The problem I keep pointing out is this: under normal election circumstances, voter fraud simply isn’t a concern. If 500 illegal votes are cast, who cares? The winner won by 10,000. Or maybe by only 9,500 – but what’s the difference?
The concern arises when you have a rare situation like Florida in 2000, where the margin is 537 votes. Or Washington state governor, 2004, where the margin was 129 votes. THEN you can’t say any more that the “extremely small” rate doesn’t matter.
You are wrong. Identified rates are in fact extremely small still in comparison to those close races.
Are you conceding that it is not impossible to measure voter fraud?
And to the point, your solution will not change the rate of voter fraud. Yet it will cost a lot of money and hinder the opportunity for legitimate voters to exercise their franchise.
Not sure I agree here. It isnt real difficult to commit fraud. Consider the amount of Identity Theft we experience. I think Brickers position is because of the ease to commit fraud, it is impossible to truly calculate the amount of it accurately. That being said, many crimes are committed because of the ease to do so. As an example, if you leave your phone on the seat of your car, and your car unlocked, it has a good chance of being lifted. Lock the car and the person keeps on walking. Granted, there are crimes that will be committed no matter what precautions you take, but if you ask any law enforcement agency, making it difficult to commit crimes, prevents a lot of crime
I guess this falls under value of money spent. I wonder if Democrats would support the money spent if Bush lost FLA because of such a program?
JMHO, where voting is concerned, I consider preventing illegal votes being cast money worth spending.
We’ve just spent a great deal of time painstakingly reviewing how one would measure fraud, and you blithely wave your hands and say it cannot be calculated because it’s easy? Bullshit.
Ive seen a lot of high level discussion, but being a resident in AZ where Identity Theft is among the highest rate in the US, I tend to be a bit more cynical. You can call bullshit all you like, that doesnt mean it is fact.
You can only measure the fraud that has been verified. You cannot measure what you dont know.
Call bullshit all you like, it just makes me chuckle.
And this is where the issue of those 11% of voting-age citizens with no photo ID come into play. Do you deny that making it unreasonably difficult for people to vote is just as bad as voter fraud? That preventing a legitimate vote from being counted is as bad as counting an illegitimate vote?
Once again, the numbers just don’t add up. If you admit that voter fraud is negligible, then in order to make this case, you have to deny that it is exceedingly difficult for certain people to get voter ID, and that that group of people is lower than the number of people committing voter fraud that would be prevented by voter ID. You cannot make this case. The data just simply doesn’t align with your ideas, I’m sorry. When you have white, middle-class citizens with driver’s licenses complaining about how they spent an entire day and like $20 in gas travelling to their local DMV and still couldn’t get the ID they needed renewed, when you have 1 in 10 voters lacking photo ID… As I pointed out earlier when I did the math, if 1/250th of those voters lacking photo ID lack it because they cannot, for whatever reason, get it, then you are not making elections more representative with these laws, but less. And, just to be perfectly clear, the fact that primarily progressive and democratic demographics are the ones hit by this is not lost on any of us.
Do you have any evidence that more voter fraud is going on than what we know about? Because Hentor already outlined what is essentially a foolproof way of determining boots-on-the-ground voter fraud. Foolproof in the sense “You will catch all the perps with this”. Your comparison of identity theft to voter fraud is, as such, completely bogus, as there exists no such way of detecting identity theft.
Clearly, we should throw out all murder statistics, as the actual rate is about 250 times higher, because it’s so easy to kill someone and so hard to prove it if the killer knows what they were doing.
Yes, I agree that preventing a legitimate vote from being counted is as bad as counting an illegitimate vote.
BUT: I don’t agree that those 11% have been prevented from voting. I don’t agree that just because you don’t have a photo ID, it’s automatically “unreasonably difficult” to get one.
But they would have to do that anyway. In other words, they needed drivers’ licenses. Why do you charge that difficulty to the voting system? Even if they never intended to vote, they would have undertaken the exact same problems and difficulties. Why is that assessed against the voting system?
Here’s the bottom line: no one, except hard-core lefties, agrees with you hard-core lefties on this issue. There is wide-spread public support for these laws. You keep recycling the same arguments, but you’re not convincing the public. And if you don’t convince the public, how do you hope to reverse the trend exhibited by Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas etc.?
Serious question: did you ever actually have a course of study that included the logical fallacies? I don’t mean being self-taught by reading web pages or books – I mean an academic setting where logical fallacies were discussed?
Since we have established that the Republicans are exploiting this issue for partisan advantage, I will bow out and let you guys talk about the virtues of voter ID to your heart’s content. You appear fascinated by this issue for reasons I cannot fathom, but hey! freak freely. Knock yourselves out.
I have no issue with voter id, so long as the state is wiling to “go the extra mile” to ensure easy and convenient access to such id for all citizens. A state that does not make such an effort is not fulfilling its role as an honest custodian, but functioning as a partisan operative.
I have little doubt that the Republican Party will succeed in this endeavor, and will reap whatever reward is to be had. Their willingness to use the levers of legislative power to bolster their electoral advantages does not surprise me. It is who they are. They will do it, and they will get away with it. And so it goes. It is impossible to shame a cynic.
The fallacy of appeal to popularity happens when the truth of a proposition is said to rest on its wide-spreads acceptance.
But when the proposition is the legitimacy or validity of a law in a democratic republic, the fallacy, by definition, does not apply, since the method by which the democratic republic enacts laws is tied to popular support.
It’s distressing to see the names of fallacies pop up as if from a parrot. This happens a great deal with tu quoque, shouted reflexively when any comparison to another circumstance is made. But such comparisons are not always fallacious – you have to look at what is being asserted and what the comparison is attempting to refute.
This is a close second, I think. You have to ask what’s being argued. In this case, it’s the legitimacy of the laws. There is no objective component to the issue. Water boils at sea level at 100[sup]o[/sup] C. No amount of voting can change that; no public survey can undermine the truth of that proposition.
But the “correctness” of a voter ID law is not like that. It has no objective component. It is legitimate under our system if properly passed into law.
And evidence for its legitimacy is properly found in popular support.
Has there been a comprehensive investigation? I dont ever remember reading or hearing about one. Typically, they only check when things like FLA occur, and they only check that area. So to simply say no evidence or not a lot of evidence is a bit obtuse.
Hyperbole. Gratz on your straw man, do you want to light it or shall I?
No, of course not. But remember, I’m not proposing that all of those 11% have it “next to impossible” or even “drastically hard”. I’m proposing that of those, something like maybe 1/100th of that group is going to be severely disenfranchised by this law. Again, if they don’t have ID, why not? All it takes is approximately one in a few thousand for the cost-benefit to swing far away from voter ID laws. Do you deny that any legal citizen would have trouble getting voter ID?
That’s not the point. The point is that they spent an entire free day (something that is an absolute luxury for many people) driving for about an hour’s worth of gas (again, an absolute luxury for many people), to get turned away at the DMV after waiting for several hours. I know that in the place I used to live back when I was in the states, the closest DMV was, on average, 20 miles away from anyone living in the same area as I was, and that’s something like 10,000 people (Mount Desert Island, in case you’re wondering)! Imagine if you don’t already have a driver’s license – you are fucked!
Just because a lot of morons are swayed by weak arguments and don’t understand the issue doesn’t mean that they’re right. Case in point:
Yeah. This person clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, but that’s not stopping him. He’s bought full-scale into this assumption – “I got ID, so why should anyone else have trouble?” Ignoring the issue of people who can’t drive, people who work full-time in multiple jobs, people who simply can’t afford to take the time off and visit the DMV (which may be quite a good distance away). As for how we plan to reverse them? Well, I’m sure that poll taxes were fairly popular back in the day, before the courts decided that disenfranchising the poor was a bad idea.
Well, the figure would literally have to be off by a factor of about 250 (or was it 25,000? I forget which figure I’m using this time…) for voter ID laws to help the issue.
And guys, I’m still not missing the fact that every one of you is a known right-wing partisan, and these laws disenfranchise primarily democratic demographics.
There’s some validity to what you’re saying there, but of course this kind of opinion-polling can be totally meaningless. I mean, if you and I are arguing about a complicated budgetary issue where I’m proposing some tax cuts and you’re proposing some spending cuts, but there are dozens of moving parts in a very complicated issue with lots of dependencies, it would be pretty meaningless for me to go out and poll the public and say “would you like your taxes to be lower”, and then when of course they say that they do, claim that that gives my argument some sort of electoral validity or superiority.
I mean, who isn’t in favor of there being less voter fraud, in a vacuum? Heck, I support it, in a vacuum. But unless people were polled, and asked “do you support measures whose declared aim is to decrease voter fraud, but (27 paragraphs of disclaimers and explanations)” then I think it’s pretty irrelevant.