> would actually prefer voter ID as well as people standing there to do a brief check. In addition to preventing fraud, it also helps remind voters if they forgot to sign or something.
I’m just unsure why you would want to make it harder for people to vote.
I’m honestly uninformed on this, apart from being from Australia which has compulsory voting without voter ID and there’s no issues, but have there actually be scenarios where there’s been fraud instances where showing ID would have resolved things? Has voter ID shown to help more people vote around the world?
I don't see ID as a major barrier to voting, but it adds confidence to the system.
I received two ballots, one for me and one for some previous tenant. I marked the other one "return to sender" and put it in the mailbox. But someone else could have pretty easily just voted twice.
Maybe that would be caught by some other mechanism? Maybe people just don't do that? But it still adds confidence and I don't really see a downside.
Maybe it doesn't need to be a super secure ID, but something would be reassuring.
> But someone else could have pretty easily just voted twice.
No they could not have. Every vote is checked off against the voter registration rolls. The Board of Elections knows when you have voted. You should volunteer for your local board of elections next election. Maybe it will give you more confidence in the system.
To vote get excess votes, you have to first commit voter registration fraud or vote for people you know will not vote. And you have to do it in large enough numbers to make a difference. And you have to assume only one party engages in fraud. Also, it’s a felony to commit voter fraud.
Voter ID is an attempt to fix a problem that doesn’t exist in the real world. Meanwhile, it suppresses votes.
There’s a large amount of “cure” work that’s occurring right now by both parties throughout the country because of votes that weren’t counted due to all sorts of innocuous mistakes people make. It’s thousands of ballots in some places. Meanwhile fraud? There’s no there there.
My brother helped to cure ballots in Florida because people forgot a signature. Someone has to go to their house and get them to sign an affidavit that they voted.
There’s cure efforts in NC for provisional ballots for things like the DMV failing to forward a registration to the Board of Elections. Or someone who voted in the wrong precinct by accident.
These are all valid votes that won’t be counted due to a mistake by the voter unless someone contacts them and helps them to provide the documentation necessary to the BOE to validate their vote.
Stop spouting nonsense about fraud and volunteer for your local election board or your party.
So if this person didn't bother to update their voter registration, then maybe they didn't bother to vote either. In which case the person who gets their ballot can vote for them (illegally) and it will match their registration.
There's still signature matching. I didn't say it's impossible. It's just virtually impossible to do at enough scale to matter w/o getting caught and evidence of it occurring doesn't exist. The GOP has looked for it really, really hard.
The vast majority of people are both a) honest; and b) not going to risk a felony just to cast a single fraudulent vote.
I can't prove a negative here, so if your argument is that it happens and it's impossible to detect or we just aren't looking hard enough, I don't know what to tell you.
Meanwhile, voter suppression and disenfranchisement exists! It's right there to see. A higher voter turnout would reduce the impact of any single fraudulent vote.
The most recent fraud attempt I'm aware of, the culprit got caught. They were collecting absentee ballots and then not returning them. (NC no longer publishes who's requested an absentee ballot till after the election to make this harder to do.)
I'm not asking you prove a negative and I am not even saying fraud happens at any significant scale. I am just saying that confidence in the system is important, and we could have done better on that axis.
There are a lot of people I know who are saying (in a casual, let's-not-start-a-war-over-this tone) essentially "yeah, it was tilted to get Trump out, but no surprise there, and Trump will never prove it". We really could have done a lot to make the situation better.
FWIW I think my state did a pretty good job, but it's not a swing state.
> "yeah, it was tilted to get Trump out, but no surprise there, and Trump will never prove it"
That’s cognitive dissonance at work.
The GOP has a structural advantage in the EC, the Senate, the House, and legislatures across the country[1,2]. Despite the GOP candidate having won the popular vote for the nPresident once out of the last eight (now nine) elections, they control six of nine seats on the SCOTUS. Despite Trump having a single term in office, he’s appointed 30% of the Federal judiciary with judges who are on average several years younger than the judges Obama appointed.
If anyone has reason to complain about tilt, it’s Democrats. Trump lost the popular vote by four million votes. I know it’s only the EC that matters, but that doesn’t make the system any less fair.
Trump voters are complaining about a tilted field that exists only in their imaginations. In reality, the electoral process in the U.S. currently favors the GOP.
1. A particularly egregious example is here in NC where the GOP won 50% of the vote in 2018 but secured 10 of 13 districts.
He lost the popular vote by nearly 3M votes. That's with an assist from Russia and Comey.
Despite all that, Clinton conceded the next day. She called Trump and congratulated him. She gave a gracious concession speech saying things like "We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don't just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things; the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too and we must defend them."
No one accused Trump of fraud at the ballot box. She didn't seek to undermine the democratic process. She graciously accepted defeat to a man who had been threatening to lock her up.
Lastly, he was the incumbent this year. That's such an advantage that the incumbent has lost only five times in a hundred years.
The field was definitely tilted this election as in the last, but it was in Trump's favor both times.
If people do that on a large enough scale there will be collisions (i.e. the previous tenant will want to vote themselves, leading to this scheme unraveling real quick and no easy way for you to hide this fraud since you are living at one of the previous addresses of that last tenant.)
This cannot influence elections meaningfully and it is nonsensical to state that.
I’m just unsure why you would want to make it harder for people to vote.
I’m honestly uninformed on this, apart from being from Australia which has compulsory voting without voter ID and there’s no issues, but have there actually be scenarios where there’s been fraud instances where showing ID would have resolved things? Has voter ID shown to help more people vote around the world?