>the bill would prohibit election officials from sending absentee ballots to all voters, regardless of whether they had requested them; ban using tents, garages, mobile units or any temporary structure as a polling location; further limit who could vote absentee; and add new identification requirements for voting by mail.
>Partisan poll watchers would also have more access and autonomy under the bill’s provisions, and election officials could be more harshly punished if they make mistakes or otherwise run afoul of election codes and laws.
Why does the United States allow anyone to vote without identification is a shocking question to be asking in 2021.
Do you still feel that way when considering how this would inhibit many people who cannot get IDs from voting? It's their right, no? Just because they don't have a means to obtain an ID doesn't mean their voice shouldn't carry weight in our democracy.
To be absolutely clear: I hope no one is suggesting that there should be any voter ID laws that aren’t preceded by ensuring people have ID (free, easy access).
The voter ID discussion should be phrased as “assuming 99.9% have ID, do you think it’s a good idea to check it when voting?”
The answer to that question is: “yes”.
The other question (much less interesting!) is “assuming ID access and possession is as skewed as today, is it a good idea to require ID for voting?”. The answer to that question is an equally easy “No”.
That does seem to be a lynchpin in many of the rulings against voter ID requirements. There's an obvious workaround: the elimination of fees for ID. That's curiously aligned with the party goal of cutting taxes, but for some reason I never see that come up in this kind of legislation.
You need to identify yourself to register to vote, and to vote you have to arrive at the poll, state your name and address, and sign a sworn statement. The system is practically impossible to abuse, evidenced by the fact that there have been almost no documented cases of anyone abusing it.
The reason identification laws are bad is because they disproportionately affect black people, who are less likely to have state identification, and that is because there are many people still alive today who were born in counties that literally refused to issue birth certificates to black people. It is very easy for someone to just sit there behind a computer and question why someone might not have government identification, but think it through.
>You need to identify yourself to register to vote, and to vote you have to arrive at the poll, state your name and address, and sign a sworn statement. The system is practically impossible to abuse, evidenced by the fact that there have been almost no documented cases of anyone abusing it.
Or it's because it's rarely caught and charges are rarely pressed:
61 out of 63 attempts to vote fraudulently were successful, and one was rejected only because the poll worker happened to be the mother of the person they were trying to fraudulently vote as.
Until there's widespread and thorough pentesting of the election systems in various states it's impossible to say at what rate fraud does or does not occur.
Who cares? Retail one-at-a-time vote fraud doesn't scale, is extremely risky (it's a felony) and doesn't happen at problematic levels. On the other hand, disenfranchising the 13% of black Americans who lack a photo ID is obviously going to swing elections.
Is this written by the Larry Levy from Bracewell & Giuliani (yes, that Rudy Giuliani), and who worked on Giuliani's 2008 primary bid? (That is, in addition to being vice chair of th Republican National Lawyers Association, as described.)
If so, perhaps he's a bit, I dunno, biased?
I point this out not to say that connection must taint the source, but because there have been many investigations for the types of in-person voter fraud tested here ("died, moved out of the jurisdiction, or been convicted of a felony at least two years earlier").
You'll notice that real-world data should be more convincing as a pen test like the WSJ editorial described specifically excluded the estimated probability needed for a valid risk assessment.
Someone could crash a tank through my front door to grab my laptop. A tiger team might even demonstrate that on a similar building to mine. But I'm not going to install anti-tank barricades to reduce the chance that already unlikely event will happen.
Permit me therefore to remain suspicious about a WSJ op-ed piece written by what appears to be someone with a strong financial and/or political reason to cast doubt on existing election security even if that doubt is unjustified.
> In a follow-up interview with the New York Post, Schulkin stated, "I should have said 'potential fraud' instead of 'fraud'". Referring to the Project Veritas operative who secretely recorded him, Schulkin said, "She was like a nuisance. I was just trying to placate her", noting that in his haste to get away from her he "was agreeing with her when I shouldn’t have been."
You'll note that Levy writes "telling the truth", but doesn't present the evidence that this is actually the truth.
Worse than getting your information from the opinion section of the WSJ is imagining that empowering a local petty tyrant to refuse a ballot to a voter is a good idea. Their policy and training is to issue a provisional ballot to virtually anyone. You really don’t want local poll workers trying to adjudicate everyone’s signature or photograph. The problem in the NY investigation was that the dead people were still registered. The report was not directed at the performance of the election department on Election Day, it was directed at the maintenance of the voter file.
Having to register to vote is the other thing that could be removed as a barrier to vote.
Re: the lack of fraud: people obviously believe (or say they believe) this is a problem. So it (giving everyone free and easy access to ID and then requiring it to vote) seems like a trivial fix to that problem of trust. I realize it’s solving a problem that might not exist, but once everyone has ID it’s an easy decision, and there are other possible benefits of having more IDs.
Sure, do it. But before you require the IDs at the polls. Seriously the days when a black mother was not allowed into a hospital and was refused a birth certificate by their county was only 50 years ago. Pretending like this isn't discriminatory isn't helping.
The US does not have any universally available form of government ID that is automatically given freely to all citizens, therefore any piece of photo id is behind a paywall of some kind. Voting should not be limited to only those who hold a passport, or a driver's license, etc.
Other democracies have very liberal requirements on what constitutes an ID, and they do just fine. For example, here's the list of acceptable identification documents to participate in Canadian elections. https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...
The list covers everything from parolee cards, health cards (which are issued free of charge), firearm licenses, to letters of residency from a homeless shelter/soup kitchen, thus ensuring everyone can vote regardless of which walk of life they are from.
It's also worth noting that this law is not being passed in good faith to protect the integrity of elections, as there is little to no evidence that there is a threat. It is a partisan attempt to limit the voting rights of groups that for various reasons typically don't have identification cards, as there is significant overlap between those people and those who tend to vote in opposition to the those currently in power.
It is disconcerting that your post, which is factual in every statement, is downvoted. Truth is downvoted on Hacker News? That is fucked-up behaviour. We can be better than this.
If all US states had free, easy-to-use programs to ensure that all residents had useful government-provided ID, or a common, free, federally-provided ID, this wouldn't be an issue. However, that is not the case, and so long as the requirement to have an ID costs money, it effectively amounts to a poll tax that serves to suppress low-income voters.
In practice, most people in most states probably do vote with IDs, since providing your ID is the easiest way for the poll workers to find your registration. And of course in the processes most people use to register to vote, some (if not multiple) form(s) of identification must generally be provided. The reality is that no significant ID-solved voter fraud exists in the US, so while nice in principle, voter ID laws only serve to suppress voter turnout.
>Why does the United States allow anyone to vote without identification is a shocking question to be asking in 2021.
I feel this is a huge misconception, everyone has to identify for the most part to get your voter registration card for example, so to claim we are allowing votes without identification is false.
Voter registration usually also includes your signature which is verified on all ballots mailed or otherwise.
For example last year I had to verify that my ballot was actually coming from me since they questioned my signature as it was an old signature I used. I sent in the proper documents to update said signature and prove I am who I said I was and it was done and over with.
As a non-american(as this is a worldwide site), I was literally wondering the same thing.
Having no form of identification? That's crazy... Not knowing the specific challenges.
In Canada you don't need to have "ID" as govt form of identification, you still need to be able to identify yourself.
They offer 3 options.
Passport/driver's license/provincial I'd card.
Then if you don't have that, there are secondary items like student id + utility bill, or indigenous status card.
Then lastly, you can have someone who does have ID vouch for u.
"You can still vote if you declare your identity and address in writing and have someone who knows you and who is assigned to your polling station vouch for you.
The voucher must be able to prove their identity and address. A person can vouch for only one person (except in long-term care institutions)."
> Still, the bill includes a provision that could make overturning an election easier. Texas election law had stated that reversing the results of an election because of fraud accusations required proving that illicit votes had actually resulted in a wrongful victory. If the bill passes, the number of fraudulent votes required to do so would simply need to be equal to the winning vote differential; it would not matter for whom the fraudulent votes had been cast.
Wow, this establishes an incredibly perverse incentive. If a party believes that they will lose, they can engage in fraud in favor of the opposite party (e.g. burning boxes of ballots in safe districts), and spoil the vote. If the same party is already in power, it would appear that they could just keep playing this game, pardoning the offenders each time, and maintain control of the "interim" government indefinitely.
>If the bill passes, the number of fraudulent votes required to do so would simply need to be equal to the winning vote differential; it would not matter for whom the fraudulent votes had been cast.
>Wow, this establishes an incredibly perverse incentive. If a party believes that they will lose, they can engage in fraud in favor of the opposite party (e.g. burning boxes of ballots in safe districts), and spoil the vote.
By this rule, they could have the election overturned by casting fraudulent votes for their own party.
I’m not sure. If Party A expects Party B to win by 1%, A can seek to frame B with fraud by creating 1% more vote for B, who now wins by roughly 2%, meaning the bill doesn’t apply as the margin is greater than the fraud.
I don’t disagree with your assessment but I think the result is more complex. This becomes a statistical cat and mouse game, which again is a total distraction from the actual purpose of the voting process.
Even without that obvious long term power grab, intentionally spoiling an election and requiring a new one shifts the voter base. Compare voter turnout of presidential elections and midterms, any other election gets even less turnout.
Plus, think of what one example of a "fraudulent election" would do to nationwide discourse.
> Plus, think of what one example of a "fraudulent election" would do to nationwide discourse.
The Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000 did exactly that, and today's discourse is visibly impacted by its aftermath. It wasn't prosecuted, and Democrats complained about the potential illegitimacy of Bush's win for ages. When Trump called the 2020 election into question, Republicans pointed the finger at Democrats, essentially saying that turnabout is fair play.
Opponents argue that the uninformed will vote. The alternative however is much worse: disenfranchisement (eg why exactly can't felons vote?), active efforts to purge the wrong kind of voters from the electoral rolls [1] and voter suppression in the form of voter ID laws when no evidence of widespread voter fraud has ever been documented.
Australia has mandatory voting and it's non-controversial. It's technically not even mandatory voting. If you want to drop and empty ballot into the box so as to not to vote you can. You never have to wait in line for hours.
Make no mistake: removing access to absentee ballots, voter ID and efforts like Georgia making it illegal to give water to someone in line to vote have two goals:
1. To feed into the baseless GOP base delusion that the election was somehow stolen. It's virtue signaling for the Trump faithful because no GOP politician wants to be the next Liz Cheney and lose their next primary; and
2. To make it harder for Democrats to vote and to make less of them vote.
Each time there is an election here in California, I get to vote on presidency, senators sometimes, representatives, propositions... and then a whole pile of people I've never heard of, who have minimal bios, and about whom no meaningful research is possible beyond what basically amounts to advertising. The work required to choose which candidate makes sense for these lower tier positions seems basically impossible and I do reference a number of voter guide sites.
Realistically, if someone who cares enough to put some effort into it cannot reasonably convince himself that he is making informed decisions for the approximately half of the ballot that these candidates for whatever, is it really unfair to assume people who don't care and are forced to vote will do anything but vote randomly or purely by party affiliation?
> and then a whole pile of people I've never heard of
From the outside, it looks crazy. So many service positions that are treated as political positions instead of employee positions. So many positions that should have qualifications as a requirement for employment (e.g. education, certification, training), turned into positions that have no qualification requirements save for one: get elected. People of no competency mucking up jobs that require competency. Coroners who have no education whatsoever! Animal Control guys with no animal training! Sheriffs and whatnot with no legal training! It’s fantastically insane!
36 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 60.8 ms ] thread>Partisan poll watchers would also have more access and autonomy under the bill’s provisions, and election officials could be more harshly punished if they make mistakes or otherwise run afoul of election codes and laws.
Why does the United States allow anyone to vote without identification is a shocking question to be asking in 2021.
The voter ID discussion should be phrased as “assuming 99.9% have ID, do you think it’s a good idea to check it when voting?”
The answer to that question is: “yes”.
The other question (much less interesting!) is “assuming ID access and possession is as skewed as today, is it a good idea to require ID for voting?”. The answer to that question is an equally easy “No”.
Time cost. If they work 8-5, or two jobs, they can't get time off to go get an id.
That's just a few off the top of my head.
The reason identification laws are bad is because they disproportionately affect black people, who are less likely to have state identification, and that is because there are many people still alive today who were born in counties that literally refused to issue birth certificates to black people. It is very easy for someone to just sit there behind a computer and question why someone might not have government identification, but think it through.
Or it's because it's rarely caught and charges are rarely pressed:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-fraud-a-myth-thats-not-wh...
61 out of 63 attempts to vote fraudulently were successful, and one was rejected only because the poll worker happened to be the mother of the person they were trying to fraudulently vote as.
Until there's widespread and thorough pentesting of the election systems in various states it's impossible to say at what rate fraud does or does not occur.
If so, perhaps he's a bit, I dunno, biased?
I point this out not to say that connection must taint the source, but because there have been many investigations for the types of in-person voter fraud tested here ("died, moved out of the jurisdiction, or been convicted of a felony at least two years earlier").
And they've found bupkis. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_impersonation_(United_St... for many of the relevant studies and court cases.
You'll notice that real-world data should be more convincing as a pen test like the WSJ editorial described specifically excluded the estimated probability needed for a valid risk assessment.
Someone could crash a tank through my front door to grab my laptop. A tiger team might even demonstrate that on a similar building to mine. But I'm not going to install anti-tank barricades to reduce the chance that already unlikely event will happen.
Permit me therefore to remain suspicious about a WSJ op-ed piece written by what appears to be someone with a strong financial and/or political reason to cast doubt on existing election security even if that doubt is unjustified.
EDIT: The 'Alan Schulkin, came under pressure resign after he was caught on tape telling the truth' is from a Project Veritas video, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas#New_York_City_... :
> In a follow-up interview with the New York Post, Schulkin stated, "I should have said 'potential fraud' instead of 'fraud'". Referring to the Project Veritas operative who secretely recorded him, Schulkin said, "She was like a nuisance. I was just trying to placate her", noting that in his haste to get away from her he "was agreeing with her when I shouldn’t have been."
You'll note that Levy writes "telling the truth", but doesn't present the evidence that this is actually the truth.
Re: the lack of fraud: people obviously believe (or say they believe) this is a problem. So it (giving everyone free and easy access to ID and then requiring it to vote) seems like a trivial fix to that problem of trust. I realize it’s solving a problem that might not exist, but once everyone has ID it’s an easy decision, and there are other possible benefits of having more IDs.
Other democracies have very liberal requirements on what constitutes an ID, and they do just fine. For example, here's the list of acceptable identification documents to participate in Canadian elections. https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...
The list covers everything from parolee cards, health cards (which are issued free of charge), firearm licenses, to letters of residency from a homeless shelter/soup kitchen, thus ensuring everyone can vote regardless of which walk of life they are from.
It's also worth noting that this law is not being passed in good faith to protect the integrity of elections, as there is little to no evidence that there is a threat. It is a partisan attempt to limit the voting rights of groups that for various reasons typically don't have identification cards, as there is significant overlap between those people and those who tend to vote in opposition to the those currently in power.
In practice, most people in most states probably do vote with IDs, since providing your ID is the easiest way for the poll workers to find your registration. And of course in the processes most people use to register to vote, some (if not multiple) form(s) of identification must generally be provided. The reality is that no significant ID-solved voter fraud exists in the US, so while nice in principle, voter ID laws only serve to suppress voter turnout.
I feel this is a huge misconception, everyone has to identify for the most part to get your voter registration card for example, so to claim we are allowing votes without identification is false.
Voter registration usually also includes your signature which is verified on all ballots mailed or otherwise.
For example last year I had to verify that my ballot was actually coming from me since they questioned my signature as it was an old signature I used. I sent in the proper documents to update said signature and prove I am who I said I was and it was done and over with.
As a non-american(as this is a worldwide site), I was literally wondering the same thing.
Having no form of identification? That's crazy... Not knowing the specific challenges.
In Canada you don't need to have "ID" as govt form of identification, you still need to be able to identify yourself.
They offer 3 options. Passport/driver's license/provincial I'd card.
Then if you don't have that, there are secondary items like student id + utility bill, or indigenous status card.
Then lastly, you can have someone who does have ID vouch for u.
"You can still vote if you declare your identity and address in writing and have someone who knows you and who is assigned to your polling station vouch for you.
The voucher must be able to prove their identity and address. A person can vouch for only one person (except in long-term care institutions)."
Source: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...
Wow, this establishes an incredibly perverse incentive. If a party believes that they will lose, they can engage in fraud in favor of the opposite party (e.g. burning boxes of ballots in safe districts), and spoil the vote. If the same party is already in power, it would appear that they could just keep playing this game, pardoning the offenders each time, and maintain control of the "interim" government indefinitely.
>Wow, this establishes an incredibly perverse incentive. If a party believes that they will lose, they can engage in fraud in favor of the opposite party (e.g. burning boxes of ballots in safe districts), and spoil the vote.
By this rule, they could have the election overturned by casting fraudulent votes for their own party.
I don’t disagree with your assessment but I think the result is more complex. This becomes a statistical cat and mouse game, which again is a total distraction from the actual purpose of the voting process.
Plus, think of what one example of a "fraudulent election" would do to nationwide discourse.
The Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000 did exactly that, and today's discourse is visibly impacted by its aftermath. It wasn't prosecuted, and Democrats complained about the potential illegitimacy of Bush's win for ages. When Trump called the 2020 election into question, Republicans pointed the finger at Democrats, essentially saying that turnabout is fair play.
Opponents argue that the uninformed will vote. The alternative however is much worse: disenfranchisement (eg why exactly can't felons vote?), active efforts to purge the wrong kind of voters from the electoral rolls [1] and voter suppression in the form of voter ID laws when no evidence of widespread voter fraud has ever been documented.
Australia has mandatory voting and it's non-controversial. It's technically not even mandatory voting. If you want to drop and empty ballot into the box so as to not to vote you can. You never have to wait in line for hours.
Make no mistake: removing access to absentee ballots, voter ID and efforts like Georgia making it illegal to give water to someone in line to vote have two goals:
1. To feed into the baseless GOP base delusion that the election was somehow stolen. It's virtue signaling for the Trump faithful because no GOP politician wants to be the next Liz Cheney and lose their next primary; and
2. To make it harder for Democrats to vote and to make less of them vote.
That's it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force
Realistically, if someone who cares enough to put some effort into it cannot reasonably convince himself that he is making informed decisions for the approximately half of the ballot that these candidates for whatever, is it really unfair to assume people who don't care and are forced to vote will do anything but vote randomly or purely by party affiliation?
From the outside, it looks crazy. So many service positions that are treated as political positions instead of employee positions. So many positions that should have qualifications as a requirement for employment (e.g. education, certification, training), turned into positions that have no qualification requirements save for one: get elected. People of no competency mucking up jobs that require competency. Coroners who have no education whatsoever! Animal Control guys with no animal training! Sheriffs and whatnot with no legal training! It’s fantastically insane!