And the vote he cast is still valid, and “voter confidence” is still as impaired (or not), either way.
You’re smart enough to know you’re not supporting your “argument”, Counselor. The only mystery is why you think anyone else would think so, either.
You didn’t answer my question about the vetting process to get an ID, which I gather you feel would have stopped Cue and Walters early on, though I don’t share your confidence that a poll worker could be relied on to identify one voter out the thousands they may have seen that day, months later (unless the illegal voter was particularly memorable in some way).
It’s our by-you-willfully-ignored concern that a process designed to catch Cue and Walters (generously doing away with the presumption of innocence for the sake of argument in the absence of a conviction or even indictment) is going to “catch” a far greater number of perfectly legal voters who may have incomplete or inconsistent personal records and/or a name similar to “Cue” or “Walters” or to some other disqualified person as was the case for many people who found themselves struck from voter rolls through no fault of their own.
Simple calculation - which is more offensive to the sensibilities: a disqualified person who lives in the U.S. casting a vote or a qualified citizen of the U.S. being denied a vote? What if the latter outnumber the former by ten to one? Twenty to one? It’s not really any more complicated than this.
I too am having a difficult time seeing how an ID is going to assist in a conviction. If a poll worker has such a fantastic memory that they can remember the exact ID that was provided I’m unsure why they are not reliable enough to just ID the illegal voter. It is still he said/she said as to whether this particular defendant was the person who voted.
He’ll, I don’t even believe that this would cause a significant problem for the impersonator voter if the ease with which I was able to obtain a fraudulent liquor ID in the late 80s is any indication.
At a one-on-one level, I’d rather one improper vote be counted than one proper vote be discarded. But I’m damned if I can figure out what the ratio is where my opinion flips. Two to one? One point seven to one?
I’m not even sure my opinion stays the same if the mere number of cases increases. Suppose I’d rather see one improper vote counted than one proper vote discarded. Can I say the same for ten, or a thousand?
It’s a kind of utilitarian calculus I have no idea how to sum up.
Where I get cranky is when we have evidence that a policy was instituted for partisan reasons. “Let’s make it harder for the elderly to vote, and students, and poor people, and people with foreign-sounding names, because those classes lean toward our opposition.” At that point, the question of honest moral assessment is out the window, and we’re dealing with deliberate, conscious criminality.
An improper vote negates the vote of an authorized voter. In reality, you are throwing away a ‘proper vote’ of an eligible voter for someone who may, or may not, be eligible.
Heck, your calculation is going the opposite way of what I intended - I was speculating on twenty legitimate voters being blocked (or stymied to the point where they give up - effectively the same) in order to keep that illegal vote out.
This strikes me as a far more likely outcome to the current voter-ID shenanigans, indeed their intended effect.
How bad is that, though, really? The illegal voter is presumably resident in the United States, possibly not a citizen but quite possibly working and paying sales taxes. I’m not personally inclined to get tizzied at the idea of a convicted felon voting (I don’t really understand why they can’t, anyway), so what’s the big deal? Is there any indication of, say, a deliberate attempt by organized illegal voters to swing a particular election? Without organization, maybe the illegal voter is just cancelling out another illegal voter who had a different opinion.
The same argument applies to a state trooper who issues a ticket to a speeder and then has to testify in court that the accused was the person stopped, months later and hundreds of tickets later.
How do you imagine such convictions stand?
OK. Seriously.
Can you accurately, fairly, to the best of your ability summarize my argument?
What you’ve written above is a mishmash of concepts that shows nothing beyond generalized confusion. I believe I can accurately summarize your arguments. Why do you keep misstating mine? Am I arguing in favor of striking anyone from the voting rolls?
The comparison you offer, as elucidator even has tried to remind you, does not exist. No one is being denied a vote.
Which is more offensive to the sensibilities: a disqualified person who lives in the U.S. casting a vote or a qualified citizen of the U.S. having some additional barriers to surmount in order to vote?
Answer: the former.
Because the stakes are sufficiently low that the testimony of one witness (the officer) can routinely sustain a conviction. This would not be the case, I presume, for the major felony you have hinted vaguely you want illegal voting to be treated as.
I seriously think you have abandoned any pretense of integrity and would gladly support the fucking-over of numerous legitimate voters if it led to an end you supported, so long as you could hang an ostensibly justifiable cloak on it like “voter confidence” being shaken by the rare illegal voter, which any honest evaluation of the problem of making elections reflect the true will of the voters would put at the lowest priority.
That is my honest and to the best of my ability, fairest assessment of your stance (and has been for quite some time, on this and other topics), and it offers you the dubious courtesy of not presuming that you’re simply stupid enough to have been duped by cynical would-be manipulators of the electoral process, though at times I wonder.
This is a nice simple, clear and untrue statement. I don’t know what you’re claiming on elucidator’s behalf. Feel free to cite a post number.
Perhaps I’m burdened with an education in statistics and engineering and technical subjects, as opposed to a cheery legal background where negative conditions can be casually assumed to not exist. The legitimate voters so vastly outnumber the potential illegal voters that even if “some” additional barriers prevented a small fraction of the legitimate voters from exercising the franchise, they will still outnumber any reasonable estimate of voter-impersonators. In statistics, we refer to these as Type I and Type II errors, but you needn’t concern yourself with the specifics.
November will prove interesting, probably.
True, but it’s a question of the government’s role.
I’d rather the police fail to save my life from an assault by a murderer…than kill me themselves. If I absolutely must choose, I’d like the police to be too weak than to be too strong.
(Also…this viewpoint might swap back and forth in different zones. For instance, I might prefer the police to be “just barely” too strong than “just barely” too weak – but to be “vastly” too weak rather than "vastly’ too strong.)
It isn’t an easy calculation!
Agreed. That’s not only what is most likely to happen, but, far worse, it is what some strategists have designed it to cause to happen.
And a ratio like that is absolutely unacceptable. It’s like having a legal system that improperly convicts twenty (factually) innocent people, to obtain the benefit of allowing no more than one (factually) guilty person to go free.
Now, in law schools, they still teach the “ten to one” motto, as far as criminal guilt and innocence. But, I confess, I would be mighty damn unhappy – might even side with Bricker – if ten improper voters were having their ballots counted for every proper voter who was prohibited from voting. That high a ratio would be damn destructive of the democratic process.
But, again, the absolute numbers are also important. If we know that exactly two improper votes were being counted in every district of 689,000 voters, and exactly two valid voters were being turned away – that would be a pretty admirable overall level of error! That’s probably an order of magnitude – or two! – less than the number of ballots that people spoil by accidentally voting for the wrong guy!
If the problem rate is up at the level of 5,000 per each district of 689,000, then we’re approaching serious problems.
You do so love to pretend that partisan politics is not an issue here, that our lovely civic exercise takes place in a pristine vacuum. Ain’t so, you know it, I know it, and damn sure betcha the people affected by this know it. Hell, you can just feel their voter confidence soaring, knowing that the Republicans can pull this shit and more or less get away with it.
You asked the question for the debate *you *want to have, about whether or not voter id does, indeed, possess any neutral value. Perhaps a nice GD thread, where you can explore the topic in great depth, sipping tea and referencing Hume and Locke. This is the ugly part of town, where nasty people do nasty shit while intoning pious bloviations about the sacred vote. Like a clapped out old whore preaching abstinence.
I say its spinach, and I say to hell with it.
So what do you think Bricker thinks you were trying to remind me of, elucidator?
I love you and want you to write my biography when I’m famous and dead. 
Ugly analogy. Their job is to protect me and not kill me. I’d rather that they do both very, very well.
And this is the core of why people dislike your tactics here. You can clearly do the math here but it’s just as clear you have no intention of ever doing so.
See also “false equivalency”.
Is there a way of tracking / verifying the difference between
a) Someone who votes twice, or three / four / 57 times
b) Someone who votes, who isn’t “supposed” to (i.e - the convicted felon, the illegal immigrant who has been living in the US for 48 years, pays taxes, etc etc)
c) Someone who was flown in from India for the day specifically to vote?
Isn’t the calculus of effort to stop the illegal vote, and the harm done going to be different in each case?
Further - as rightfully pointed out already - at the current moment it seems the number of “false positives” is going to far outweigh the number of “infected” votes (i.e - its much easier to imagine people having a problem getting the proper ID than it is an equal number of people fraudulently voting)
I have long held the position that these sordid legalisms were not designed to actually prevent voting, but to make it simply more difficult, to trim away a few percentage points so the Republicans could win the close ones. I think some of us miss the subtlety of that, and it is a semi-important point, or at least an interesting one.
Somewhere along the line, the smart cynics lost control of the batshit baboons. This plan was pretty darn good, measured by the metrics of dastardly mendacity. It would have worked, too. They could get their one or two percent victories and all the while they could blather in civic pieties about the sacred vote.
Had to guess, I’d guess that the “getting away with it” part inspired them, shit, if we can do this, why not that? And this thing over here, why just win when you could landslide! Mandate! Mandate!
But I digress: my point all along has been that actual “disenfranchisement” was not the goal, an abridge too far. It’s still dirty, cheap and low down. (If it had been actual rock-solid “disenfranchisement”, my criticisms would not have been so mild and temperate.)
I’ve never been ticketed in the States so I’m not sure but doesn’t the officer note identifying details from your licence on the ticket which can be used to establish the presence of the ID and the officer at the same time and place? As well, does the officer have a log book in which he notes particulars of the stop? I’m not pinning too much on the logbook idea because that could be Hollywood fantasy but the fact that information from the driver’s license is noted on the ticket provides evidence of the presence of the accused over and above the word of the officer. Do any voter ID laws require a copy of the ID number be kept or is showing the ID enough? If not can you explain why relying on the election officials memory of an ID is better than relying on their memory of a face? What about the ID makes it more reliable?
Good points - there can be quite a bit of documentation around a speeding ticket, including time-stamped computer records of the officer running checks on the car’s registration and the driver’s license and insurance status, plus dashboard-camera recordings and whatnot. I’m not aware of the prevalence of not-guilty pleas in traffic court that use a strategy of mistaken identity, though. Isn’t the more common claim that either the alleged violation was poorly or ambiguously marked (i.e. speed limit signs were missing or contradictory) or the officer measured the speed of the driver incorrectly? Now that I think about it, is this why there’s a stereotype of traffic cops saying “I clocked you at eighty, but I’ll only write up the ticket for seventy.” Maybe to imply they’re giving the driver a break but also to discourage attempts to challenge the ticket in court because the officer could testify that the offense was even worse than what was cited.
Anyhoo, the last time I was in traffic court, it was for a parking ticket. I won, though oddly it was for a reason completely unrelated to the actual problem with the ticket. I started to explain, but then had to tell myself “Shut up, you fool, you’ve already been acquitted, just get out of here.”
Besides, the guy who shows up with a good fake ID (or for that matter, someone who gets an ID when he shouldn’t have, which of course is a possibility) is going to be far less memorable and time-consuming than the legitimate voter who forgets (or couldn’t get) his ID and has to go through whatever backup mechanism might exist like swearing out an affidavit or having a neighbor vouch for him.