[HN Gopher] One in 10 ballots rejected in last month's vote-by-m...
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One in 10 ballots rejected in last month's vote-by-mail elections
in New Jersey
Author : Alupis
Score : 86 points
Date : 2020-08-10 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.njspotlight.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.njspotlight.com)
| madballster wrote:
| That's one of the reasons why the US makes it only to spot #25 on
| the democracy index and earned the "flawed democracy" label.
| koolba wrote:
| > Still, the League of Women Voters and NAACP say the state's
| signature-verification requirement is unconstitutional because it
| disenfranchises so many. Election officials are not trained in
| handwriting analysis to be able to properly determine whether the
| signature on a ballot matches the one on a voter's registration,
| not to mention that a person's signature can change over time and
| with age.
|
| Every time I have to sign something that might be verified
| against a signature record I get nervous and I bet my signature
| reflects it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah it's silly but it's the only process we really have and
| it's the reason I'm not going to vote by mail this year. I have
| a reasonably consistent signature if I think about it but I'm
| not going to risk a random election official throwing it out
| because I'm younger and have a variable signature. That plus
| the screwballing that's happening at USPS right now I'm not
| going to rely on that.
|
| There's 2 weeks to early vote for me so I'll just vote in that
| period.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| My bank bounced my rent checks for MONTHS. I went in, supplied
| a new signature sample, everything. Ended up having to do
| direct deposit because my bank decided there was no way I could
| be me.
| mc32 wrote:
| We definitely need a better way to sign something besides wet
| signatures; mine certainly evolves over time as well as medium
| and instrument (pens, etc.)
| elicash wrote:
| I find the way it's used by credit card companies
| interesting.
|
| When making a purchase, you can do a different signature each
| time. You can doodle, draw a straight line, write your name,
| mix it up, whatever. The only value of the signature is that
| if you don't recall making a purchase, they can send it to
| you and it can help trigger your memory or make you trust
| whether or not the purchase was actually you. So it's not for
| them to use in the verification process. It's for us to help
| trigger our memories.
| jedberg wrote:
| That's not why you sign a credit slip. You sign it so the
| vendor can match it against the signature on the back of
| the card, because they are on the hook if you later claim
| fraud. If it matches the back of the card it is a lot
| harder to claim fraud.
|
| The fact that you can put any doodle you want in there is
| because the vendors have decided it's cheaper to absorb the
| fraud than to check the signatures.
| elicash wrote:
| Their actions show that signatures aren't actually used
| in the way you describe. It does say to sign the back of
| the card, but I've never done so and it's never been
| checked. Not only do vendors not check, but there's no
| attempt by credit card companies at getting vendors to
| check. And they don't check on their end, either. _The
| reason is not just because it 's inefficient given the
| amount of fraud, but also because it's unreliable as a
| security mechanism._
|
| So clearly, that's not how the signature is actually
| used. What matters is how it's actually used, which is to
| help prevent good faith actors from accidentally
| reporting purchases as fraudulent. That's a valid use,
| but noteworthy.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah the problem is you can't really do that with
| elections. That's what makes them so tricky to do well at a
| distance (be it electronic voting or mail in though I trust
| mail in more than anything involving computers) it's hard
| to go back and fix any issues or audit and maintain
| anonymity. On top of just the sheer number of votes it's a
| lot of time and uncertainty to try to go back and forth
| trying to hash out votes.
| rgossiaux wrote:
| Originally one point was that you signed the back of your
| card and the merchant would compare the signature on your
| receipt to the signature on the card to verify your
| identity. Another point was so the merchant has proof you
| intended to pay them.
|
| When I was living in the UK (which wisely uses a more
| sensible PIN system instead of signatures) I was shocked
| the first time someone asked to see the back of my card. I
| don't think it's ever happened to me in the US. Culturally
| we've collectively decided to ignore the whole "signature
| verification" thing, but when using your card abroad you
| sometimes are reminded that it's supposed to happen in
| theory.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Plus, you have to _sign_ your ballot? It 's supposed to be
| secret.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| You need to have some way to prevent fraud if you're going to
| allow mail-in ballots.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's not as if signatures are going to do that. Especially
| not any of the types of fraud that involve coercion or
| payment for votes. If you're paying someone for their vote
| they can still sign their name. One of the reasons it needs
| to be secret is to make it impossible for anyone to verify
| that you voted the way they want you to.
|
| I still don't understand how voting in person is supposed
| to be any more problematic than e.g. buying groceries in
| person. Wear a mask, stand six feet apart etc., what's the
| problem?
| oramit wrote:
| It's not any more problematic for the voters, yes, but
| what about the poll workers? They stay there all day and
| skew older. The big concern is that reliable poll workers
| are going to skip this year because of COVID (not
| unreasonable) and we simply won't have people to
| facilitate the voting we normally do.
| https://www.npr.org/2020/08/05/894331965/wanted-young-
| people...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Would it be that hard to put a sheet of clear plastic
| between the poll workers and the voters?
| oramit wrote:
| You can put all the protections in place you want but if
| volunteers don't feel safe, they won't show.
| [deleted]
| jcranmer wrote:
| You don't sign the ballot directly.
|
| The ballot goes into an envelope. You sign the envelope. That
| envelope goes into a regular postal envelope. When the ballot
| is received, the signature on the inner envelope is compared
| to the signature on file, and, if accepted, the envelope is
| opened and the ballot is transferred to a box to be counted.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| How is that not a distinction without a difference when the
| ballot is in the envelope? So they look at the envelope to
| get your name and the ballot to see who you voted for. You
| would need some way to prevent these from being correlated
| by a person in possession of the thing you put in your
| mailbox.
| jedberg wrote:
| The votes are counted in public. The envelope is verified
| and then put in a pile of verified envelopes. Someone
| else then removes the ballot from the envelope. In theory
| they do this face down so they can't see the name, which
| is verified by the other people watching them.
|
| Then the ballot is placed in the same hoppers that the in
| person votes are put in and they are commingled.
| evan_ wrote:
| in Oregon the ballot goes in an envelope with no
| identification, and that envelope goes inside the
| envelope with identification.
|
| The outermost envelope is verified and opened, and the
| innermost envelope is collected with all of the others in
| a different area for counting.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That prevents you from doing the correlation after the
| vote has been counted but not before.
|
| To do the correlation in person you would have to do it
| in the polling place, on election day, in front of
| election monitors and the voter, during the 30 seconds
| between when the person fills out their ballot and when
| they drop it into the box.
|
| If your name is on the envelope, now it can be done
| anywhere between your mailbox and the polling place
| during the period of days or weeks between when you put
| it in your mailbox and when it gets counted. Wouldn't we
| then need independent election monitors guarding the
| incoming mailboxes 24/7 for several weeks?
| baddox wrote:
| They could also have any number of ways of secretly
| associating normal in-person ballots with the voter's
| identity. Perhaps the most obvious would be hidden
| cameras in the voting booths. There's no unique threat
| here.
| ufo wrote:
| The votes are inside another envelope. The complete
| ballot actually has two envelopes: the outer envelope has
| the signature and an inner one contains the votes.
|
| For reference, here is how it works in Washington state:
| https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's possible the counters could be looking at ballots
| but noting and tracking who voted for who would be
| difficult to do in your head and you can't track it on
| paper because there are monitors from both sides watching
| the count happen.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| In Washington state, you sign the envelope, not the ballot.
| [deleted]
| diafygi wrote:
| You sign the envelope containing your ballot. Then, when they
| receive it, they verify the outer envelope is proper
| (signature, etc.). If accepted, they open the envelope and
| dump your ballot into the box of accepted ballots. Finally,
| later, they open the box and count the ballots.
|
| This process keeps your vote anonymous.
| thephyber wrote:
| I'm 100% sure my signature from more than a decade ago when I
| last signed paperwork for a new license doesn't match my
| current handwriting/signature.
|
| Also, I'm under the impression that signature verification
| isn't a very sturdy science. I'm curious what the false
| positive/false negative rates are and what variables are likely
| to affect them.
| poorman wrote:
| Not to mention that digital signature pad they have at the DMV
| from the early 90s makes my signature looks like a bunch of
| random squiggles.
| gruez wrote:
| Are you allowed to "print" (ie. not use cursive) your
| signature? If so that would go a long way to making your
| signatures more recognizable, especially if you don't normally
| write in cursive.
| justinzollars wrote:
| I used to run campaigns in Ohio. I was also an elected HRC DNC
| delegate from 2008.
|
| There are some real concerns with vote by mail.
|
| One particular issue I noticed when canvassing was that the voter
| roll was incorrect. It was not uncommon to go to a rental unit,
| and have 3 or 4 families registered at the address - all having
| moved out years ago. Another issue was dead voters. Another issue
| was no one was registered at the address.
|
| The voter rolls not dependable. It's not by design, but its a
| hard problem to solve. Its worth listening to the concerns "of
| the other side" so that we have fair elections.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >Its worth listening to the concerns "of the other side" so
| that we have fair elections
|
| We should also look at the lack of voter fraud on any
| widepsread level before we "solve" the wrong problem and
| disenfranchise a lot of people.
|
| I suspect, from trying to find evidence on people unable to
| vote and people voting illegally, that we disenfranchise far
| more people than we allow errorenous votes.
|
| It's simple to sample who voted, compare to actual people, and
| conclude there is no where near a voter fraud problem. (Most
| states let researchers do just this, and decade in and out, no
| fraud).
| [deleted]
| mseidl wrote:
| This is one thing I like about Germany, so you when you move
| you have to signed paper by the landlord that you're indeed
| living there. Then you take it to a government building and you
| "register." Every German is automatically registered and before
| a vote, maybe a month before hand will get a letter in the
| mail. They have to use this paper to vote or they can request a
| mail in ballot. You're assigned a place to vote(you have to go
| here). But they're always(from my experience really close to
| the place of residence.
| thephyber wrote:
| In general, my experience is similar in the USA.
|
| However, I think your parent is describing what happens when
| the previous resident at your address doesn't register a new
| address. The Elections Department doesn't know if they died,
| emigrated, moved residences, or they now co-habitate at your
| address.
| thephyber wrote:
| My problem is rarely the diagnosis; it's almost always the
| prescription.
|
| The right solution is to identify all of the sinks and sources
| (all of the events which allow a voter to be added to or
| removed from voter eligibility) and work to integrate automated
| systems in a web. Birth recordings, death recordings, change of
| residency (at DMV, credit bureaus, tax bodies, etc), change of
| citizenship, change of felon status, etc. Anything short of
| this will bias voting for or against "the other side".
|
| I'm particularly frustrated by watching some states batch
| remove names from roles by using substring wildcards and also
| prevent same-day registration -- together these mean that
| people are unable to vote with no notice and insufficient time
| to restore their name to the roles.
| ooobit2 wrote:
| Was it Isaac Asimov who pondered that man's goal is to
| automate itself out of existence? I don't get this lack of
| temperament with automation vs. direct labor.
|
| I've called out Amazon before, and I stick to my stance that
| that company is going to boom and bust _because_ it is so
| automated. Just ponder what the current top complaints are
| from Amazon customers, regardless of what service they
| use...? Well, let 's head on over to https://www.consumeraffa
| irs.com/online/amazon.html?#sort=hel... ...
|
| > I contacted customer service through chat on TWO separate
| occasions ... Well, it was never fixed.
|
| > To make matters worse, when you call they are not very
| helpful ...
|
| > Merchandise more often doesn't arrive on guaranteed
| delivery time and customer service is rather disinterested on
| resolving any issues.
|
| Those are the side effects of depending too heavily on
| _automation_. So, the charge that "anything short of [a web
| of automated services] will bias voting" is itself an
| insurmountable conflict. 1 in 10 mail-in ballots being
| rejected is an example of how automation _isn 't_ a solution
| in and of itself. States batch removing names with regex is
| an example. The same-day voter registration automation having
| a conflict with the purge of expired voter registrations is
| an example. Is it ever a smart idea to pour _more salt_ on a
| wound if the sting is already unbearable?
|
| The right solution is a system with enough automation to make
| the various key election services meet 80% of expected use,
| and to have people _independent of the election_ provide the
| necessary checks and balances to resolve anomalous scenarios.
| Whether that 's citizens who surrender their right to vote,
| or a code that substitutes for the names and PI of candidates
| and voters, I don't know. But I do know that the sting is
| already unbearable. Can we just please put away the salt?
| thephyber wrote:
| Fine: replace "automation" with "a process". Focus more on
| the core intent of what I said and be a little less
| pedantic.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| End of the day, exceptions make everything worse for
| everyone.
|
| I grew up in a republican town in New York. The lack of voter
| id didn't hurt the local politicians. We should be happy that
| anybody tries to vote.
| pdovy wrote:
| What is the actual attack vector here for taking advantage of
| incorrect voter rolls? Just that it's easier to vote more than
| once by mail than in person?
|
| Where I am in IL you don't need to show photo ID to vote, so
| the level of verification that occurs in person vs by mail is
| the same.
|
| Generally it seems like you want the voter rolls to err on the
| side of being overly broad than vice versa, so long as it
| doesn't enable fraud - i.e., it's better to leave someone on
| the voter rolls who has moved/died (who is overwhelmingly
| unlikely to actually cast a vote) than to disenfranchise a
| voter by erroneously purging them.
| pc86 wrote:
| Surely sending half a dozen ballots to the same address, for
| all the previous tenants from the last half decade, "enables
| fraud" if the person living there is so inclined.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Was the roll count correlated to multiple votes from the same
| address?
|
| Where I live, you request a ballot and it gets mailed to you,
| so there is some controls in terms of people registered at old
| apartments. The voters vulnerable to shenanigans (nursing
| homes, etc) are equally vulnerable.
|
| Personally, I think vote by mail is driving more turnout and is
| ultimately a good thing. I'm surprised that the GOP is so
| against it, as it will benefit them in local elections imo.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > The voter rolls not dependable. It's not by design, but its a
| hard problem to solve.
|
| I'm not sure why it has to be such a hard problem? If I file
| taxes in tax year N at a given address, and then file taxes in
| tax year N + 1 at a different address, then it's pretty clear
| that I am no longer a resident and should be removed from voter
| rolls. I'm aware that this doesn't cover everybody, but if you
| combine a few different such datasets that the government
| already keeps track of people moving, then you should be able
| to easily assure that most stale entries are removed in timely
| (<1 year) fashion.
| jedberg wrote:
| There are too many cases where you might file taxes in one
| place but be eligible to vote in another. There are edge
| cases on pretty much all the datasets.
|
| That being said, it doesn't seem like it would be hard to
| have a national voter database that shows each voter and
| where they are registered, with the ability to notify
| districts when someone shows up elsewhere, combined with a
| national registry of death certificates.
| justinzollars wrote:
| Keeping track of people moving around, when you have privacy
| rights isn't an easy problem.
| dglass wrote:
| What if I move during an election year, before the election?
| The IRS wouldn't have my new address.
|
| If I don't update my driver's license, the DMV wouldn't have
| my new address either.
|
| If I move in with roommates and I pay my roommate for
| utilities, the utility company wouldn't know my new address
| either.
|
| Just a few reasons why it is a hard problem.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Just need to look out for Republican police officers from
| Minnesota casting illegal ballots in Florida. How do people
| like that even get registered without suitable documentation?
| advisedwang wrote:
| Unless someone is using those dead voters or moved-out voters
| to actually vote, this isn't an actual changing outcomes.
|
| If someone eligiable tries to vote but can't then that _is_
| changing outcomes.
| mason55 wrote:
| I moved out of New York State two years ago. I registered in my
| new state and have voted by mail in my new state multiple
| times.
|
| New York State _still_ has me on the voter rolls there. I tried
| to find a place to have myself removed but I couldn 't even
| find directions on what to do so I gave up and continue to get
| spam from candidates in my old district.
| baddox wrote:
| Why is that concern unique to vote by mail?
| eyegor wrote:
| How could you have 3-4 families registered at a single address?
| Can't you validate against IRS, or drivers license, or utility
| data to narrow it down? I know that my utility payment info was
| used when I went to register in a new state - I punched the
| address into the gov portal and it said "are you eyegor? This
| information provided by xyz power"
| justinzollars wrote:
| I have no idea how this happened. But I am telling you what I
| saw on the ground.
| dglass wrote:
| IRS would in theory only have the address listed on your most
| recent tax return. If have moved sometime in 2020, the IRS
| wouldn't have my new address by the time it came to mailing
| out ballots for the election in November.
|
| My driver's license lists my address when I lived in San
| Francisco. I don't live there anymore and just haven't been
| able to update it yet, so that wouldn't work either.
|
| Utilities are typically registered under one person's name
| from the household. So in theory if I have roommates and I'm
| the name on the utility bill, the utility company wouldn't
| have the names of all my roommates at my address.
| oramit wrote:
| I live in Oregon where all voting is done by mail and it has
| been done that way for decades. We're not alone either, a few
| other states and local governments do this.
|
| Is the problem with vote by mail itself, or just a bad
| implementation?
| gojomo wrote:
| Oregon has had a lot of time to practice. Also, it's a fairly
| orderly & well-managed state overall. Places improvising mass
| mail-in voting for the 1st time, and with deeper histories of
| political-machine voting abuses, are going to have more
| troubles.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I was removed from the rolls once despite not having moved or
| died. Never knew if my provisional ballot was counted or just
| binned.
| thingymajig wrote:
| I would agree with listening to the concerns of "the other
| side", but thus far their concerns do not include good-faith
| attempts at solving problems.
|
| Largely their "concerns" seem to be that vote-by-mail will
| circumvent the large amount of effort they've spent to make it
| harder for poor people to vote.
|
| The president has literally said that he doesn't like vote-by-
| mail because it makes it impossible for him to win and called
| it a coup. How do you even begin to work with that?
| osrec wrote:
| Can those that disagree with the above comment explain why?
|
| Genuinely interested, as the comment seems to be accurate
| based on a handful of Google searches I just did.
| Covzire wrote:
| Ironically perhaps, but the GP's post is decidedly not in
| "good-faith" IMO.
|
| The argument that Republicans want to "make it harder for
| poor people to vote" is a red herring regarding the voter
| ID debate.
|
| Similarly, Trump's position on mail-in-ballots, as far as I
| can tell, is that that the expected ease of large scale
| voter fraud by relatively few bad actors will make it
| impossible to win. I have no clue if that's true or not,
| but to frame the stated claim without also acknowledging
| the underlying potential issue seems misleading.
| ars wrote:
| The President is opposed to ballots mailed indiscriminately
| to everyone, and supports those requested by the voter.
|
| Based on the comments in this thread it's pretty clear why:
| People move all the time, and the state does not
| necessarily have a current address for everyone.
| osrec wrote:
| Interesting. Don't they use a unique identifier for each
| individual though?
|
| If someone was to try and vote twice from 2 addresses
| they simply shouldn't be able to because of the unique
| identifier.
|
| I mean, if they were registered to vote in 2 separate
| places, they could just drive to 2 different polling
| stations and vote twice anyway, right?
| ysavir wrote:
| Would the 2020 census help alleviate the problem in this
| particular election cycle, since it's so chronologically close?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Unlikely, as the census can't share granular census
| information with other parts of the government for decades.
| You need improvements in how voting rolls are updated and
| kept current (I've seen voting registration been done at the
| same time as acquiring a drivers license or state ID at a
| DMV, for example).
|
| There is a lot of power in leaning on existing online
| resources for performing this work, where your identity and
| address verification has already been performed (or it can
| rapidly be performed in a way that is both inexpensive to
| government and so frictionless it does not disenfranchise the
| disadvantaged). You _just_ need competent government
| leadership and technology practitioners who can rapidly glue
| it together (I know, crazy high hill to climb).
| cbhl wrote:
| Voter rolls should only contain US citizens.
|
| Census is "actual Enumeration" of "all persons", so you'd
| need to join/filter the data to remove people who are not
| citizens. Doing so would cause some folks to be
| afraid/unwilling to fill out the census.
|
| 2020 census is especially difficult because they haven't done
| as much (any?) door-to-door canvassing that usually happens
| during a census.
| ideals wrote:
| They are doing some door knocks. They stopped by my house
| recently and left a card thing, I wasn't home.
| tacomonstrous wrote:
| >There are some real concerns with vote by mail.
|
| Any others apart from the voter roll problem?
|
| In my state (RI), I have to affirmatively send in a mailed
| request for a ballot, so the voter roll thing doesn't really
| enter into the picture.
| pedrocr wrote:
| The fact that it's not secret and thus easy to buy/coerce is
| by far the biggest problem with it. It's a risky bet to hang
| your democracy on mail-in voting. Just run your elections
| with paper ballots cast into metal boxes. Run them on a
| Sunday in schools all over the country staffed by
| representatives of the candidates. That's done in many places
| and never has any issues. It's very cheap, you get results in
| just a few hours, and since plenty of representatives of the
| candidates are involved the whole way everyone trusts the
| results. The US in November is going yo get dicey with all
| the voter suppression, mail-in shenanigans and candidates
| claiming the vote is wrong.
| taude wrote:
| I just got mine today in MA, and I didn't know what this was
| for, since I've never voted by mail.
|
| Question: if I register to vote by mail, am I taking away the
| ability of this to be effective for someone else, i.e. using
| sacred resources or anything? I personally won't have a
| problem going to the polls on election day. Guess this is a
| long winded way of asking, is voting by Mail more/less
| reliable than going to the local station?
| andrewem wrote:
| The state of Massachusetts seems very likely to be able to
| process ballots by mail for essentially all voters in the
| primary (September 1!) and general elections. You will be
| doing your civic duty best by voting by mail rather than
| going to a polling place in person.
| taude wrote:
| i'm actually now more worried (after reading comments
| below) about my mail-in vote being rejected for
| mismatched signature or something.
|
| Looks like I'll send this in anyway and at least have the
| option.
| andrewem wrote:
| https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/eleev/early-voting-
| faq.htm has the official FAQs from the Massachusetts
| Secretary of the Commonwealth and says you can look up
| whether your ballot was accepted. It's not totally clear
| what reasons they might use to reject a ballot though.
| slg wrote:
| It is amazing how many problems in the US exist simply because
| the government lacks knowledge about its people. From the
| census, to maintaining voter rolls, to mail in voting, to
| general voter fraud, to stimulus checks going to dead people,
| to identity theft caused by overuse of SSNs, it could all be
| solved by having a central database that is updated whenever
| one of us is born or dies.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24104862
|
| This guy ran France's database for that when the Nazis
| invaded. They wanted a list of the Jews out of the database.
|
| The problem with tracking all of us is trusting the _next_
| administration
|
| Then again I prefer a more robust solution than hoping
| someone refuses to run a SELECT query.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think your point stands as for why we don't want such a
| database but between Social Security which is now tied to
| the new federal driver's licenses, taxes, and the census I
| think it's a tough sell that the government couldn't
| assemble the same data.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Agreed, but surely the More Evil Government could just
| buy a marketing database - or have NSA download it - and
| know everything down to what size underpants people wear
| and which specific businesses and organisations they
| support.
|
| Facebook - without checking the specific details - can
| probably tell the locality and religious position of most
| of their users; certainly enough to direct the Neue
| Gestapo to arrest you. But they also have raw address and
| religion details, which makes it somewhat easier.
| pedrocr wrote:
| And the very place where that happened now has a database
| again but without any of that information in it. The lesson
| that no database at all can exist seems like the wrong one.
| Pretty much every EU country has a database of citizens
| that is also then used to define who can vote where. It
| works fine. Those same places also do a census as a
| completely different effort for different reasons.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Such a database doesn't need to include religion or
| ethnicity. You can come a long way with just name and
| address.
| logicslave wrote:
| Efforts to actively monitor/keep track of citizens are
| suppressed by the left. There is even an effort to stop the
| government from asking who is a citizen and who is not. If
| you think this is because of humanitarian reasons, you are
| sorely mistaken
| spanhandler wrote:
| The most frustrating thing is they seem to know--or be able
| to get if they want--everything about us until that
| information would help make life easier, then suddenly
| they're clueless and you have to go round up all the info for
| them, sometimes _from other branches of government_.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Especially amazing as I know of no EU country that has the
| same problems (of course some of those cases happen, but
| there we talk about single digits in absolute cases).
|
| Take Germany for example, or France as much as I can tell:
| You move, you register a new primary residency, where you
| vote. Your residency is also you voter registration (not sure
| why separating the two makes any sense). You leave the
| country permanently, you declare it, when your French, you
| can register at the consulate in the new country of
| residency. Guess what, you get your ballot by mail to that
| address.
|
| Carrying passports or ID cards, check. No unidentified
| residents.
|
| Dead voters, no problem. Registered residencies are
| constantly updated with birth and death certificates.
|
| Voting by is, as is voting in general, a solved problem.
| Including paper trails and enough voting places for everyone.
| Voting happens on Sundays.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There's a lot of reasons but the number one one is because
| there's only a two party system here in the US and the
| Republican one by it's policies and histories is almost
| entirely reliant on non-white voters not showing up in the
| electorate. It's not quiet, in NC they've explicitly
| targeted voting days and locations that are predominantly
| Democratic and non-white [0]. Second is just our whole
| system, the states are independent and run their own voting
| so tracking movement between states is harder in places
| that having intentionally done something like motorvotor
| (where ID and voter registration happen together). [1]
|
| [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-
| id/
|
| [1] Again generally opposed by Republicans because it would
| mean more voters which demographically isn't good for them.
| microcolonel wrote:
| > _Republican one by it 's policies and histories is
| almost entirely reliant on non-white voters not showing
| up in the electorate_
|
| You could make the literal exact argument in reverse with
| at least as much credibility.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Democrats aren't the ones pushing to lock people out of
| voting. Republicans are the only ones pushing actively
| for and currently dependent on minoritarian rule.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Is that supposed to be a rebuttal? That's just a
| corollary. Yes - what you just said is logically correct.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| You had the chance to do just that and ended up not
| making an effort. It seems far fetched to think anyone
| could become president without a sizable chunk of white
| voters in the US just based on the census demographic
| data.
|
| https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
| merpnderp wrote:
| The central database would be useless because a significant
| numbers of Americans think requiring proof of who you are is
| voter suppression.
| dlp211 wrote:
| No one thinks that. The fundamental problem is the
| recognition that the lack of a central database has led to
| citizens who have the right to vote being denied that
| right. Voting is a right, voting is a right, voting is a
| right. If the US government is going to deny a person that
| right, the burden of proof is in them.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _a significant numbers of Americans think requiring
| proof of who you are is voter suppression._
|
| > _No one thinks that._
|
| > _" Voter ID requirements limit the number of people who
| are able to cast a ballot."_
|
| Ref: https://www.aclu.org/facts-about-voter-suppression
|
| The first page of results for "id laws voter suppression"
| turned up similar statements from the WaPo, Atlantic,
| Wired, Vox, and quotes numerous politicians. Your "no one
| thinks that" is not in line with reality.
| slg wrote:
| Progressives are against requiring voter ID because IDs are
| not ubiquitous and freely available. There would be no
| argument against voter ID laws if every American was
| guaranteed a free and easily acquired ID which would be
| more practical with this type of national database. It is
| usually conservatives that are against that policy of free
| and easy to acquire ID.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I would love to test this theory.
|
| Imagine a state completely waives their fees for a State
| ID (usually only $10-20 anyway) in exchange for Voter ID
| laws. Do you think progressives could support it then?
| Would you?
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| Sure, just don't make the waiver some joke that requires
| as many hoops to jump through as possible to discourage
| voters. Voter fraud isn't as significant an issue as
| electioneering but if an ID makes one side of the fence
| happy I'll support it so long as it remains free and
| universally available.
| ThA0x2 wrote:
| The IDs that are required to vote in Republican states
| are either free of charge, or they allow alternative ID
| documents.
|
| Texas being a fine example:
| https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
|
| There are free options that are easy to aquire. Not sure
| why there are so many myths about this.
| slg wrote:
| Which of those IDs is available for free? I just checked
| the state website and they charge for drivers licenses
| and state IDs and all the federal IDs require money.
|
| They at least offer the alternate forms of ID, but those
| still eliminate people. A homeless person is probably not
| going to have any of those documents on hand, but they
| have every right to vote. There is also the inherent
| problem of singling out people without ID for further
| scrutiny. This added "security" has notoriously been used
| as a method to suppress the vote over the course of US
| history. The simple act of requiring someone to state on
| a government form they can't "reasonably" obtain an ID is
| going to scare some people off from voting. What is
| "reasonable"? Am I going to be charged with voter fraud
| if I simply didn't want to spend the money on an ID? Will
| I end up in jail for voting? There is a chilling effect
| here.
| dmix wrote:
| Hasn't this been fought against for ages? There's a reason
| it's a mishmash of state driven solutions instead of one big
| federal ID database.
|
| Not to mention the groups who fight against using any form of
| identification at all during voting.
| behringer wrote:
| Of course, and it's also completely unnecessary. We are
| innocent until proven guilty. If I show up at a polling
| place (or in this case, requesting or mailing a voting
| packet), show them some sort of identity and address, then
| I should be able to vote. If you're caught committing voter
| fraud, you should go to jail. It's simple, and has always
| been effective.
| slg wrote:
| Yes, and if you listen to many of the people arguing
| against it the reason we don't have a national database of
| citizens is because the one thing stopping the US
| government from turning into Nazis and committing another
| genocide is poor record keeping.
|
| EDIT: I am being hyperbolic here, but the second reply to
| my first comment was doing exactly this. _We can 't have
| this database because of the Nazis._
| whatshisface wrote:
| There are many abuses for a national database less severe
| than genocide, and many "apocalypse scenarios" less
| likely than fascism in the US.
| slg wrote:
| I was being hyperbolic much as the people who are against
| this policy are hyperbolic, but the idea is true at any
| level of governmental abuse. If we fear government
| overreach, bad record keeping is never going to offer
| much protection.
| lehi wrote:
| The US Census has already been used to round up Japanese-
| Americans into internment camps. Post-9/11, the Census
| has handed over the locations and countries of origin of
| Arab-Americans to DHS/CBP.
| slg wrote:
| The point isn't that the US government has never done
| anything evil or will never do anything evil again. The
| point is that you aren't going to stop someone determined
| to commit evil by making it slightly more
| administratively difficult. If we fear that eventual
| evil, let's work to prevent it. Let's stop allowing this
| potential abuse to be the sole deciding factor against us
| doing good work today. It didn't stop us when we built
| the interstate highway system, which was largely built to
| facilitate military transport, so why should it stop us
| now?
|
| Also I'm not asking for a database including every
| possible detail about a person. I see no reason why
| something like race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or
| an number of other traits should be recorded. But a
| simple database with names, DOB, most recent address, a
| national id, etc would be extremely helpful.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| How are the records maintained in the US? In the UK every
| household gets a form every year on which they reconfirm who is
| eligible to vote at that address.
| spanhandler wrote:
| Looks like
|
| 1) about 1/2 of them are due to plain ol' User Error (not that
| there isn't room to improve the "UI" so that happens less) like
| not signing, not including required parts, simply leaving the
| ballot out of the envelope entirely(!), and so on,
|
| 2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match" (most of those are probably
| false negatives and should have counted, I'd bet, but given other
| issues I wouldn't be surprised if people in the same household
| accidentally signing one another's ballots or something else
| silly like that _is_ some measurable part of the problem) and,
|
| 3) 1/4 are other :-/
|
| [EDIT] looks like most of the "other" category is probably a
| couple towns in one county having a vote so screwed-up that 3,200
| ballots were rejected _en masse_. That 's about 20% of the
| rejected ballots, or about 2% of the total vote, right there.
| evanelias wrote:
| > not that there isn't room to improve the "UI" so that happens
| less
|
| Definitely this. I live in NJ and found the mail-in ballot
| instructions to be somewhat confusing: multiple layers of
| folding and envelopes, a perforated piece which you were
| explicitly NOT supposed to detach, an additional section that
| that only applied if you were mailing it on behalf of another
| person, etc.
|
| Pretty sure I filled it out correctly, but I mean, I had to re-
| read the instructions three times and I'm a former FAANG
| engineer.
| SECProto wrote:
| > 1/4 are "signature didn't match"
|
| If this was a factor in allowing someone to vote, I'd never be
| allowed. The only time i use cursive is the once or twice a
| year I have to sign something (new card, paperwork, etc) so my
| signature never looks the same as other signatures.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >simply leaving the ballot out of the envelope entirely(!)
|
| Some / all of those could've been intentional no-votes, just
| like leaving your ballot blank would be in an in-person vote.
| gruez wrote:
| >2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match" (most of those are
| probably false negatives and should have counted, I'd bet, but
| given other issues I wouldn't be surprised if people in the
| same household accidentally signing one another's ballots or
| something else silly like that is some measurable part of the
| problem) and,
|
| How does this work afterwards? Are the voters notified? Seems
| like bad design to silently drop votes just because some guy
| arbitrarily decided your signature "didn't match".
| kelnos wrote:
| So I guess we can say that at most 5% of the ballots were
| rejected for a "good" reason; that is, for a reason that might
| be related to actual fraud. But in reality it's probably much
| lower, since for #2 it's pretty much a given that a lot of
| those are false positives (as you suggest), and presumably not
| all of the #3 cases are fraud.
|
| Is that good? Bad? At the very least, if there _are_ fraud
| attempts, it 's good that they're being caught?
|
| It's just lame that at least 5% of ballots, and probably more,
| are being rejected due to ballot UX issues or a broken
| verification process.
| spanhandler wrote:
| Right: false positive from the perspective of catching fraud,
| false negative from the perspective of accepting good
| ballots, is what I mean, exactly. Same thing, different way
| of phrasing it.
|
| Anyone know what the rejection rate for in-person paper
| ballots is, in the US, typically? It's hard to judge how much
| worse this is at successful voting than in-person with paper.
| My gut tells me increased participation would dwarf even a
| hard 10% rejection rate, assuming no improvement could be
| made, and if the in-person rejection rate's not near-zero
| then it's _really_ a big win, but maybe not.
|
| Meanwhile stories like this are making me really nervous
| about the public perception of November's vote, regardless
| how well they're actually run.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match"
|
| I've always felt that matching signatures was a terrible way of
| authenticating voters. The person doing the matching is not a
| trained handwriting expert. Also, like many people, I have
| subpar handwriting and I highly doubt my signature today looks
| anything like what it did when I first registered to vote 25+
| years ago.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The on site signature books are set up for right handed use.
| The helper has to move their hand shielding the printed
| signature so lefties can just copy what they wrote :)
| jvreagan wrote:
| When I lived in King County Washington half the time my vote
| was sent back due to mismatching signature. Heard similar
| stories from others. Maybe it stops fraud, but the high false
| negative rate is egregious.
| siculars wrote:
| I recently had to sign many, many papers at a bank. They
| specifically told me to make sure my signature matched the one on
| my state drivers license.
|
| Looks like someone sold some hand writing similarity software in
| the name of fraud detection. Also, for the children!
|
| /Comments my own, not my employers.
| Gunax wrote:
| It's so odd... Like what constitutes a similarity? Do people
| not change their signature between 12 and 50?
| moksly wrote:
| It always amazes me how one of the most technologically advanced
| countries in the world has such a shitty voting system.
|
| Big American tech companies know when you're pregnant before you
| do, but the government doesn't know who lives in a specific
| house. So weird.
| thingymajig wrote:
| It's a very hard problem. I live next to a multi-family house
| in a college town and the tenants move in and out so frequently
| that I'm not even 100% sure who lives there... and I'm 10 feet
| away. Hell, I could probably only roughly estimate the total
| number of people that live there.
|
| I wonder if there's a solution in there though... maybe
| landlords should have to report tenants on their federal taxes
| or something?
| david927 wrote:
| Why are we tracking it via residency? If you're homeless,
| that doesn't invalidate your citizenship.
|
| We need to move to a unique ID per person with password, that
| you can link to email(s), phone(s) or both. And then we can
| have on-line voting.
| umeshunni wrote:
| > Why are we tracking it via residency? If you're homeless,
| that doesn't invalidate your citizenship.
|
| How do you decide which elections a person is eligible to
| vote in? There are district, city, county, state-level
| polls and your residency determines which elections you're
| eligible to vote in
| Spivak wrote:
| I really don't understand why there is so much opposition
| to online voting in the US. I think people fetishize voting
| as this super hard problem whee it must be anonymous, must
| be verifiable that the vote was counted and was correct but
| in such a way that a person can't prove to someone else
| their vote or even that they voted.
|
| It's just exhausting. Just have an account with the
| government, fill out your ballot, hit submit, post the
| votes publicly that are counted and let people find their
| ballot by some ID number if they want and call it a day.
|
| I'm willing to bet that more people than not are more than
| willing to use this system.
| adsjhdashkj wrote:
| It's by design, i imagine. Like difficult to do taxes.
| gpanders wrote:
| > but the government doesn't know who lives in a specific
| house. So weird.
|
| This seems to me a feature, not a bug.
| Eugeleo wrote:
| Genuine question: What's the benefit? And how would you solve
| the vote-by-mailproblems the US has now because of this?
| j_walter wrote:
| There is no federal system, so it's left to the states.
| Unfortunately some states are good at some things and shitty at
| others. Take my state...we rarely have vote by mail issues
| (100% for at least a decade now), but we also gave hundreds of
| millions to Nigerian scam artists in unemployment benefits
| recently. All governments have very poor performance when they
| require scaling up a system quickly...so do many companies, but
| sadly they seem to have people who are better equipped and
| motivated to do so.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vaidhy wrote:
| One of the key problems is in verifying citizenship. None of the
| existing identities work well for this. I remember when India
| introduced Aadhar card, it was explicitly mentioned that it is
| not a proof of citizenship and there was a "challenge" to come up
| with a good identity proof for citizenship.
| Qasaur wrote:
| I don't understand why voter ID is such a big deal in the United
| States. In my country (Sweden) you _cannot_ vote without
| identifying yourself with a state-issued ID card or passport, no
| exceptions. If you for some reason lack both you need to have
| someone that can affirm your identity (and they need to show
| their own identification papers). Nobody complains about it
| because it is a necessary precondition for a fair and rigorous
| democratic system and everyone implicitly agrees upon this. If
| you don 't like it then don't participate.
|
| I don't buy the argument that it disenfranchises voters. Even the
| poorest in my country are able to vote despite having these voter
| ID restrictions. India also has some form of voter ID too, and
| their population is almost triple the American population and
| substantially poorer.
|
| I can't help but think that there is some kind of malicious
| intent behind the opposition to voter ID, but it is unfortunately
| very difficult to prove.
| glofish wrote:
| Democrats believe that people without an ID will vote for then
| since these people are most likely living off government
| programs hence Democrats ought to be (though not guaranteed)
| their choice.
|
| It is not malicious inasmuch they are pushing for it solely
| because they think they will benefit from this process. If it
| were the other way around they would oppose it.
| evan_ wrote:
| Republicans know that requiring ID to vote will prevent poor
| people who are legally eligible to vote from voting
|
| If it costs $15 to get an ID and you need an ID to vote, then
| it costs $15 to vote. Poll taxes are illegal.
| ThA0x2 wrote:
| The IDs that are required to vote in Republican states are
| either free of charge, or they allow alternative ID
| documents.
|
| Texas being a fine example:
| https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
| spbaar wrote:
| Why do you think this? I've only ever seen Democrats push
| more people to vote and republicans less so.
|
| | if it were the other way around they would oppose it.
|
| ?
| logicslave wrote:
| Honestly, I cant understand why people wont just admit this
| to themselves/the public.
| baddox wrote:
| I think that decreasing disenfranchisement is good even if
| one political party might benefit from it. The other way of
| phrasing this looks a lot worse: that another political party
| benefits from policies which disenfranchise voters.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's hard to understand from other countries but voter ID laws
| and a lot of voting changes (eg: eliminating voting days and
| polling places) have been specifically [0] targeted at minority
| populations and by proxy at the Democratic party. [1] There's a
| long history of this happening and when the Supreme Court
| removed a law requiring some states (in the south) with a long
| history of extremely racist voter suppression to get approval
| for changes a few years ago there were suddenly large
| reductions in voting sites, days, and attempts at instating
| voter ID laws.
|
| [0] As in we have emails where they talk about specifically
| eliminating Sunday as an early voting day because it's heavily
| black and disproportionately Democratic.
|
| [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-id/
| commandlinefan wrote:
| How many places _don't_ require voter ID? Is the U.S. the only
| one?
| spbaar wrote:
| There is no federal id (except for DC drivers licenses).
| Drivers licenses are not proof of citizenship, Social Security
| card is not proof, university id card is not proof. Passports
| are expensive and time consuming to get
| Qasaur wrote:
| Then perhaps the federal authorities should push for federal
| ID cards so people can actually identify themselves when
| voting. It is beyond me how the State can enforce a non-
| voluntary tax liability on a citizen but has no way of
| reliably identifying said citizen - it doesn't make any sense
| whatsoever. ID cards in Sweden cost roughly 350 crowns, which
| is around 40 USD. If people can't be bothered to get one of
| those cards to vote in an election then I see no reason to
| accommodate them as the fee is so low and 99.9% of people can
| afford it. If they can't, they can ask a friend or election
| official to validate their identity at the election booth.
| I'm sure the government could provide ID cards free of charge
| cross-referenced with biometric data to avoid duplicates.
| This isn't a difficult problem to solve but it seems like the
| Democrats are trying to stonewall it any chance they get.
| evan_ wrote:
| There are millions of eligible voters in the US for whom a
| $40 fee would be impossible to overcome. You don't
| understand how deep and how widespread poverty is in the
| US.
|
| If you think the Republicans are pushing for a national ID
| and the Democrats are blocking them, you also don't
| understand the US political parties.
| spanhandler wrote:
| That last sentence is interesting. The state of things is
| that a few lawmakers, mostly Democrats, support a
| national ID, but then most Republicans _and a bunch of
| other Democrats_ strongly oppose it. It 's semi-
| bipartisan to hate the idea of national ID.
|
| Meanwhile Republicans are very into requiring ID to vote,
| and a free Federal ID is a _great_ way to allow for that
| while also solving a bunch of other problems that amount
| to a bunch of extra work, risk, and stress for normal
| people, but there 's no way they'll join the (AFAIK)
| minority of Democrats supporting it to get it through,
| because they like ID to vote but hate, like, _good_ ,
| efficient ID systems, at the same time.
|
| Opposition's mostly fear of government misuse, with
| overlap with a minority of people really certain it's a
| sign of the end times and marks us as servants of the
| Devil or something (I guess it's not when it's in other
| countries, or maybe those people are all servants of the
| Devil now, IDK). Democrats fear Republicans will use it
| to target minorities or set up rules effectively non-
| personing parts of the citizenry by denying them IDs,
| after they're (the IDs) made super-important. Republicans
| are afraid they'll be used to round up guns or track
| militia members or something. Basically a bunch of people
| on both sides are afraid of it, so it's a dead issue.
| evan_ wrote:
| I think people outside of the US have a lot of difficulty
| imagining that conditions within the US could actually be
| as bad as they are. I think a lot of people within the US
| do as well.
| spanhandler wrote:
| Tell me about it. I'm shopping for non-employer family
| health coverage right now and I bet if people in the rest
| of the OECD knew what that looked like here they'd lobby
| the UN to send peacekeepers and relief aid. Country's
| great for making money, and also great at taking a bunch
| of it with little to show in return. And inconveniencing
| you for the privilege.
|
| Five figures a year for another five figures of risk
| exposure, and none of it even applies except at about
| (optimistically) 1/3 of providers in one state--wrong
| hospital a mile from your house, you're uninsured. Travel
| out of state and get in a car wreck without getting some
| kind of travel insurance ahead of time which'll probably
| also find a way not to pay in the fine print anyway, like
| you're going to f#cking Colombia, you're uninsured. Ugh.
| This friggin' country.
|
| (for those outside the US, you can translate "you're
| uninsured" to "you are definitely going bankrupt if you
| actually need a hospital for anything. If you're very
| lucky you'll still manage to get sufficient care before
| they realize you have no money left. And then if you also
| lose your job as a result of the health issue it gets
| _really_ bad but at least you _might_ get government
| insurance then, after it 's too late to save you from
| permanent poverty.")
|
| [EDIT] oh, and yes, that's about as good as it gets in my
| state--that's not, like, the worst option, that's ~
| _every_ option. Almost every insurance provider has left
| the individual (i.e. non-employer-provided) market,
| leaving bottom-feeders who 've figured out new ways to
| deliver nearly-useless coverage while technically
| complying with the ACA, plus a few "non-compliant"
| coverage options that, aside from being crap (but at
| least cheap crap, instead of expensive crap) expose you
| to tax liabilities, if the Feds ever decide to start
| enforcing those again.
| evan_ wrote:
| I would only add that, regardless of the severity of your
| condition, if a hospital discovers that you will be
| unable to pay they will simply send you home untreated.
| spanhandler wrote:
| Yep. An ER has to make sure you're not _actively,
| immediately dying_ but after that you 're cut loose and
| they don't have to do a thing. Good luck with that cancer
| or whatever. Plus if they do anything I'm sure they still
| send debt collectors after you even if they know you
| don't have money.
|
| Knowing hospitals you'd end up with five debts from
| different companies from one uninsured post-heart-attack
| stabilization in one room at one ER. This also makes it
| nearly impossible to actually _know_ you 're covered for
| anything--one of those entities might not "take" your
| insurance, and now all that money you paid is useless and
| you're screwed anyway.
|
| Navigating US healthcare feels like performing voodoo
| magic and tea-leaf-reading with some combination of your
| physical and financial health on the line, trying to
| balance it so if something goes wrong both are only
| _badly_ harmed rather than _catastrophically_ harmed.
|
| [EDIT] on the plus side if you start off poor there's a
| decent chance the government does cover your health care,
| though it makes sure to make maintaining that super
| stressful--it's just that it's all set up so the health
| care system eventually gets a huge chunk of everyone's
| money, if they have any, and often _all_ of the money,
| sooner or later. May not apply to the super rich but
| otherwise you 're either poor and covered, or not-poor-
| but-not-rich and hoping you get the right roll on the
| dice so the healthcare system doesn't find a way to take
| all your money. And it is in all cases incredibly
| stressful _even when you 're not sick_.
| Qasaur wrote:
| Seems like India does this well and they are the world's
| largest democracy and much poorer than the average
| American. Poverty is not an excuse for government
| incompetence (or even malice).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_(India)
| evan_ wrote:
| Trying to wrap my head around "Poverty is not an excuse
| for government malice". Poor people are to blame for
| Republicans trying to disenfranchise them? Certainly
| those who vote for Republicans I guess...
|
| Seems like you aren't in the US so maybe you don't know
| the history. Basically the US has a very long history of
| white supremacists protecting their own power and wealth
| at the expense of non-white people through
| disenfranchisement. This continues today. I'm arguing
| from the point of view that this is bad and should not be
| a basis for policy.
| baddox wrote:
| > It is beyond me how the State can enforce a non-voluntary
| tax liability on a citizen but has no way of reliably
| identifying said citizen
|
| Are there tax liabilities that depend on one's citizenship?
| Qasaur wrote:
| The United States taxes its citizens globally regardless
| of residence, yes. One of the only countries in the world
| that does that (the other is Liberia AFAIK).
| ghaff wrote:
| Congratulations. You have now instituted _both_ a poll tax
| /at least obstacle to voting and a Federal ID card. You
| have pretty much managed to alienate the entire political
| spectrum in the US.
| gruez wrote:
| >ID cards in Sweden cost roughly 350 crowns, which is
| around 40 USD. If people can't be bothered to get one of
| those cards to vote in an election then I see no reason to
| accommodate them as the fee is so low and 99.9% of people
| can afford it.
|
| A $40 poll tax that "99.99% of people can afford" is still
| a poll tax.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The cost in Argentina is of US$3, and it is not necessary
| to get a new one for each election. You get one when you
| are born, a new card at 8 yeas old and a new one at 14
| years old.
|
| And if you can't pay for it, the government give it for
| free anyway.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| The malicious intent behind any Voter ID law is that they
| generally don't include enough funding or accessibility to get
| a Voter ID itself.
|
| In the USA this generally disenfranchises minorities, people
| from lower socioeconomic status, or those for whom English (and
| navigating complex information in English) is not a primary
| language.
|
| If the government would MANDATE voter ID but then also gave 4
| years for everyone to get one and made it nearly free, then I
| think much of the opposition would be gone.
| cbhl wrote:
| I think that this is a fair question, especially if you don't
| live in the US.
|
| The context is that certain populations in the US are known to
| be disenfranchised from getting ID. Here's an example from the
| Washington Post in 2016:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...
|
| I actually really like the process that Elections Canada uses.
| They verified that most Canadians have ID (86% have Driver's
| Licenses). They identified the most common issue (proof of
| address) and added a mitigating process (mailing Voter
| Information Cards). And finally, they have a fallback: as a
| third option, a person's identity can be vouched for by a
| person who does have ID.
| https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=med&dir=c76/id...
| https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=poli/r...
| ThA0x2 wrote:
| The IDs that are required to vote in Republican states are
| either free of charge, or they allow alternative ID
| documents.
|
| Texas being a fine example:
| https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
|
| There are free options that are easy to aquire. Not sure why
| there are so many myths about this.
|
| The WaPo article has some glaring falsehoods. Of course in
| Texas you can vote with your concealed handgun license, it's
| the hardest one to get.
| Qasaur wrote:
| I can see why a tiny minority of people would be
| disenfranchised, but unfortunately compromises have to be
| made to have a fair and rigorous election system. Edgecases
| exist where people slip through the bureaucratic cracks but
| those exist here too and I see _no one_ complaining about it.
| If you for some reason lack identification papers you 'd try
| to fix it by going through the processes that we have to
| verify your identity. Nobody ever complains and says that the
| system is actively disenfranchising them as that is patently
| ridiculous.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The issue problem is it's a solution to a problem that
| doesn't exist. In person voter fraud is hard to do in large
| numbers and there's only a handful of cases where people
| have voted more than once. Trump tried to create a panel to
| find voter fraud and found either nothing or basically
| nothing.
|
| So on the one hand we have a solution to fraud that doesn't
| happen vs explicit and intentional voter
| disenfranchisement.
|
| [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-
| id/
| [deleted]
| superjan wrote:
| In the Netherlands we also require ID. But everybody already
| has an Id card because you need it to travel abroad. In the US,
| a lot of people dont have a passport, especcially the less
| wealthy ones.
| the-dude wrote:
| In NL, you are required to have an ID to be in the public
| space. Although there is no requirement _to carry_ , there is
| a requirement _to show_ under certain circumstances ( for non
| Dutchies, this is classical Dutch policy ).
|
| Also, if I am not mistaken, is an ID not mandatory when using
| public transport?
|
| I lived without an ID for quite some time.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _I don 't buy the argument that it disenfranchises voters._
|
| It sure did back in Alabama in 2015:
| https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16767426/...
| (ctrl-f for "But the stories getting attention were almost all
| from 2015".)
|
| > _Even the poorest in my country are able to vote despite
| having these voter ID restrictions._
|
| Good for them, but I'm not sure what bearing that has on the
| poorest in an entirely different country.
| baddox wrote:
| > I don't buy the argument that it disenfranchises voters.
|
| There is already significant voter disenfranchisement in the
| United States. Adding an additional requirement (which likely
| costs money and time) surely will not _reduce_
| disenfranchisement. What do you not buy?
| bitbckt wrote:
| There is strong opposition to any sort of national registry
| which might be used to "categorize" citizens for any purpose.
| That distrust is further compounded by general distrust in a
| strong federal government.
|
| The whole concept of a federal personnummer/identitetskort - in
| their Swedish incarnations - and any benefits/conveniences
| offered by that sort of system is ideologically abhorrent to a
| (large?) portion of the US population.
| tzs wrote:
| In Sweden, does getting your state-issued ID so you can vote
| require visiting a government office that is only open during
| business hours on weekdays, in a place very poorly served by
| public transit and far away from poor neighborhoods, so that
| poor people without cars will have to take a whole day off from
| work to travel there? Is the office understaffed so it might
| take two or three visits to actually get your ID? In Sweden,
| when the government reduces the number of places you can get ID
| or cuts hours under the guise of cost cutting, does almost all
| that cutting only come from offices that serve high minority
| areas?
|
| In Sweden, are there limited protections for worked so that
| many poor workers won't have any paid days off they can use for
| such a trip, so it will cost them a day or two of pay to get
| their ID, and perhaps their job if their boss doesn't approve
| of them taking time off from work?
|
| In Sweden, are the politicians who instituted the voter ID
| policies the same politicians that have drastically reduced the
| number of polling places per capita in minority neighborhoods
| so that actually voting there can require hours of standing in
| line (and missing work if your employer doesn't give you a paid
| day off to vote), while not cutting or even increasing polling
| places per capita in white neighborhoods so that it is a breeze
| for whites to quickly and easily vote?
|
| Have they cut back early voting programs that opened the
| polling places during the weekend before election day, so
| people could vote on their days off?
|
| If the answer to all of the above is "no", then what you see in
| Sweden is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to understanding
| voting in the US.
|
| The fact is that the people enacting voter ID laws in the
| United States (1) are generally the same people who have been
| working hard to limit minority voting, (2) cannot demonstrate
| that it solves any actual problem, (3) try to make it hard for
| poor and minorities to get the ID that they pick for their
| system while making it easy for white people.
|
| That's why there is plenty of opposition to voter ID--the
| politicians pushing for it are not acting in good faith. If
| someone proposed a voter ID system in good faith--one in which
| it was free to get ID, could be obtained quickly and without
| the need for a lot of travel, and was easy for minorities to
| get as for white people, there would mostly only be objections
| from those who oppose national ID system in general.
| osrec wrote:
| I'm new to US politics, however I'm extremely surprised at
| how frequently the concept of voter suppression comes up. It
| seems completely anti-democracy.
|
| I've never really come across this phrase in UK politics. If
| it was to come up, I'm certain it would be met with extreme
| outrage. Why is it just accepted in the US?!
| evan_ wrote:
| I wonder if the signatures actually didn't match, or if someone
| bulk-challenged votes based on demographics (either perceived
| from the name or from an actual list of registered voters by
| campaign contributions or zip codes).
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| That headline isn't anything to be proud of, I'm not sure if 10%
| is supposed to sound significant or insignificant, but at any
| sort of scale 10% is enough to potentially change a close
| election.
|
| What we don't have for comparison a similar breakdown for
| elections in physical polling places. Politicians engage in all
| sorts of squabbling and shenanigans every election in attempts to
| knock votes off of opponent's tallies. I'm sure the difference
| between votes cast and votes counted is pretty substantial in any
| election.
|
| If the rates are similar then this is not much of a headline at
| all.
| verylittlemeat wrote:
| I keep seeing people say "user error" to these problems as if
| that's an acceptable answer to a quarter of submitted votes being
| rejected.
|
| These are mistakes that are caught and resolved with in person
| voting.
|
| I'm not in the camp that thinks mail in voting is impossible but
| these are real problems that need to be solved before November.
| For our country this is an unprecedented election, it deserves
| more respect than being explained away by partisan politics.
| davidw wrote:
| Vote by mail works very well here in Oregon. Indeed, we _only_
| vote by mail. Here 's our Republican secretary of state saying
| so:
|
| https://www.myoregon.gov/2020/06/19/vote-by-mail-works-espec...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| >There are many security measures to guard against fraud,
| including a signature line on the outside of the envelope that
| is checked against a digital signature on file. Every single
| ballot envelope signature is compared to the signature in the
| voter file to make sure it is a match. Our election workers are
| trained in forensic handwriting analysis to determine whether a
| signature matches. Each ballot return envelope contains a
| unique barcode that cannot be duplicated to make sure that
| voters can only return one ballot. Voters can even go online to
| track their ballot to confirm that it was received and counted.
| It is a system that costs less, is more secure, and has a paper
| trail.
|
| There is a difference between a system that has been running
| for years and evolved to work, and one that is put together in
| an emergency. Some things of note.
|
| 1) They check signatures and the election workers have training
| in forensic handwriting analysis.
|
| 2) They use unique barcodes to prevent duplicates
|
| 3) They have a way to make sure your ballot was received and
| counted.
|
| I bet that for a lot of states ramping up mail in voting, they
| are missing one or more of the above.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Everywhere has vote by mail already it's largely a question
| of scale that's changing with this election.
| davidw wrote:
| Imagine if we'd started preparing when it was clear that
| things were serious.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah, if only, but it was never going to happen with
| Trump in office. Everything is far too personal even
| beyond the gutting of institutions that's happened.
|
| It's crazy to me that things like temperature checks
| aren't more common, it's a relatively easy way to get
| control and open up more safely, but then the US isn't
| great at collective action. We're individualistic and
| contrarian to a fault.
| baddox wrote:
| > There is a difference between a system that has been
| running for years and evolved to work, and one that is put
| together in an emergency. Some things of note.
|
| I don't really understand this argument. You list some things
| that we should do to have a secure vote-by-mail election, but
| you seem to be phrasing your argument as if it's an argument
| _against_ vote-by-mail elections.
| nisuni wrote:
| I know everyone in certain social circles is pressured into
| saying that vote-by-mail is the best thing ever, because the
| Orange Man said that vote-by-mail is bad and you must be on the
| other side.
|
| However, it's time to admit that vote-by-mail has huge problems
| and it's more prone to fraud.
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