voter registration is - a database of every citizen's address.
The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like college students.
These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political tool to alter turnouts.
> There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database
In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved.
I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc).
> (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc).
If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.
Hardly. The Republicans are against databases, population registration, ID cards, and gun tracking databases. It's only the voter ID they're in favour of.
So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's no problem. Now, things get complicated and we would have to do work to get it right in that we have inconsistent rules on residency in terms of students and temporary housing, and we have a significant number of people who don't want to see a national registry of citizens (see issues with using SSN as a national ID) but there's nothing specifically that Democrats would object to philosophically.
The problem comes when we start trying to purge the rolls and there are false positives. The bigger problem is when those false positives are disproportionately citizens of color. Similarly, voter ID cards are not problems philosophically as much as these ID laws disproportionately affecting poor people and people of color.
If you want an ID law, you make IDs free, you account for many of the edge cases like elderly people who don't have birth certificates yet are clearly citizens, and you bend over backwards to make sure everyone who can vote gets one regardless of it costing a little more.
> So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's no problem.
And you believe it's the Republicans who are hating on immigration enforcement? The proposal for tracking everyone's residence not going to fly(coincidentally another thing you need id to do) with those people.
Immigration enforcement is easy. Jail every CEO and executive team that hires undocumented immigrants, and fine the company or individual $100 per hour of work from undocumented labor. If you have a threat of jail time or bankruptcy, you won't hire undocumented workers.
If you are a farmer who uses undocumented workers, same thing. Put the onus on wealthy citizens for doing the wrong thing and have real consequences. Have sting operations. Yes, there's a basic underground economy of labor like maids, but that's a small portion of the undocumented economy.
That tracking is already being done. It is just poorly coordinated. Social Security is not a national ID. Hell, many men have a number due to "Selective Service" (AKA the draft that hasn't happened since Vietnam). Three companies have our entire address history unless we don't have credit cards. Our phone numbers are tied to us and our GPS is tied to our phones. The vast majority of us are tied to biometrics due to Real ID. We are all tracked when it matters.
We already lost that battle. And we are tracked when we register to vote.
"It is just poorly coordinated." Another spherical cow statement. The coordination makes all the difference. As a trivial example: an area could be covered in CCTV, but that's significantly different than if they all feed into a central governmental agency.
In Germany and Europe (UK is outliner) you pay a fee for ID card, but it's valid for 10 years or so and cost is around 20-30 euro. Really don't understand what's the panic about in America, you don't have to do and pay it every year.
1. The people can keep track of a card for 10 years.
2. They can afford to pay 20-30 Euros for something they only use for voting, since apparently they aren't involved in any other part of civic life that involves having an id.
I think it's semi-legitimate. It's legitimate to have accurate voter lists of course, but aggressively pushing people off is not really legit. Let me explain:
It so happens that active voter suppression is actively practiced by republicans, because we have their emails from people in state legislatures to researchers asking questions in two key areas: what forms of ID are minority voters not likely to have that 'our' voters do, so that we could block them for registering [0]. And the second thing is picking your voters, which used to be in both parties but today is pretty much also used by one party. Also doing things like cutting early voting and other extended voting which predominantly let people with low-wage jobs have time to vote on weekends. Another cool one, preventing kids from pre-registering, cause those kids are of course not so conservative [1].
Also we have conservative conferences including ALEC talking about how to suppress voters [2].
Today there is no question that republicans use these tactics to actively suppress votes and voter registration for people that are likely to vote against them. It's not in question, it's not just a few bad apples.
Meanwhile the NSA records and analyzes every communication (that they can see, at least) you make over the Internet, and has probably megabytes worth of per-person profile information on a large chunk of the world population.
Of course the state knows they just can't admit they know. Besides that you are alive and your adress they probably also know if you are going to vote and who.
I think you're replying to a different point than the GP was making -- the "major party" you are (I assume) referencing is also the party that backs Voter ID laws, which the GP was explicitly pointing out as a solution to the problem.
It is fundamentally the same point since that party doesn't want to make it easy and free to get a voter ID. If you have to take a day off work to go to the DMV or need to pay some fee to get your ID, then requiring ID is in practice making it harder to vote. If you want to require a voter ID, it is the duty of the government to assure that everyone citizen who wants one has one.
Everybody has an ID. Find a study that shows differently (for example [1]) and you'll be able to see how obviously synthetic it is. I have no doubt that the people who are opposing Voter ID have no nefarious motive, but there's a lot of confirmation bias at work that creates a false narrative that getting a photo ID is "difficult" and that people without photo IDs are common and disproportionately minorities.
A telephone survey of 982 people called on landlines. How many total calls were made -- what was the response rate, and what has been done to de-bias any correlation between response rate and the outcome? And a self-reporting survey, over the phone, about government photo ids, without any mention being made of how they convinced people that the survey was genuine?
And then there's just the standard phone survey stuff, where you up-multiply based on (once again, self-reported) attributes to match population demographics, causing everything to be wildly out of whack.
This level of obfuscation of methodology is pretty high even by the standards of regular polling.
Everybody in your world has an ID. In some impoverished and elderly communities not everyone has an ID. You don't run into these people in your day-to-day life as they manifestly don't have the same work and living habits as you do.
Millions of these people do exist. I've had family members in this boat. Renewals, name changes (especially for women), DUIs, homelessness (which encompasses much more than literally not having a roof over your head), lack of mobility, a DMV that's 30+ miles away, and the simple fact that successfully voting isn't exactly high on the list of priorities for people facing these issues--these are just a few of the myriad random barriers that conspire to hold back people from voting. I've personally seen them among acquaintances; if you haven't, consider yourself fortunate.
I don't see why it needs to be denied. The level of effort the state should expend to address these issues, what sort personal investment and initiative we should expect of people, and such burdens relative to the risk of fraud--these questions are worthy of debate. But nobody wants to argue these things fairly because, for better or worse, the facts are uncomfortable, especially if you cling to the principle of universal suffrage, which we're all expected to do. And maybe that's unfair--it is difficult for certain political perspectives, such as that we should recognize some aspect of voting as an earned privilege requiring some modicum of initiative, to be voiced these days. But that's no excuse for denying facts.
I'm totally fine with requiring an ID _and_ making it easy for legitimate voters to get one. I don't understand why there are people who are opposed to voter ID requirements (full stop), as though they are inherently racist.
The latter is where Voter ID laws tend to bite. They make it difficult for certain communities to obtain an ID via a variety of underhanded tricks.
What you typically see is a Voter ID go into effect, and then whoops, the state budget is too tight this year so we're closing down a whole bunch of DMV locations and restricting hours on the rest.
For example, there's that one DMV that's open only four days per year (!), with the closest alternative being 20 miles away and only open 7 to 5 two days a week (have a fun time managing that if you're a working stiff without a car). https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/19/...
Is that inherent to voter ID systems, or could you imagine a world where ID issuing authorities are required to keep better hours? Perhaps we could check out Europe’s model to see how they keep their voter ID systems from regressing into a racist dystopia?
So require ID-issuing authorities to keep certain hours. This is a trivial problem; I don't understand the compulsion to paint this as a dichotomy--there's lots of middleground between Evil Racist voter ID requirements and no voter ID requirements at all; it's not even a slippery slope.
This wouldn't solve the problem of too many inner city residents voting and messing up your legislative majority.
In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.
> This wouldn't solve the problem of too many inner city residents voting and messing up your legislative majority.
I'm not a Republican, and I'm not advocating for a legislative majority for any party. You're not participating in good faith.
> In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.
Maybe. It's probably an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to implement some basic voter ID reqs (you know, like so many Europeans enjoy) than to continually validate that voter fraud is a non-issue _and_ persuade the country that it's a non issue. The idea that these laws only exist to "suppress [legitimate] voting blocks" is absurd; many countries have them, including those enviable European countries. How can securing our Democracy be a bad thing, any way? Recall which party was paranoid about foreign meddling in the last election, after all.
ID costs here in Europe too, but it's valid 8 or 10 years so it's not a huge problem.
Someone is posting this link about one dmv being opened only 4 days a year for some reason but the population of that place is ca 3000 people. In Europe you don't have a dmv in a village and you get it done after every ten years at some bigger city or town.
Right. These are simple, tractable problems, and there are successful models the world over. That people fight so adamantly against something as straightforward as voter ID indicates ulterior motives.
To do a laundry list[1] of other things that I would consider less important than voting requires an ID, which in turn requires you to go to the dreaded DMV. Is it the duty of the government to provide the ID for these people? Nope.
Clearly you haven't tried to do half of these things without an ID.. and a good portion of the other half would likely be illegal. You are correct about the constitutional right however.
Most times people say ID is "required" is because they are lazy and don't want to go through the effort of confirming identity using other means. There are certainly things that do legally require ID like opening a bank account, but others just have a strong preference for ID such as flying which can be done without ID if you are committed to fighting through the difficulties.
I am not sure where you live but in the U.S. flying without an ID of some sort is impossible, and an accepted ID other than a drivers license all have an arguably larger barrier to entry than going to the DMV and paying the ~$10 and an hour+ of your time. That or you are someone with an inordinate amount of resources available to you and are looking at this problem through rose colored glasses.
Then by all means make them stay open more often instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Voter ID is important and should certainly include provisions in the legislation to help make it easier for people to get a government issued ID. However, for most people in America I would wager that this is not the case at all and you have just cherry picked an edge case to suit your argument.
Voter ID would be important, but unfortunately, the Republican Party has repurposed the concept as a tool of oppression rather than a way to secure the vote. People are rightly wary of the idea because of this, and will continue to be wary of it until free and no-hassle IDs are available to everyone first.
> However, for most people in America I would wager that this is not the case at all
Most? Probably. But "most" doesn't matter. Voting is a fundamental part of the democratic process, and "most" still leaves millions of people in the lurch. Make it "all" and then I'll stop being upset about it.
The population of that place is ca 3000 people. In Europe you don't have a dmv in a village and you get it done after every ten years at some bigger city or town. And yes it costs a bit too.
Once again, it is highly suggested you use an ID, but it isn't 100% required.
From TSA's website[1]:
>In the event you arrive at the airport without valid identification, because it is lost or at home, you may still be allowed to fly. The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name, current address, and other personal information to confirm your identity. If your identity is confirmed, you will be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint. You will be subject to additional screening, to include a patdown and screening of carry-on property.
Ah yes, get to the airport 5 hours early everytime you want to fly so you can go through that process buddy. That's a huge barrier to entry, one that is clearly not taken advantage of very often because the vast majority of Americans have an ID..
I'm not a legal scholar, but I believe there are more restrictions on the 2nd Amendment than there are on the amendments related to voting. Specifically the 24th Amendment prohibits the poll tax and requiring a voter to pay for an ID is in practice a poll tax.
Also this topic isn't limited to presidential elections, so that Electoral College logic loophole doesn't apply to all elections.
No, that doesn't follow that 200k "should have been purged." It just means that 200k MIGHT have been correctly purged. People move all the time and don't always remember to update their voter registration until too late; people do die, yet previous voter purges have incorrectly matched up death records resulting in registered voters being denied their right to vote at the polls.
Well, we don't actually have the Constitutional right to vote. The only vote that matters is that of the members of the Electoral College, which is tilted in favor of the Republicans in close elections. That's how we got Bush II and Trump.
> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day?
Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote.
> Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote.
Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. Also, your source is not substantiated.
I'd be happier if proof of citizenship was required to vote, not just photo id. Don't know of a practical way to do that except to check passports, but the passport office would be overwhelmed.
How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative?
Let me put it into computer terms: when your program isn't fast enough and you've got a nice profile trace, do you start your analysis with the functions using up a lot of time? Or do you start among the functions that aren't using lots of time?
Why approach vote fraud any other way? The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted.
Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
>How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative?
None of those things make any sense. A church is more than welcome to only accept people with a passport. I can't imagin that will be going on for long. The post office is a service, and they will sell to whoever can pay. Sending a letter to your representative - you'd probably get a bigger impact if you somehow managed to convince him you voted regularly for different parties. As for "access to a free press", I don't know what you mean. They want your eyeballs as long as they can make some dosh there.
The rest of your post doesn't make sense. The computer analogy breaks down as you don't have a nice evidence log for voting and possible illegal voters, so you start trying different things.
> The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted
That's begging the question. You're asserting the point you're trying to prove, which is what "begging the question" means.
> Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
Yes. First, the plural of anecdote is not data. Second, just because something helps in that situation, doesn't mean it will help in the problem you want to solve right now. You _can_ do both. Nuance and stacked solutions are important.
> Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue.
It's a court ruling that shut down North Carolina voter ID and early voting laws, in part because the defense of those laws included that that literal quote about it making harder for black people to vote.
> All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases.
I don't see how it follows that a state legislature's cupidity directly translates to a national party's intentions. That's a bridge too far. If there's a smoking gun, such as a leaked internal memo, I would agree totally. People are scumbags and are biased to try to make their side win in most situations.
>It literally links directly to the court judgement.
Yes, for closing the polls early, not for voter id laws.
That shows no evidence that they are willing to make their views public or that they are shared by republicans on a national level. There is absolutely no evidence for that.
> The judgment is on a law that affects both.
That is not in evidence. The article you cited did not link the court decision mentioned. The court decision is only speaking to the decision to close polling spots on Sunday because it will suppress black, and majority Democratic voters.
If you doubt dozens of leaks, hundreds of exposés, archival records, court documents, and diaries from the operatives who coordinated the nationwide disenfranchisement campaigns:
> Ah, so we are still acting like Republicans aren't the legacy bearers of Jim Crow.
Democrats enacted Jim Crow laws (0). I see no evidence that Republicans have enacted any laws that systematically discriminate against black people, in fact Trump has tried to reform the criminal justice system (1). He pardoned Jack Johnson posthumously, and has been handing out pardons like candy to wrongfully accused blacks.
It was the dems from places like my state in the south, but they all moved to the republican party because of the success of republican party taking on those conservatives. During reconstruction, since lincoln was a republican all the southerners became dems. It wasn't until Nixon and the 1970s that the republicans attracted those conservatives.
Today the jim crow defenders, the people that say slavery wasn't so bad, some people were even better off. Those are republicans.
> Today the jim crow defenders, the people that say slavery wasn't so bad, some people were even better off. Those are republicans.
> They switched.
A lot of them switched for reasons unrelated to race. "Many white southerners switched to the Republican Party, some for reasons unrelated to race. The majority of white southerners shared conservative positions on taxes, moral values and national security. The Democratic Party had increasingly liberal positions rejected by these voters.[20] In addition, the younger generations, who were politically conservative but wealthier and less attached to the Democratic Party, replaced the older generations who remained loyal to the party.[20] The shift to the Republican Party took place slowly and gradually over almost a century.[20]"
Elections are de-federalized in the US; they are run by each state or, really, each county. That explains a lot of the mess.
The other problem is there's never been a real effort to establish a universal ID in the US. Which means you can't fairly do voter ID, since a lot of people don't have ID for various reasons. The lack of voter ID doesn't turn out to be a big problem; there's basically no voter fraud in the US. But it means there's no proper role of eligible voters, either.
The politics of this can't be ignored. The Republicans have a deliberate strategy of making it difficult for people to vote, and employ that strategy every time cleaning up voter roles or enacting voter ID comes up. They do not operate in good faith.
> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day?
In a very real sense: because that would make it easy to vote.
Free IDs are directly inimical to the effort to prevent people from voting. That prevention is a major effort of one major American political party because it's seen as the only way they can win in an increasingly diverse country.
The folks who are against free IDs--who want it to be hard to vote--also get very weird about "databases of people", even though they already exist and corporate entities compile them right alongside governmental ones every day.
I get the desire to assume good faith in this, but we literally have the receipts.
> also get very weird about "databases of people",
I always frame the argument like this to my family when they complain. "I'm not opposed to the government maintaining a database of everyone's current address and related information, but if they are going to do that, they should provide free IDs and encourage everyone to participate."
The GOP learned a long time ago that if you win it doesn't matter how dirty you are. You're not going to prosecute yourself after all. By the time the leadership changes hands everybody will have forgotten about it.
Voter ID doesn't solve the problem of outdated/invalid voter rolls at all. I can have an ID from a state I no longer live in for many years after I move out of that state. I can also have an expired ID for the state I currently live in. If I don't regularly buy alcohol or drive, I probably won't feel hard-pressed to spend a day renewing my ID.
Thank you for reinforcing my point. That's a great example of how I would get disenfranchised despite being a resident of the district I'm voting in, while the IDs themselves would have no effect on whether a voter is wrongfully purged from the voter rolls.
In the state of WI when they first implemented Voter ID, there were some entire counties where there was a single DMV location, that was only open for a few hours a week. (of course, during normal business hours). This makes it incredibly difficult for people that are poor, or young, and obviously have no drivers license to then take off work, and get themselves to the town across the count between 11am and 2pm on a Thursday.
If you add in some of the requirements for getting a valid State ID, it can be even harder for people to get. (Many poor people don't have ready copies of their birth certificate, marriage license to show the change in name, etc)
You don’t gave a low cost, accessible national ID. In Europe, we do. Democracy is for everyone, not just those who can drive or with a passport, but everyone so unless the US gets a national ID for everyone any restriction on identification will disproportionately hit low income voters.
I am still baffled at the election system in this country.
It's not an accident, it's designed to be this way, for the last 15+ years, at least. People in certain states, in a certain party, know their way to victory is to disenfranchise a certain other party's members.
> "Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?"
> I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters.
> "The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It’s done for one reason and one reason only."
I've seen uncountable articles from reputable news organizations. Is it that people have their head in the sand or think it's just fake news? Because if the people that vote for GOP candidates are OK with this, then they are completely alien to me. Maybe we should split into two nations, one for people who think this is disgusting and one for those who don't.
Such "seams" are needed in the voting system to allow states to disenfranchise people. The country has a very rich and recent history of disenfranchising blacks wholesale, and that history is what guides changes to the voting system today.
Republicans say Democrats just want to get all the poor people/illegals registered to up their vote, Democrats say Republicans want to suppress votes to keep control.
I think most Americans have a problem with the government keeping lists about them. How that makes sense in the modern age of driver's licenses, SSNs, and the Patriot Act, I'm not sure, but as long as people here are so against the idea, it's kind of dead-in-the-water.
According to the article, moderate Republicans in Ohio insisted on transparency for purging voter rolls. They sent out the proposed list to various voter advocacy groups across the political spectrum, which reviewed the proposed changes and flagged mistakes. 80% were purged correctly. 20% were not.
Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency to the process (as long as the mistakes are corrected).
Possibly not, but if they were trying to be nefarious, they shot themselves in the foot with transparency. More likely to be a mistake OR the conspiracy of a single individual.
It's not a coincidence but I don't think it's super malicious. it's not because it's a "democratic strong-hold" it's because Franklin county is Columbus, dense, and more populated than the surrounding areas.
Did they purge eligible voters? My reading of the article was that they proposed purging voters, but got input from advocacy groups first. Did I misread it?
Besides, if those checks showed that a large number of people were included in the purge for demonstrably wrong reasons, it would be prudent to assume that a lot of additional purges would also be suspect.
What? So, you're willing to engage in unethical activity, with a modicum of lip service to transparency? The entire idea of purging voters rolls is antithetical to voting freedoms and transparency.
It is grossly unethical to purge valid voters in secret, but how is limiting voter rolls to those with a legal right to vote unethical? Should people be allowed to vote and have a say in the government of places they don't live? The reductio ad absurdum of this is allowing the whole world to vote for your local school board.
Transparency and community engagement (through advocacy groups) helps ensure that valid voters are kept on the voter rolls. Don't knock Ohio for trying to take steps in the right direction.
When people talking about voting rolls, it's really just a dog whistle for suppressing the votes of minority and underprivileged groups. The debate about "legal right to vote" and all of those arguments are mostly smoke screens for disenfranchisement.
While it's true that we should have voting roles and ensure only people who are in the state should vote etc, that's absolutely not what people are doing or talking about when implementing voting systems. When the Republican party talks about these ideas, the end goal is skewing the voter turnout in their favor.
That's a extreme. Unless you want the government to track every citizen's whereabouts using activity to figure out if you actually still live here isn't unreasonable at all.
No one should be praised other than the people who discovered "the mistakes".
The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Republicans and has been around since forever.
The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. Those thousands can _easily_ be achieved, however, with sloppy aggressive and unnecessary purging.
I wish there existed the political will to issue "citizen ID" cards (or other mechanisms) to all citizens, like they do in civilized countries. These could be used for residency and authentication for voting, banking, taxes, and other functions. This authentication mechanism would instantly remove the phony concern of voter fraud amongst republicans while not disenfranchising voters.
> The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election.
You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered.
I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2].
> [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way.
If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best).
No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.
> If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best).
To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
By "truly inactive" I mean voters who can't vote because they're dead, no longer live in that voting district, never actually existed, or are ineligible to vote. If these names appear as having voted, those are invalid and might be an indication of fraud.
There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place.
Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.
If your contention is that vote fraud is hard to detect and probably happens more than we know, look into statistics. The likelihood of detecting a single case of improper voting is low, but if there's a significant volume of it happening then the likelihood of detecting that it's happening at all is pretty high, at which point more detailed investigation can be done.
Edit: this kind of ties back to the allegations of massive voting fraud in the 2016 elections. Lots of people looked into it and found no significant level of improperly cast votes. That leads to either a contention that it did not happen or a contention that all of the people investigating it were either corrupt or incompetent.
I was an election integrity activist, poll judge, poll worker for ~10 years. No one I know opposes need for identifying voters when issuing ballots. Jurisdictions vary, IIRC North Dakota doesn't require ID, so YMMV.
Voter ID is verified during registration. Generally, voter ID is then confirmed when a ballot is issued in person. In most jurisdictions, many forms of identification are accepted to be issued a ballot.
The stricter voter ID laws reduce kinds of identification permitted. Further, they'll do stupid shit like insist on exact matches, so "Mike" vs "Michael" would be rejected. Generally, these laws insist on perfection while injecting errors into the system, for explicitly partisan reasons.
Tellingly, postal ballots are issued without confirming identification. Which are a much greater source of errors. But there's no partisan food fight over postal ballots.
The fix is simple. Eliminate data quality problems with universal automatic voter registration. Moot the ID confirmation kerfuffle by issuing government ID, such as the upcoming Real ID.
Then voila, the USA just joined all the other mature democracies by adopting time proven reasonable best practices.
The problem is they're out-of-reach financially to many people ($145~) and they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
I am thinking of something akin to the Chinese Resident Identity Card, which does track enough info to determine voter eligibility, I think.
I mean, the cost is not inherent to the ID itself: a piece of paper doesn't have to cost anything.
We also have passport cards, which is the credit-card sized version of the passport, and only works for travel to Mexico/Canada (but is still a national ID).
>they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
You know, I can Google my name and get my current address out of public databases (TruePeopleSearch, etc).
I can also see my current address on the voter record from the website by entering the VoterID number.
The passports have numbers. These can be used to pull/check the address from a voter record database. It's less than trivial.
The address itself doesn't have to be on the ID.
TL;DR: issue passport cards for free to all citizens, force the states to let anyone with such a card to vote with a federal law.
It's doable, but it's certainly not trivial. And no, it's not just "a slip of paper" it's far more than that when you consider all the human, bureaucratic and technical infrastructure, systems and support that would have to be behind it.
Sure, there are trashy and unreliable online aggregators like mylife and their ilk that can provide all kinds of dubious info. I am talking about something much more rigorous and reliable.
There are steps in the right direction occuring now (like Real ID) but even these half-measures have been years in the making and have years to go.
>It's doable, but it's certainly not trivial. And no, it's not just "a slip of paper" it's far more than that when you consider all the human, bureaucratic and technical infrastructure, systems and support that would have to be behind it.
I've considered that, and nope, still trivial
SELECT address FROM voter_addresses WHERE passport_number = {number}
The concept of "pulling up a record" perhaps was non-trivial in the 1950's, but not in 2019.
If you were referring to the cost of the passport itself - yes, it requires infrastructure, and this is exactly what the taxes are for. It's an essential component of being a citizen, the extra fees are highway robbery.
Good to know your threshold for major fuck-ups is 20%. Would you accept a grocery store that overcharges you 20% of the time? Would you accept a car that doesn't start 20% of the time?
A reasonable process would do a spot-check, discover that they are horrifically off, and then implement a second-level check.
There doesn't appear to be an explanation for the purges. I can understand the need to purge the voter lists of "dead" (literally or otherwise) entries, but surely it would be best if the state provided an explanation for each removal?
>And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections.
and
>The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged.
>“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Ms. Kulina-Lanese, who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me was terrifying.”
In Germany we do not have this problem (neither voter suppression nor voter fraud), for a multitude of reasons:
1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document
2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office ("Meldebehörde") where you live, and you have to prove this with a copy of your rent contract or property deed
3) everyone getting a document ("Wahlschein") by mail a couple of weeks prior to election date. If you don't get one but should have gotten, you can contact the election authority to investigate, and if you lose/misplace it you can easily look up where your voting place is, go there and have them locate you on the voter roll.
4) if any piece of official mail goes returned by the post as "undeliverable", the Meldebehörde will investigate and de-register you (thus also removing you from the voter roll)
The only real vote fraud in the last years was from a politician who had seasonal workers register at a company and apply for mail-voting, but that's it.
Yeah, from the European perspective the American situation is hard to understand. In the U.S., requiring everyone to register their address is going to be met with cries of Big Brother and small but vocal resistance. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of people have to declare an address to file their tax return and/or to have a driver's license.
The other piece is that the constitution, written before direct elections were common, explicitly leaves the execution of elections to the states, which makes it hard for the federal government to set standards or require this kind of registration. And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in the constitution.
It becomes much easier to understand when you realize that the modern Republican Party opposes centralized voter ID at the national level and supports stricter but wildly patchwork voting ID requirements at the local level for the same reason: it makes it harder for demographics they don't like to get acceptable IDs for voting.
For example, in 2015, North Carolina's Republican state legislature literally looked up the forms of ID statistically most likely to be used by black people for voting ID in the state and banned those for use in voting, while leaving the forms of voting ID most used by white people as valid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...
> And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in the constitution.
Which is why I had originally hoped not for Warren or Sanders to end up as Democrat candidate but Biden (which is very unrealistic at the moment)... the general idea was having a left-moderate candidate like Biden get enough votes in 2020 to have a strong Congressional majority in order to fix voter suppression, gerrymandering, electoral college, campaign finance and media ownership (e.g. breaking up Sinclair, re-establishing something like the Fairness Doctrine).
Then in 2024 a proper leftie candidate could compete on fair and even terms against whatever the Republicans put up.
But since Biden is pretty much toast now thanks to the Ukraine scandal it will probably be Warren who ends up as Democrat candidate and I fear that the Republicans will launch an all-out anti-communist war campaign, aided by Fox, Sinclair and "conservative" rags - pitting 'Trump vs "Communism"' in the 2020 elections may yield a victory for Trump in the current situation...
This has been debunked in the German media a million times. Absentee ballots are not necessarily counted in the district where the voter is registered, which makes the number of votes cast exceed the number of people egligible to vote in some districts.
The website even says that the district was collecting absentee ballots for five other districts as well.
All of this makes perfect sense which is why we don’t do it. For the same reasons one party favors aggressive purging in urban areas, another party is hostile toward implementing voter ID requirements in those same districts.
Conservatives in the US know that the only way they can hold onto power in our electoral system is to subvert that system (gerrymandering, voter intimidation/misdirection, erroneous purges) and they are not afraid to do so. And let's not forget the Supreme Court halting a vote recount in Florida in 2000 for literally no reason besides politics, leading directly to the Iraq catastrophe.
I'd encourage you to read some of the scholarly material related to Bush v. Gore, particularly the distinctions between the first case and the second case as well as materials that cover the actions of the FL court specifically - it's a lot more complex and nuanced than you summarize here.
As a Franklin county resident, I see multiple groups of volunteers who have a big push around August-October to concentrate efforts around the the Ohio State campus and downtown areas to register voters. This includes groups affiliated with campus political organizations, the League of Women Voters, and groups who seek signatures to bring issues to a ballot vote. The extent to which the article describes purging 40,000 Franklin County voters is much more than what I'd expect than people being ineligible to vote for reasons like leaving student voters leaving the state/county (and not updatign their address), becoming deceased, or the recent case regarding the "use it or lose it" rule. In my opinion there should be a formal audit that includes other state data to correct the discrepancies in the spreadsheet of voters to be purged.
Additionally, Ohio voter ID laws themselves can be regressive in harming poorer populations. Many don't have access to a nearby BMV bureau to get an ID, aren't aware of the registration deadline which has already passed, lack utility bills in their name, or can't get a stamp for an absentee vote to be mailed. For the the current and next ballot cycle it's important to allow citizens to voice their opinion at the box and to register with a party for primary votes as well.
TLDR: We need national, universal, automatic voter registration.
#1 Our VRDBs only contain eligible voters. Ineligible voters are removed. This is very hard to verify, audit.
The Correct Answer is to list everyone, with a flag for eligibility, with a separate audit log for changes. aka standard DBA best practices.
#2 We already have virtually complete rosters of every person, living or dead, updated in near realtime. Commercial data brokers, facebook, law enforcement, national security. We should license or repurpose these readily available data sources for both voter database and the census.
#3 States administer elections. Feds make the rules. Anyone who opposes nationwide standards should also oppose currency, weights & measures, intra-state trade, the entire American experiment, etc.
FWIW, some states already share data, to better track people who move, students, overseas voters (registered at home), deaths, etc. I haven't been active for a while, so don't know how far along those efforts are.
--
Now about this article. Purging (caging) is the weaponization of normal data quality efforts for partisan reasons.
Option 1: Send verification mails to inactive (but still eligible) voters. Some sizable fraction won't be returned. USPS's UAA rate is %1, more for high density areas. Many people just don't response (eg looks like junk mail). Then aggressively, silently remove anyone who doesn't respond.
Option 2: Any official communication sent by election admin which is returned (recall USPS UAA 1%) is used to purge.
Option 3: Ignore or inject data quality problems. Match voter roll against other demographic databases, eg DMV. Purge any records for any error whatsoever. eg Mike vs Michael. Missing commas, hyphens. Whatever works.
This is from memory, I'm sure there's other strategies used, but these are the big ones.
Note that The Correct Answer above moots the entire problem. And would be both cheaper and nearly error free.
America, the country where you can't stop massive voter fraud because every time it is tried, one of the two parties disallow legal voters from voting. America might be richer than Europe, but it seems to me to be much more dysfunctional.
243 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadAaaand there it is.
Edit: ok, 2/5ths isn't most but it's still a lot. Chill with the down-votes, it was an honest question, not an attack on your ideology.
> The rates of rejection vary widely across the states, with some states counting all or nearly all provisional ballots while others reject more than half.
I would expect maliciously executed voter purges to be accompanied by malicious rules on provisional ballots.
[1] http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-da...
https://www.rockthevote.org/voting-information/election-date...
> As of June 30, 2019, a total of 21 states plus the District of Columbia have enacted same day registration (SDR), which allows any qualified resident of the state to go to register to vote and cast a ballot all in that day.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-da...
And, same day isn't necessarily the best solution. For example, Oregon does vote-by-mail. This process would make it difficult to allow for same day registration. But, Oregon also has nation leading voter turnout. No polling places, no hassle, just an envelope in the mail.
* Oregon also does automatic registrations when interacting with the DMV.
The precise rules of voting don't really matter: as long as the anti-vote group gets what they want, they'll suppress the vote and strengthen themselves politically.
https://www.sos.state.oh.us/elections/voters/register/
Edit: The down vote to reply ratio indicates that what I am saying is factually correct yet inconvenient.
In my mind, the difficulty to do both should be equal, as making either more difficult than the other is suppressing the rights of a group to do which ever is more difficult.
In addition, penalties are highly asymmetric. Denying an eligible voter their right to vote is virtually risk free. Casting a vote while being ineligible is subject to harsh punishments. Even with the current, political, process, government officials would think twice about illegally purging 20,000 voters if the penalty for that would be equivalent to the one for illegally casting 20,000 votes.
The state has a sort of pretty solid idea of where they live...
You can connect the dots on why groups like these are disenfranchised by the state.
Millions of college students do it every year. The last move I made was in September so I hadn't changed licenses or filed income taxes yet, so they had no awareness of me yet.
Luckily I'm in a fairly permissive state and was able to register with a couple utility bills without any hassle.
Some sort of voter registration is a necessity when you can move 3000 miles in a weekend. Unfortunately it's often used to disenfranchise voters, but a significant subset of the population does not have up-to-date records. Registration is a way to fix that.
But... driver's licenses or state IDs aren't the end all be all. If I keep real property in another state, I could potentially qualify for a license or state ID there as well, but that state would not be my main residence and I could not be a citizen of that state unless I actually intended to move there permanently. If I lived a more transient life, I would be able to freely choose which state I wanted to be a citizen of. Like if I spend 73 days exactly in each of five states and received mail there, then I would be able to choose which state to register in. There's no way for states to know or to control my movement without imposing arbitrary and illegal restrictions.
Why? Ballots can and do vary by district. Different districts have different representatives (on both state, county and town/city level)
Different districts have votes for different issues (state amendments, county amendments, town/city amendments)
Different districts have different local offices (county officers vs city/town officers)
Registering also locks a person into voting only once.
It's sort of ridiculous that some of your rejoinders are basic civics.
The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote.
Also, how is it hard to vote? Absentee ballots are totally easy to get. If I was blind, I might have to plan ahead to get the help to do it. Otherwise, no biggie.
Wikipedia has a great summary of the racist policies voter ID laws were made to enforce, and that voter fraud is "vanishingly rare" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
> Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that fraud at the ballot box — the sort that photo identification requirements might reduce — is already vanishingly rare.
With no citation.
Anyway, "vanishingly rare" could mean that fewer than 1% of votes are fraudulent, but those fraudulent votes could be concentrated in a handful of key counties thereby having a big impact. I'm not arguing in favor of tougher voter ID restrictions but rather in favor of educated discourse.
Even the Heritage Foundation, which is incentivized to dig up as much voter fraud as it possibly can, has only found fewer than 1250 individual cases in what seems to be the last decade. This is overwhelmingly lower than the preposterous 1% presented in the above straw-man. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
Indeed my point was not just about voter fraud, but the racist history of Voter ID laws in the US. My overall point was that there is overwhelming and easily accessible evidence that voter ID laws are racist and that voter fraud is not an issue.
Well, almost nobody else behaves that way.
As someone else who does things that are not common, my advice would be to recognize that you are way off the curve and don't universalize your experience.
Certain political factions put a lot of work into making it actively more difficult to use absentee ballots. For example: https://www.apnews.com/ae1c8f1af38f4b4fb0187553be7a6e72
Also, many states require you register to far ahead of time and will arbitrarily purge you from the voting roles. So I guess my point is this is more of issue than you're making it seem.
Does this include smart phones? Seems like percent of people with Internet access would be more relevant. I would think public libraries would also provide a lot of coverage here.
> 15% of adults don't have a driver's license
What's the statistic for adults with any kind of government issued identification? Surely that's more relevant for this debate than the driver's license statistic?
A factor to keep in mind here is that it's an established tactic for Republicans to specifically allow alternative IDs used by whites for voting purposes, while banning alternative IDs used by blacks for voting purposes. A North Carolina law was struck down in 2016 specifically for this reason, for example.
Hint: the people wringing their hands and the people making it more difficult to vote are not the same groups.
The republicans generally would prefer that lower-income folks don't vote because they generally vote for democrats, so of course they would like to see voter turn-out to be low.
It's not strange, it's divided. One group is worried about low voter turnout. Another group is actively making it more difficult to vote. There is virtually no overlap between the two.
This all varies by state, too. Here in Oregon all voting is done by mail, and registration is automatic. It's meant to increase turnout and make it easy to vote.
There's also mail in ballots by default, at least in King county (Seattle/Bellevue, much of the suburbs). (I think the whole state)
If you don't get this card, you know you're not registered (or are registered with the wrong address) and can fix that. You can even register at (what should be) your polling location on election day.
This isn't a hard problem to solve.
[1] https://www.elections.ca/content2.aspx?section=vote&dir=vic&...
However now that i can see the article the 20k is actually 50% of the set of 40k folks that shouldn't have been on the list, which of course is a different story.
Trapped behind the paywall.
While the site it loading, just hit the escape key.
Edit: Also I was slightly impressed that they found my current mailing address. I've moved like 6 times across several states, since I left Ohio.
Ohio is a state where the GOP holds 75% of federal House seats despite winning only 50% of the vote. Similar effect holds for the state legislative offices
Voter fraud is a non-existent issue and these mass-removals serve no basis except as cover to remove voters that don't support their party.
Um, no they're not. Simply wanting to maintain a clean record is a personality difference that it is unreasonable to get suspicious over given the varying personalities of the various secretaries of state (the one who ultimately decides such policies).
The other half the story is that the Dems object to every cleanup and always claim the Republicans are trying to suppress votes, but never have any suggestions on how to do it better, only "don't do it now" or "do it after the next election" in perpetuity. That's how blue states like Michigan end up with court orders requiring them to do cleanups (court orders which Michigan is violating).
Both houses of Michigan's state legislature have been Republican-controlled since 2011. Not much of an example of the Dems controlling voter rolls at the state level there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Snyder
> “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller.
I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controversial, but India, with more people, poverty and issues seems to have managed it. Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day?
> The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September [...] voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people
But that means 200k some thousand should have been purged. If they died, and a death certificate was issued, doesn't some government database know about it and say, "yeah, person is dead purge their voter record". It's 2020 almost, we flew people to the moon, there is a Tesla roadster in Sun's orbit, self driving cars, but somehow managing a few hundred million voter records is an impossible task and I don't understand why.
It's dead simple. But it hinges on the state having a database with every citizen's address. As I understand it such an idea would be very unpopular in the US.
The problem comes in when those addresses change. There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database. Generally there's a requirement to register in the new state (drivers license) within 30 days which is often missed, or not required for temporary moves like college students.
These purges do serve a legitimate purpose, but are often used as a political tool to alter turnouts.
In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved.
I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc).
If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.
The problem comes when we start trying to purge the rolls and there are false positives. The bigger problem is when those false positives are disproportionately citizens of color. Similarly, voter ID cards are not problems philosophically as much as these ID laws disproportionately affecting poor people and people of color.
If you want an ID law, you make IDs free, you account for many of the edge cases like elderly people who don't have birth certificates yet are clearly citizens, and you bend over backwards to make sure everyone who can vote gets one regardless of it costing a little more.
And you believe it's the Republicans who are hating on immigration enforcement? The proposal for tracking everyone's residence not going to fly(coincidentally another thing you need id to do) with those people.
If you are a farmer who uses undocumented workers, same thing. Put the onus on wealthy citizens for doing the wrong thing and have real consequences. Have sting operations. Yes, there's a basic underground economy of labor like maids, but that's a small portion of the undocumented economy.
Then, create a Real immigration system that does not have 15 year wait systems. (http://www.openlawlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMmigra...) Fix the H-2A guest worker program. (See https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/advocacy-and-programs/gues... ) Provide pathways to citizenship. Replace the H1-B program with one that is not exploitative. (permission to change jobs? Immediate deportation if you lose a job and don't immediately have another?) Accept that grocery and dining prices will rise.
Oh, and don't put kids in cages. Treat asylum claimants as human. Provide pathways to legal status.
The problem is that every Republican solution is based on punishing those who are poor and turns a blind eye to those who are wealthy.
Don't let that get in the way of actually responding to the objection regarding tracking of the residents of the US. But tell us how you really feel.
We already lost that battle. And we are tracked when we register to vote.
1. The people can keep track of a card for 10 years. 2. They can afford to pay 20-30 Euros for something they only use for voting, since apparently they aren't involved in any other part of civic life that involves having an id.
It so happens that active voter suppression is actively practiced by republicans, because we have their emails from people in state legislatures to researchers asking questions in two key areas: what forms of ID are minority voters not likely to have that 'our' voters do, so that we could block them for registering [0]. And the second thing is picking your voters, which used to be in both parties but today is pretty much also used by one party. Also doing things like cutting early voting and other extended voting which predominantly let people with low-wage jobs have time to vote on weekends. Another cool one, preventing kids from pre-registering, cause those kids are of course not so conservative [1].
Also we have conservative conferences including ALEC talking about how to suppress voters [2].
Today there is no question that republicans use these tactics to actively suppress votes and voter registration for people that are likely to vote against them. It's not in question, it's not just a few bad apples.
[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-north-carolin...
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/north-carolina-wont-stop-s...
[2] https://www.mediamatters.org/american-legislative-exchange-c...
One of 2 major parties in the US has made making it hard for people to vote a central strategy. This has happened in the past as well.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...
And then there's just the standard phone survey stuff, where you up-multiply based on (once again, self-reported) attributes to match population demographics, causing everything to be wildly out of whack.
This level of obfuscation of methodology is pretty high even by the standards of regular polling.
Millions of these people do exist. I've had family members in this boat. Renewals, name changes (especially for women), DUIs, homelessness (which encompasses much more than literally not having a roof over your head), lack of mobility, a DMV that's 30+ miles away, and the simple fact that successfully voting isn't exactly high on the list of priorities for people facing these issues--these are just a few of the myriad random barriers that conspire to hold back people from voting. I've personally seen them among acquaintances; if you haven't, consider yourself fortunate.
I don't see why it needs to be denied. The level of effort the state should expend to address these issues, what sort personal investment and initiative we should expect of people, and such burdens relative to the risk of fraud--these questions are worthy of debate. But nobody wants to argue these things fairly because, for better or worse, the facts are uncomfortable, especially if you cling to the principle of universal suffrage, which we're all expected to do. And maybe that's unfair--it is difficult for certain political perspectives, such as that we should recognize some aspect of voting as an earned privilege requiring some modicum of initiative, to be voiced these days. But that's no excuse for denying facts.
What you typically see is a Voter ID go into effect, and then whoops, the state budget is too tight this year so we're closing down a whole bunch of DMV locations and restricting hours on the rest.
In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.
I'm not a Republican, and I'm not advocating for a legislative majority for any party. You're not participating in good faith.
> In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.
Maybe. It's probably an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to implement some basic voter ID reqs (you know, like so many Europeans enjoy) than to continually validate that voter fraud is a non-issue _and_ persuade the country that it's a non issue. The idea that these laws only exist to "suppress [legitimate] voting blocks" is absurd; many countries have them, including those enviable European countries. How can securing our Democracy be a bad thing, any way? Recall which party was paranoid about foreign meddling in the last election, after all.
Someone is posting this link about one dmv being opened only 4 days a year for some reason but the population of that place is ca 3000 people. In Europe you don't have a dmv in a village and you get it done after every ten years at some bigger city or town.
[1]] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/24-things-that-require-a-... Almost every single one of which is either illegal, or very difficult to do without an ID.
There are a lot of people for whom the 'small' barrier to entry of dealing with state bureaucracy is much larger than it is in your world.
Voter ID would be important, but unfortunately, the Republican Party has repurposed the concept as a tool of oppression rather than a way to secure the vote. People are rightly wary of the idea because of this, and will continue to be wary of it until free and no-hassle IDs are available to everyone first.
> However, for most people in America I would wager that this is not the case at all
Most? Probably. But "most" doesn't matter. Voting is a fundamental part of the democratic process, and "most" still leaves millions of people in the lurch. Make it "all" and then I'll stop being upset about it.
From TSA's website[1]:
>In the event you arrive at the airport without valid identification, because it is lost or at home, you may still be allowed to fly. The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name, current address, and other personal information to confirm your identity. If your identity is confirmed, you will be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint. You will be subject to additional screening, to include a patdown and screening of carry-on property.
[1] - https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
On the other hand, unless you are one of the 538 electors, you don't have a constitutional right to vote for the president.
So if "constitutional rights" is the determining factor, it's the ID requirement for guns that you should be fighting against.
Also this topic isn't limited to presidential elections, so that Electoral College logic loophole doesn't apply to all elections.
Well, we don't actually have the Constitutional right to vote. The only vote that matters is that of the members of the Electoral College, which is tilted in favor of the Republicans in close elections. That's how we got Bush II and Trump.
Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote.
For an example direct quote from a court case: https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280
Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. Also, your source is not substantiated.
I'd be happier if proof of citizenship was required to vote, not just photo id. Don't know of a practical way to do that except to check passports, but the passport office would be overwhelmed.
Let me put it into computer terms: when your program isn't fast enough and you've got a nice profile trace, do you start your analysis with the functions using up a lot of time? Or do you start among the functions that aren't using lots of time?
Why approach vote fraud any other way? The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted.
Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
None of those things make any sense. A church is more than welcome to only accept people with a passport. I can't imagin that will be going on for long. The post office is a service, and they will sell to whoever can pay. Sending a letter to your representative - you'd probably get a bigger impact if you somehow managed to convince him you voted regularly for different parties. As for "access to a free press", I don't know what you mean. They want your eyeballs as long as they can make some dosh there.
The rest of your post doesn't make sense. The computer analogy breaks down as you don't have a nice evidence log for voting and possible illegal voters, so you start trying different things.
> The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted
That's begging the question. You're asserting the point you're trying to prove, which is what "begging the question" means.
> Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.
Yes. First, the plural of anecdote is not data. Second, just because something helps in that situation, doesn't mean it will help in the problem you want to solve right now. You _can_ do both. Nuance and stacked solutions are important.
It's a court ruling that shut down North Carolina voter ID and early voting laws, in part because the defense of those laws included that that literal quote about it making harder for black people to vote.
> All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases.
When 'some' is enough to control a state legislature, and similar things happen across the country (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su...), it's a logical conclusion.
> Also, your source is not substantiated.
It literally links directly to the court judgement.
I don't see how it follows that a state legislature's cupidity directly translates to a national party's intentions. That's a bridge too far. If there's a smoking gun, such as a leaked internal memo, I would agree totally. People are scumbags and are biased to try to make their side win in most situations.
>It literally links directly to the court judgement.
Yes, for closing the polls early, not for voter id laws.
What about a variety of direct quotes from the heads of different state Republican parties? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...
>Yes, for closing the polls early, not for voter id laws.
The judgment is on a law that affects both.
That shows no evidence that they are willing to make their views public or that they are shared by republicans on a national level. There is absolutely no evidence for that. > The judgment is on a law that affects both.
That is not in evidence. The article you cited did not link the court decision mentioned. The court decision is only speaking to the decision to close polling spots on Sunday because it will suppress black, and majority Democratic voters.
1. 4 times Alec was caught talking with republican lawmakers about how to suppress the vote (Montana, Alabama, Phoenix, Omaha : https://www.mediamatters.org/american-legislative-exchange-c...
2. North Carolina suppression tactics https://www.thenation.com/article/north-carolina-wont-stop-s...
3. More on N.C. voter id law to suppress voting: https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-north-carolin...
It's not just some scattered occasional thing of a few bad actors. There are state by state actions and national conferences making this happen.
What measure of proof do you require?
Ah, so we are still acting like Republicans aren't the legacy bearers of Jim Crow.
Democrats enacted Jim Crow laws (0). I see no evidence that Republicans have enacted any laws that systematically discriminate against black people, in fact Trump has tried to reform the criminal justice system (1). He pardoned Jack Johnson posthumously, and has been handing out pardons like candy to wrongfully accused blacks.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/3100-inmate...
Today the jim crow defenders, the people that say slavery wasn't so bad, some people were even better off. Those are republicans.
They switched.
> They switched.
A lot of them switched for reasons unrelated to race. "Many white southerners switched to the Republican Party, some for reasons unrelated to race. The majority of white southerners shared conservative positions on taxes, moral values and national security. The Democratic Party had increasingly liberal positions rejected by these voters.[20] In addition, the younger generations, who were politically conservative but wealthier and less attached to the Democratic Party, replaced the older generations who remained loyal to the party.[20] The shift to the Republican Party took place slowly and gradually over almost a century.[20]"
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_Southern_Unite...
The other problem is there's never been a real effort to establish a universal ID in the US. Which means you can't fairly do voter ID, since a lot of people don't have ID for various reasons. The lack of voter ID doesn't turn out to be a big problem; there's basically no voter fraud in the US. But it means there's no proper role of eligible voters, either.
The politics of this can't be ignored. The Republicans have a deliberate strategy of making it difficult for people to vote, and employ that strategy every time cleaning up voter roles or enacting voter ID comes up. They do not operate in good faith.
In a very real sense: because that would make it easy to vote.
Free IDs are directly inimical to the effort to prevent people from voting. That prevention is a major effort of one major American political party because it's seen as the only way they can win in an increasingly diverse country.
The folks who are against free IDs--who want it to be hard to vote--also get very weird about "databases of people", even though they already exist and corporate entities compile them right alongside governmental ones every day.
I get the desire to assume good faith in this, but we literally have the receipts.
I always frame the argument like this to my family when they complain. "I'm not opposed to the government maintaining a database of everyone's current address and related information, but if they are going to do that, they should provide free IDs and encourage everyone to participate."
https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712
The GOP learned a long time ago that if you win it doesn't matter how dirty you are. You're not going to prosecute yourself after all. By the time the leadership changes hands everybody will have forgotten about it.
If you add in some of the requirements for getting a valid State ID, it can be even harder for people to get. (Many poor people don't have ready copies of their birth certificate, marriage license to show the change in name, etc)
It's not an accident, it's designed to be this way, for the last 15+ years, at least. People in certain states, in a certain party, know their way to victory is to disenfranchise a certain other party's members.
> "Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?"
> I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters.
> "The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It’s done for one reason and one reason only."
I think most Americans have a problem with the government keeping lists about them. How that makes sense in the modern age of driver's licenses, SSNs, and the Patriot Act, I'm not sure, but as long as people here are so against the idea, it's kind of dead-in-the-water.
Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency to the process (as long as the mistakes are corrected).
Besides, if those checks showed that a large number of people were included in the purge for demonstrably wrong reasons, it would be prudent to assume that a lot of additional purges would also be suspect.
Transparency and community engagement (through advocacy groups) helps ensure that valid voters are kept on the voter rolls. Don't knock Ohio for trying to take steps in the right direction.
While it's true that we should have voting roles and ensure only people who are in the state should vote etc, that's absolutely not what people are doing or talking about when implementing voting systems. When the Republican party talks about these ideas, the end goal is skewing the voter turnout in their favor.
The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Republicans and has been around since forever.
The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. Those thousands can _easily_ be achieved, however, with sloppy aggressive and unnecessary purging.
I wish there existed the political will to issue "citizen ID" cards (or other mechanisms) to all citizens, like they do in civilized countries. These could be used for residency and authentication for voting, banking, taxes, and other functions. This authentication mechanism would instantly remove the phony concern of voter fraud amongst republicans while not disenfranchising voters.
You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered.
I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2].
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu... has a good set of articles attempting to debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on "credible allegations"
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d... -- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology, and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.
If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best).
No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.
To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place.
Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.
Edit: this kind of ties back to the allegations of massive voting fraud in the 2016 elections. Lots of people looked into it and found no significant level of improperly cast votes. That leads to either a contention that it did not happen or a contention that all of the people investigating it were either corrupt or incompetent.
Voter ID is verified during registration. Generally, voter ID is then confirmed when a ballot is issued in person. In most jurisdictions, many forms of identification are accepted to be issued a ballot.
The stricter voter ID laws reduce kinds of identification permitted. Further, they'll do stupid shit like insist on exact matches, so "Mike" vs "Michael" would be rejected. Generally, these laws insist on perfection while injecting errors into the system, for explicitly partisan reasons.
Tellingly, postal ballots are issued without confirming identification. Which are a much greater source of errors. But there's no partisan food fight over postal ballots.
The fix is simple. Eliminate data quality problems with universal automatic voter registration. Moot the ID confirmation kerfuffle by issuing government ID, such as the upcoming Real ID.
Then voila, the USA just joined all the other mature democracies by adopting time proven reasonable best practices.
We call them passports :)
The problem is they're out-of-reach financially to many people ($145~) and they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
I am thinking of something akin to the Chinese Resident Identity Card, which does track enough info to determine voter eligibility, I think.
We also have passport cards, which is the credit-card sized version of the passport, and only works for travel to Mexico/Canada (but is still a national ID).
>they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
You know, I can Google my name and get my current address out of public databases (TruePeopleSearch, etc).
I can also see my current address on the voter record from the website by entering the VoterID number.
The passports have numbers. These can be used to pull/check the address from a voter record database. It's less than trivial.
The address itself doesn't have to be on the ID.
TL;DR: issue passport cards for free to all citizens, force the states to let anyone with such a card to vote with a federal law.
It's doable, but it's certainly not trivial. And no, it's not just "a slip of paper" it's far more than that when you consider all the human, bureaucratic and technical infrastructure, systems and support that would have to be behind it.
Sure, there are trashy and unreliable online aggregators like mylife and their ilk that can provide all kinds of dubious info. I am talking about something much more rigorous and reliable.
There are steps in the right direction occuring now (like Real ID) but even these half-measures have been years in the making and have years to go.
I've considered that, and nope, still trivial
The concept of "pulling up a record" perhaps was non-trivial in the 1950's, but not in 2019.If you were referring to the cost of the passport itself - yes, it requires infrastructure, and this is exactly what the taxes are for. It's an essential component of being a citizen, the extra fees are highway robbery.
It means that nobody has found errors... Yet.
A reasonable process would do a spot-check, discover that they are horrifically off, and then implement a second-level check.
>And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections.
and
>The experience has left some voters like Jennifer Kulina-Lanese, a former veterinary professional, shaken. She got a call from the League of Women Voters shortly after it received the list, informing her that the county where she had voted just last year had started the process for her to be purged.
>“I still don’t know why, and that’s what’s scary,” said Ms. Kulina-Lanese, who is 45. “The idea that Franklin County was starting a process to remove me was terrifying.”
1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document
2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office ("Meldebehörde") where you live, and you have to prove this with a copy of your rent contract or property deed
3) everyone getting a document ("Wahlschein") by mail a couple of weeks prior to election date. If you don't get one but should have gotten, you can contact the election authority to investigate, and if you lose/misplace it you can easily look up where your voting place is, go there and have them locate you on the voter roll.
4) if any piece of official mail goes returned by the post as "undeliverable", the Meldebehörde will investigate and de-register you (thus also removing you from the voter roll)
The only real vote fraud in the last years was from a politician who had seasonal workers register at a company and apply for mail-voting, but that's it.
The other piece is that the constitution, written before direct elections were common, explicitly leaves the execution of elections to the states, which makes it hard for the federal government to set standards or require this kind of registration. And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in the constitution.
For example, in 2015, North Carolina's Republican state legislature literally looked up the forms of ID statistically most likely to be used by black people for voting ID in the state and banned those for use in voting, while leaving the forms of voting ID most used by white people as valid. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...
Which is why I had originally hoped not for Warren or Sanders to end up as Democrat candidate but Biden (which is very unrealistic at the moment)... the general idea was having a left-moderate candidate like Biden get enough votes in 2020 to have a strong Congressional majority in order to fix voter suppression, gerrymandering, electoral college, campaign finance and media ownership (e.g. breaking up Sinclair, re-establishing something like the Fairness Doctrine).
Then in 2024 a proper leftie candidate could compete on fair and even terms against whatever the Republicans put up.
But since Biden is pretty much toast now thanks to the Ukraine scandal it will probably be Warren who ends up as Democrat candidate and I fear that the Republicans will launch an all-out anti-communist war campaign, aided by Fox, Sinclair and "conservative" rags - pitting 'Trump vs "Communism"' in the 2020 elections may yield a victory for Trump in the current situation...
https://wahlen.sachsen.de/LW_19.php?wahlkreis=51&_cp=%7B%22t...
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State elections in saxony this year. Look at the table underneath the map:
Wahlberechtigte -- eligible to vote -- 1 722
Wähler -- voters -- 2 083 -- 121,0 %
Think of voting like a sales pipeline. Any friction whatsoever reduces the conversion rate.
Every little extra bureaucratic step disenfranchises voters.
Additionally, Ohio voter ID laws themselves can be regressive in harming poorer populations. Many don't have access to a nearby BMV bureau to get an ID, aren't aware of the registration deadline which has already passed, lack utility bills in their name, or can't get a stamp for an absentee vote to be mailed. For the the current and next ballot cycle it's important to allow citizens to voice their opinion at the box and to register with a party for primary votes as well.
#1 Our VRDBs only contain eligible voters. Ineligible voters are removed. This is very hard to verify, audit.
The Correct Answer is to list everyone, with a flag for eligibility, with a separate audit log for changes. aka standard DBA best practices.
#2 We already have virtually complete rosters of every person, living or dead, updated in near realtime. Commercial data brokers, facebook, law enforcement, national security. We should license or repurpose these readily available data sources for both voter database and the census.
#3 States administer elections. Feds make the rules. Anyone who opposes nationwide standards should also oppose currency, weights & measures, intra-state trade, the entire American experiment, etc.
FWIW, some states already share data, to better track people who move, students, overseas voters (registered at home), deaths, etc. I haven't been active for a while, so don't know how far along those efforts are.
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Now about this article. Purging (caging) is the weaponization of normal data quality efforts for partisan reasons.
Option 1: Send verification mails to inactive (but still eligible) voters. Some sizable fraction won't be returned. USPS's UAA rate is %1, more for high density areas. Many people just don't response (eg looks like junk mail). Then aggressively, silently remove anyone who doesn't respond.
Option 2: Any official communication sent by election admin which is returned (recall USPS UAA 1%) is used to purge.
Option 3: Ignore or inject data quality problems. Match voter roll against other demographic databases, eg DMV. Purge any records for any error whatsoever. eg Mike vs Michael. Missing commas, hyphens. Whatever works.
This is from memory, I'm sure there's other strategies used, but these are the big ones.
Note that The Correct Answer above moots the entire problem. And would be both cheaper and nearly error free.