[pistle]

I'm not going to get into parsing the video you watched, but the source raises monumental red flags when it comes to any sort of journalistic integrity. Project Veritas is the same folks who did the widely discredited hack-editing to swat at Planned Parenthood and ACORN. They are partisan hacks well-understood to be either the pot or the kettle.

To your point on American, entrenched parties controlling and applying many of the levers of power, that is mostly a forgone conclusion. The only way out is for one party to splinter cleanly and then the other could as well. The parties seed, raise, and harvest grist for the mills to feed the party itself.

I would suggest massive voter fraud is not feasible. There are many quality checks that limit the potential. There are disconnects in how many Americans think about the registration and voting process which, when played out, inspire suspicions or contempt. Busing voters, encouraging political engagement from the religious pulpit, etc. We have or can get the data. Between census, voter roles, etc. Fraud can be detected and surfaced - but it rarely is.

Also, all sober reviews of voting has supported the argument that the ID issue follows the narrative that one tribe is trying to apply ID laws to disenfranchise to their benefit and the other is trying to enfranchise to their benefit. Nobody stakes a purer claim to virtue on the matter. But, in a democracy enfranchisement > disenfranchisement, so in this case, Democrats are in closer alignment with the spirit of democracy.

In terms of how and why voter ID is being used in recent US cycles, review North Carolina where they collected and applied data on voter access to certain types of valid ID (there are multiple) and then applied that data for max political effect. It's a turf war. You won't find Republicans arguing to hand out voter ID's or making it trivial to get them. Just picking certain forms of ID to make it more cumbersome for certain people to vote.

[trendia]

I would like to propose the following counter-argument: not everyone who supports voter ID is doing so because they want to disenfranchise a certain class of voter; not everyone who opposes voter ID wants to commit fraud.

From there, we can assume that there is a reason to have Voter ID, and that is that it prevents a certain type of disenfranchisement: the dilution of your vote because someone else votes twice. That is, Voter ID ensures that nobody gets more than the 1 vote they are allotted in a Democracy.

There have been successful voter ID laws, and they usually are successful because they are bipartisan. Specifically, in Crawford v. Marion, the Supreme Court found that it was legal to have a voter ID law that included

(1) the ability to vote up to 30 days before the election at a courthouse, and

(2) free voter ID.

Further, the plaintiffs were unable to provide a single case of anyone who was unable to vote as a result of this law.

So, while voter ID is currently a controversial and partisan topic, it doesn't need to be: it is possible to both ensure that people only vote once, and ensure that they also get to vote.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawford_v._Marion_County_Elec...

[evgen]

If the inconvenience is greater than the reward why go to the effort? What you claim to be a certain type of disenfranchisement is more commonly known as voter fraud, and the sort of voter fraud which showing an ID at the polling place seeks to combat DOES NOT HAPPEN. Prove that there is a problem before you seek to erect any additional roadblock between the citizenry and the polling booth.

[trendia]

> Prove that there is a problem ..

Why is it that people who oppose Voter ID are able to provide hypotheticals without any evidence, but people who support it have huge requirements for evidence? I sense that the anti-Voter ID crowd uses the following arguments:

Step 1: Deny that a problem exists

Step 2: Deny that the evidence exists

Step 3: Pretend that you are still correct

http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2016/10/18/state-alleges-...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/17/no-voter-fra...

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/...

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/electi...

https://www.rt.com/usa/363097-texas-investigation-voter-frau...

[jshevek]

> Why is it that people who oppose Voter ID are able to provide hypotheticals without any evidence, but people who support it have huge requirements for evidence?

One side is claiming racism. We are such a vigorously anti-racist society, claims of racism dramatically tilt the field.

[evgen]

I think you mean that one side is showing over and over in court that the objective of those pushing strict voter ID laws is to disenfranchise poor and minority voters and therefore any such restrictions have a high bar to cross.

[trendia]

I think you mean that the Supreme Court has found that Voter ID laws, properly enforced, do not impose an excessive burden [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawford_v._Marion_County_Elec...

[evgen]

Sorry, not even going to try to deal with propagandist mouthpieces like RT or freep, but lets look at the others.

What you have are _concerns_ about voter registration and indications that some people may have submitted multiple mail-in votes. Please note that none of the cases mentioned in these articles touched in-person voting. They primarily talking about things like dead people still being on voter registration rolls (because dead people have this annoying habit of not filling out the paperwork to properly close accounts after the die it seems), cases where registration information does not match data on other government databases (because we all know that data entry is a perfect science and so any case where we have two different records for the same person is obviously a case of attempted fraud), and a few cases of people who submitted absentee or mail-in ballots and then also voted in person.

Lots of 'alleged', a few instances of 'concern' regarding what might possibly happen, and a small handful of cases where voting other than in-person polling was abused.

In short, you have a big, fat, nothingburger. Over the billions of ballots cast in the past decade this is the best you can do I guess, which proves my point that this is not a problem.

[trendia]

You have yet to prove that there are instances where Voter ID laws led to disenfranchisement, yet you require that everyone who supports Voter ID provide immense evidence that you will accept.

But you will never accept any evidence, because you have already convinced yourself that it's not a problem, and thus don't have to provide any evidence yourself.

[evgen]

It has been shown repeatedly, but I will just link you to a nice story by the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...) regarding the 4th Circuit Court utterly destroying the North Carolina voter ID law a couple of months ago as being strictly about disenfranchisement of poor and minority voters. If you read the ruling (linked to in the article) the court shows exactly how the conditions of the law were decided and evidence that such conditions were specifically aimed to disenfranchise these voters.

I do not need to dig hard to provide such evidence because the courts are doing quite well at digging them up. On the other hand, you fail again and again to show that in-person voter fraud is actual a problem in this country. If you wish to create additional constraints on exercising a fundamental right I am sorry, but we are going to require you to actually make the case that these constraints are serving democracy and not just your desire to keep poor and minority voters out of the polling booth.