It shouldn’t be, but it is, if you’ve ever heard people go on about it.
Also, FWIW, voter rolls used to be where most jurisdictions got their jury pools from, so many people avoided registering to vote so they wouldn’t get called for jury duty. Recently, counties have changed to using vehicle registration in addition to voter registration so people wouldn’t avoid voting, and also to widen the jury pool.
But if you were already registered to vote, the deadline to enroll in a party or change parties was October 9. Someone who never registered could register as a Republican or Democrat up until March 25- but someone who was registered as a Republican and switched to Democrat after October 9 wasn’t eligible to vote in the primary.
Or, more relevantly, people who registered as independents, but who then decided this year that they wanted to vote in the primary. There were a lot of those this year, on both sides of the aisle.
Yes, it has been touched upon at length on the thread on voter-ID/suppression.
Schnitte, as mentioned a bit earlier in the thread, the US does not have one universal ID document that is proof of your identity, citizenship and lawful residency and follows you through life. Heck, whoever proposes creating that openly will be shouted out of the room in either party.
To complicate things further, some of the ID-establishing documents such as birth certificates, depending on your home state, are managed at not even the state but the county level. Add to that the sprawl and displacement of the US and it means you have a lot of people for whom gathering together the paperwork is a greater hassle.
Interesting story - one day I was walking to lunch in county 1 (state capital city). A person asked me how to get to city A. Because they came here for their birth certificate, but found out it was kept at the county seat, not the capital city of the state. Then they said they were born in county 2. City A, that they asked about was actually the county seat of County 3. I know that because though I work in City 1, I live in the county they were asking about and shop in the city they were asking about.
So the person (who’d moved out of the state as a child) came to the state capital for birth certificate, but then found out he had to go to the county seat of his birth county, but was actually asking about the county seat for another county by city-name.
Edit: And the county courthouse did not have an original or a copy of my father’s birth certificate. Turned out his mom had the original. He discovered this at 48.
An issue that seems likely to come up in this election is the validity of delegates in the Electoral College .
From … United States Electoral College - Wikipedia
You normally think of votes as being points, and the person with the most points wins…
But President works with delegates. Each state is awarded a number of delegates based on population . The vote in that state decides how many delegates each party gets to send … You’d think that it would be fair if a party got 1/3rd of the vote that party would get only 1/3rd of the delegates, but that only happens in Maine and Nebraska. In the rest, its winner takes all. 49% counts gets 0 %, 50% counts as 100%.
BUT these delegates are real people, and they don’t merely show their face in Washington, they actually fill out a voting form ! .
So these Electoral College delegates can change their vote, and they can be disqualified.
Worse, some states make it law that the delegate “vows to support the candidate who they were nominated by”…
The issue could well be that a number of delegates may have a conscience and vote against the candidate who sent them.
The laws don’t it clear as to how timing affects this. its the state that is disqualifying the delegate, but the voting is occurring in federal jurisdiction. How do the feds know if the delegate is disqualified by their state ? Does the timing of the disqualification matter to the feds, or is it the timing of the feds KNOWING of the disqualification ? The states imply that the delegate must be treated as a “point” and not a person who votes… But the feds let them vote. The state is saying if they vote against their party, the party they vowed to support to become a candidate for being a delegate to the Electoral College, then they should be disqualified. However, the Fed’s treat the vote as happening FIRST and then the state can consider state law as they will based on what happened in the Electoral College Vote… basically how the delegate votes cannot change the validity of their vote, as the vote must be made first… timing you see… It has to be that way or there would be race conditions, logical conundrums…
But in this election, it may be that some states make real efforts to disqualify delegates to the electoral college BEFORE the vote… it may be that some electoral college candidates actually want to get THEMSELVES disqualified, which can mean showing their passport instead of their birth certificate, or vica versa , the old switheroo, to claim that they are actually to be disqualified as they shouldn’t even be registered votes…
You’d think that they’d just make it a preferential points system… but the status quo remains, and the issue is that people like the idea that a small number of delegates may sabotage the delegates preferred party because they don’t want that person as President…
It is very hard to discuss this in GQ. But let me just mention a few things about establishing ID. In general, they want a birth certificate. Different states have different requirements for issuing a BC. When I needed one to prove my age for retirement, I simply wrote to the PA registrar of vital statistics with a check for something like $6 and after an exchange (owing to the fact that the name I use is not the same as that on the BC) it was sent by return mail. Great. But I hear tell that if you are in some states, you actually have to go to some central registry and apply for it. Now if you can take a day off work and own a car you can drive to it, fine. But poor people cannot take a day off work and also have no way to get there since there is little or no public transportation in rural areas.
The first time I voted, in suburban Philadelphia, I just went to some office and registered. It was assumed I was a citizen or I wouldn’t have asked to register. When I voted, I gave my name and they sent me to a voting booth and I pulled the levers on the machine. When I moved to NY, much the same. And in IL. Then I moved to Canada and have voted absentee in IL ever since (federal offices only).
When I moved to Canada, I got a driver’s licence. After a couple years, medicare came and I got a medicare card. Eventually, both got pictures. I register to vote when I file tax returns and I use my medicare car as voter ID. In the US there is simply no standard ID and therein lies the problem.
Incidentally, while the documentation required for a student ID might be much less that that required for a gun permit, it is not significantly less than what you need for a driver’s license.
When the Republican-dominated PA legislature passed a voter ID law, a Republican official exulted that now the Dems didn’t have a chance to win the state. Somehow the law was suspended and the Dems did win in 2012.
And to mention something lightly touched on above, the question of enough voting booths in poor (mostly black) precincts is another contentious issue. A friend of mine who lived in Ohio in 2000 said that a few weeks before the election in the year, the Republican governor ordered the removal of several hundred voting machines from poor Cleveland areas where they were desperately needed to rural areas of the state where they were not. As a result, in some Cleveland precincts people lined for hours and many left discouraged, which might have changed the outcome of the election. I read that in the recent AZ primary, there was at least one precinct that had no polling station at all, so residents were disfranchised.
Others have touched on this, but perhaps not very clearly. This is the point. You are wrong. Many, many people don’t have this documentation, especially if they are poor, and it can be very difficult and expensive to obtain, especially if they are poor.
Your next question should be why this is the case.
Just to clarify, except for the electors from DC, the electors do not perform any duties in Washington DC and do not have any official reason to go there. (They are free to travel to DC as tourists, just like anyone else.)
The electoral college never meets as a whole. Each state (and DC) has a meeting of its electors in the state and the state then sends certificates to DC showing how they voted.
Except some states do exactly that. You can show up at a polling place and register to vote on the spot.
No. Students have a legal right to vote where they reside for the purpose of attending college. (I was in college in 2008, and you couldn’t take three steps without an Obama volunteer asking you if you were registered to vote at your university address.)
Three weeks was if you had never been registered before. Six months was if you were changing party affiliation.
Primaries are completely different from the actual election.
Last time I moved it took two clicks on a computer to register to vote- by mail. Thus getting rid of that pesky requirement of having to figure out which polling place to go to, figuring out how to get there on a Tuesday, and remembering to bring ID.
I want to clarify this, because while you are right, so is the person you are responding to. As far as I can tell:
Student ID’s aren’t acceptable for voting because it in no way establishes you are a legal resident of a particular state; you can in almost all circumstances go to school in one state, even far from home, without establishing residency. In addition, student ID’s frequently don’t include an address, and many state colleges are close enough to a border than students and can do communicate over the state line. Hence, while it may establish you are who you say you are, a student doesn’t usually suffice to show that you live in a particular state or district.
If I made any errors here, feel free to correct me, but that’s all I can figure on this one.
Another point not fully touched on…
Elections in the United States are not run by a federal elections office. Elections are run at the state and/or local level.
Similarly registration requirements are not fully set at the federal level, though there are Constitutional protections that cover a few things (citizens over age 18 are eligible to vote in federal elections, no poll tax, etc…).
One point of contention with the Motor Voter registrations is that some states want to enforce stricter registration requirements than those stated on the Motor Voter registration form.
Finally, changing laws that result in disfavoring one group is not phenomenon unique to the Republican party. In the first two years of the Obama Administration the Democratic led Congress passed amendments to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a law meant to ease voting for American residing abroad, largely military servicemen stationed overseas. Prior to the amendment an overseas voter could make one request for ballots to be mailed for all elections for the next 4 years. The amendment eliminated that so now overseas voters must request ballots individually for each election. No notice was sent to overseas voters that their previous request for a ballot would not be honored.
In Canada, the income tax people ask if you want your name added to an on-going voter registry; but for some reason some provinces still use door-to-door enumeration at the beginning of every provincial election. The Canadian politicians (Conservative) have had the same paranoia about how the lower class vote early and often for their opponents; indeed changed the rules to try and eliminate that. It used to be that you could just swear yourself in, or have someone swear you in, at the polling station. Having done poll scrutineering (for the Progressive Conservatives) in a lower-class polling area, I can assure you there is no such “horde of fake voters” from what I saw. It’s a myth Conservatives and US Republicans tell themselves to explain their polling shortcomings.
(Fun Fact - when they lost the independence referendum by a squeaker, Quebec politicians cried fraud. “Look, for example one of the voters in Montreal was even called ‘Omar Sharif’ - how fake is that??” Turns out Omar Sharif, son of Omar Sharif the famous actor, is a Canadian citizen living in Montreal.)
For the USA…
I remeber an episode of “All In The Family” (1972?) where Archie goes to vote to cancel Meathead’s vote, only to find he isn’t registered and can’t vote. It used to be that you had to be registered months before the November elections, so by the time the election was news to the general public around August (ah, those old and naiive times!) it was too late to register. I assume a lot of the different rules were designed to reinforce or aleviate that problem, depending who was in power.
Note another tactic; sometimes felons can’t vote. In some states, like Florida, never, even after their sentence was over. Virginia’s governor just issued an edict delcaring felons could vote, despite a law saying they could not. When you consider that something like 1 in 4 black men has a prison record, or 1 in 10 young men is in prison, you can see why one side would want felons to vote, one side would want to bar them?
In the last federal election there was a controversy over the group ACORN submitting voter registrations for “Mickey Mouse” and other fraudulent names. Apart from the bad idea of paying people by th person registered, the rules are clear. You cannot as an independent group collect voter regiastration forms and not turn them in to the government for processing, even if they are “obviously” fraudulent. First, it’s not the group’s right to determine fraud. Second, if you don’t turn in EVERY form, your group could collect forms and be selective about who is passed on and actually registered. People voting for the other party would go to the poll and find out too late they were never registered even though they thought they were.
the whole “delegate to convention” thing and primaries are something very different. People (party members in some, anyone who wants, in others) vote in primaries. In some cases, as mentioned, delegate votes for that state at the convention are awarded proportionately. In some states, winner takes all. The thought was that an apparent winner would be obvious and by bandwagon effect would collect the last states’ delegates and be guaranteed a majority. This time, however, it will be close.
the electoral college was a clever design by the founding fathers. In a spread on states along the coast, weeks of horse travel from one end to the othr, the system was designed so that the big states or some regions could not win by sheer population vote and make the smaller states and less populous areas irrelevant. So a candidate had to win that state to get the electoral votes. (Not by 50% - that only happens because there are only 2 candiates nowadays).
The electors (not necessarily together, at the same time) cast their 2 ballots for 2 candidates and the candidate with 50% of the electoral college votes was president, the one with the next most votes was vice-president.
So unless someone was immesely popular all through the country (think George Washington) nobody would win. If nobody won 50% or it was a tie, the house of representatives picked from the top 3 electoral-vote-getters. This happened once. Someone forgot to vote to vote one less for the party’s VP, so the tie meant congress, with a majority of the third guy’s members, picked The president - the picked Jefferson after heated debate. Rules were then changed, electors vote for a prez and VP.
The other flaw was that by the time Washington retired, country-wide political parties had formed and so people at one end of the country would happily vote for for someone they knew nothing about, because the local party brass assured them he stood for what they wanted.
It’s not despite the law. The law in Virginia is that the governor can restore any felon’s right to vote. Previous governors only did this sparingly, after an application was submitted, but the current governor decided to just restore the rights of everyone whose sentence was complete, in the same way that Jimmy Carter pardoned all of the people who elected not to participate in the draft and not just the ones who applied for a pardon.
Until recently, the registers were kept by having one form per household to fill in every autumn, and I understood that there was a legal obligation on the person filling in for the household to register everyone eligible to vote (not that I ever heard of anyone being prosecuted for not doing so). Then it switched to every individual having to register themselves (there had been some concern about the possibility of people adding fake or multiple identities to their households), which more or less makes registration voluntary.
But there is a legal obligation on the local authority to maintain an up-to-date and accurate register, bolstered by requirements to canvass all households to check (and the fact that their supplementary funding from the government to cover local services is linked to the numbers of people registered).
We’ve had battles in the past over registering expatriates living overseas, a Tory government allowing them to stay registered for 20 years outside the country, and the Labour government replacing them cutting this to ?5 years; but otherwise I don’t think there’s much manoeuvring for party advantage in the registration system, since it’s all supervised by the independent Electoral Commission and carried out by professional local civil servants. You don’t have to provide ID when you vote, though you are sent a reminder card to tell you where and when you can vote, and this gives the polling station clerks your registration number and the rest of it; “personation” has been known to occur, but it’s difficult to organise it effectively in sufficient numbers to have much significant effect on results.
My American Student ID didn’t even establish that I was a legal resident of the US, or a citizen thereof; I was the first, temporarily, but not the second. It did contain my SSN, which looked exactly like anybody else’s SSN… I think that’s how it got stolen (someone opened a savings account with that SSN for a company which did not exist).
[QUOTE=PatrickLondon;19282482 You don’t have to provide ID when you vote, though you are sent a reminder card to tell you where and when you can vote, and this gives the polling station clerks your registration number and the rest of it; “personation” has been known to occur, but it’s difficult to organise it effectively in sufficient numbers to have much significant effect on results.[/QUOTE]
I usually lose or forget my polling card when I go to vote. Telling the clerk my name and address for then to tick me off their list is sufficient.
The main controversy, which does result in challenges, is postal voting.
What seems to happen is that whole extended families (mainly Asians) give their voting papers to a ‘patriarch’ for him to complete. Whether this has a significant effect outside their local area remains to be seen.
Voting is compulstory in Australia, so you have to register to vote - it’s also pretty easy, just fill in a form (there’s an online option) with your driver’s licence or passport number (nearly everyone has one of them) - or, you can get someone who’s already on the electoral roll to verify “Yeah, that’s them!” as an alternative.
When you show up at the polling booth, there’s a big List O’Voters (recently on a computer, but marginally less recently in actual book form, and still used in many places). You tell the polling official your name, they cross you off the list, you vote, then head outside to enjoy some Democracy Sausage Sizzle and head home.
Count me among those surprised at the brouhaha voter registration causes in the US, and the idea that significant numbers of people don’t have driver’s licences or other government-issued ID.