[blackflame7001]

Then why are Democrats against showing an ID to prove you are who you say you are? Why are Democrats OK with allowing ballot harvesting in California when the election in North Carolina was invalidated for the same reason?

[akhilcacharya]

For the record, showing an ID would __not__ help with the sort of absentee ballot shenanigans that took place in NC9 (which was election fraud not voter fraud). If anything, it doesn't do anything at all - it's elections security theater.

[mikeash]

Because there’s no significant amount of fraud occurring that ID requirements would fix, and ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups.

[daenz]

>ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups

It's interesting to hear what those "certain groups" think about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odB1wWPqSlE

[mikeash]

A video with anecdotes, this is sure to be worth my time!

[daenz]

Saying that the thoughts of people affected by policies you claim to support isn't "worth your time" really undermines the idea that you have their best interests in mind.

[mikeash]

I don’t have the time or resources to interview all 235 million eligible voters in the US. I’ll have to rely on others to sample them. Any sample comes with the potential for bias or error so it needs to be done well. I see no reason to think that this four-minute video, whose description says it has interviews with people from Harlem, comes even remotely close. Am I wrong?

[daenz]

>Am I wrong?

You're conflating a scientific study on who does and does not have a valid ID with what people think about people assuming they have no ID because of their skin color. They're orthogonal concepts.

All of the black people interviewed in that video found it ignorant and offensive that people assume that because they're black, they likely don't have ID or know how to get ID, and the white liberals had no problem making broad, negative assumptions about black people, if it supported their political views. That's the point I'm trying to make.

[runako]

TL;DR; this 5-minute video polls each individual in those groups to get their opinion. It therefore presents a comprehensive survey of voter attitudes in the affected populations.

It definitely does not ridiculously poll a handful of able-bodied people on the street to get their opinions.

[blackflame7001]

Your comment makes no sense in context with the original article. Why would someone spend all the time and effort to hack voting machines when they can just walk up look at the list and pick a name without a signature and say yup thats me. Ive worked at a poll it just a list with peoples names sitting on a table

[tomjakubowski]

Those attacks don't scale at all and could only be a concern for local elections in small towns and the like.

[blackflame7001]

Neither does machine tampering because they are not networked.

[Nerdfest]

One person with a USB key can change many votes on a single machine.

[mikeash]

Because you have to be physically present in order to do that, and nobody wants to risk getting thrown in jail if they pick a name that’s already voted, or that the poll worker happens to know.

[blackflame7001]

How else would you do it on a machine not connected to the internet?

[mikeash]

You could pull a Stuxnet and create malware that would spread over whatever devices are used to program the voting machines. I believe they typically just use standard USB thumb drives, and are notoriously insecure.

However, the article talks about "election systems" which encompasses much more than just voting machines. Voter registration records are a prime target and those are usually (always?) connected to the internet. You don't need to actually alter any votes to swing an election. Just delete or alter the registrations of some people who you know will tend to vote the other way.

[FakeComments]

Can you cite something to support that?

It sounds like a just-so claim: it’s not really a problem, and the people complaining are just bad people!

As far as I’m aware, not only is there not accurate study — jurisdictions like Washington intentionally make it difficult to track whether non-citizens are voting by issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship. This is why WA has to have enhanced ID — they don’t meet the federal standards of ensuring people they issue ID to are here legally.

It seems strange that people refuse to even talk about it and resort to nasty ad hominems if there genuinely is no issue.

By contrast, insulting the motivations of people genuinely trying to stand up for the law and act with integrity because you decided to employ force and just override them is deeply, unrecoverably immoral.

[kevingadd]

Go look for citations to support your claim that voter ID is needed and identity fraud is pervasive in elections. It'll be hard to find some, because historically it just doesn't happen.

It'd be one thing to put those laws in place in response to pervasive fraud, but historically we just have lawmakers explicitly saying they did it to reduce voter turnout which is... kind of a mistake.

Whether or not ID is issued to non-citizens is a massively different issue. People need ID for all sorts of stuff - that doesn't mean everyone with ID is automatically going out there and skipping work to stand in line to vote.

[andrewla]

> because historically it just doesn't happen

I understand the objections to voter ID based on unequal access to acceptable identification.

But I don't understand the "it just doesn't happen" argument. This kind of voter fraud seems like it would be nearly impossible to detect. I guess you could look at how often ballots are spoiled because of signature mismatches or incidences of "the registry shows that you already voted".

It seems like once voter id laws are passed, any laws or regulations limiting access to ID are de facto challengeable under the Equal Protection principle.

[mikeash]

It's trivial to find if you look for it. It's difficult to do with 100% accuracy on election day, but it's easy to find large-scale instances of it afterwards. Consider the various scenarios for the sort of voter fraud that ID requirements would prevent:

1. A person votes using the name of another registered voter. This will be detected any time the registered voter in question also casts a vote. Typically, the second person voting with the same registration will immediately be flagged and told they can't vote because they already voted. Worst case, you find it afterwards by seeing that they "voted twice." This can also be detected in cases where the registered voter didn't cast a vote by asking them whether they actually voted, and seeing who says "no" when the records say "yes."

2. A person votes using the name of a stale registration for a voter who moved away. This can be detected by seeing if the person still actually lives in the area.

3. A person votes using the name of a dead person. Detected by comparing with death records.

4. A non-citizen registers and votes using their own name. You can see who voted and check to see if they really are citizens.

Despite this, there is no evidence of any large-scale voter fraud. Known instances number in the single or at most double digits per year, nationwide. If it's happening, then it must be because nobody has ever gone looking for it. Note that the necessary evidence is all public information, so it's not just a matter of governments not looking for what they don't want to see. You'd have to propose that no university political science research group, no think tank, no public policy center, no lobbyist group, and no political party has ever gone looking for it either. And even if somehow that were true, that voter fraud is a major issue that nobody has ever gone searching for, then the best thing you can say is that these onerous and often discriminatory laws are being passed on the basis of no data, when data could be readily obtained!

[kevingadd]

I apologize for being inaccurate, your final point is the argument I was trying to make. There are examples, but they are double digits. Effectively a rounding error.

[andrewla]

I'm not so sure that gathering this data is as easy as you're making it out to be.

> 1. A person votes using the name of another registered voter

I'm not aware of any comprehensive analysis of how common this is. Ballots are frequently rejected or require provisional ballot (I had to fill out a provisional ballot once in NYC because someone had voted my ballot; no fraud in this case (probably) since the signature in my box was one of the neighboring lines in the book) but I can't find anything definitive saying how often this particular event happens.

> 2. A person votes using the name of a stale registration for a voter who moved away. This can be detected by seeing if the person still actually lives in the area.

This analysis I think is never done; analyses of voter registration routinely show huge numbers of voters who are no longer at the registered address. Once again, no proof here that anything is problematic with this, but I'm not aware of any comprehensive analyses of the scope of the problem (that is, some notion of how often these voted or had a second registration that voted, effectively voting twice. This could theoretically be targeted since voter rolls are semi-public-ish.

> 3. A person votes using the name of a dead person. Detected by comparing with death records.

This is harder than it sounds because people often share names with deceased people, and even addresses for familiar relations. Death records are not always comprehensive, especially if the individual has been deceased for a while. I've seen a couple of one-off analyses on these [1] but nothing that makes me confident that we have a grasp on the scope of the issue.

> 4. A non-citizen registers and votes using their own name

I'm not sure how you'd measure this one at all - in some ways this is the least significant because there are plenty of circumstances where aliens are permitted to vote in local, municipal, or state elections.

We have plenty of laws around preventing electioneering, voter intimidation, vote selling, etc., a voter id law does not seem substantially worse than these for identifying specific voting problems that are difficult to otherwise detect. Motor voter laws ensure that almost every licensed driver is a registered voter. I've seen estimates as low as .3-.6% of registered voters lack a photo id (in states that have instituted an affidavit-based exception to voter id laws); this seems like a small enough number to make me comfortable with voter id laws.

[1] https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/2-investigators-chic...

[js2]

Purely from a logistical standpoint, it would be difficult to commit voter fraud in large enough numbers to make a difference in most elections, and get away with it.

An individual here or there might manage to vote more than once by, say, impersonating someone they know won't vote (deceased, moved away, etc), but that's unlikely to make a difference.

To make a difference, it would need to be coordinated and large scale. So how do you round up a sufficient number of people, convince them all to vote illegally, and then keep quiet about it? How do you get them to all the different polling places? How do you ensure that whomever they are voting in place of on the voter rolls is both eligible to vote and hasn't already voted?

Now I'm only going by my voting district. Here, you either absentee vote, early vote, or vote in your precinct. Regardless, you have to give your name, address and signature. They then check you against the voter rolls and record that you've voted. Presumably if I tried to vote again, they'd know I'd already recorded a vote, when and where.

To prevent conflicts, you'd have to in addition commit large scale registration fraud.

Maybe I'm just not sufficiently clever, but whenever I've thought through this, I haven't figure out how it could work.

[andrewla]

It seems unlikely to be able to get the scale required without someone spilling the beans or accidentally getting caught. But things like voter intimidation and vote buying are illegal and we have structural remedies to (attempt to) prevent those. Of 9 million voters in Texas, only 16,000 did not present ID [1] and had to fill out affidavits. I'm unconvinced that the harm of voter id laws is sufficient to balance the peace of mind that we would get by closing up a potential form of voter fraud.

[1] http://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2019-01/fraga...

[kevingadd]

Many crimes are impossible to detect. That isn't a valid argument for going after crimes in a way that has a proven negative impact on democracy.

The ID laws are already challenged, but the nature of our courts means they remain in place for years while the gears of justice turn.

[andrewla]

The proven negative impact of the voter id laws, as far as I know, is very small. Michigan had .3% non-id voters, and Texas had ~.01% non-id voters. Both states allow voters to fill out an affidavit. These stats were just found offhand, I'm not sure if there's a comprehensive review.

So we have a small proven negative impact on democracy from voter id laws, and a small unproven negative impact from their absence; I don't think it's unreasonable to prevent a crime that is easily preventable under those circumstances.

[blackflame7001]

Go look for Russian collusion, “it’ll be hard to find some, because historically it just doesn't happen”

Still satisfied with your argument?

[FireBeyond]

> jurisdictions like Washington intentionally make it difficult to track whether non-citizens are voting by issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship. This is why WA has to have enhanced ID — they don’t meet the federal standards of ensuring people they issue ID to are here legally.

You are not automatically registered to vote just because you have a WA driver license. I moved here from Australia, got my DL, doesn't mean in any way shape or form that I can vote as a permanent resident, nor can I register.

[FakeComments]

> > offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship

> You are not automatically registered to vote just because you have a WA driver license.

I find it interesting you didn’t actually critique what I said.

In my experience, that’s common with people who hold your position.

There was also no attempt to reply with actual facts: just more fallacious arguments when they were called out about making an unsupported claim and ad hominem —

> Because there’s no significant amount of fraud occurring that ID requirements would fix, and ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups.

That’s what HN groupthink is: unsupported facts and ad hominems in support, downvotes and strawman responses to people who disagree.

[FireBeyond]

You said:

> issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship

Washington state doesn't "offer to register you to vote based on you getting a Washington Driver's License". WA DOL on Voter Registration:

"You will be required to show that you are:

- A citizen of the United States.

- A legal resident of Washington State and have lived at your address for at least 30 days before the election.

- At least 18 years old when you vote.

- Not under Department of Corrections supervision for a Washington felony conviction.

and

- Not disqualified from voting due to a court order."

So your statement that Washington is "offering to register people to vote "sans additional proof of citizenship" is factually false.

So, absolutely did I critique what you said. It's wrong.

Washington's Drivers License does not meet federal standards because it doesn't require citizenship or residency _to be issued_, not because they're registering or offering to register non-citizens to vote (because the Fed governments solution to that would be to ignore that actual issue, and just say it doesn't meet Fed ID requirements, sure).

"Fallacious arguments" - I quoted the WA DOL. Where is your source that the refusal to accept the state DL federally is due to "voter registration of non-citizens"? As it is, Washington ALSO offers the Enhanced Drivers License which _does_ meet federal requirements, showing citizenship proof, primarily used for land travel to Canada.

[throwaway5752]

Ballot harvesting is not de facto bad. It can help increase turnout with indigent, disabled, and elderly.

However, what happen in North Carolina was 1) ballot harvesting 2) alteration of the harvested ballots. They picked up the ballots and then changed the ballots they collected

Did that happen in California?

[akhilcacharya]

(It didn't!)

The results in NC-9 are also incredibly suspicious even back down to the Republican primary.

[jerf]

"(It didn't!)"

How do you know?

And moreover, why should I know that?

Elections have no purpose if nobody trusts the results afterwards. That dominates all other concerns about elections, because if you don't have that, your election with all the other desirable characteristics is still just so much wasted time.

[kevingadd]

Assuming ballots were modified is kind of a weird stance to take, isn't it? I mean, you're welcome to assume it, but we don't have many historical cases of it happening until recently. It'd be one thing to assume it by default in every state if we knew there was a long history of it happening everywhere... instead we seem to be treating the possibility as an excuse for making it harder for citizens to vote. Weird how that works.

We could always verify the ballots after the fact if you're really concerned that every absentee ballot is being forged.

[jerf]

"Assuming ballots were modified is kind of a weird stance to take, isn't it?"

No, it's perfectly sensible stance to take. The stakes are enormous and the idea that everyone's just so peachy-keen on fair play that we don't have to structure the system to be robust against hostile modification is refuted merely by stating the case. Just bring up whoever are your political bogeymen and ask yourself if they're that moral. The answer is no, obviously. They're the bad guys.

(Besides, didn't we just spend two years agreeing that the Russians were deeply involved with our elections in all sorts of nefarious ways? Now suddenly elections are all totally safe and anyone who questions it is obviously racist and just wants to keep the brown people from voting. You'll pardon me if I can't keep up with all the shifts in the Official Opinions. I'm sure no Russians have looked at our remote ballots and thought about what they could do with it. Or whomever else you like.)

In addition to the first-order security concerns around getting a fair ballot count, there's also the second-order concerns that elections must not just be fair, but have all the appearance of being fair. They don't appear fair when the ballots are filled in, and then disappear from the pipeline for arbitrary periods of time, only to re-appear somewhere else. Even if the system is stipulated to be entirely fair, when the loser (who could be the Good Guys, you know, because obviously the Bad Guys are waaay more likely to cheat than the Good Guys) says "Hey, the vote may have been manipulated!", how do you prove them right or wrong?

Personally, I have my own conspiracy theory which is that it rather suits our Powers that Be that the increasing number of absentee ballots and similar voting "options" makes the elections easier to forge, and citing "oh, what if poor suffering people don't get to vote?" is a rather convenient cudgel for them to pick up and hit anyone who wants to ensure security in voting with.

[kevingadd]

The fact that these necessary options for making the vote accessible might be exploited does not justify getting rid of them. Many, many people cannot or will not get to a polling booth, especially given how many unreasonable constraints our government puts on voting.

It's simply not acceptable to sacrifice accessibility on the altar of 'election integrity', especially when we don't have enough evidence to prove it's necessary.

I agree that making elections not only fair but visibly fair is important. If anything, lowering accessibility like this might reduce faith in elections.

I'm not arguing in favor of e-voting or un-validated ballots here. It's simply unreasonable to disenfranchise that many people on what is basically a (in all fairness to you, very plausible) conspiracy theory. We have too much of that going on in 2019 as-is.

[fzeroracer]

The entire point is that identity fraud is hardly any issue in elections. That's why, to use your own terms, 'the powers that be' usually are in favor of stringent voter ID requirements. They can disenfranchise entire groups of people without being afraid of having to do more unsavory things which could potentially get them caught committing fraud like in say...North Carolina.

After all, it's not fraud if it's law. How convenient if the law only affects people that vote for the opposite party, too. Security is in many ways used as a buzzword. Not in attempt to actually improve election security, but to appeal to people's fears of illegal immigrants somehow showing up in the millions to vote illegally and what not.

[kevingadd]

Identity fraud when voting basically doesn't happen. We're talking dozens of cases in a given election, even when people investigate it.

There are other kinds of fraud that are pervasive (like harvesting absentee ballots and modifying/discarding them) and those should be policed, but voter ID laws historically do literally nothing except punish people who don't have access to ID - like people whose birth certificates burned up in a fire, or people whose nearest DMV office is hours away.

We have decades of evidence that voter ID is a waste of time and money. It has one very obvious reason. It also seems to be pretty close to illegal, if not illegal.

[everdev]

Wild guess -- Rep. & Dem. political parties are more motivated by self-serving interests than guided by any sustained principles.

Both will easily flip on war, justice, tax reform, voting, etc. as needed.

Part of the problem is it's easy to complain and spitball ideas when you're out of power, it's a lot more complex to gain consensus and implement policy when you're in power.

[dashundchen]

Republicans are definitely not interested in enfranchising eligible voters, especially demographics they think will vote against them, and it shows:

Whether it's removing polling places where demographics work against them [0], purging voter rolls with a heavy bias against black voters [1], placing polling places in gated communities [2], cutting down polling places in cities, onerous requirements to obtain a voter ID [4](essentially becoming a poll tax), or refusing to renew and update the Voting Rights act, it's clear the Republican party is not interested in allowing every legal citizen the right to vote.

[0] https://lawandcrime.com/civil-rights/gop-removes-sole-pollin...,

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/georgia-black-voter-regist...

[2]https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/politics/elections/south-f...

[3] https://www.texasobserver.org/election-identification-certif...

[4] https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Amendment-4-Former-Felon...

[5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-have-a-secret-weap...

[pfranz]

This is just anecdotal, but the individuals I've talked to seem to mirror this. I'm imprinting my own perceptions of this, but it's often an elitism that populism (following the will of the majority) is self destructive and there's this privileged class that knows better--whether that's a certain class of voters (people responsible enough to hold an ID) or a political class.

When I try and dig in, their opinions seem very shallow and self serving. I don't think their idea, in concept, is entirely without merit. Senators used to be elected by the state legislature because the intention was they represent the state's interest, not necessarily the voter's. Things like capping the House has really skewed representation and the Electoral College...which has undermined any "genius" that might have been intended by the EC. These otherwise well-read people don't seem interested in these problems, they're just supportive of the approaches you describe.

[aaomidi]

Most democrats are fine with an ID if it's given free of charge and the transportation and loss of wages for the day are covered.

[akhilcacharya]

Speaking for myself, I'm not. There's no evidence that they're necessary, and in many states where they are mandated including my home state they were biased against individuals that usually don't vote for Republicans - in the case of NC the law was designed to "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision" [0] according to the courts.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693...

[aaomidi]

Which is my point of remove the bias of getting an ID and then it's fine.

In its current state it's not fine and shouldn't be pushed.

[kevingadd]

It's absolutely important to separate the concept of 'requiring ID to vote' and the concept of 'encouraging everyone to have ID', as you point out. ID is useful for many different things. Voter ID laws have an obvious historical impact and can be assumed bad at this point, but we shouldn't allow that to turn us negative on IDs in general. They're too essential in modern society.

[codegrappler]

How would you design an unbiased ID system?

[runako]

Some ideas for a baseline:

0) Many states that require ID to vote are moving in the direction of permit less carry for firearms. (I think GA, where I live, has the condition that a permit is required but officials are not allowed to request it.)

An unbiased system would recognize that if permitless is sufficient for carrying firearms, it should be sufficient for voting.

0') Recognize that filing other official documents does not require ID. Notably, tax filings do not require any kind of ID, yet the information contained in them is considered extremely sensitive (e.g. knowing the AGI from a form is considered sufficient authentication in some government interactions).

Recognize that many citizens of voting age simply do not need an ID. If you don't buy alcohol, fly on a plane, or drive, your need for ID becomes vanishingly low. If you just do basic stuff like go to the grocery store, physician, and park, you may find that you never need an ID.

So again, do not require ID for this fundamental exercise of participation in government.

1) Accept all federal and state-issued IDs. States have a habit of cherry-picking, for example by accepting firearms licenses and not student IDs. That means accepting student IDs from public universities, among other things.

2) Make the provision of ID the responsibility of the government. That is: IDs should be free to acquire and free to replace. Acquisition of IDs should not be biased against the homebound by e.g. requiring a citizen to present herself in a government office at any time to obtain one. Social Security cards function according to these rules, so our government has known how to do this for generations.

3) Grandfather existing citizens. The last slave in the US died barely 40 years ago; there are likely millions of people born in situations where birth certificates may not have been issued. Pre-computer records were destroyed from time to time. The onus is on the government to track citizens, not the other way around (ref: US Constitution). So there needs to be a way to (transparently, without effort on the citizen's part) get ID to people like my uncle, who has lived in the same place for ~70 years no matter whether he can produce his birth certificate.

The basic problem is once you do all that, you defeat the goals of the modern voter ID project. So there's no reason to aim for an unbiased ID system here. Either aim for the real goals (which require bias) or don't implement voter ID.

[jakeogh]

If someone is in the US, I want them to have effective tools to defend life.

If they are not eligible to vote, then obviously we do not them voting. It's one of the few situations where identity really matters.

[runako]

> If someone is in the US, I want them to have effective tools to defend life.

Historically, representative government has been one of the most effective tools to defend life in the US.

> If they are not eligible to vote

ID checks do not verify eligibility at the time of voting. I can show up with a perfectly valid driver's license and be ineligible to vote for any number of reasons (I am a convicted felon, I am not eligible to vote in this county because I moved and my new license is still being processed, I renounced my citizenship this morning, etc.)

Going the other way -- a person who becomes eligible to vote just in time to cast a legitimate ballot may have trouble producing a valid picture ID confirming this status in time for the election.

[amanaplanacanal]

Fully in favor of universal voter ID. It should be issued by the federal government to all US citizens of voting age. It's letting individual states decide what ID they will accept that's the problem.

Unfortunately there is no way that Republicans would agree to it. I don't know if Democrats would or not.

[8note]

democrats are against ID laws because the government and employers together have made it too difficult to get an ID for the working class