The whole point of what?
It’s a kind of blue-leaf cabbage, but that’s not important right now.
ISTM that not having a government ID would be the bigger burden. I get asked for a photo ID all the time and can’t imagine how I’d get by without one. Of course, that is their decision to make but for the life of me I can’t see living without one.
William “Boss” Tweed in the Gangs of New York,
Killoran: Monk’s already won by three thousand more votes than there are voters.
Tweed: Only three? Make it twenty, thirty. We don’t need a victory, we need a Roman triumph.
Killoran: We don’t have anymore ballots.
Tweed: Remember the first rule of politics … ballots don’t make the results, the counters do. Keep counting.
Tweed was an evil bastard . . . and a very wise one.
That some would prefer us to focus on the ballots and ignore the counters is telling.
CMC fnord!
You would be, if your town took away your local, easily walkable, voting location and are now requiring you to vote in a place 5 miles away, that you can’t get to since you don’t have a car.
Then you ask, why did you move my location? They answer “efficiency”. But, when you look at their report, the town doesn’t save 10 cents from the move. The only actual effect is to make it harder for the low income folks like you to get to the voting location.
That’s what this ultimately is. It’s a solution in search of a problem, that causes an entirely separate, entirely real, very identifiable problem for some voters, while “solving” a problem that we don’t even know exists in any substantive way.
Again, everyone is claiming this is a solution that is worse than the problem. What are those claims based on? Because the only stats I’ve seen to back that up are conviction stats, which as I said, don’t mean much to me. How do you convict someone who showed up, voted, and never showed an ID? How much effort would you even put into that? It seems after every election I read an article about all the dead people that showed up and voted. Would that not be solved with voter ID?
How many voters would be turned away for not having ID? I’m not even necessarily advocating photo ID. There are states that require absolutely no form of ID, photo or otherwise. Every single voter at least has a SS card, right?
Well, for me it’s based on the fact that problem is zero. That is, expected errors due to irregularities in counting etc. vastly outweigh illegal votes. So, by definition, if the problem is zero then any solution to it that causes a non-zero number of valid voters to not vote is “worse than the problem”.
First, cite that a significant number of “dead” voters have voted anywhere. Second, an ID doesn’t even necessarily solve it (particularly a non-photo one). Imagine Saint Cad’s proposed solution. My dad dies and still gets an ID mailed to him. I use that ID to vote in his precinct. Of course this is even easier to do absentee.
Most states require some sort of ID. As I’ve said, MO requires one but there are many valid ones (including both the government-provided voter ID card and something as simple as a utility bill). This seems like the best approach as it eliminates the vastest potential frauds (voting multiple times in multiple places) with the smallest risk of causing someone not to vote.
It doesn’t appear that any of the proponents of this have addressed my points in post #65.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14864321&postcount=65
Can anyone dispute my logic? (Asking for a ride to the polls doesn’t count.)
So, since there will be counting errors anyway, who cares if some people are voting illegally?
That website gives a state by state breakdown of dead voters in 2008. From one state:
“Madison County, Mississippi has 123% more registered voters than people over the age of 18. 486 people on the list of registered voters are over 105.”
Most states listed have hundreds of dead voters.
EDIT…
You’re assuming each fraudulent vote is an isolated incident. As I said above, each state has hundreds of instances of fraudulent votes. I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to consider that some of that is organized.
It sounds like you are in favor of some kind of ID as opposed to no ID at all.
All this proves is that nobody is taking the dead off the voter rolls. Unless someone impersonates a dead person, no election fraud is taking place.
Try to follow. If the number of fraudulent votes is significantly less than the inherent error in the voting system then there is no problem to be solved. A system that took the fraudulent vote count to zero would be no more reliable than the current system. In fact, it would be worse because any such system would inevitable cause some non-zero number of would-be voters to fail to vote (either because they lack ID or they are discouraged by the hassle of getting one). Hence, “the cure is worse than the disease”.
That was not the data requested. I asked for a cite that dead people actually voted (or, obviously, someone voted by representing themselves as a dead person). That is what I think doesn’t actually happen in any significant number.
Sure. I have no problem with requiring some form of proof that you are who you say you are. I think the current situation in MO is perfectly reasonable - come up with anything that has your name and address on it and you’re golden. That discourages large-scale outright fraud (because you’d have to come up with something with all those names and addresses on it) while minimizing the inconvenience. I also don’t have a problem with a no-ID system simply because I don’t think there is a problem to be addressed in the first place. But, at least in this case, the compromise position seems the sane one.
Photo ID? No, simply because there are a non-trivial number of people that don’t have one. And it has very little benefit over the non-photo ID systems in exchange for the increases number of eligible voters discouraged.
May I just add to this, by noting that these false votes have to happen at a live voting location, and not through absentee ballot.
For all the interest in fixing the problem, there has been frightfully little work done to size the problem.
Way to simplify things and miss the point! Overall magnitude does count. Jas09’s point is that the number of illegal votes, that would be prevented by ID laws, is to small to make a difference.
All of your examples are of dead people still on the voter rolls. That is not the same thing as “dead voters”, which are dead people who actually had a vote cast in their name.
To be fair, your link does mention some irregularities in some areas of California where people appear to have voted after they died. The officials cited all say that this was probably some sort of administrative error. Certainly, it’s conceivable that individuals stood in line and voted in place of the dead people, but the risks to the individual of doing this are so high compared to the benefit that I’m much more inclined to believe that the problem was either bookkeeping errors or some kind of inside job (which wouldn’t be prevented by ID laws).
In any case, the remedy to the issue of dead voters is to keep the rolls more up to date. ID laws don’t eliminate election officials stuffing the ballot with dead voters.
Ok, but if this:
Why this?
If the problem is zero, why require any ID at all?
The link mentions examples of hundreds of votes cast by dead people in certain counties in CA and TX.
I agree. Unless a photo ID is provided free of charge to those who don’t have a driver’s license, I have no problem with requiring a non-photo form of ID. But there are states who require nothing at all.
What would? Is there evidence of this being a significant problem or is it just a red herring?
I don’t know that there is much evidence, but people are bringing up the issue of “dead voters” so I’m addressing it.
Barkis is Willin’ did link to an article that cited some evidence of votes being recorded in dead people’s names, but it’s hard to say whether or not those were administrative errors.
Compromise. Used to happen pretty often when two sides disagreed about something. Harder to find these days.
One side says “Photo ID”, other side says “No ID”, we compromise on “Non-photo ID”. See how easy that is?
The problem is that many states are taking that compromise and pushing harder. Texas, as one example, currently requires non-photo ID. They pushed for a strict Photo ID law. Justice denied them pre-clearance (rightfully, in my opinion).
When non-photo ID is already required in a state, and one party is pushing for strict photo ID, I find it hard to see anything other than a partisan effort to make it harder for the other party’s voters to cast ballots.
My personal preference is taking the voter’s word for it - I think the easier it is to vote the better. In fact, I think one of the best recent inventions is early voting. One might notice a similar trend in that states with newly-found GOP majorities (or GOP governors) are now pushing to curtail early voting as well. Coincidence?
Heck, change the vote from a Tuesday to a whole weekend - a 48-hour period from Friday at 5 p.m. to Sunday at 5 p.m. to make the process even easier. What’s the need for the big one-day rush, anyway, after 18-plus months of campaigning?
No coincidence at all. A number of states are attempting to enact things like voter ID laws, laws curtailing early voting, laws chilling voter registration efforts, etc. As far as I know, none of them are not GOP majority.
I find it interesting that we suddenly have this flurry of Republican supported voter ID laws following the release of ALEC’s model Voter ID Act.
http://alecexposed.org/w/images/d/d9/7G16-VOTER_ID_ACT_Exposed.pdf
Why is a corporate front like ALEC suddenly so interested in state voting regulations?
Well… My state just passed it. :mad:
It’ll be tied up in the courts for a while.
Maybe we should organize ID drives similar to voter registration drives - help people obtain IDs. If we do they’ll probably try and outlaw it or something.
I guess we could legally focus on one party and refuse to help those of another, since it’s not voter registration. 