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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I'm sure it is as easy as I'm making it out to be. I don't mean that it's trivial in the sense that some random person like you or I could go out and figure this out for ourselves. But a research team with decent resources absolutely could. Pick 1,000 voter registrations at random. Check each one for all the things I listed. Come up with a good estimate for how pervasive voter fraud actually is. How much do you suppose such a study would cost?
I can't help but notice that you completely ignored my last paragraph. Do you really believe that nobody has ever attempted what I describe above? And if so, do you really believe it's wise to be passing these laws without doing the research first?
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.
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.
So election security theatre? Color me not convinced. We should be doing everything possible to increase voter turnout in the U.S.
I'll make you a deal. Let's do away with voting machines that don't produce a physical receipt, make voting day a national holiday, and setup automatic voter registration. As part of all that, I'm willing to concede a feel good voter ID measure.
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.
The incidence of voter fraud in the 2016 election was approximately 0.000003%.
Why do your numbers get labeled as "proven" and mine as "unproven"? You're eager to declare it to be impossible to figure out how pervasive voter fraud is based on imagined hypothetical difficulties, but you're eager to pull out numbers saying that ID requirements don't discourage people, despite obvious holes in the measurement (such as people who decided not to vote because they don't know about the affidavit).
> 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.
> > 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.
> 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.
It's interesting to hear what those "certain groups" think about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odB1wWPqSlE