GOP admits voter id laws will "allow" Romney to win

[SparkyJJO]

Requiring a valid ID to vote makes perfect sense. The only "voter disenfranchisement" caused by this is keeping illegals and dead people from voting (I'm referring to some democrats casting votes on behalf of deceased people in some elections years ago).

If you are legally allowed to vote, you will have an ID by then. It is required for other more mundane things after all.

The ONLY reason for people throw a fit over requiring ID to vote is because they want voter fraud (in their favor of course).

 

[Tom]

I would guess $0. Up here in Canada we require ID for voting and it doesn't seem to cause any problems.

Here's how voting in Canada works.
Voting is based on where you live. If you live at X street and Y avenue, you must vote at polling station Z. This is important because where you vote determines who you can vote for; different ridings have different candidates obviously. The polling stations will already have a giant list of people who are registered to vote in that area. People who live in the area but are not on the list can be added to the list at a moment's notice, and I had to do that last time.

1) Walk into the polling station and give them your government issued ID. You can either use a photo ID like a drivers license or you can use your social insurance card (like a SS card) and a piece of delivered mail that shows where you live.
2) They check the address on your ID or mail and verify that you are at the correct polling station. A couple months ago I was at the wrong one; the correct station was across the street. They put a check mark next to your name to indicate that you have voted, and then they give you a piece of paper.
3) You take the paper over to the cheap folding table that has some cheap cardboard on it that gives some privacy then mark the appropriate candidate with the pencil provided.
4) Take the marked ballot back to the people who gave you the paper.
5) Fold the paper in half and put it in the box; nobody else is allowed to see or touch your ballot.
6) Leave the polling station.


Maybe democrats see this as being some mind bogglingly complex problem. Paper and pencil? $20 folding tables? Senior citizens reading the address on your drivers license? Inconceivable!

You don't understand the issue. These new photo id laws are designed to exclude certain classes of people, the elderley, disabled, people who can't afford cars or live in cities where mass transit is sufficient to make a driver's licesne unnecessary.

Those people most likely trend Democratic. And even if a great deal of effort is expended to get them jumping through the new hoops, at least some of them will give up and no longer vote.

There is no fraud prevention purpose, voter fraud is virtually non-existent.

And specifically, people who have voted all their lives with a birth certificate, a social security card, and a piece of mail, such as you describe, can no longer vote in some United States.

 

[jackstar7]

It's painful to see people show up 10+ pages in and still be spouting the same tired shit.

 

[Tom]

Um, no. You may at best be 100% behind accurately counting the votes of whomever shows up to cast them, but since you're also 100% behind making sure we have no way to verify identity or eligibility, you are definitely not in favor of making sure elections are honest.

An honest election would require, at a minimum:
1) Making sure every voter is eligible to vote.
2) Making sure every person casting a vote is the actual voter she claims to be.
3) Making sure that every person who becomes ineligible to vote is removed from the roles and that no one who happens to have the same (or a similar) name is not removed.
4) Using paper ballots which can be counted by machine but also recounted by hand.
5) Allowing NO copying of ballots, or altering of ballots, for any reason. (That is why we have Senator Franken - at least one county copied ballots that they deemed in bad shape and then added them with the "bad ballots". Amazingly, a judge ruled that the new total, counting the original ballots as well as the new copied ballots, be counted as the official ballots.)
6) Requiring that any interpreted ballots (i.e. hanging chads) take a unanimous decision to be counted.
7) Keeping at all times rigid control and bi-partisan overwatch of all voting machines, voter registrations, ballots, ballot boxes, etc. at all times until the count is official, AND keeping all this on video.
8) Allowing each party no more than one lawyer per county, so that a party cannot swamp local officials with minutia in attempts to wrongly disqualify voters likely to vote for the other party.
9) Running some (preferably all) of a precinct's ballots through a second machine to verify the totals.
10) Requiring mandatory stiff jail terms for violation of rules. An election official caught with a voting machine in his car, as in Broward County in 2000, needs to spend five years in federal prison.

Nothing you've posted refutes the point you were refuting, namely that photo id has nothing to do with stopping voter fraud.

 

[trenchfoot]

It's painful to see people show up 10+ pages in and still be spouting the same tired shit.

You ARE referring to folks from BOTH sides of this issue, yes? 😉

 

[lotus503]

The whole notion that ineligible voters sway general elections is comedic fallacy.

Anyone who thinks its a legitimate issue is a koolaid sipping puppet.

When someone is born in the USA they are auto registered for life, problem solved.

 

[SparkyJJO]

You don't understand the issue. These new photo id laws are designed to exclude certain classes of people, the elderley, disabled, people who can't afford cars or live in cities where mass transit is sufficient to make a driver's licesne unnecessary.

Those people most likely trend Democratic. And even if a great deal of effort is expended to get them jumping through the new hoops, at least some of them will give up and no longer vote.

There is no fraud prevention purpose, voter fraud is virtually non-existent.

And specifically, people who have voted all their lives with a birth certificate, a social security card, and a piece of mail, such as you describe, can no longer vote in some United States.

They might not have a driver's license but that doesn't mean they don't have any ID at all 🙄 As mentioned already you need ID for a bunch of other things so the vast majority of people are going to have an ID.

There are plenty of elderly people who vote republican too, in case you didn't realize.

Your "victimized voters" sob story doesn't hold water.

And yes, there HAS been voter fraud committed, from both sides. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.

 

[Tom]

Requiring a valid ID to vote makes perfect sense. The only "voter disenfranchisement" caused by this is keeping illegals and dead people from voting (I'm referring to some democrats casting votes on behalf of deceased people in some elections years ago).

If you are legally allowed to vote, you will have an ID by then. It is required for other more mundane things after all.

The ONLY reason for people throw a fit over requiring ID to vote is because they want voter fraud (in their favor of course).

You are just wrong on your facts. There are lots of people who don't have a photo id and have no need for one.

Requiring a photo id just means that some percentage of those people will stop voting.

And there's no magical fraud prevention you get with a photo id.
think about it logically, how could a photo id provide more reliable identification of a person and their current residence than the documents necessary to get the photo id in the first place ?

Its completely nonsensical for a fraud prevention purpose to accept a photo id but not accept the documents required to get a photo id.

All it is is an obstacle, a hurdle to make it a little more difficult to vote. And it is cynical for those of us who already have photo ids for the other reasons they are needed to impose a hurdle for those people who for whatever reason have no need for a photo id.

 

[glenn1]

You don't understand the issue. These new photo id laws are designed to exclude certain classes of people, the elderley, disabled, people who can't afford cars or live in cities where mass transit is sufficient to make a driver's licesne unnecessary.

Those people most likely trend Democratic. And even if a great deal of effort is expended to get them jumping through the new hoops, at least some of them will give up and no longer vote.

There is no fraud prevention purpose, voter fraud is virtually non-existent.

And specifically, people who have voted all their lives with a birth certificate, a social security card, and a piece of mail, such as you describe, can no longer vote in some United States.

So Canada and other places that require photo ID are doing it to suppress votes?

 

[trenchfoot]

You are just wrong on your facts. There are lots of people who don't have a photo id and have no need for one.

Requiring a photo id just means that some percentage of those people will stop voting.

And there's no magical fraud prevention you get with a photo id.
think about it logically, how could a photo id provide more reliable identification of a person and their current residence than the documents necessary to get the photo id in the first place ?

Its completely nonsensical for a fraud prevention purpose to accept a photo id but not accept the documents required to get a photo id.

All it is is an obstacle, a hurdle to make it a little more difficult to vote. And it is cynical for those of us who already have photo ids for the other reasons they are needed to impose a hurdle for those people who for whatever reason have no need for a photo id.

If the folks who introduced and passed these laws also required that any voters who were disdvantaged by these laws call their local city hall and have a mobile satellite hall drive to their residence and get the required documentation completed there on the spot, then I'd suredly believe that these laws were specifically meant to prevent fraud and only fraud.

At present, the disenfranchisement potential is unmistakeably there, built right into these laws, when these laws should have made it even easier for those that were disenfranchised to be able to vote. I mean, what better way to encourage folks to excersize their right to vote, yes?

Regrettably, such is not the case. And even when the folks who passed these laws were plainly made aware of the potential for disenfranchisement, they did nothing to alleviate the problem.

So, what can any person with an iota of common sense derive from this set of circumstances? I mean really....honestly now. We have the potential for having a win-win-best-of-both-worlds situation where we get to prevent fraud and encourage/make it easier for folks to vote.

edit - We also need to also ask ourselves why the only states that passed these laws are Repub controlled ones. Gee, I wonder why.

 

[bfdd]

It's neat that there are people in this thread who would love for the USA to be more like Canada in certain areas, namely health care. Yet those same people wouldn't like us to have similar voter identification laws? I'm willing to pay tax dollars to ensure free identification for all legal residents.

 

[nehalem256]

Regrettably, such is not the case. And even when the folks who passed these laws were plainly made aware of the potential for disenfranchisement, they did nothing to alleviate the problem.

You mean like making the IDs available for free?

edit - We also need to also ask ourselves why the only states that passed these laws are Repub controlled ones. Gee, I wonder why.

Probably because Democrats are courting the illegal immigrant vote. Or because they believe their constituency is made up of the senile elderly, criminals, and hobos?

 

[nehalem256]

Its completely nonsensical for a fraud prevention purpose to accept a photo id but not accept the documents required to get a photo id.

IF you read the thread you will note whining that people lack the necessary documents anyway.

EDIT: So why do we even have photo id at all then?

 

[simpletron]

No real point in making this argument. I've tried. I've used facts, numbers, studies, a half dozen different sources ... none of it works. But I'll try again.

Someone posted a link earlier, 21 million adults without ID. A link I found showed that in 2008 there were 169 million registered voters out of 212 million of voting age citizens. So 79.7 percent who are old enough are registered. So that leaves us 16.7 million registered voters estimated that would be affected by voter id laws, or 10% of the voting population. Now that would mean that voting fraud would have to occur at a rate of 10% to just break even. However studies that estimate voter fraud place the rate of occurrence between 0.0002 and 0.00004. If we use the higher estimate rate of 0.0002, then we have a rate of 1 fraudulent vote stopped for every 50,000 people we disenfranchise. Now lets make the case that somehow 90% of the people affected by voter id laws got an id on time for the election (a rate that is virtually impossible to expect to occur), then we'd have a rate of 1 fraudulent vote stopped for every 5000 people we disenfranchise.

None of this takes into account that the rates of voter fraud include absentee ballot fraud. And that voter id laws can't stop that, so the rate at which these voter id laws stop fraud is much lower. It should also be pointed out that absentee ballots are used much more heavily by Republican voters and that absentee ballot fraud favors the GOP.

Now, despite all those numbers, the talking heads in here will still make claims that can be mathematically proven to be bullshit. This may be why conservatives want to defund public education and ruin science classes, learning and education work against them.

You are giving a upper bound to disenfranchisement without a lower bound thus disenfranchisement could be 0 and has to be no more than 21 million.

Given that the number of registered voting age citizens exceed that of non-ID voting age citizens, I could assume that all non-ID voting age citizens didn't registered and therefore there would be no voter disenfranchisement. Your proportional assumption that is very poor given that some states require ID to register to vote and that most people register to vote at the same time as getting their driver license.

Until you provide a lower bound and since voting fraud has already shown a lower bound the ratio of disenfranchisement to fraud could be 0 to 10000.

 

[actuarial]

It's neat that there are people in this thread who would love for the USA to be more like Canada in certain areas, namely health care. Yet those same people wouldn't like us to have similar voter identification laws? I'm willing to pay tax dollars to ensure free identification for all legal residents.

You not only don't need photo ID, you don't need any ID at all to vote in Canada.

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e

 

[actuarial]

You mean like making the IDs available for free?

Are you willing to go out and get a voter ID card? Make identification based on voter ID cards only, no other form of identification allowed.

That's what the ID laws are asking of people: to go get identification that, to them, is only for the purpose of voting (assuming it's true that 10% of eligible voters do not currently possess the required ID).

 

[cybrsage]

Can not currently meet I guess would probably be more accurate.

Actually it is not more accurate. Some of them simply will not request the "we cannot find your birth certificate" report.

Let's frame this argument properly - would you be in favour of a national voter card? One in which you will need to get it to be allowed to vote, and that's the only reason for it. Your current ID would not be useful for the purposes of voting.

I have no problem with a national ID. Using it only to vote would be silly, as it would be a good form of photo ID which could be used to prove your identity. You could buy cigarettes and beer with it.

 

[nehalem256]

Are you willing to go out and get a voter ID card? Make identification based on voter ID cards only, no other form of identification allowed.

That's what the ID laws are asking of people: to go get identification that, to them, is only for the purpose of voting (assuming it's true that 10% of eligible voters do not currently possess the required ID).

Its only for voting assuming they never want to bank, hold a job, purchase alcohol, etc.

Although I guess your proposal would keep ACORN from falsifying voter records 😛

Actually it is not more accurate. Some of them simply will not request the "we cannot find your birth certificate" report.

I have no problem with a national ID. Using it only to vote would be silly, as it would be a good form of photo ID which could be used to prove your identity. You could buy cigarettes and beer with it.

Not to mention you could use it to get a job. Why is okay to force private employers to verify identity, but not okay for states to verify identity?

 

[cybrsage]

Bullshit! It is not at all easy to effectively forge a signature you're seen only once, upside down and from a distance. Once again, nonsense pulled straight from your rectum to support your false premise.

Maybe you just suck at forging or I am just awesome at it and think everyone else is too. I find it pretty easy.

Moreover, at least where I've voted, it doesn't work that way. I've always had to complete and sign my vote card first, then go to the table where they check the card against their voter rolls. Any precinct that doesn't do it that way today could easily prevent such imaginary forgeries by following that same practice.

PA does not do it that way. Another easy solution is to require the person prove they are who they say they are.

 

[werepossum]

You missed the far more important step zero; to make sure anyone eligible to vote has a fair chance to. I suspect the reason for this is the process you are advocating directly impinges upon this. Or is it still a fair election to you if thousands of American citizens are prevented from participating in democracy, just so long as they people who would have voted against the guy you like?

That's a fair point, but I suspect you and I vary greatly on the definition of a fair chance to vote. I'd describe it as a lack of significant government obstructions, you'd describe it as a lack of required effort. Why not just advocate that government be forced to travel to every citizen so that he or she can vote without leaving the home? That seems well nigh impossible for significant numbers of presumably Democrat voters, from the comments here. Oddly enough it appears that these same presumably Democrat voters for whom obtaining photo ID (a one time event) is roughly equivalent to climbing Mount Everest in a Speedo and SCUBA fins find no problem getting out to vote each election. Most odd . . .

Nothing you've posted refutes the point you were refuting, namely that photo id has nothing to do with stopping voter fraud.

That's not a point that needs refuting. The only issues are to what extent potential legal voters may be inconvenienced and even (if sufficiently trifling to be unable to get photo ID but also unable to vote via absentee ballot) disenfranchised, and whether or not the cost and aggravation (for those without photo ID now) is worth the benefit.

 

[jackstar7]

That's not a point that needs refuting. The only issues are to what extent potential legal voters may be inconvenienced and even (if sufficiently trifling to be unable to get photo ID but also unable to vote via absentee ballot) disenfranchised, and whether or not the cost and aggravation (for those without photo ID now) is worth the benefit.

The benefit being...?

 

[thraashman]

Its only for voting assuming they never want to bank, hold a job, purchase alcohol, etc.

Although I guess your proposal would keep ACORN from falsifying voter records 😛



Not to mention you could use it to get a job. Why is okay to force private employers to verify identity, but not okay for states to verify identity?

It's been a while since I opened a bank account, however the first account I opened was prior to my being 15 which means I opened it prior to getting a learning permit (my first government issued photo id). So you can open a bank account without a photo id.

The government I-9 form that employers use to verify your employment has a list of valid forms you can use. If you take something from List B (voter registration card) and List C (Social Security Card) then you have a form combination that meets the requirements for an I-9 and doesn't require a photo id. Not to mention people who work in family businesses and probably don't fill out that form to begin with. So you don't need a photo id to get a job.

And most states do not require id to buy alcohol. As recently as 2007 not a single state law required checking of an ID to purchase alcohol. Most businesses that check ID for everyone do it as a company policy to protect themselves because the only law most states have is you must be 21 and selling to underage is illegal.

Anything else you want to say that I can prove wrong? Because so far in this thread everything you've claimed has been proven wrong by someone.

 

[Pens1566]

You can absolutely get a job or open a bank account without a photo ID.

 

[Jhhnn]

It's neat that there are people in this thread who would love for the USA to be more like Canada in certain areas, namely health care. Yet those same people wouldn't like us to have similar voter identification laws? I'm willing to pay tax dollars to ensure free identification for all legal residents.

You not only don't need photo ID, you don't need any ID at all to vote in Canada.

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e

Pwned.

Yeh, I'm all in favor of making our voter ID laws more like Canada's...

 

[hal2kilo]

They might not have a driver's license but that doesn't mean they don't have any ID at all 🙄 As mentioned already you need ID for a bunch of other things so the vast majority of people are going to have an ID.

There are plenty of elderly people who vote republican too, in case you didn't realize.

Your "victimized voters" sob story doesn't hold water.

And yes, there HAS been voter fraud committed, from both sides. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.

The vast majority of election fraud is in the counting not the voting.