I disagree. Strongly.
In order to work, you must provide proof of eligibility. This means that every time you get a new job, you have to show that you’re either a US citizen or a legal resident permitted to work here. We have an entire infrastructure dedicated to this point…
That last argument goes to the strength of the evidence, not its existence.
If you don’t have a birth certificate, you can usually get one from the state where you were born. I had to do that a few years ago-- it was very simple.
Question: why wouldn’t a social security card + driver’s license be enough? Isn’t this, plus a driver’s license, what’s used to document citizenship for getting a new job?
In answer to Bricker’s question about what level of certainty we need to use for this issue, I’d say it depends on how big the problem is. First off, do we know of any election in, say, the past 50 years in which illegal votes cast by noncitizens changed the election’s outcome? If we don’t know of a single example in which this is even likely to have been the case, I’d say the problem is negligible, and any solution to the problem must have no more than negligible disadvantages.
A disenfranchised citizen is worse than an enfranchized noncitizen, IMO: the former alienates someone from the system and clearly denies them a right, whereas the latter only risks an overturned election. I’d much rather enfranchise ten noncitizens incorrectly than disenfranchize one citizen incorrectly; the risk is much greater in the latter case.
If there are multiple examples of elections being unfairly decided by illegally cast votes from noncitizens, then it’s worth setting up serious measures to prevent that occurring in the future. If there are no examples of that, then this smacks of pandering to the xenophobic vote with a symbolic but useless action with the primary real-world effect of disenfranchizing those without the means to obtain the documents of verification.
Daniel
But try doing it when you just remembered, or just found out it’s necessary, and registration for the next election closes out in two days.
A noncitizen can get either.
I don’t know how (or even, whether) employers use SS cards and DLs to check appliants’ citizenship status, but if there is a way to do it, the election offices should be able to do the same. The practical question is whether they can do it quickly – i.e., quickly enough to keep from holding up the line.
Do they actually check citizen status? What they have to do is check the name against the SS#, and then assume that the SS# was not given to an illegal alien. I guess they also have to check that the SS# isn’t also being used somewhere else.
I disagree. Ten illegal votes weigh ten times as much as one legitimate vote. Votes are fungible; once cast, they are all of equal weight.
Let’s turn your standard around: if there are multiple examples of elections results being different because legitimate voters were denied their ballots, then it’s worth setting up serious measures to prevent that ocurring in the future.
Not so palatable now?
Like I said a birth cert = “it’s certainly good for almost all circumstances”. We agree it’s not quite 100%, but it’ll work. Shy of a Top-Secret BI as you mentioned, it’s what we’ll have to live with. The current administration is trying to push Passports for everyone. :dubious:
SS# isn’t enough to prove citizenship. Non-resident aliens can legally get a SS#. SS# means you’re eligible to work in the US, which is why employers accept them. Doesn’t mean you’re eligible to vote.
Yes, votes are fungible, but experiencing the right to vote is not. Being denied a vote is a much worse harm than being allowed to vote next to someone who is allowed illegitimately to vote. Do you disagree? Or do you think that experiencing the right to vote is a negligible societal good?
Ummm…I’m really not sure what you’re saying. I absolutely think that it’s worth setting up serious measure to prevent “that” (i.e., the denial of ballots to legitimate voters) from occurring in the future. That’s totally palatable to me. Did “that” refer to some other antecedent?
If you’re suggesting that, because votes are fungible, your example ought to justify measures to prevent illegal votes, that argument certainly doesn’t follow, any more than it follows that it justifies measures to prevent ballots from breeding and multiplying in the ballot box. Measures are only necessary to prevent harms that have a serious chance of occurring, not to prevent harms that are mathematically equivalent to harms that have a serious chance of occurring.
Daniel
Employers are required to get your SSN and copies of a government-issued ID to verify that you are eligible to work, under the assumption that a vast majority of people with a valid document is indeed an eligible worker (citizen or noncitizen), or that at least, is someone who has put enough thought into creating and maintaining a legal identity that we may as well retain payroll taxes for his effort until he gets caught 
And that is one of the things with ID-checking voter registration/voting itself; we KNOW it’s not foolproof, but we do want to create a semblance of you bothering to clear some procedural requirement slightly greater than occupying space and breathing. The notion being that most people who have an interest in avoiding contact with The Man will avoid this form of contact too.
When I registered as a voter, I was required to provide an official ID plus my birth certificate. This does not prove I did not resign my citizenship the day before, but how many people who do that try to vote? A thousandth of a percent of the population?
Opponents say that requiring verification of identity (at voting) or citizenship (at registration) is onerous for a large number of people, specially in the underclass. But … I’ve worked elections and registrations with some poor rural communities, semiliterate senior citizens, recently naturalized immigrants, etc. Y’know what? *They bother to get their papers in order. * Because they want to vote. Heck, for the very old country folk who do not have BC’s we’ll take parish records of their christenings instead if need be.
Maybe it’s just a cultural/“way we’ve always done it” issue: around here it’s relatively easy to get your hands on your birth certificate; and your voter reg card IS a state-issued photo-ID, given to you free of charge. I know that stateside, it can be a more complicated process to get your papers and most official ID is not available for free.
Which is what makes me wonder: if I came up with a way to establish ID check for voting and/or citizenship check for registration* AND a way to PAY for it and streamline the process so it’s not onerous to the voter*… would proponents and oponents still be adamant in their respective positions?
Getting a bit OT but in New Zealand we allow permanent resident non-citizens to vote. I wonder how common that is around the world. I think in the USA, even local town elections are citizens only.
If it’s truly not onerous, then no, I wouldn’t be at all adamant. My position is that more people voting is good for the health of a participatory system of government: it involves people in their society, makes them feel responsible for what happens, and I want that. Any hurdles to voting ought to be done for a reason, and the strength of the reason ought to be commensurate with the inconvenience of the hurdle.
A hurdle so trivial that it doesn’t stop anyone from voting is no problem at all to me. A hurdle that stops a single person from voting needs to have a clear reason for existing. If you can’t show me that clear reason, the hurdle ought not exist.
My suspicion is that vanishingly few undocumented folks try to vote: folks without documentation generally try to avoid contact with the state as much as possible, and this would seem an absurd risk to most of them. If there’s a problem, then sure, let’s see it. But a solution in search of a problem smacks, as I said before, of pandering to xenophobes.
Daniel
So the goal of laws having people prove citizenship is basically, in the eyes of the proponents, an attempt to avoid having our elections tainted by the illegal aliens who might obtain fraudulent identification in order to cast a vote.
But at the same time, we know that the employment verification system is routinely flummoxed by illegal aliens who hold papers that show they are in this country legally.
If one is attempting to design a system to increase confidence in our voter rolls, relying on the same documentation that is used to fool our employment verification system on a routine basis – while holding out the possibility for legitimate citizens to have a constitutional right abrogated for lack of proper paperwork – is a foolish plan.
If Missouri wants to verify the citizenship of its voters, Missouri should work to find a way to have its bureaucracy work with the Federal government, which certainly has some process in place to determine eligibility for Social Security cards and passports. Shifting the responsibility to each voter to prove citizenship is an unreliable delegation of what should be a state responsibility. I’m not hearing anyone doubt that the proposed system could limit the access of some citizens to the polling booth, nor that the current methods of verification of nationality are an effective barrier to other activities, namely, illegal aliens getting jobs with bogus documentation.
Do we know that non-citizens voting in our elections is a real problem? I’m not sure that anyone has identified a specific case where it has shown to be anything more than a theoretical (yet reasonable) problem. Do we know that legitimate voters being turned away from the polls is a problem? Absolutely we know that. While trying not to lower this discussion to the typical Bush-bash fest, I think one must acknowledge that a very significant legitimate registered voters were unfairly turned away from the polls in Florida in 2000, to cite one clear example.
Not only that, but also many Americans believe–with defensible reasons–that had this not occurred, we’d have had a different president the last 8 years. Turning legitimate voters away from the ballot box seriously undermines confidence in our democracy.
If we’re going to raise the bar rather than lower it, we need to see that the harm it prevents outweighs the harm it’ll cause.
Daniel
The problem is that we have not bothered examing elections to see how many voters were legit. It only comes into notice when there is a really tight election. If you look into the election of Loretta Sanchez, Congress found 624 votes cast by illegals, and 4,700 questionable registrations. Illegals DO vote sometimes. Now, the Republicans in Congress did not think that it was enough votes to swayed the election, so Sanchez was seated over B-1 Bob Dornan.
However, there were a lot of voters in that district who felt that their vote was cancelled out by the votes of non-citizens. That is the type of concern that some are trying to address with the photo ID and proof of citizenship.
Oh - and I have my birth cert (I had to get a new one from the US State Dept), I have birt certs for my kids, all of our Social Security cards, and passports for everyone.
See, that’s exactly the sort of evidence I’m talking about. That’s a serious concern, and even though the Republicans themselves didn’t see the number of illegally-cast votes as significant to the election’s outcome, it does undermine democracy to have such situations.
I wonder whether there are other measures that could work. For example, those 624 votes cast illegally: what happened to them? Were these cases pursued diligently, and were the criminals prosecuted fully? I’d really like to see cases of actual election fraud (including both this and illegal voter suppression cases) prosecuted as major crimes, at least equal to the prosecution of possession of hard drugs.
Great. So? Not everyone has all these things, and the question is whether obtaining any of them presents a barrier to voting for some people. Voting IMO ought to be as painless as possible, so that folks with very little discretionary time in their lives can still do it.
Daniel
Time - I am not concerned about that. If you do not have the discretionary time to get your paperwork, how the hell do you have the time to educate yourself on the issues on the ballot?
Now - the cost and timeFRAME to get the necessary documents IS an issue. Passports are not free, nor are copies of your birth certificate. I don’t know about getting Social Security cards. For the truly indigent, there should be a way to get your ID run without spending any direct funds. Once these laws are passed there should also be enough time in the cycle to aquire the documents as well (e.g. you can’t pass an ID law one week before an election that requires the ID).
I am almost certainly going to regret asking this, but, no pain, no gain.
How could anyone possibly object to requirements that:
prospective voters prove (1)who they are, and (2)that they are eligible to vote?
If the requirement was that new voters registering had to show proof of citizenship that would be OK. But for someone who has been registered for years, it adds a barrier to exercising their most fundamental right in a Democracy.
Many people do not have easy access to their birth certificates, do not have a drivers license, or do not have a passport. If you are old, poor, or disabled it may be a real pain to figure out how to get proper ID. Imagine you don’t have internet access and don’t have a car and live out in the country someplace: where do you start?
Now if the govt was going to make it easy for people by sending around mobile registration vans and helping people get the required documentation that would be one thing, but the people that proposed and passed these laws did them in full knowledge that they would disproportionally disenfranchise poor and minority voters.