Heya Bricker,
Okay, you do find that some people don’t have ID. I cited some number above, you think they’re inflated, but you do agree that some of these people do exist, right?
Certainly some of these people won’t vote in any case. And some will pay the few hours of tedious line waiting necessary to get the ID (some will not because of poverty, lack of mobility, ignorance of the proper channels to get the forms they need, work schedules and so on).
But do you agree, in principle, that if the number of people outright kept from voting is higher than the number of people who would commit in-person voter fraud, that Voter ID would be a bad policy?
As a secondary question, do you assume that in-person voter fraud is 50/50 Dem/GOP?
Also, do you think that the people who can’t find five or so hours and a weekday off to stand at the DMV don’t deserve to vote?
No. Because the government, even under the regulations that were struck down, never said that – or, more accurately, never said ONLY that.
By which I mean you were always permitted to run some ads. So the real question is not about a government that says NO ADS, but rather a government that says ONLY THIS MANY ADS. This is a difference of degree that needs to be addressed by your examples.
Doesn’t matter, all outmoded forms, anyway. As long as the revolutionary progressive front has free use of the intertubes that is not dominated by the porcine power of The Man’s wallet, then…
It depends on the candidates and issues in play, and the location. I suspect there are a lot of snowbirds – older voters who vote in their Florida homes in person and by absentee ballot in another state, and I suspect those go GOP more than Dem. This is not impersonation, but it’s fraud. And it’s safe, because prosecuting it is virtually impossible.
In two years? And why a weekday? What state’s ID can only be issued during weekdays?
So I reject the premise: no state requires such a thing.
So you do literally believe that voter ID is worth doing, even if more people are kept from voting, than would have committed in-person voter fraud. I just wanted to get that explicit.
It shows that you aren’t being reasonable, imho.
And voter ID has nothing to do with it, so why even bring it up?
In Hawaii, where I live now, you can only get a State ID on M-F, and it’s not a given that you’ll get it. At least on Oahu.
I don’t have the time to do a more detailed search now, so suffice to say, you’re wrong.
As I just showed you’re not correct.
Anyway, many people have childcare and mobility issues, so a trip to the DMV for a few hours isn’t something trivial. It’s trivial to you because you have mobility and leisure time.
And it’s a well-said, well-considered approach that I’m glad to compliment. As far as I can tell, either Bricker thinks voter ID laws exist in a vacuum (which makes him absurdly credulous) or he’s okay with bad effects that are extremely likely to vastly outweigh the vaporous “problem” of voter fraud (which makes him kinda of stupid) or it’s all okay since it favours the Republicans (which makes him kind of scummy). There’s no positive way to spin this that I can see.
Bricker, how about instead of just “supporting” efforts to make ID more easily accessible to voters, you propose that efforts to make ID more easily accessible is a necessary prerequisite to tougher voter ID laws? Just for the heck of it.
That said, I guess it’s entirely possible that voter-suppression (which I’m content to define as efforts to restrict voter access beyond just ID requirements, including cutting voting hours or days or polling stations or any strategy to make access more difficult) might not be a significant factor in November. Maybe only a small handful (or just one, or possibly even none) of November’s congressional elections will be close enough to turn on voter suppression.
You wouldn’t know facts if they hit you on the head. You must be a creationist.
The fact is that 52% don’t bother to vote. That a few people might be inconvenienced in getting an ID isn’t going to damage your ‘democracy’ to any further extent.
With only 48% of eligible voters actually voting, I’d hesitate to say that any marginal or even clear victory by anyone accurately reflects the views of eligible voters. A more accurate view is that the majority didn’t think that the choices were worth getting off their asses to choose between.
Frankly, no, I don’t understand your position. You seem to have been saying that voter ID laws would make narrow election results less likely. Now you seem to deny that.
Why did you bring up narrow election results at all? What is the relevance to voter ID laws?
Don’t ask me to tell you what your point is; that’s inane. Tell us yourself, and make it as clear as possible. Use language, for once in your life, for the purpose of facilitating communication, not as an obstacle to it.
Huh. I thought he was saying he’d have more confidence that a close election reflected the will of the electorate if photo ID laws were in place. The absurdity is that even if the literally one-in-a-million case of voter fraud was stopped and there were absolutely no other effects whatsoever, simple tabulation errors have a much greater influence.
Imagine a casino. They acknowledge that their slot machines may occasionally screw up and fail to pay off, but advise the public that the machines also pay out more money than they should.
Even though a rational player might well philosophically accept this balance, most players would not. Confirmation bias would make them remember the ones that went against them and weigh less the ones that came in their favor – especially when the actual “correct” results were not visible.
I see this behavior at the blackjack table. When a novice player does something “wrong” – hits his sixteen against a dealer five, let’s say – the player is often blamed for subsequent losses on the hand as play proceeds around the table…even though the reality is that such a “mistake” is just as likely to help as hurt the next player. Seldom does that mistaken player get lauded for taking a bad card.
This is an illustration of people’s perceptions. As long as people believe the system has rules and they are being followed, they will accept the results of elections as legitimate. If they believe the results are derived from cheating, they won’t.
This is something that will arise when elections are so close that fraudulent votes could have swayed it. When that happens, people will not philosophically say, “Ah, well, we accept this as a rare outcome and acknowledge that such events may happen.” No – they will look at 139 votes and realize that the result could be different but for illegal votes.
Votes potentially discouraged, in other words, are not weighable one-to-one against votes fraudulently cast.
Hawaii does not require ID to cast a vote.
So no: I am not wrong.
You said: “Also, do you think that the people who can’t find five or so hours and a weekday off to stand at the DMV don’t deserve to vote?”
I replied: “In two years? And why a weekday? What state’s ID can only be issued during weekdays? So I reject the premise: no state requires such a thing.”
Such a thing refers to a state ID that is required for voting, not simply a state ID.
No, no. If you have two years to do it, I don’t agree it’s so onerous and difficult a requirement as you would have it. You cannot show me someone who had two years to get an ID and spent every spare second on child are or stranded with no transport. I don’t agree. You and I both know that they simply didn’t bother. Every story you can point to of people putting in effort ends with them getting the ID. Your complaint is really the one elucidator …um…elucidates: that it discourages.
And I don’t regard that as serious enough to scuttle the framework.
And it’s you?
We disagree. So how shall we resolve our disagreement? We both have to live here. What system shall we use to craft laws when we disagree on what the laws should be?
This is my fundamental problem with your side: your proposed system is: “When we disagree, I win.”
We have a system: we elect leaders and let them vote laws into being. We let those leaders appoint judges and grant those judges the power to resolve conflicts in those laws.
Here, the leaders we elected crafted these laws. The courts have approved them (and when the courts have not, I am fine with accepting a final court ruling from a state as definitive that the state law was infirm). And the overall populace, We The People, is overwhelmingly in favor of them.
But that’s still not enough to give them legitimacy. Because you oppose them.
The world isn’t YOU. I am fine with accepting the result – trying to change the laws, sure, but not insinuating that the laws themselves are illegitimate, evil, undemocratic, or any of the other adjectives used to criticize Voter ID.
The thing is… I have explained it. Many times. I will try again below, but I ask that this time, you read it as though it were a classroom assignment that your grade depended on being able to accurately summarize.
Our system of representative democracy depends on people trusting election results: our elected leaders govern “with the consent of the governed,” as Thomas Jefferson put it. Confidence in the result of an election is very important.
An election with fraudulent votes cast is vulnerable to this concern.
Normally, though, it is not a serious concern, because normally, elections of national or state-wide interest are decided by hundreds of thousands, or millions, of votes. The knowledge that a few hundred votes might be fraudulent does not impair confidence in the result. It does not matter if the winner won by 654,377 or “only” 654,177. Either way, he is clearly the correct winner.
Rarely, though, an election may end up with an extremely close margin. This has happened in recent memory: Florida presidential in 2000, Washington State governor’s race in 2004. When this happens, suddenly every vote becomes significant, and the spectre of fraud becomes highly significant.
To avoid that rare but very serious event, one good approach is to institute a serious way to prove the identity of every voter. This helps ensures that a voter is legitimate by making a criminal prosecution for fraudulent voting feasible.
Whether you agree or not, can you accurately summarize or paraphrase what I have said?
I’d support no IDs and just taking a fingerprint from each person who voted. That would be an even better way of tying the person to the vote. Almost everyone has a fingerprint, and it’s free.
My opinion is that those people who choose to not get a free photo ID in order to vote are not “suppressed” in any meaningful sense. For this reason, I don’t agree with you as it pertains to ID requirements.
I’m curious how you see this being implemented - is this contingent on the creation of a vast database of everyone’s fingerprints to verify identity, which I assume has to give instant verification? I’m not sure the technology is up to it.
Well if it’s free… but is it? Time is money, too, after all, and if getting the ID takes lengthy trips and multiple hours… Now, if there were kiosks set up in malls where you get a picture snapped and an ID printed in a few minutes, that’d be cool.
I like this little smuggled-nugget, though:
When has that “knowledge” ever existed? A few hundred cases of voter fraud in one election? Now if you were talking stuffed or destroyed ballot boxes or other shenanigans by election officials, sure, but a few hundred fraudulent voters? Really?
Also:
Sure, but voter fraud is the most trivial form of fraud at play in these situations, trivial to near- (if not actual-) nonexistence.
I think the fingerprint is something that can be tied to the vote for verification and assistance in prosecution should the vote be questioned afterward and not something to be used for one the spot eligibility checking (although use of an ink that marks your finger for the length of the voting process can immediately prevent a person from voting multiple times and provide proof to your employer that you really did take that time off to vote (in Canada anyway. I’m not aware if employers are mandated to give employees time off to vote in the US).
No, no need for anything so dramatic. The whole value of Voter ID, as I envision it, is non-repudiation: you cannot easily vote and then claim you were not the person that voted. This allows a prosecutor to easily amass sufficient proof to obtain a criminal conviction.
So there’s no need for ANY verification up front: just leave space next to the voter’s name in the roll book for him to impress his fingerprint. He votes, and there’s almost irrefutable proof he was there. Then, if it turns out he was an illegal alien, or a convicted felon ineligible to vote, or an eligible voter voting in two different places, or a person impersonating another person…all those cases can be proved, if need be. The penalties for casting an illegal vote will become serious, in the sense that prosecutors can realistically pursue convictions, and this will deter the casting of fraudulent votes.
In an election of several million votes cast? Sure, I bet there’s a few hundred felons/illegal aliens/double-location voters/impersonators.
Normally, who cares? Two hundred votes out of three million means nothing. It’s almost zero.
But when those three million votes create a near-tie, THAT’S when the issue becomes of paramount importance.
If you can point out any factual error, you’re encouraged to do so. Or you can simply continue to demonstrate your lack of a grasp of same; it’s up to you.
We do need a more active, engaged, responsible electorate than we have, no question. But the problem here is disenfranchisement of some of those who are all of those. Please try to keep up - and yes, I understand that a Hong Kong resident’s views of the importance of democracy may be somewhat strained.
The registration process itself is disenfranchising. Signature requirements are disenfranchising. Simply having to find your polling place is disenfranchising.
The issue is over whether these are reasonable requirements for voting. I maintain that an ID is no more of an impediment than registering, matching signatures, or having to apply for an absentee ballot or find your local polling place.