At that point in time, they didn’t have the benefit of my presence.
It is not at all impossible to detect in person voter fraud. We’ve been through this before.
All you would need to do would be to go through the book and follow up with people who are recorded as having voted. If they say they did not vote, it is either in person vote fraud or a faulty memory/false report.
If it were as easy as some here suggest it would have been done.
Voter fraud is nothing new and people certainly engage in it.
In person voter fraud is the worst of all possible means of voter fraud except, perhaps, in very small elections.
Ballots in the US are cast in private. Even if someone paid a lot of people to vote for their guy/gal there is no way to be sure the people you paid voted as you wanted.
Consider the cost of hiring thousands of people (at least…necessary to swing an election). Consider the penalties for being caught which are substantial. You will have to pay them well.
Add to that the chances of keeping several thousand (at least) people from spilling the beans on your scheme.
Add to that the chances that election officials will not notice.
TL;DR This sort of voter fraud SUCKS! It is rare NOT because people are nice but because it is a SUPREMELY shitty way of rigging an election.
Asserted without evidence. That it might benefit the GOP is no evidence that it is conservative in principle. I would like all citizens to be registered, DNA samples and biometric scans on file, and register and restrict their firearms too.
Except in Oregon. Yet lots of progressives support this! Drives me nuts.
Even if there’s a problem, and I don’t think there’s a problem. but let’s say there is,
… how is the solution to create an expensive bureaucracy which collects and stores personally identifying information?
Bricker supports it.
I rest my case. 
A bloke I know voted twice. He registered once at his mother’s address, and once at the address he was living in (in another city) as a student. He got caught.
(The judge let him plea bargain, as it was his first offense, and was just a damn fool student prank, not part of a conspiracy to affect an election’s outcome.)
As for voting machines, one election morning, here in San Diego, we found the machines not working. Techs had to come around to every precinct to repair them. One man, at my precinct, had a plane to catch – that’s why he’d come first thing in the morning – and ended up losing his opportunity to vote. He begged to be allowed to write down some kind of provisional ballot, but the poll workers couldn’t permit it.
So…anecdotal, but there ya go…one case of voter fraud, and one guy denied the right to vote.
Adds up to a tidal wave of fraud and misfeasance, I guess!
It seems to support a lot of what we’ve been saying here. It says that there is a real danger of voter ID laws disenfranchising voters. It goes on to say that voter ID laws can be designed to avoid disenfranchisement and offers proposals on how to achieve this.
But then it goes on to say that no state that has enacted voter ID laws has used any of the proposed means of avoiding disenfranchisement. And to quote the report: “While the numbers of registered voters without valid photo IDs were few, the groups least likely to have them were women, African-Americans and Democrats.”
So the unavoidable conclusion is that voter ID laws have nothing to do with preventing fraud. The purpose of these laws is to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters.
Way to cherry-pick exactly the half of the Carter Center stuff that criticises the pro-ID crowd without noting other parts like:
“Democrats have tended to try to block voter ID legislation outright — instead of seeking to revise that legislation to promote accessibility.”
“[O]pponents are sure that it will lead to voter suppression even though they haven’t been able — until Pennsylvania — to point to a single instance where a voter could not vote because of a lack of ID…”
“The problem remains registration — not IDs — in reducing voting participation.”
“In Florida, for example, the commission found 140,000 voters who had also registered in four other states — some 46,000 of them in New York City alone. When 1,700 of them registered for absentee ballots in the other state, no one investigated.”
ETA: You opponents need to stop being obsessed with the “purpose” of the laws, and reflect on whether your opposition looks reasonable to the median voter. That’s called pragmatism. When you realise that it does not look reasonable, the next step is to decide how to appease that median voter while doing as much as possible to amend proposals so they include stuff you like too, just as the Carter Center said: “revise the legislation to promote accessibility”.
Why would I do that if the goddamn purpose is to reduce votes for Democratic candidates? The purpose is to put up roadblocks in front of legal voters so they give up and decide not to vote anymore. I’m supposed to be OK with this, as long as I can tweak it a little? Fuck. That. Shit.
You say that’s not the purpose? Bullshit. Step #1 in crafting the solution to a problem is understanding the size and scope of the problem. You step in front of the microphone and justify the fix by presenting your statistics. “In the last Presidential Election, up to x% of the vote, that’s xx Thousand votes, may have been cast improperly, and MY legislation will stop those votes from happening.”
We don’t have this. Why? It’s certainly NOT because it’s impossible to gather the data, Hentor shows just how easy it is to at least get a sense of the scope of the problem. But no Republican has done such a study, and referenced the results of that study to justify the legislation.
Why? Because you and I both know that he’ll be up there in front of the microphone saying “In the last Presidential Election, up to 0.001% of the vote, that’s 0.1 Thousand votes, may have been cast improperly, and MY legislation will stop those votes from happening.” Instead, the quotes from leading Republicans are more like “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done”
We already have that, but the information is in the databases of several different bureaucracies in different agencies and at different levels of government with no reliable overall system of coordination or cross-referencing. Hence, it is possible for a person to be registered to vote in more than one state at the same time without anybody catching on, etc. Well, except the NSA, but they stay out of all this.
At the end of the book, Hasen proposes his solutions:
Is he right? Is there nothing We the People can do to override both parties’ vested interests?
Why are you putting words in my mouth? Show me where I said that was not the purpose??
So far as I know . . .
Will you answer this, Bricker?
Will you answer this, Bricker? I know you’re posting in GD today.
In all ways possible? No. It’s possible to mobilize the armed forces and have them serve as shuttle bus drivers to transport voters to the polling stations.
There should certainly be a goal of minimizing the burden of voting to some degree, but that goal must be balanced with the cost of the measures undertaken.
The question then becomes – and indeed always has been: where do you draw the line?
You can always PM me if I’m missing a call for a response. That’s a more certain method than hoping I see a bumped thread.
I’d say, about where Hasen draws it; see post #272. Any objections?
At least now, you recognize the value of reducing the burden of voting – something you have in the past explicitly rejected.
Actually, I never look in my PM box and tend to forget it exists. I can’t be the only one.