58 replies to this topic

[*Anastasia]

Voting is a right. But how do you determine whether the person voting actually HAS that right? What's to stop me from going to the neighboring state and voting?
 
This issue has always had me torn. On the one hand, I realize that voter fraud is not really a thing. And, as I said, I recognize that the real agenda behind voter ID laws, at least on the right, is disenfranchising poor and minority voters. But I still can't get past the fact that we are expected to show IDs for any number of things far more trivial than voting. Some of those things are rights too. I have a right to own a dog, but I have to register that dog, and in order to do so I need to show an ID. I have a right to be a fisherman, but in order to do so I need to get a fishing license, for which I need to show an ID. I have a right to keep and bear arms, but in order to exercise that right I have to show an ID. I have a right to drive a car, but... Well, you get the point. The anal-retentive in me simply cannot accept that we have to show IDs for virtually every aspect of modern life, but when it comes to choosing our leaders people are just expected to believe that we are who we say we are. Why? In what other context would that ever be accepted? That's why the only solution I can see is to provide free IDs.

I would argue that you don't have a right to do any of those things (aside, for some very strange reason, the ownership of a gun), but that's a discussion for another time. My point is that while you may accept that you have to show IDs for all those things, I don't accept that. More to the point, for some of the things you mentioned, the idea of having to show an ID is laughable to me. I've owned a dog, and never had to show ID to register it. I've held a fishing license, and never had to show ID to get it. Until 2009, there were religious exemptions in Alberta that allowed some minorities to get driver's licenses without photos on them (and while I do see the reason behind photo IDs in that case, I still feel the 2009 change was one for the worse).

As for guns, well, that's a whole other issue, isn't it, because in many parts of your fine country, many of them the same places instituting voter ID laws, people would slap you for suggesting such a thing.

People get IDs. More to the point, people get first IDs. At some point none of us had an ID, and then we did. So obviously it's not an insurmountable problem. We simply lack the will to fix it.

No, it's not an insurmountable problem, but even you have to admit that as far as your obtaining of your first ID went, you probably had some things going for you that made it a lot easier for you than it is for many others. You probably had a birth certificate—plenty of people don't. You probably had a fixed address—plenty of people don't. In my case, here, where a valid photo ID is apparently required to get a driver's license, I'm assuming the logic is that most people will get their license while they are in school and have a valid school ID card to use. Well, I'm not in school, I didn't get a driver's license while I was there, so where does that leave me?

Sure, it's not an insurmountable problem if enough resources are put behind it, and enough exceptions are made to requirements for ID to get ID. And here we find the solution: vouching. Because there is, in fact, one form of ID I've found I can presently get (albeit at significant expense, but if we're only looking for solutions, we can set that part aside for now). The one form of photo ID I can obtain is a Possession and Acquisition License—a gun license, in layman's terms. And to get that, I merely need to print out a photo of myself and have one other person, an adult who has known me for at least one year, sign an affidavit affirming that the photo is of me. That's it, that's all. No other identification, no other requirements to prove I am who I say I am.

If that's all that's necessary for me to get a semiautomatic rifle, excuse me if I feel it's absolutely absurd I or anyone else should be required to jump through more hoops in order to drive a car or vote.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Then how do you prove who you are who you say you are? How do you prove that you are entitled to the rights you say you are entitled to?

 

Solution: Give everyone a free photo ID when they turn a certain age, say 18. After that you just renew it periodically. Or, better yet, take a DNA sample of every child born and keep it in a central database matched with their name and ID number. Watch conservatives' heads explode at THAT idea!

 

As for birth certificates, there are very few people born in the United States (and, I would imagine, Canada) who do not have a birth certificate on record somewhere. And those people are probably quite elderly. In the US, the municipality where you were born keeps a copy of your birth certificate forever. And in most places they are free for the asking.

 

Again, I'm not trying to be dismissive here. No solution is going to cover every last person. But they manage to give people free national ID cards in Europe, and Europeans do not possess any special powers that we do not (other than the ability to produce and consume vast quantities of stinky cheese). Like it or not, proving your identity is a basic premise of human society, and always has been. We just have better means of doing so now than in the past. 

[*Anastasia]

No, you very much are being dismissive. I'll repeat it again: voting is a right. Any so-called solution that doesn't allow a vote to everyone entitled to it isn't a solution at all.* I get it's easy to be dismissive when we're already talking about people on the margins of society, but try to put yourself in their positions, and ask yourself whether you'd find all your so-called solutions acceptable if they meant that you, personally, could not exercise your right to vote. If you can do that and still think that's just the price of maintaining society (which I'll note never collapsed before anyone had a photo ID), then you and I have irreconcilable differences in what we believe a right is, and there's no further point in our dancing around in circles.

*Of course, it's a moot point anyway, because you yourself admit voter fraud isn't an issue. You're demanding a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

[Manoka]

It's not about the very specific definition of what voter fraud is and more so about the problems with voting in general. There are double, even quadruple counts in some cases, more voters than people in an area; even a 90% voter turn-out is incredibly suspicious since only about 50% of people vote in an election. 

 

Something being a right doesn't mean no regulations. There is a right to bear arms, but not nuclear weapons or nerve gas. A right to free speech, but not to hate speech which calls on people to be killed. A right to privacy, until the police do an investigation to prove what you've done.

 

Hell, a right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" until you are a criminal and are put in to jail, when we take away that liberty and pursuit of happiness. Every right is conditional; your entire right is a right to something until you start to unjustifiably infringe on someone else's right. It's a part of your right that the only liberty you get when you murder someone is a jail cell or a quick and painless death.

 

 

Voting is by and afar the single most important thing in a free society, in a free democracy. It's the way a society listens to the people and how they balance the government and make sure they are for the people; if we can't even make sure that the people involved aren't manipulating the results in some way, what good is a democracy? It's a democracy we're supposed to trust in blind faith exists. Making it harder to get away with manipulating votes is a way to secure a democracy, not prevent one from existing. Else a politician can just say "oh yeah, we got 60% votes for that" and there'd be no reliable way to prove it. It would cut out double-counts or stolen ID. Putin claims over 90% support, but I highly doubt that's true. The last election was determined by just 2% of the vote, between Romney and Obama; Obama only got about 51%. A few percents is all it would take to throw an election.

 

A far more common practice is to build a profile on someone and see if they vote regularly in elections or not. If they don't, a company can sell your private information to individuals and use that to for you in an election. Ther'es a low-risk of a potential double count, many that are rarely checked at all. In fact in some places, they don't even check for these kinds of things at all. They only figure out after an election that more than 100% of people voted. And these sorts of things happen all the time. Or if a person voted, who didn't actually vote in the last election. At least with this, only one vote would count and the amount of personal data that would be needed to replicate something, sufficiently to change something like a vote, would be too great to steal even if someone got your credit card and the like. 

 

There's electronic tampering, ballot tampering where individuals make it seem as if they have to choose between very specific individuals, and other potential problems, more important than any of them multiple-counts of the same vote. It's almost impossible to prove as well, given that there is so little oversight in making sure these sorts of things don't happen. Saying they're never caught in a world with no restrictions is like saying no-one ever speeds in a world where there is no speed limits. Maybe we ought to put in some speed limits. 

Edited by Manoka, 25 February 2016 - 10:53 PM.

[*Anastasia]

Oh look! A whole new generation that could be without birth certificates, just to up the stakes some more!

[Thrash]

The bottom line is that if the will were there, it is possible to provide most people a free photo ID. 

Absolutely. I'll even give a $1 towards it at tax-time. Would eliminate the mention of fraud and make the system more legit. Not having insurance for a few months last year cost me too. Get rid of that Obamacare shit and have FreePhotoIDCare.

[Redezra]

I'm with Ana on this one. There's no need for any of this. Paper voting is such a hardened system, nothing else need be added.

 

That said, it must be a paper voting system, not any of this electronic shit.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

No, you very much are being dismissive. I'll repeat it again: voting is a right. Any so-called solution that doesn't allow a vote to everyone entitled to it isn't a solution at all.* I get it's easy to be dismissive when we're already talking about people on the margins of society, but try to put yourself in their positions, and ask yourself whether you'd find all your so-called solutions acceptable if they meant that you, personally, could not exercise your right to vote. If you can do that and still think that's just the price of maintaining society (which I'll note never collapsed before anyone had a photo ID), then you and I have irreconcilable differences in what we believe a right is, and there's no further point in our dancing around in circles.

*Of course, it's a moot point anyway, because you yourself admit voter fraud isn't an issue. You're demanding a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

 

Voting is a right. BUT NOT EVERYONE HAS THAT RIGHT. You still haven't answered the fundamental questions: How do you prove that you are entitled to the right to vote? Why should anyone simply accept your word that you are who you say you are? What is to stop you from walking into my polling place, claiming you were me, and voting?

 

Just because voter fraud is not a serious problem now does not mean it couldn't be in the future. Or, for that matter, the past. Many historians believe that JFK effectively stole the 1960 election, for example. An awful lot of dead people voted in Illinois that year. Someone with the resources and the will (perhaps someone named Koch, for instance) could exploit the weakness in the voter-identification system to their benefit.

 

Electronic voting is a bad idea. The potential for abuse is too great. There needs to be a paper babllot so that there is a physical record of the vote that cannot easily be tampered with. If they had done that in Ohio in 2004 George W. Bush might never have had a second term.

[Redezra]

No, you very much are being dismissive. I'll repeat it again: voting is a right. Any so-called solution that doesn't allow a vote to everyone entitled to it isn't a solution at all.* I get it's easy to be dismissive when we're already talking about people on the margins of society, but try to put yourself in their positions, and ask yourself whether you'd find all your so-called solutions acceptable if they meant that you, personally, could not exercise your right to vote. If you can do that and still think that's just the price of maintaining society (which I'll note never collapsed before anyone had a photo ID), then you and I have irreconcilable differences in what we believe a right is, and there's no further point in our dancing around in circles.

*Of course, it's a moot point anyway, because you yourself admit voter fraud isn't an issue. You're demanding a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

 

Voting is a right. BUT NOT EVERYONE HAS THAT RIGHT. You still haven't answered the fundamental questions: How do you prove that you are entitled to the right to vote? Why should anyone simply accept your word that you are who you say you are? What is to stop you from walking into my polling place, claiming you were me, and voting?

 

Actually, let's address this directly.

 

Nothing. There is nothing stopping them.

But one vote is not going to do much. If someone is going to do this effectively, they are going to do a lot of these. At that time, polling people are going to notice a significant percentage of the population appear to have double voted. The result? The election is invalid. And you do it again.

[Manoka]

First, all rights have regulations, such as the right to bear arms or even free speech. You can't own a nuke, you need a background check, you can't threaten or harass people, call to violence.

 

Secondly, it's probably worse than a lot of people think. Certain types of voter fraud are low, but that doesn't mean all voter fraud is low. An estimated 700,000 or so illegal immigrants and pending american citizens voted in the last election. Now, while I don't really care much about illegal immigrants voting, it sort of highlights the problem with the voting system. 

 

 

No-one even bothered to check most of these people, and just let them in to vote anyways. 

 

That's pretty worrying. The idea that a bunch of random, impoverished people could break our system so easily in such large numbers is evidence that, deliberate corporations or other political entities could probably do it on a larger scale if they wanted. 

 

 

And while the difference may only be a few percents, consider that almost every election in the last 40 years has been won by a few percents. Obama got 51% of the votes, compared to about 47% for Romney. George Bush is said to have gotten less than 1% difference. So, yes, a few percents could throw an election; hell, Bernie and Hillary were only off by about that much in the primaries just as of now. A tiny amount of voter tampering, in any form, be it with machines, voter fraud, underhanded tactics that trick people in to voting for the wrong person, and all the others are generally enough to throw an election if it comes down to a few percents, which most have in the past couple of years.

 

And consider that 3% of the vote means a 6% margin. If one side has say, 53%, and another 47%, than just 3% of the voters, not 6%, made the difference, since choosing to vote for one side or the other exponentially changes things. So it's even greater than many people would think based on the margins, which you can find here. The point is, if it hasn't already thrown an election, it could very easily in the future. The greatest threat to our American liberty is a threat to our democracy, and if we don't take precautions to protect the voting in this country, than any election or vote can be rigged, which effectively could throw out the usefulness of a democracy. 

Edited by Manoka, 15 March 2016 - 05:16 AM.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

I stipulate that voter fraud is a nonexistent problem. But that doesn't change the principle. If you are going to assert a legal right, I believe there should be a means of determining whether you are entitled to that right. This is why I am so conflicted about the issue. I'm too anal retentive for the honor system.

[Redezra]

If you have a legal right, it should apply first, questions asked later. It is a right, not a privilege.

 

If you want to do what you're doing, welcome to fascist Redezraland! Where nobody has rights and the points mean nothing!

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

But in order to assert a legal right, one must first possess that right. Let's use a fictitious country as an example. All citizens of White Trashistan have the right to carry a gun. But when you go to buy a gun, you must show your ID in order to prove that you are a citizen of White Trashistan and thus entitled to that right. Why shouldn't it be the same for voting?

 

When I go to my polling place, I give my name to a volunteer who checks it against a list of registered voters. But how does that volunteer know that I am who I say I am? The first time I went to vote at 18 I had my license at the ready, assuming I would have to prove my ID. I was surprised to find out that I did not.

 

As I said, this issue causes great conflict for me. If I were an elected official, my official position would be that I was against ID laws for voting. But privately, the obsessive-compulsive-bordering-on-mildly-autistic in me really thinks that of course ID should be required, and remains astounded that it has not been all along.

[the rebel]

Over in the UK those that vote through the polling centre get a polling card in the post which has your name and address on, then you show the card and they scratch your name off the register and give you a voting slip for your mark and then post in the box.

[Redezra]

But in order to assert a legal right, one must first possess that right. Let's use a fictitious country as an example. All citizens of White Trashistan have the right to carry a gun. But when you go to buy a gun, you must show your ID in order to prove that you are a citizen of White Trashistan and thus entitled to that right. Why shouldn't it be the same for voting?

 

When I go to my polling place, I give my name to a volunteer who checks it against a list of registered voters. But how does that volunteer know that I am who I say I am? The first time I went to vote at 18 I had my license at the ready, assuming I would have to prove my ID. I was surprised to find out that I did not.

 

As I said, this issue causes great conflict for me. If I were an elected official, my official position would be that I was against ID laws for voting. But privately, the obsessive-compulsive-bordering-on-mildly-autistic in me really thinks that of course ID should be required, and remains astounded that it has not been all along.

 

Because clearly firearm ownership has silently moved from a right to a privilege. There are scenarios when you can be stripped of that "right", so you have to prove that you still have it.

 

Voting does not have this limitation.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

But you still have to prove that you are ENTITLED to that right.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Over in the UK those that vote through the polling centre get a polling card in the post which has your name and address on, then you show the card and they scratch your name off the register and give you a voting slip for your mark and then post in the box.

 

Couldn't anyone take that card, though? A piece of paper with your name on it is not proof of identity.

[KiWi]

"Are you permitted to have that firearm? [...] Really? Well, let me just accept your word for it. HEY HQ. THIS GUY SAYS HE'S ALLOWED TO CONCEAL CARRY HIS AK-47 INTO WALMART. IMMA TAKE HIS WORD FOR IT. SEEMS LIKE A STAND UP GENTLEMEN"

etc.

[Molagbal]

My position is simple, voter ids should be required but at the same time they should be provided free of charge. 

[the rebel]

Couldn't anyone take that card, though? A piece of paper with your name on it is not proof of identity.

You don't need the card but its easier with the card. You could say the same thing about postal voting too which you can also do instead of walking into a polling station.

I can't imagine what process they have in place if you turn up and they say you have already voted... I may test that out somehow and let you know lol.