Here’s how I understand it. Everyone has been looking at the idea of reducing voter fraud. That’s all well and good, but what is the goal of doing so? What is the ultimate end of reducing voter fraud? The ultimate end is reducing fraudulent outcomes, which is not exactly the same thing as reducing voter fraud.
Keep in mind that there multiple methods of voting, the main ones being in person and absentee. If your attempts to reduce fraud suppress in person voting without an equal suppression of absentee voting, then the proportional influence of absentee voting increases.
Given that absentee voting is much more prone to fraud than in person voting, we can end up with the counter-intuitive result of reducing fraud while increasing fraudulent outcomes.
I haven’t read the entire paper yet, but presumably they show why they believe that the conditions may be common. If they don’t then it does weaken their argument somewhat.
In any case, your reasoning also applies to the arguments being made in defense of these laws. People claim that the types of fraud prevented by these laws is common, but they have no proof of that.
If you’re going to do something that will, as a side effect, suppress some portion of legitimate voters, then you need to show that it will increase the overall accuracy of the outcome.
If you’re going to claim that elections are never close enough for absentee fraud to make a difference then you’re also saying that they are never close enough for in person fraud to make a difference.
Also, I’m not necessarily endorsing anything; just putting it out for discussion.
Edited to add: Also, I have to believe that most vote brokering is done via absentee ballots, where the vote can be verified by the broker. Thus this bolsters the author’s argument.
Well, what we do know is that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. In-person voter fraud, the only type that Voter ID will actually stop, is extremely time-consuming, involves multiple felonies, is fairly easy to check if suspected, and even in the most extreme conspiracy could hardly account for more than a few hundred votes (and that’s a scenario that’s completely unrealistic). So it makes sense that when the Bush administration went hunting for voter fraud, they turned up just about fuck-all. Seriously - the rate is somewhere between 0.0004% and 0.0009%. In other words, in an election, for every 250,000 votes, there’s likely to be *one *fraudulent vote. That’s really nothing. What’s more, there’s no evidence or reason to suggest that this is all going in one direction. For all we know, it may very well be fairly equal in partisanship, and cancel out. There’s no reason to believe that this disproportionately effects one party.
What we also know is that voter ID is not ubiquitous. That is, a lot of people in this country don’t have photo ID. The most recent figure on that placed it around 10%. That is, For every 10 people who vote in an election, there’s likely one of them with no voter ID. Furthermore, there are good reasons to believe that this disproportionately effects one party, as the people by far least likely to have photo ID are college students (hard left), racial minority groups (left), the poor (slight left), the disabled (slight left) and the elderly.
So yes, you absolutely have good reason to believe that the above example is plausible. I’m just going to quote myself here:
I made that post like, 2 years ago, and it still holds true.
So basically, we’re creating a situation where we’re solving a non-problem with a solution that prevents a lot of people, disproportionately people who would vote for more liberal candidates, from voting. And before you say “well, they should just get ID”, keep in mind that if you don’t have photo ID, you’re obviously not driving. Often, it’s as much as 30 miles to the nearest DMV. In one case in Texas, they brought up a man who had to go 120 miles in each direction to get to the nearest place he could get photo ID. What’s more, these places tend to keep standard business hours, making it somewhat difficult to get ID if you work full-time, let alone double shifts. And if you do have to take time off, then you’d better be damn sure that you get everything right the first time. Which is not a given.
And all this, just to be a drop in an ocean of votes? You can blame it on them all you want, but the fact is that you’re putting a non-trivial hurdle for them to jump through, and the end result is less people voting. It’s actually kind of twisted, when you think about it - “Oh, anyone could get ID. If you can’t be fucked to take the time off work, ride your bike 30 miles, wait at the DMV, and potentially have to do it all over again in a week, well, then maybe you just aren’t motivated enough to vote”. If that sounds callous, good - it’s more or less exactly the argument presented by, among others, Bricker and several others in that aforementioned pit thread when they were presented with the aforementioned numbers.
And of course, all of this ignores the fact that absentee ballot fraud is infinitely easier to pull off. Food for thought.
See here, this is your problem. It’s not “everyone” looking at reducing voter fraud, it’s Republicans. Their goal has nothing to do with reducing fraud. The goal is to increase the difficulty of voting for segments of the population they identify as likely to vote Democrat.
The paper has one major issue, his factor depends on the raw number of fraudulent votes, a number that no proponent of Voter ID has ever actually attempted to capture, despite the fact that it is data critical to even the most basic understanding of Voter Fraud.
Of course. But this is taking the argument to them in their own terms. They claim to be attempting to reduce fraud (the implication being that they are attempting to reduce fraudulent outcomes, a different thing). If this paper is correct, then even if we concede the voter ID supporters’ points for the sake of argument, their “solution” doesn’t solve the problem they claim exists.
Honestly, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but it’s so hard to do on this issue. The evidence, when stacked up, screams “NO THIS IS A BAD IDEA STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING”. It also will almost certainly hurt democrats. Any wonder that it’s such a partisan issue among politicos, who almost certainly understand it? I cannot believe that republicans are arguing in good faith on this issue.
Well, yeah. That’s been the argument from the start.
The paper outlines ways in which it can solve the problem, and ways in which it would make the problem worse. It comes down to how the change affects both lawful and fraudulent votes.
However, the counter argument is that the lawful votes affected are those who are marginally interested in voting to begin with, those who can’t be bothered to get an ID. If a particular candidate’s supporters are unenthusiastic about voting, perhaps their loss does not reflect an inappropriate change to the outcome.
Of course, SOMEONE voted claiming to be Cue, using Cue’s name, address, and birth date.
But Florida didn’t require voter ID in 1996. So proving that it was Cue will not be possible.
With Voter ID, on the other hand, Florida can prosecute Cue and Walters for voting as non-citizens. The state will have legally sufficient evidence to show they voted.
This scenario is continually glossed over by those arguing against Voter ID laws. Even the paper valorized in the OP says:
That’s untrue. ID laws create a framework that allows prosecution for fraud that is not impersonation-related, and thus create a deterrent for those would would otherwise feel safe in engaging in low-risk voting fraud.
When your standard for agreeing that a case of voter fraud exists is a criminal conviction, then of course the numbers will be low. For example, neither Ramon Cue nor Neville Waters are captured in any study that was used to build that “0.0004%” [sic] figure.
You’re still on about your poster boy Cue? What about anecdotal evidence about legitimate voters who were not able to vote? If I name one, does that cancel Cue? If I name two, does that mean the Cue example is defeated?
Since it’s a new beginning and we’re rehashing old claims, your examples still aren’t persuasive.
Cue and Walters plus the eleven other claimed non-citizen voters are not examples of in-person voter fraud. Instead, if they are anything, they are examples of problems with in-person voter registration. They (or some of them) may be examples of actual fraud, whereby non-citizens knowingly misrepresented themselves as citizens in order to gain the privilege of voting. Or they (or some of them) may be examples of clerical error wherein non-citizens erred in making application and voter enrollment officials erred in accepting them as applicants and certifying them as voters. Or perhaps there were clerical errors made at the time of voting. Cue, for instance, claims never to have registered nor voted. If he as an individual is differentiated from legitimate voters sharing his name and birth date only by a street address, clerical confusion could explain his presence on a “fraud” list.
Either way, we must conclude that these parties possessed sufficient means of identification (legitimate or not) to satisfy voter registration officials as to their bona fides. Once their names have been accepted onto the voter rolls, any requirement to present “Voter ID” on election day would merely involve display of identifications congruent with those previously used for registration. Since election day merely involves comparison of presented ID with some version of recorded ID, they would be neither caught nor deterred at the polling place.
Rather than being a justification for election day voter ID, all 13 instances here demonstrate a need for greater scrutiny of voter registration applicants, if anything.
ETA: Sorry, Bryan, “your examples” refers to Bricker, not you.
This study seems kind of goofy. Yes, these conditions are possible. They hardly appear likely, though. Certainly not enough so as to make this a plausible reason to oppose voter ID legislation when there are much better ones already.
Nobody has been looking at that idea. People have been looking at the idea of depressing minority and low-income turnout, and couching it as a means of reducing voter fraud.
The majority of voter fraud occurs in the absentee balloting process, but nobody is demanding absentee ballot reform. I wonder why.
I win the bet I just made with myself, the terms of which were: someone would completely ignore the key point I made.
That point being: the threat of prosecution is generally regarded as a deterrent. So why do you ignore the threat of prosecution for voting when you’re not a citizen, and say:
I grant you they would not be caught at the polls. But since they would have to present ID, even if it’s the same ID used to register, they can be more reliably prosecuted after voting. The problem that now exists is we cannot prosecute them reliably; they can simply claim some other person voted using their name.
Exactly. How, pray tell, did a non-citizen end up registered to vote? Oh, and for the record, I probably long since left that thread before you brought up Cue. After a while it became incredibly tedious. I welcome you to tell me though - what are your X and Y?
Or maybe you’d like to present a study that has other cases of proven voter fraud that nonetheless did not lead to convictions? Because somehow, I doubt you have much more than a handful of anecdotes. Which we can easily match. The difference is in hard data. We have solid data on how many people have photo ID. You claim that there are methodological errors in the 0.0004% figure. Okay - how much do you think it’s missing? Furthermore, would voter ID laws have stopped Cue from voting? No! At most, it would mean that after the fact, we could prosecute him. That’s the most we can say. Alternatively, we could just make sure the registration office does its job right. This is an incredibly weak argument for voter ID laws. It’s not nothing, but it’s like if you have scales where one scale has a ton on it, and the other has a pound. You’re adding another pound, if that.
What’s more, none of this does anything to challenge the assertion that it makes sense that there’s so little. It makes sense that there’s very little voter fraud, because it’s hard to do, time-consuming, and has very little effect.
You know, not to drag up too much old ground, but you talking about a “deterrent” on this issue is extremely ironic. Like, wow. After all, how meaningful is it that a voter ID requirement is a clear and demonstrated deterrent to legitimate voters voting?