The problem is, the exact same argument applies equally to eligible but excluded voters.
If you exclude 1000 eligible voters from voting in order to keep those 100 ineligibles from voting, then by doing so you may have reversed the outcome of an election that was officially decided by a 10x larger margin than any election those 100 ineligibles could have affected.
You’re ignoring the big issue. Some potentially ineligible voters are actually eligible voters just as some presumed innocent people are actually innocent people.
To use a legal system example, most people would agree that it’s a good idea to put criminals in prison. So here’s a proposal - abolish trials. A lot of accused criminals are found not guilty at their trials. So by abolishing the trials and just imprisoning anyone who is accused of a crime in prison, we’ll be ensuring more criminals go to prison.
Would this be an improved legal system and would it make the public feel more confident about the legitimacy of the legal system?
Getting back to the electoral system. Every time we enact a procedure that bars some fraudulent voters we also run the risk that this procedure will bar some legitimate voters. If we stop a hundred ineligible voters from voting but the price we paid was that three hundred eligible voters couldn’t vote also, then the outcome was worse than we started. We ended up farther from the ideal outcome where all eligible voters and no ineligible voters were involved.
In addition, there’s the political reality. Cynics have suggested that the issue of ineligible voters is a smokescreen. The real purpose of these procedures is to bar eligible voters that are likely to vote for the other side. If there was a choice between two procedures, one which narrowly targeted just ineligible voters and one which targeted those same ineligible voters with a larger number of collateral eligible voters, these partisans would choose the latter procedure.
Procedures like this do a lot more damage to the perceived legitimacy of election outcomes than fraud does.
And even if these partisans ignore the moral issues, they should keep the practical issues in mind. To sell these procedures, the partisans have to make voter fraud a major issue in the public mind. They have to convince people that election fraud is a serious crime. And that means that when it becomes apparent that the partisans themselves are perpetuating election fraud, they will have increased the consequences they face.
But Jefferson lifted the idea from Locke. So it’s more of a common human ideal than some specific American one.
It isn’t even an ideal - even during the “the right to rule comes from God” periods there were revolts, revolutions, hunting accidents, dethronings and the occasional king fired by his own parliament. It’s a fact that if you piss off your ruled badly enough, you won’t rule them any more.
Well, arguably it’s a culture-bound Western idea with pretensions to philosophically-grounded trans-cultural universality, like the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Sure.
But “exclude” in this context is a slippery word. If the “exclusion” is simply requiring that each voter avail himself of a free photo ID, any voters that fail to do so cannot, in my view, be said to have been “excluded.”
If the supreme court can find abortion rights in the penumbra and self defense rights in the foundation, I think they can find the most fundamentla right of a democracy hidden away somewhere in a corner of the constitution.
Givenn our history, why would you be satisfied with this?
We only tax foreign income if you are a resdient or citizen.
A better example would be the fact that we tax resident aliens (and theoretically illegal aliens too) for their US earned income. taxation and the franchise have little to do with one another.
Having national ID cards makes the voter ID laws more palatable. basically everyone already has ID cards and you don’t end up discriminating against the poor or minorities.
And do we care if voter ID laws exclude millions of eligible voters (I have no idea what that would be in the state of washington but I bet its more than 100)? Doesn’t THAT undermine voter confidence?
Why not condition the voter ID law on getting the number of undocumented eligible voters below the estimated number of fraudulent voters? It seems like you are fixing a hangnail by chopping off a hand. You sure that partisan politics doesn’t have something to do with this?
That’s one of those legalistic arguments that people don’t like.
Suppose we enacted a law that said each state would only have one designated voting place (in order to make it possible to monitor the voting more carefully). And for the sake of convenience, the voting place would be set in the most populous city of each state. All California voters would have to travel to Los Angeles to vote; All Texas voters would have to travel to Houston; all New York voters would travel to New York City; all Illinois voters would travel to Chicago; all Pennsylvania voters would travel to Philadelphia; all Florida voters would travel to Miami; etc.
Now this law wouldn’t “exclude” any voters. Any voter in rural California or Texas or New York or Illinois or Pennsylvania or Florida who “chose” not to travel several hundred miles to cast their vote would have done so voluntarily. But in the real world, the effect of such a law would be that people who vote would predominantly be from large cities.
Which party would you expect to see favoring such a law? Would you feel that party was promoting this procedure for nonpartisan reasons or because it worked to their political advantage?
Perhaps it’s not okay to bar either from voting.
Sorry, but I can’t figure out what you’re saying in that sentence, because it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. 
I’ve been down this road quite a few times in my years on the Dope, but I’ll go down it again: you can put expectations on an individual to do the ‘right’ thing, but the only expectations you can reasonably put on a large group are statistical.
Regardless of the convenience, or lack thereof, of getting that free photo ID, you can chivvy your friend into getting that ID. Even if you don’t help him, chances are good that if he wants your continued company, he’ll eventually get it just to shut you up on the subject.
But you can’t do that with everybody. You have to expect people at large to be no better or worse than they are. Any initiative that relies on the citizenry being better than it is, is doomed to failure.
I expect conservatives to understand this in their bones, because I learned it when I was a conservative, an eon or so back, and it was allegedly* the left that was hatching all sorts of schemes that required people to be good in order to work, with the ultimate example being communism.
So: suppose you’re a billionaire who has decided to blow $120 million by giving a $20 bill to every man, woman, and child in Maryland. (Magically, in a list borrowed from Skald the Rhymer Enterprises, you have the current names and addresses (or locations, for homeless persons) and photos of every Marylander.)
How many $20 bills you give away will depend on how convenient you make it for people to get them.
If you have every $20 bill delivered to each Marylander (at a bit of extra cost to yourself, of course), you’ll give them all away, thanks to the properties of your list.
If they have to come to the nearest Wal-mart next Tuesday to pick up their $20, you will give away a lot of $20 bills, but you will keep a lot of them, too.
If they can pick it up at the Wal-Mart any time next week, you’ll give away a lot more $20s than in option 2.
If they can pick it up at the nearest Wal-Mart or post office or pharmacy or grocery any time next week, you’ll give away even more $20s than in option 3. Still not all of them, though.
If everyone has to come to the state capitol building in Annapolis to get their $20 anytime next week, you’ll surely give away fewer $20s than in option 3, and probably fewer $20s than in option 1.
And so forth. But do you think you could come up with an option where all but, say, 1000 of your $20 bills went unclaimed, other than delivering them directly to the recipients? I doubt it.
And so it is with voting. There were 5.9 million Marylanders last fall; 2.7 million of them voted. It is possible that 100 ineligible voters successfully cast ballots. But any process you come up with for handing out voter IDs, short of delivery to everyone’s door, will inevitably result in a much larger number of Marylanders not having IDs who are otherwise eligible to vote.
Because the word ‘excluded’ is slippery to you in this context, we’ll use the word ‘blargh.’ A much larger number of Marylanders will have been blarghed from voting by this process, by virtue of people being people.
Maybe, you say, those people blarghed from voting deserved to be blarghed from voting. That is putting a moral test on voting. Again, a conservative should know in his bones that it’s a bad idea for anyone to decide who is ‘good’ enough to vote, because different people have different notions of good. Mine might well exclude you, except that I’m not interested in being the commissar of voting, getting to determine who ‘ought’ to vote or not. I don’t want any poll taxes, property requirements, literacy tests, moral standards, IQ or general knowledge tests, or anything else to stand in the way of a citizen of 18+ years of age casting his or her ballot. If someone is mean and nasty and dumb and ignorant and lazy, can’t read and gets their political opinions from WorldNutDaily, that someone should be just as able to vote as everyone else is.
But again, the ultimate cause of a nontrivial number of people getting blarghed out of their franchise is that people are people. If the 100 ineligible voters who get to vote can tip a close election, so can blarghing 1000 otherwise eligible voters out of their franchise. In fact, that can tip an even less close election. And the fact is that voter ID laws pretty much everywhere threaten to blargh many more voters than any mere 1000 out of their vote.
You’re complaining about what might be a very tiny thumb on the scale of democracy, and your solution is to replace it with a much bigger thumb.
Fail.
Then let us simply define it in a non-slippery way, as good lawyers (as opposed to the best lawyers) do:
Any person who is legally eligible to vote so far as actual legal disabilities to the privilege are concerned, such as noncitizenship, or minority, or felony conviction where applicable, or length-of-residence where applicable, but who for any other reason, such as lack of ID, or a bogus challenge from a Pub working from a “caging list,” is turned away from the polls (or offered a placebo “provisional ballot,” and never to know whether it has been counted or discarded), is for purposes of these discussions “excluded” from voting.
Some news from South Carolina:
Yet one more set of overblown claims of voter fraud, ruined by the facts.
Boy: “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” And yet people who should know better keep taking the boy seriously.
Also, I gather from previous threads that the process for getting ID cards in countries where they’re ubiquitous is simpler than it is to get the “free photo ID.”
For people who aren’t familiar with the way this works, when people talk about “free ID” in voter ID threads, they mean that the very final transaction is free of charge. In Ohio, a basic state ID costs $8.50. If Ohio ever enacts a photo ID requirement for voting, this $8.50 charge will be waived. That is the only charge that will be waived, and the last photo ID bill provided no assistance to help prospective voters get their birth certificate ($21.50 in Ohio; more, possibly with onerous ID requirements, in other states), Social Security card, or proof of residence.
If the parts cost actual cash (I’m not talking about effort in getting to the place, just actual cold hard cash in fees for the necessary documents), it is not truthful to call the sum “free.”
You hang out on this board for 13 years, you start picking stuff up.
See Eagle Land Osmosis. (The which is not a good thing.)
I think that’s too sweeping a standard. Why is a provisional ballot unacceptable? It solves the problems at hand: unsure if a voter is permitted to vote, his vote is captured until such time as a determination can be made. That’s perfect. Why do you reject it?
And “lack of ID?” No – if the ID is available, and the voter does not get it anyway, they have not been excluded – they have chosen not to participate.
I reiterate: true only at the individual level. Not at the group level.
So…
Joe? not excluded?
Ed? not excluded?
Reba? not excluded?
Charles? not excluded?
Freddie? not excluded?
Ann? not excluded?
Emma? not excluded?
Reese? not excluded?
Florence? not excluded?
Yvette? not excluded?
Renard? not excluded?
Albert? not excluded?
But all of them, together? Excluded.
No, sorry, don’t agree.
And neither do the courts.
So, how can you justify any system short of delivering ballots door to door to every eligible voter and waiting patiently until they find time to vote, then carrying the ballot back to be counted? Anything short of that will have the “flaw” you seem to be concerned about.
Every time you close a polling station, you risk someone not getting there in time. Every time you require anyone to do anything on his own, you risk having fewer people vote.
No procedure will be perfect. But we can work on obtainable goals. One such obtainable goal is to maximize legitimate voting and minimize fraudulent voting. But it has to be a dual standard. If you blindly chase either one without considering the other you’’ produce a bad procedure. If you blindly chase after maximizing legitimate voting, you’ll end up just allowing everyone to vote as much as they want because that way you’ve ensured all possible legitimate votes were cast. If you blindly chase after minimizing fraudulent voting, you’ll end up cancelling the election because that way you’ve ensured no fraudulent votes are cast. Both would be dumb ideas.
Voter ID programs, while not as extreme as either example I gave above, must be judged by this same standard. It’s great if they prevent fraudulent voting. But if they do so at the cost of preventing a larger amount of legitimate voting, they’re a failure.