# The most important thing you need to know about the voter ID issue . . . **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 29, 2013, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813 "2013-07-29T14:42:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/101 "2013-07-29T20:56:37Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > How so? > > An integrity that was only called into question by scare mongering from conservatives? The only people who will feel better are the ones who uncritically accepted the pronouncements of fraud and believe a problem exists where there is none and never was. > > The nation has stayed together just fine for 237 years without demanding photo IDs to vote. I have yet to see one case where people can point to rampant voter fraud of the sort that would be fixed by photo IDs. One can only marvel that the whole system survived this long. :rolleyes: > > In fact, if anything, the conservative assault on voting rights in an attempt to disenfranchise voters (and make no mistake, that is ALL this is) serves to undermine my faith and confidence in the integrity and reliability of the electoral process. Yes, but you are in the minority. Most people believe that asking for photo ID as a condition to voting is quite reasonable. So as far as increasing faith and confidence goes, it’s a valid step. Why should your minority view be the one to win out over such a strong majority view? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/102 "2013-07-29T21:04:23Z")
And the majority holds this view because…? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/103 "2013-07-29T21:07:01Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > It’s a small problem in terms of likelihood. > > But when it happens, it has the potential to deliver huge consequences. > > There will probably not be another governor’s race in Washington State for a hundred years that gets that close. There probably won’t be another presidential election in any state that gets as close as Florida was in 2000. And even if that happens, the odds of that state being the one to determine the outcome of the national race are just miniscule! > > But how foolish would it be to ignore it, after it’s happened once? And how will this measure prevent other close races from happening? Are you implying that voter ID fraud had anything to do with the close races in Florida and Washington State, because that’s what it looks like to me. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/104 "2013-07-29T21:10:23Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > And how will this measure prevent other close races from happening? Are you implying that voter ID fraud had anything to do with the close races in Florida and Washington State, because that’s what it looks like to me. It won’t prevent such results from happening. But when they rarely but inevitably do happen, we won’t have, hanging over the final razor-thin result, the spectre that perhaps that result was tainted by a few illegal votes that would have otherwise been cast. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/105 "2013-07-29T21:11:25Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > And the majority holds this view because…? Because of what happened in Florida in 2000. The entire country saw the presidency of the United States depend on the difference between hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/106 "2013-07-29T21:13:01Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > Because of what happened in Florida in 2000. The entire country saw the presidency of the United States depend on the difference between hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads. And demanding photo IDs would fix dimpled chads how? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/107 "2013-07-29T21:21:31Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > Because of what happened in Florida in 2000. The entire country saw the presidency of the United States depend on the difference between hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads. And how did the entire country decide that Voter ID cards would solve that problem? Can you think of any group that might have been pushing that as a “solution”? ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/108 "2013-07-29T21:23:58Z")
Not about voter ID. About using voter ID as an excuse to trim Dem voter rolls. Which, by now, you have been told maybe a thousand times. Voter ID could be issued and required in a way that not only refrains from infringing upon legal and valid voters, but add significantly to the voter rolls. The Republicans are not interested in those options, citing a condition of extreme emergency which simply does not exist. But they’ve moved on from this, and even the sparse pretense of legitimacy, and are now nakedly and baldly trying to bugger the voting rolls in their favor. It is a repulsive spectacle, and I would be assured if Republican were at least ashamed of it. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/109 "2013-07-29T21:24:12Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > It won’t prevent such results from happening. > > But when they rarely but inevitably do happen, we won’t have, hanging over the final razor-thin result, the spectre that perhaps that result was tainted by a few illegal votes that would have otherwise been cast. When you keep switching the subject from voter ID fraud to close elections and back again without warning, can you see how some might think that you are trying make people think that one is causing the other, even though you won’t say it directly? ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/110 "2013-07-29T21:36:50Z")
Do those who oppose mandatory voter ID believe people ought to be able to buy liquor or cigarettes or cash checks or get on trains or airplanes without ID as well? Just curious. ---
**Author:** ![Cyros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a698b9/32.png) [@Cyros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cyros)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/111 "2013-07-29T21:39:15Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Do those who oppose mandatory voter ID believe people ought to be able to buy liquor or cigarettes or cash checks or get on trains or airplanes without ID as well? Just curious. The standard answer being that requiring an ID for those does not entail a burden on a right. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/112 "2013-07-29T21:43:19Z")
> [@Cyros](#): > > The standard answer being that requiring an ID for those does not entail a burden on a right. And to add(if I may) that adding such a burden should require evidence of such a need, and not just fleeting popular opinion engineered by one group or the other. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/113 "2013-07-29T21:57:46Z")
> [@Cyros](#): > > The standard answer being that requiring an ID for those does not entail a burden on a right. I have lived all over, have known lots of people, but never knew anyone without either a driver’s licence or a state ID (for non-drivers), or if I did I was unaware of it. It’s an odd way to live in the 21st century, akin to living without indoor plumbing or electricity. And like those things, we should help people get it rather than insisting on their right not to (this hints at why I hated that movie Beasts of the Southern Wild). I also wonder how many of these people vote as it is; and aren’t they all really old? Hard to imagine this will all matter in a few years. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2013, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/114 "2013-07-29T23:58:38Z")
More from Hasen’s book: > [@](#): > > Legal scholar Cass Sunstein noticed a correlation, even in academic writing, about the legal issues in _Bush v. Gore,_ between the writer’s political beliefs and his or her views of election law: liberals analyzing the case tended to attack the decision and conservatives tended to support it. Sunstein attributed this not to conscious bias but to psychological factors that lead us to reach conclusions in line with our preexisting beliefs. > > Objectivity is a point I constantly struggle with as I analyze disputes in the Voting Wars. Readers of this book need to be self-reflective, too. I suspect that many who read this book come in as either skeptical of [Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer] Brunner’s motives (because she’s a Democrat) or skeptical of [Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth] Blackwell’s motives (because he’s a Republican). And I suspect that this skepticism correlates very nicely with the reader’s own politics. I hope that by the time you finish this chapter [Chapter 4, “Who Counts?”], you will be more suspicious of the motives of _both_ Democratic and Republican election officials. Later in the same chapter, discussing the 2008 case of [_Republican Party of Ohio v. Brunner_](http://www.brennancenter.org/legal-work/republican-party-ohio-v-secretary-brunner) (Brunner refused to share with local election officials a file of “mismatch information,” about mismatches between data in individual voters’ records in the database of the voter registration system and their records in the database of the motor vehicle authority, because, in Hasen’s words, “she trusted neither the information nor the officials,” for pretty good reasons which he sets out; the Ohio GOP sued to make her; the HAVA required her to collect the mismatch information but was ambiguous as to what she was required to do with it, and also ambiguous as to whether any private party had the right to sue over the dispute): > [@](#): > > The debate in the [federal] Sixth Circuit [Court] mirrored the public debate on these issues. The Republican judges were worried about voter fraud and ruled in a way that would minimize that danger even if it meant disenfranchising some voters. The Democratic judges were skeptical of the voter fraud claims and voted against ordering Brunner to take steps that could disenfranchise voters, even if it raised the potential for fraud by new voters. > > So strong were these countervailing instincts that judges seemed to abandon their usual jurisprudential philosophies. Generally speaking, conservative judges are much more hesitant than liberal judges to read federal statutes expansively so as to give individuals a right to sue for their violation – what lawyers call a “private right of action.” (In 2001, as a private lawyer, [conservative 6th Circuit Judge Jeffrey] Sutton had argued in the United States Supreme Court against an expansive reading of the “private right of action” doctrine.) Liberals are much more willing to interpret statutes expansively, consistent with their overall purposes; conservatives tend to favor narrower more “textual” readings that adhere to what they perceive as the “plain meaning” of the statute. > > In _Ohio Republican Party v. Brunner,_ however, the Republican judges read the Help America Vote Act broadly to create a private right of action and interpreted its matching provision well beyond the plain meaning of the text, which on its face required no more than that the chief elections office engage in a matching exercise. The Democratic judges read the act narrowly, contending that Republicans had no right to sue, and read the statute in a narrow, textual way. The subtle psychological forces that Cass Sunstein identified in _Bush v. Gore_ seemed to be at work once again. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/115 "2013-07-30T00:22:40Z")
That’s an interesting observation. I agree with the judges who felt there was no private cause of action. I thought the SCOTUS in Alexander v. Sandoval settled the issue of whether we could expansively read private causes of action into laws that don’t define them. (Hint: no). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/116 "2013-07-30T01:32:26Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > That’s an interesting observation. I agree with the judges who felt there was no private cause of action. I thought the SCOTUS in Alexander v. Sandoval settled the issue of whether we could expansively read private causes of action into laws that don’t define them. (Hint: no). The _Brunner_ case went up to the SCOTUS, which agreed with you in a rare unanimous opinion, reversing the 6th Circuit and ruling that there was no private right of action here. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/117 "2013-07-30T02:55:26Z")
My opinion so far on this issue is based on my perception of the balance between the “avoiding voter fraud” camp and “not disfranchising eligible voters” camp. If my understanding is wrong, I’d like to know about it, but I think lots of people here would have similar preferences for what to do, if we can at least reach some agreement about how much of each problem actually exists. So far from what I’ve read, the number of voters who vote fraudulently is outnumbered by the eligible voters with no photo ID by something like 1000:1. That’s off the top of my head, but from that, I had formed the opinion that the voter ID laws are a scam. On top of that, my opinion of the voter-ID thing was that it was a hysteria, created by lawmakers who are trying to whip up emotions on a non-issue, while serious issues go unaddressed in every state. I don’t think this is just my partisan bias, because I always tended to have more of a Republican party view of governance, at least before that party got shanghaied by the social conservatives. So can we address the relative sizes of the problems before we decide the proper way to fix them and if we need to fix them at all? ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/118 "2013-07-30T04:23:15Z")
I just think ID should be required whether you want to vote or not. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/119 "2013-07-30T04:26:22Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > I just think ID should be required whether you want to vote or not. "Are hyour paperz in order, _mein Herr?"_ 😉 ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2013, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813/120 "2013-07-30T05:15:18Z")
I know, I know…but if someone is a suspect in a crime and has never had any kind of ID, what do the police do with that? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-important-thing-you-need-to-know-about-the-voter-id-issue/664813.md?page=7)