“The beat goes on.”
-Bono.
So don’t have Voter ID since it doesn’t stop all fraud?
No, don’t have voter ID since it stops almost no fraud at all, and perpetuates a greater fraud than any it stops. Which is exactly what it’s designed to do, as evidenced by the statements from its designers.
Never mind, Chronos beat me by 20 minutes.
Replace “ll” with “ny” and your sentence is accurate.
And you know this how again? Because last I checked, places without voter ID have no way of knowing who voted fraudulently and from my own experience, isolated cases (so your “any” is incorrect) was met with, “Eh, no big deal.”
Even if this was all one year and all in one place, you wouldn’t even throw the election for dogcatcher.
The number of crimes committed always exceeds the number of convictions for that crime.
Voter ID is an issue the Democrats will always have a hard time winning over the general public on. Opposing voter ID typically comes across as naive or unreasonable, while supporting voter ID sounds common sense - no matter how much voter fraud there actually is or isn’t. Opposing ID is a foolish hill to die on.
To the average voter, “Should voters be required to produce ID to vote?” probably sounds as “duh” as “Should passengers be required to have a boarding pass in order to board a plane flight?”
TimeWinder Vs Chronos – cage match!
Yes, because of the tremendous amount of misinformation and fearmongering the right engages in on this issue, which is why it’s vital that honest people remind folks that the real cases of voter fraud virtually never would be affected by voter ID laws.
I’ve said before, voter ID laws are like Kraken Repellent buoys placed off of popular swimming beaches.
The right doesn’t have to fearmonger; requiring an ID to vote is one of those things that sounds and feels naturally reasonable to a large portion of the general populace. All fraud statistics aside, it *feels *right to many; in fact you’d have a harder time inventing a better-crafted PR implement than this one.
I would liken it more to shark-repellant buoys. The odds of a shark attack are infinitesimally small, yet to many average beachgoers it sounds perfectly reasonable and natural to have anti-shark measures, and a political party that argued against the anti-shark buoys would be perceived as, What, you WANT shark attacks to happen??"
When Democrats oppose voter ID, they often aren’t being perceived by the average voter-folk as defenders of suffrage and voting rights; they’re perceived - fairly or unfairly - as aiding and abetting election fraud.
Right: emotions say one thing, facts another. That’s why rational honest people should work extra hard to show the facts.
How many elections each year have results changed by voter fraud?
How many people each year are attacked by krakens?
How many people each year are attacked by sharks?
The kraken analogy is much more on-point, since the same number of elections each year are changed by voter fraud as the number of people each year who are attacked by krakens.
Not “fairly or unfairly”: “unfairly.” The facts are clearly on one side and not the other. If you’re an honest, rational person, you shouldn’t be throwing your hands up helplessly at this, you should be working to overturn the incorrect perception people have.
My guess is that as his defense, he’s going to claim he was just showing how easy it is to commit voter fraud. The fact that he failed to commit it will be utterly lost on him and anyone who still supports him.
I can tell you for certain that in my county (and I expect everywhere else in my state, which, like Colorado, has 100% vote-by-mail), his vote of his ex-wife’s ballot would not have been counted. If the ex had not come forward, he may not have been fingered as the culprit, but the ballot would definitely have been rejected due to the signature not matching.
I guess this doesn’t make me feel better, since the workers likely have zero actual scientific training at matching signatures. What happens when a real signature is deemed to “not match”? Do they investigate more, just toss the ballot, give the person an opportunity to send in a fresh signature sample, make them do the whole ballot all over again?
It turns out that’s an invalid assumtption. They send the signature checkers to a class on it run by the FBI. One of the advantages to vote-by-mail is that the signatures are checked by a relatively small number of trained permanent employees at the county election office, rather than a large number of (untrained?) temporary workers out in precincts.
They send a notice to the voter who (I think) has to come in and submit a new registration card. Probably has to produce ID at that point. I’m not completely sure about this. I saw the signature checking in action, but we didn’t spend a lot of time discussing what happens to the rejects.
Of course, if the voter says thay didn’t sign the ballot, then an investigation is begun. My understanding is that that is quite rare. It’s usually just that their signature has changed since they submitted the registration card, which may have been years earlier.
I would bet my house that in Washington (mail in ballot state) no one checks signatures. The system would grind to a stop, they simply can’t check millions of ballots.
I would retract that bet, if I were you. While Oregon isn’t quite as populous as Washington, I’m fairly sure we check all signatures in this state. At least we certainly do in this county, which has a population of over half a million people and about 300,000 voters. And I expect all vote-by-mail states do it.
How do we do it? Automation. First they scan all the registrations with the signatures into the computer and keep them on file. At the elections office, they have a large sorting machine that can do more than just sorting. Before they’ve been removed from their envelopes, all ballots are run through it twice. The first time, it scans all the signature blocks on the envelope as well as the identifying codes. Then it brings up to the signature checkers both the on-file signature and the one from the ballot, one above the other on the screen. They compare the two and if they don’t match, mark the ballot for rejection. After they’ve compared an entire batch, they run the batch through the sorter again. Accepted ballots are sorted by precinct; rejected ones are sent to the reject bin.
How long did this take? Not as long as you would think. In the most recent election, we had all the ballots counted by the morning after Election Day. I had a temporary job there for that election. I wasn’t comparing signatures, but rather a member of the Elections Board. Before computers, Elections Boards were the ones who actually counted ballots. Now, in this state, they’re just envelope openers with a fancy title. Computers do about 80% of the work in counting votes.
Just out of curiosity, what happens to the ballots that go to the reject bin? Are they then double checked, to make sure that they actually are supposed to be rejected? Are the voters contacted, to see if it was their actual intended vote, and that maybe they need to update their registration card?
I’m sure they’re double checked. And probably triple and maybe even quadruple checked. They take voting pretty seriously at the Elections Office. And if they’re still rejected, they do what you suggest, although I’m not certain of the exact details. We didn’t discuss the rejected-ballot procedure very much.
How seriously do they take the voting? How’s this: One of the ballot envelopes I opened did not have a intact ballot. It wasn’t that the envelope-slicing machine had caught the ballot (that happened too), but rather the voter had torn their ballot into many small pieces. About 15 or 20 pieces. We left that ballot in the secrecy envelope and saved it for later. Someone would then have to reconstruct the ballot and tape it back together so it could be counted. That is, if they’d actually filled in any of the circles (they probably didn’t). Fortunately the pieces were small rectangles and not randomly shaped pieces, so it wouldn’t be that much work to reconstruct.