Pace, pronounced PA-chay, Latin, “peace to,” traditionally used in English to mean, “despite what he/she says to the contrary.”
I think that there is non-existent voter fraud because of voter ID.
Why do all such laws focus on voter ID, and not on, say, preventing fraudulent absentee ballots? It’s quite easy to continue to apply for an absentee ballot for your dead husband, for example – much easier than claiming to be him at the polls, especially if you’ve just claimed to be you.
Most likely because both sides DO have ulterior motives. The “same day registration” people are as ulteriorly motivated as the voter ID people.
We probably won’t get a compromise on this until elections stop being 50-50 affairs. As long as they are close, both side will seek advantage any legal way they can.
“Your side does it” =/= “Both sides do it”.
As you know.
No, I never made any such admission. That is an absolutely false statement.
I remember that thread. It was the same one where you waxed nostalgic about your love for kicking puppies, stealing candy from toddlers and setting random house fires.
When we want to discourage armed robbery, we pass a law making it criminal.
We don’t so far as I recall, ever survey how many armed robberies still occur in violation of the law: we simply prosecute the armed robbers.
In fairness, I was a unicorn during that period of time and typing with hooves and a pointy horn was difficult, so explaining the nuances of my position was often left undone.
And you wanna know the worst part? He’s from out of state.
It was already illegal to commit voter fraud. Voter ID laws are not necessary for making the practice illegal.
Huh.
I kind of think we might want to do that, so we know whether or not new strategies to reduce armed robberies are effective, or if they just inconvenience people, or violate their rights, for no reason. It might also be useful to know how often armed robberies occur, so that you know how big a problem they are, and how much resource to use combating them.
In Republican Voter ID land, we don’t know how many armed robberies occur, and don’t even bother trying to find out. We just claim that they are a big problem, throw a half assed solution at it, and walk away ignoring the pleas of people who claim the solution harms them directly.
It was effectively unprosecutable.
We don’t survey in order to determine if the practice should be criminalized. I certainly grant that we survey everything under the sun.
It was already criminalized. At best, given the most generous treatment of the issue, we have an enforcement problem. Or… we THINK we have an enforcement problem.
ALMOST everything. There is at least one thing we don’t survey. Nobody can give me a reason why we don’t survey it, we just don’t.
You claim we have an enforcement problem, but without surveying the underlying crime, you don’t actually know if we have an enforcement problem, OR if this particular enforcement remedy will do anything to improve our enforcement.
Yes, but in a super-dooper close election, a half dozen votes could wrongly decide an election! You see, when a butterfly farts in Peking, we have huge tornadoes in the Midwest come spring! Now, if we could find that butterfly, and stuff a tiny little cork in its rectum…
In Ohio in 2012, 17 non-citizens cast ballots. And 274 other non-citizens illegally registered to vote but did not (apparently) vote in 2012.
We have an enforcement problem.
You don’t agree about the scope or seriousness of the problem. But we have a system in place to determine what rules are made when there is not unanimous agreement on their wisdom.
Right?
And if those laws are open to exploitation by “some” Republicans, who do not share your unyielding commitment to voter equality, what then? I note that you very carefully keep your argument as abstract as possible, you defend voter ID as if it were a discrete entity. As if it were not true, or not relevant, that such laws may be used to illegitimate purpose.
As if it were not true, or not relevant, that they are being used to “stack the deck” in order to award an unjustified electoral advantage to the Republicans.
You wave away evidence that the problem of voter impersonation is vanishingly small, and offer in its place abstraction and theory of what might happen, what could possibly happen. And in the next breath, scorn evidence that some number of otherwise qualified citizens will not vote. Evidence offered that thousands of voters will be hampered you brush aside, and set your rather tenuous fantasies as though they were solid fact.
Are their votes somehow different? Does a “bad” vote weigh more than a legitimate vote? You weep copiously over a legitimate voter whoi’s vote might be negated by an illegal alien voter, yet shed not a tear for a qualified voter who is hampered and harassed by this legislation.
If all voters are equal, and all votes are sacred, what explains this discrepancy? Why is preventing an illegal vote so much more important than empowering a legitimate one?
I’ll agree with you on the scope. 17 votes out of 5.6million. 0.0003% of the vote. I want the elected officials to justify the law on that. 17 votes.
Let them identify the cost of providing ID to everyone who doesn’t have one, and divide by 17*. Let them estimate the extra time everyone is going to be at the polls, and divide by 17. Let them estimate the number of current legal voters who will have to make a special trip to the DMV to be allowed to vote, divide by 17 Let them estimate the total time voters are going to spend going to and from the DMV to get their id, and divide by 17. Estimate the fuel cost of bringing voters to the DMV, divide by 17. Estimate the number of voters turned away at the polls for not having current ID, divide by 17.
*This is a fun one. From here we have an estimate of 938,000 adults without ID, and about 630,000 “likely voters” without ID. At $8.50 per ID, that’s $5.3 million to provide everyone with ID, merely $315,000 per vote. Of course, that the one time cost of making an ID, annually you have to include renewals, and lost revenue from folks who used to pay for ID, and now get it free. The guys in the link estimate $4.8M per year, so that’s $19.2M over 4 years, just $1.1M per illegal vote prevented, assuming you get 100% compliance now.
I’d love to hear some of these fiscal conservatives start defending those numbers when convincing their constituents of the “seriousness” of the illegal voter problem.
17 votes.
No.
Instead, tell me the cost of an election which ends like Indiana’s 8th district did in 1984: decided by four votes, and where it then comes to light that 17 votes were cast by non-citizens.
Because as I hinted to you before, you don’t get to frame the decision based on 17 out of 5.6 million – that’s not the debate. The debate is: what about the case where 17 votes are compared to a margin of victory of 4?
According to Wikipedia, the population of Ohio is about 16 times the population of Indiana’s 8th district. Assuming the percent of illegal votes stays the same, we would assume that about ONE illegal vote was cast in the vote you cite. So, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Also, I don’t know why you get to say “you don’t get to frame the debate…” and in the same breath say “The debate is…” Did someone anoint you the Official Debate Framer?
And besides, when one considers the teeny tiny chance that somewhere, someday, a vote will be decided by a margin smaller than the number of fraudulent votes, that number is still likely to be lost in the statistical noise, in terms of the vote result perfectly reflecting the collective will of the electorate. What about people who get sick on election day and stay home? Or get caught behind a car accident and so don’t get to the polls in time? And if 10 illegal votes are cast in some election, what if they were cast 6 for one candidate and 4 for another? When one compares the chance of a particular election being swayed by illegal votes, to the thousands of people who will be dissuaded from voting by ID laws requiring additional time and expense, it truly boggles my mind that anyone would weigh the factors the way you do. (But understand, I’m not really trying to persuade you anymore. I’m talking more to the lurkers and readers who may still be on the fence.)
No, he’s quite right. Clearly, the fundamental value of voter ID is the only real question. And Bricker is kindest, bravest, warmest, most non-partisan human being who ever Doped. Oh, shit, another of those headaches. Nurse? Nurse?..