Not always. There have over the years been a number of experiments with electronic counting machines, although never in elections for the Westminster Parliament. The most high profile cases have been for the London mayoral and assembly elections, including those being held next week.
The issue as to which is easier is mostly about which voting system is being used. There’s no real advantage over the old, low-tech methods if it’s a simple FPTP election. But less so for other types of election.
(bolding mine)
In some (most?) states the birth certificate that parents are given at birth from the hospital (and then save in a baby scrapbook) is completely different from the government-issued certified birth certificate required as proof of citizenship.
Like many Americans, I’ve ordered and seen exactly one copy of such an official birth certificate — I used it to get a passport, after which the passport is usually accepted as substitute for the certificate.
I think many Americans who never applied for passport have never had an official birth certificate in their possession … at least until recent needs, e.g. voter registration.
Even if that were not a crime before 9/11, I would find it hard to believe post-Patriot Act that being here illegally is not a crime now.
Possibly they use an ‘electronic poll book’? The current Secretary of State here in Minnesota is working on converting to this.
It’s basically an online database replacing the printed poll book, and each polling place has access to it to check registrations (and possibly to update them as people vote). That system would make it possible for someone to vote at any convenient polling location, like voting voting at lunchtime at one near your job.
But there is opposition from those (Republicans) who want to make it harder to vote.
You are misunderstanding what I said. If there are 35 cities/towns/locales in the county, as there are, and only 60 polling stations in the county, as there were, that’s an average of less than two polls per locale. Some of those locales had many more than two (such as Phoenix, which had twelve). To make that math work, then, most of the rest of those locales had less than two, and some would have had less than one. That means zero, which means residents of that city or town or place found themselves voting in another city or town because there was no location in their own town where they COULD vote, which was the point I was making in response to elfkin477’s statement that s/he had “never once heard of anyone having to vote outside of their own town.”
In the upcoming May 17 primary, Maricopa County has doubled the number of polling places and they still have one town, Youngtown, whose 6,000 residents have to vote elsewhere because there is no polling location in Youngtown whatsoever. In other words, even if Youngtown residents are assigned to one ward and must vote at that one ward, they will still find themselves voting in another town because that ward won’t be in Youngtown on May 17.
Is this sufficiently clear?
And in response to your other point, we have an electronic poll book in my home county. Every polling place has an iPad connected to every other polling place, and voters sign in on an electronic pad connected to the iPad. We as poll workers can tell instantly if you are a registered voter, which is your assigned polling station, and whether or not you have already voted, for every ward and precinct in the county. (And if the wireless connection goes down, everybody has to vote provisional, because we have no printed poll book to fall back upon.)
Sorry, hard to believe or not, being here illegally (unlawful presence) is a civil violation punishable by civil penalties (notably, deportation), but it is not a criminal act and is not subject to criminal punishment such as prison. cite
OK is stand corrected on the the technical issue of committing a criminal violation but I still contend that people in the country illegally know that are committing an illegal act and that signing a paper under penalty of perjury in order to vote is not that different.
The difference is that one is a crime! It carries the potential penalty of being put in prison.
And if you are already living your life in the shadows because you overstayed your visa (which is how the majority of undocumented people got here, not by illegal entry) then you are more likely to avoid crimes than citizens, which is reflected in the rate of crimes among undocumented immigrants.
This is a very important point. As implied by my post upthread, Mrs. FtG and I never had a “real” birth certificate until recently, and only then to renew driver’s licenses (which in turn are need for voter id).
Out state issued little plastic cards at birth that were more or less official, at least within that state. But don’t look at all like “normal” birth certificates other states would accept.
People clearly go many decades just fine without them. Either in our case or in the case of the 107 year old woman I linked to above.
Another political trick is to close down DMV offices in Democratic-heavy areas. E.g., Wisconsin. Even non-driving voter-want-to-bes usually have to go thru their DMV to get id.
As others have mentioned, this is not a safe assumption; your parents are not automatically issued an official copy of your birth certificate, and once you are over 18 (so your parents can no longer request one on your behalf), you will need some form of official ID to get a copy. If you have no such ID (which usually requires a birth certificate), things get complicated.
Even worse, if you were not born in a hospital, it is possible that your birth was never officially recorded at all, in which case things get more complicated.
Even if you have a proper copy of your birth certificate, it is usually not in and of itself sufficient proof of identity to get a state ID; it proves legal name (at birth), age, and citizenship, but you will need other documents to tie it to your signature, place of residence, etc. Most states will let you present common things like utility bills and cancelled checks for this, but if you have been living a sufficiently marginal life you may not have those either.
Add in the cost of the fees and having to take time off work to visit the appropriate office and wait in line (last time I got my ID renewed it took almost 2 hours, not including commute), and getting an official state ID can be a major hurdle for poor people, especially in areas without public transportation.
Apparently the guy who runs the country did not have a “real” birth certificate sufficient to satisfy a number of members of congress and at least one current presidential candidate.
Remember, a lot of the documentation issued by governments before the days of laser printers was either typewritten (Hawaii long form?) or line-printer on a pre-printed form. These are as easy or easier to fake than laser-printed forms.
there was a discussion about proving your identity in an earlier thread- someone mentioned that in Puerto Rico they even asked for copies of birth certificates for triviata like applying for a job; thus anyone with an interest in identity theft had access to large number of birth certificates, and in fact older PR BC’s are not considered valid documents nowadays in many places. Many Puerto Ricans are no longer back home where they can apply for a new more secure BC and the difficulties of applying from remote and proving your identity are interesting and expensive… Just one example of the hurdles many citizens face.
I wonder whether any of this information has changed the way the OP looks at this issue.
Because if people were doing that (voting in someone else’s name at the polls) in any kind of large amounts, there would be collisions, where that person did show up to vote.
I’m not saying I have proof that the problem is small. I’m saying that there’s no evidence that the problem is significant, and there is good reason to think that if it were, someone would have found some by now. With all the political clamor over this probably-nonexistent problem, it would be trivial to find evidence *if it were an actual problem. Someone can just grab the voter rolls and called up a few thousand of them to check whether they voted in the last election.
Literally anyone could do this. People have. And they don’t find anything.
An analogy: If you wanted to detect whether authorized people were entering a building, you could have a security guard carefully check ids. Or you could just have a security guard take peoples names and check them against an approved list. Because you can then always randomly call the people listed as entered and determine if they really did go in that day. If all you want to know is whether security breaches are widespread, you don’t have to authenticate access, you merely have to catalog it, and do some basic after-the-fact checking.
I wonder why you wonder that. The question was actually genuine, not meant as a prejudiced political rant in any way if that’s what you were trying to insinuate. What struck me is simply that this debate about voter registration seems, as far as the first world is concerned, an almost exclusively U.S. issue. I’ve lived in, and voted (on the basis of my EU citizenship), in countries with both mandatory residence registration (in which case voter registration does not occur because every resident is registered anyway), and without mandatory residence registers where a separate registration as a voter was necessary. But I’ve never heard of anotehr first world country having such an extended controversy about this procedure; pretty much anywhere else in the first world it’s just taken as a given. That’s why I wondered what is different in the U.S., but this thread has given me a lot of background information.
I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything. But after sj many lists there had not been any reaction from you. The mission of this board is to fight ignorance. Sometimes one likes to know whether that mission is being served.
And the reason it is interesting with respect to thus topic is that in this very country, when the facts and context is offered, a significant number of people will simply deny it.
There’s a thread on these boards now thousands of posts long that is exactly such a conversation.
I can’t recall whether this has been addressed, but this country has a history of voting requirements and procedures bring used to suopess minority votong.
All aspects of voting, such as registration procedures, votong requirements, government office hours, poll locations, etc., have been used to suppress the votes of certain groups.
Election rules and procedures are a political weapon in this country and voter ID is part of that.
Yes, leachim made this point back in post 44, but it bears repeating:
It should be noted, to the extent of GQ, that there is a long history in certain states of enacting “common sense” laws in regard to voting (e.g. literacy tests) which on their face were neutral in their effect, but which had the effect of restricting the poor and black vote. The zaniest of such shenanigans were only put to bed by the Voting Rights act of 1965.
In that context, it is legitimate to wonder whether the new voter ID laws are done out of legitimate security concern, or a desire to return to the “bad old days”.
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And just to expand on that point, it’s worth remembering that voter suppression measures have been so bad at some points in US history that a constitutional amendment was actually passed to rectify it, at least in the context of poll taxes.