This is strange. The Missouri Supreme Court has already stricken down a voter-ID law. I suppose they’re trying another route now - going after registration instead of identification at the polls.
I didn’t say they would, I was referring to the act of actively renouncing US citizenship, as brought up by Giles, which is not the same as holding dual citizenship.
ETA: oops: renounce, not denounce.
You can’t compare scientific proof of theories with legal proof of legal status. Apples and altar boys.
I think Missouri’s new law is stupid, but I have to say that this isn’t a very strong objection. The number of people who were born U.S. citizens and aren’t any longer is trivially small - just becoming a citizen of another country does not remove U.S. citizenship - and would of course consist almost entirely of people who don’t live in the United States anymore. The miniscule number of people who were born in the United States, then renounced their U.S. citizenship, and then moved to Missouri and would try to vote illegally is probably about 0, or close to it.
The purpose of the law, clearly, is to prevent illegal immigrants from voting, and that purpose WOULD largely be served by asking to see a birth certificate.
Whether Missouri has a large-scale problem with illegal immigrants voting that this would help, without doing even more harm to the democratic process, I don’t know, though I doubt it.
Of course, if an American became a citizen of Canada, he or she would still be a citizen of the United States. MY best friend is a born American, in New Jersey. He moved to Canada as a child, became a Canadian citizen in 1991, and moved to California in 1998 to work for a company there. He is now a citizen of both countries; when he goes to Canada he shows his citizenship card, and when he goes back to the USA he pulls out his American passport.
That’s going to be true of most people who were born in the USA, and became citizens elsewhere.
Sure you can. The principle is precisely the same; the application may, but doesn’t have to, fail because of lack of rigor.
In other words, when we discuss global warming, we usually say something like, “We know to a 90% certainty that humans are causing a warming of the climate.” So we can then make decisions based on that 90% certainty.
In criminal law, we say a person is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This isn’t the same as “100% certain.” It’s enough certainty to eliminate all reasonable hypotheses of innocence, as far as we know.
We use a lesser standard to rule against someone in a civil claim - “preponderance of the evidence.” We are more willing to subject someone to a civil finding and take away some of his money than we are to imprison him.
The same kind of calculations need to apply here. We can’t ever be 100% certain – so should we be certain of citizenship beyond a reasonable doubt? 90% certain? 51% certain (preponderance of the evidence). Some other standard?
A court of law is set up to make those kinds of determinations. An elections office is not.
Well, of course it is. They currently require a mild proof of citizenship - any documented evidence you live there. The legislature is proposing making the evidentiary requirements much stricter, but they’re not inventing the idea of the elections office asking for SOME form of ID.
I couldn’t vote in Missouri, because I couldn’t provide any evidence I lived there.
You’re getting a little extreme in your refusal to accept Bricker’s point here; there’s not an industrialized democracy in the world that doesn’t require some evidence you live in the place you’re voting. Here in Canada you have to have something on you that proves who you are; it can be something simple, like a driver’s license; you cna use a cable bill or something that’s not personal ID only if you’re already registered, but that still constitutes evidence you’re a resident. It’s EVIDENCE all the same.
The question here is not whether the Mossouri proposal newly introduces the idea of voter identification, because it doesn’t. The salient question, I think, is whether it jacks up the stringency of identification needed so high that the cons outweigh the pros.
OK. I don’t accept that assertion, but assuming I did, what of it?
We may reasonably decide that showing some documentary evidence of citizenship from an approved list of such documents suffices, and then merely require that the elections office check that evidence. Then the role of discretion at the elections office vanishes.
Hmm. It seems a little messed up that they are changing the voter registration requirements in the middle of a major election cycle…
Yes. See my post #116 in your linked thread.
Yes, it does, doesn’t it?
My birth cert. is somewhere I couldn’t name right now, but I could probably find it. It is also badly faded and kid of falling apart. It is also document that just about anyone could easily forge.
Mrs. Murdoch is a naturalized citizen who will cast her first vote for president this fall. She must have some kind of papers somewhere, maybe next to my birth certificate. She has an accent so she could be more seriously challenged by such a maneuver than me.
My mother-in-law is also a citizen, but if she had to jump through this hurdle she simply wouldn’t vote. No chance. It would be just too confusing for her and she retains a mistrust of authorities from the old country. And that I suspect is the real objective of these measures, to reduce the vote in a slanted way.
MARC ANTONY: Cry “Kerfuffle!” And let slip the kits of war!
I’ve been working around this whole ID problem for the past 30 years - working w/offenders, we get the gamut of issues w/birth certificates. Problem is that 30/40 years ago folks didn’t use them for much of anything, so lots of folks were casual about it - everything from “my dad left and my step father raised me, so we just started using my step fathers name, never adopted us officially…” to the guy whose mom never told him where he was born (that’s happened at least twice now), guy who was adopted by US service personnel in Germany, and my personal favorite was the woman who was born at home, the midwife registered the birth several days later and picked the wrong gender to put on it.
as for me, because I’ve seen what a pain in the arse it is to come up with the stuff again, I’ve got at least 2 copies of my DL around, and several other copies of everything else I need to get it.
Aside from the musings of what could constitute evidence of citizenship, we don’t currently have a government system that is too involved with questions of citizenship. Our systems right now are targeted more toward establishing identity, not nationality, since the overwhelming number of us rely on drivers licenses or state-issued ID cards which generally have no relationship to citizenship at all.
So what do we have in the way of papers to establish citizenship? Birth certificates, passports, and Social Security cards are the only common documents I can think of. I’d say that a reasonably large minority of people don’t have their original birth certificate, I believe I’ve seen that only one in five Americans have a passport, and forged Social Security cards are routinely used for illegal immigrants to get legit jobs.
So at this time, our best options for having Americans comply with this proposed restriction on their right to vote are two documents which perhaps millions of Americans have neither; or one document that is so routinely forged that the people who are intended to be excluded from the electoral process (that is, illegal immigrants) probably have one anyway. Uhh… remind me what problem this is supposed to solve?
When Republicans swept into Congress in 1994, they complained a lot about the Feds putting unfunded mandates on states, sticking them with finding a way to comply with Federal laws without actually providing the states a means to effectively do so. These laws strike me as an unfunded mandate on people: foisting the burden of compliance onto individuals, when it is really the state (or the Feds) that ought to be providing the means to readily verify citizenship.
If citizenship can’t be proven, then how do I convince the INS to release me if they detain me as being in the country illegally? And if you can’t prove citizenship, then how does the INS prove non-citizenship in cases where people are detained and deported?
Aliens are required to carry their passport, or their green card if they are a permanent resident. However, I’m not aware of any document that US citizens are required to carry with them at all times.
(And the other problem is finding a country to deport you to: generally, other countries will only accept their own citizens as deportees from somewhere else. So if a US citizen is caught by the US immigration folk, and can’t prove they are a citizen, they could be detained by the federal government indefinitely, with nowhere to be deported to.)
But if I’m a citizen, I don’t have a green card. If the INS thinks I’m an alien, then how do I convince them I’m not?
Nor am I. I’m confident there isn’t any.
Kinda like Tom Hanks in that movie “Terminal”? (I never saw it, but I seem to recall the plot involved some such case.)
But the point I’m trying to make is that, as **Bricker **said, surely there is some level of “proof” that can established as part of the law that would be acceptable. We needn’t re-invent the wheel here.
Interesting: