[brightball]

You can’t abolish the electoral college without standardized voting across all states. A single state or even county allowing frivolous or unverified voting can swing the entire election.

The EC provides a failsafe by capping the max impact of a single state in the event of an anomaly.

In other words, you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.

[cogman10]

Not an issue.

Voter fraud has been prosecuted, measured, and accounted for across the US. It basically never has any sort of impact on any election. There are 10s of instances of it each year. Far too few to swing any election.

That said, I'd be willing to accept voter ID with a few caveats

1. A national ID has to be provided to all voters. Charging people to vote shouldn't happen.

2. We need reform to polling location laws, it should be a violation of the law if it takes more than 10 minutes to get to a polling location in a district.

3. We need reform to location capacity, more than a 10 minute wait to vote should be against the law.

I'm fine if we want to require in person voting or whatever. I'm fine with paper ballots counted by machines. That said, there should be accommodations made for the old or disabled.

You could even make the problem of fraud moot if you have mandatory voting (or opting out of voting) so that every person is accounted for regardless. It'd make it much harder for anyone to "cheat" as there'd be pretty obvious statistical anomalies.

[brightball]

All of those caveats make perfect sense.

[cogman10]

Yeah. The main problem I have with voter integrity laws is they all seem to revolve around making voting harder. To me, it seems to be an effort to make it easier to throw away inconvenient votes.

Some laws, in particular signature matching, should be eliminated. With so little hand writing, I'd be shocked if almost anyone has consistent signatures now-a-days. Since there's such variability it makes it a lot easier to discard votes due more to prejudice and less due to an actual problem with someone's signature.

[darksaints]

Voter ID laws would not be a problem if said IDs were free. They’re not, and nobody that ever proposes such laws ever proposes a way to make IDs free, because they aren’t actually caring about election integrity, they only care about the practical disenfranchisement that would result from it.

[brightball]

Voter ID is supported by 82% of the US population. It’s virtually impossible to live in the US without ID.

Nonissue.

[brainwad]

This is not a problem in other western countries, so why would it be in the US? It sounds very much like post-hoc justification to me.

[striking]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Once you see it as a throughline of your conversations with people who have been steeped in the American culture for so long, it is hard to unsee.

[kelseyfrog]

> you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.

Sure we can. We can even do it right here. I'd never let someone tell me what I can and cannot talk about.

[throwaway85825]

Technically yes you can, but most everyone else will do a bit more scrutiny than you.