Just an aside to the OP re: the thread title, the US colloquialism you were searching for is fuss, not fuzz.
Because I would imagine everybody to have at least a birth certificate. Is that assumption really far-fetched?
Entering or staying in the country illegally is not illegal? :eek:
8 USC §1181 Begs to disagree
(a) Documents required; admission under quotas before June 30, 1968
Do you wish me to quote 8 CFR Part 316 as well.
Gee, I wonder how I could possibly have missed the truth of your tautology!
Could it be that you’ve improperly substituted a term in order to make your incorrect claim appear to be correct?
I know you intend that as a rhetorical question, but it really is far-fetched to expect that every person, regardless of how troubled their life is, keeps ahold of a small piece of paper that they don’t do anything with over the course of decades. Some people’s parents lose their birth certificate or never pass it on to the kid when they’re older, some people run away from home, some people just lose it from carelessness when moving, some have to move in a hurry because of violence, others suffer from a house fire, others have their stuff stolen, others pack it away and then can’t remember where they packed it years later, and many more.
Further, a birth certificate does not have a photo (and wouldn’t have a useful photo even if it did), so isn’t even considered a form of ID in any state that I’m aware of, so even if you were correct that everyone had their birth certificate handy, they still wouldn’t have a valid ID to vote.
You’re the one claiming being in the country illegally is not in of itself a crime.
Do you see how your last post fails to address that claim?
(Perhaps you did not know that not everything that violates a law is a crime?)
It’s not only far-fetched, it’s exactly wrong. There are millions of people in this country that never were issued a birth certificate at birth—there’s no national law requiring them. And the kind of people who are unlikely to have them in their possession are exactly the kind of people who will find it difficult to replace them or get one issued anew decades later—old people, poor people, people with less education, people with difficult childhoods or difficult family relationships.
As noted, incredibly far-fetched.
Take the recent case of Virginia McLaurin who at one point actually danced with Pres. Obama. Due to the circumstances of her birth and the officious rules of her birth state, she was unable to get photo id and hence wasn’t eligible to vote (and had other problems).
Simply due to her fame and the resulting press about her case, D.C. issued her a special temporary photo id.
But she still isn’t out of the woods yet. She has to convince others the temp id is good enough to get a birth certificate (which isn’t what you think it is in a case like this) and then get a real id.
Note: She will be able to settle this matter eventually only because she danced with Obama. Less PR-friendly folk are just plain screwed.
Speaking of PR. Puerto Ricans* are US citizens. They can move to the mainland, get driver’s licenses, vote, etc. In theory. In practice it’s a mess. Some records are lost or never existed. There’s a thriving industry in Puerto Rico to generate suitable documents. Some places, like Florida, treat all PR documents suspiciously. Even for a time denying the validity of all PR documents.
Note that it’s not just birth certificates, you also have to document name changes (which hit married/divorced women** particularly hard). So you have to get all those records and each state has its own quirks and such.
And it’s all security theater. To renew our driver’s licenses, we had to get birth certificates. To get the birth certificates we had to send them copies of our current driver’s licenses. Note something odd about this process? We are who we say we are because we were who we say we were. Wow, that sure fixes everything.
- and ** Both groups more likely to vote Democrat.
And just to add, doing all of this stuff requires that you know you need it well in advance of voting. And requires a lot of form-filling and keeping track of information, which ill-educated and elderly people often have difficulty with. And requires fees at various steps along the way, which poor people may not have available. And often requires appearing in person somewhere during regular business hours, which is rough for people who have jobs with limited or no time off, and expensive and/or time consuming for many people who don’t have a car.
Pretty much how it’s done in the UK. When I vote next week I will be given a sheet with all the candidates names and their party affiliation (if any). This is just for local councillors so only one sheet with maybe five names. When there is a general election, there are two sheets - one for the locals and one for the MPs.
The big difference is that the votes are counted by hand. Volunteers sit round a big table and the ballot boxes are tipped out in the middle. You just grab some and start sorting into piles and every now and then someone takes the sorted papers away to be checked and counted. There used to be a bit of a competition to see who could declare first, but some constituencies wait until the following day now, rather that sit up all night.
Nitpick; they’re not volunteers doing the counting. Some of them are local government staff diverted from their more usual duties, and others are additional temporary staff hired by the returning officer for the occasion.
Or perhaps you are wrong
I still don’t understand what makes you think that if your designated polling place is busy, you can vote somewhere else. Absolutely impossible.
Maybe Arizona is different, but in all the states that I have lived and voted in, you are registered in only one ward or district. If you go to any other polling place, your name won’t show in the official list. If you aren’t registered there, you won’t be voting. That’s one of the primary purposes of registering; to show that you live in only one place and can vote in only one place.
Well, on a nitpick, the claim you’re challinging is not that it’s not a crime to enter the country illegally; it’s that it’s not a crime to be in the country illegally.
It’s perfectly possible to enter the country without infringing the law you cite, but at a later stage to have no authority to remain (e.g. you overstay your visa). As far as I’m aware, no crime is committed in that case.
Does slash2k think that? If so, he hasn’t given any indication of it in this thread.
Actually, in the most recent elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, you can vote at whatever polling station you want. "Voters will be able to vote at any of the polling places listed below in the May 17 Election. " and their polling place locator by default shows the three locations closest to your home address.
Yes, definitely odd, and different than how it works in most other places. However, I will dispute that “you won’t be voting” in those other places. This very much depends on local laws. I’ve worked as a poll worker here in Kansas; our instructions have always been to try to steer the person to the right location, but if they want to vote at our location instead, take a provisional ballot. Whether that ballot gets counted depends on how the offices/issues align with the offices/issues on the ballot the voter should have cast. For example, in the last election the major race was school board elections; I had a voter who was at the wrong precinct but in the right school district, and all of the seats were at-large anyway, so he voted in the same races he would have voted in at his home precinct, and his ballot would have been counted. If he’d tried to vote in another school district, though, his ballot would have been discarded unopened.
However, my point was that with 60 polling places spread across 35 cities/towns/locales, and some of the cities having multiple polls (Phoenix, e.g., had 12 of the 60), Youngtown would likely not have been the only town in the county that did not have even a single polling place. (By contrast, they are planning to have 724 polling places, twelve times as many, for the November election. cite)
So how do they determine if the voter is registered (elsewhere) if there’s no record in that particular ward/precinct? Call around to every other ward/precinct? It must take weeks to get everything certified and counted.
If it’s policy that voters can vote in any of a number of polling places, it doesn’t take rocket science to work out that each polling place needs to have a complete copy of the register of electors for all the wards/precincts/districts that are entitled to vote there. So you supply one. Or, you give all the polling places electronic access to a digital register of electors, rather than giving each of them a paper printout. Viola! Problem solved.
Of course, there’s a different problem. What’s to stop me voting, say, six times, at six different polling stations?
If they have electronic access to the voters’ register, then each polling station can record electronically that a particular voter has voted. If that voter later presents at a different polling station to vote they’ll see, when they check his eligibility, that he (or someone claiming to be him) has already voted.
If they’re still using paper copies of the register and recording who has voted on paper then that can’t happen. On the other hand, after the election when they reconcile the voting records from each polling station they’ll see that I have voted six times, and no doubt they will call around to me to discuss the implications of this. Unless I’m more than ordinarily stupid I will foresee that this will happen, and that may be enough to deter most people from voting multiple times.
I should say that it’s standard in Australian elections that you can vote in any polling place in your electorate. Furthermore, in every electorate there are several polling places which hold copies of the voters register, and ballot papers, for every electorate throughout the country. So if you live in (say) Sydney and you happen to be in (say) Melbourne on election day and you have failed to cast an early ballot because you would be out of town, there will be places in Melbourne where you can go, identify yourself as a voter from Sydney, get the appropriate ballot paper and cast a vote in the election for the electorate in which you live.
It does mean that the final total of votes for any election isn’t known for a few days. But the total of all the votes cast within the electorate is known on election night, and it is rare for out-of-electorate votes to be so numerous that they could affect the outcome. Consquently the winner of the election is known, even if it may be some days before the exact total of votes he got is known.