Yes, those moves by Democrats are douchey and unAmerican. Just like the Republican moves, right?

Douchey fosho, unAmerican, I am not so sure.

CA --

Thanks for the link.

I guess I don't have much sympathy for the younger part of our population that doesn't have a photo ID. Having a DL/state ID seems to me to be a pretty important part of being a citizen, and taking a few hours out of one day every 4 years to get an ID doesn't seem to be too much to ask. Independent of the voting issue, it's pretty hard for me to understand how that many people get by without a photo ID . . . I guess I should have taken more social justice/sociology classes in college.

The not accepting student ID thing also doesn't seem to be a big deal to me; unless things have changed since I was in school, they're essentially just a piece of cardboard with a photo, a class year, and college name. Can't students going to school out of state just either register to vote in the county/state in which they're going to school or use an absentee ballot from their state of residence? That's what most of the kids I went to school with did, and I never heard of anyone having a problem. Arguing that this rule disenfranchises college students is a lot tougher sell to me than arguing that it disenfranchises poor people.

In any case, the answer to me seems to make it easier for poor people to get photo ID, not infantilize them by excusing them from a societal requirement because of liberal guilt.

Having ID isnt a societal requirement.

Phill,

It's not? It's necessary for traveling by air, buying controlled substances, cashing checks, etc . . . Are you just arguing that it's not legally required? Why shouldn't it be?

Do you support obamacare?

I ask because all the things you mention are voluntary. Somebody might choose to do them, or not. Choosing not to doesn't make you a non-citizen.

You said having ID is an important part of being a citizen. Actually, it's an important part of how you choose to live but has nothing to do with being a citizen.

don't fly, don't buy controlled substances, and do you seriously cash checks?? I haven't actually cashed a check in over a decade, I've deposited a few, but that doesn't require ID.

ID's are not legally required, attempting to require an ID is a major government overreach, and would hopefully be ruled unconstitutional.

Exactly. A requirement to do voluntary things is by its definition not a "societal requirement".

Actually it would be incredibly hard if you want to maintain things like secret ballots. It's not like building a banking/ATM system.

It's hard enough to make electronic voting machines robust when you've got control of the physical machine and polling location. Distributing the process over the internet makes the problem several orders of magnitude harder.

Alright, how does one demonstrate citizenship absent of a government ID? Carry around their birth certificate and SS card? Is being able to demonstrate citizenship not important/necessary iyo?

Why specifically is it unconstitutional?

My wife works in healthcare and thinks it sucks; I am not really informed enough to have an opinion worth a salt. Letting people carry no insurance and freeroll care for catastrophic injuries seems wrong to me but I have no idea how to cost effectively solve that problem.

Birth certificate and SS card is by definition a first level of identity in terms of demonstrating citizenship. A passport is the only other way if you are born in America if im not mistaken.

Oh and its unproven opinion (possibly even settled law in some parts, namely the federal level mandate) that a compulsory and/or de facto ID card is unconstitutional, hence the REAL ID act being challenged at various levels of the legal system right now.

Any requirement for voting that isn't already met by 25% of a sizable demographic is not a reasonable requirement.

The importance of demonstrating citizenship depends on the incidence of non-citizens voting.

It's a test with a false positive / false negative rate. Imposing the test eliminates 11% of voters today. That you feel they can overcome the barrier doesn't matter -- many of them will not and you are taking away their votes.

Not imposing the test means the status quo. Except the status quo has a minuscule rate of non-citizens voting. It's an imagined problem, not a real one.

Thanks for the responses CA and Phill; I still don't agree that requiring an ID to vote (or for anything else) is particularly onerous, but I at least understand the argument from the other side now.

As an aside, I am assuming that you feel the same way regarding the AZ ID law designed to catch illegal immigrants? For the life of me I could never understand why people thought it was so horrible of a law, but extrapolating the prevailing opinion ITT to that issue I finally get it (I still don't agree, but w/e).

No wonder black unemployment is so high. Don't you have to have an ID to get a job?

Every phony vote cast cancels a legitimate vote.

There is no greater war on voters than cancelling people's votes.

I don't think you can say you support voter rights and oppose voter ID at the same time with a straight face. They are fundamentally at odds with each other.

I'm not sure what the ID requirements are for jobs that I assume go to the lower income (fast food, big box stores, assorted retail stuff, etc) but I'm quite certain that I never had to show my DL for any of my post college work (I am 32 and a professional in the pharma industry, FWIW).

Approximately 5 people cast phony votes, whereas voter ID would lock out millions of potential voters. No one who supports voter ID can support voter rights at the same time. Or be Republican.

Obviously not said with a straight face.

Chalk up one person who doesn't care for voter rights.

Ballot box stuffing FTW

You are being entirely too reasonable. You're not from around here, are you?

I will now ramble for a bit.

---

Counting votes was the hot topic in the 2000 election. I was paying attention then and my conclusions were:

• All voting systems have uncertainty -- a margin of error. They report counts to the vote, but the true count could be any number within the margin of error.
• When the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, there's no way to know who really won.
• If there's no way to know who won then the decision is arbitrary. It's not a stolen election, it's an arbitrary choice.

My memory is no voting system at the time had a margin of error less than 1%. Some were really bad.

There's a couple of ways to define errors:
1. Somebody who thinks they successfully voted for X, how often did their vote for X not get counted?
2. Somebody attempted to vote for X, but failed somehow. They are aware that they failed but unable to fix it.

The trouble with voting, what makes it a hard problem, is that it has to be anonymous. Which means that as soon as your let go of your ballot and put it into the box (literally or figuratively), there's no way to check if it is used in the count the way you intended. This is an open loop system. Open loop systems suck, closed loop systems don't suck.

Part of why the systems suck is how they are purchased. Vendors use their connections to schmooze important political people with purchasing power. Their systems don't face widespread testing from people looking for flaws -- the people who want to do that are dismissed as cranks.

If you really want to find out the error rate in a voting system, you need to close the loop: ask people who just voted who they think they voted for, and compare that to the results. This is how outside observers sent to monitor elections in other countries detect errors. Small scale testing with fake elections could be used to improve voting systems here, but I doubt anybody cares enough to do such things. Why would vendors go to that trouble when golf in Palm Springs with the right man can land the order?

I don't care about ineligible people voting because the evidence I've seen says they are very few people. Now I'm no expert, so my memory of what I've heard is worth about nothing. Still, this too can be measured. Get some stats guys, do some sampling of voter roles (the people who actually voted), and investigate those people thoroughly to find out if they are citizens. Then you'll know something about the actual rate of ineligible voters casting votes.

I suspect the number will be small compared to the margin of error. Which means they can't decide an election. Remember -- when the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, you can't steal an election, the winner is arbitrary.

Now it's possible the ID requirements will also disenfranchise rates low enough to not swing elections. 11% and 25% aren't real small number though. Also, there will be the unknown set of people who have ID, but are rejected. I don't like giving the government rules that allow them to reject voters. Feel free to insist I should trust the government.

Ineligible voters voting is what I call retail voter fraud. When you have to do it one vote at a time, it's really hard to swing an election.

What I fear is wholesale voter fraud. Ballot boxes disappearing. Buggy software. Running out of ballots. There's a long list. The poll taxes and literacy tests belong on this list. I think ID requirements do too.

Finally, keeping people who are eligible to vote from voting is bad policy. The economists will tell you voting is irrational -- your vote will never matter. The economists are -- of course -- correct. Still, people believe that their vote matters. It has value to them. So when somebody knows their vote was taken away, that is robbery. Not counting a single vote doesn't make a bit of difference when they don't know.

Ha, I have lurked for a long time, although not really in this forum, and just decided to start posting whenever the urge hit me.

My problem with the ID issue is not necessarily that not checking IDs could lead to voter fraud (even though it could theoretically, it seems fairly well demonstrated that the effect would be negligible at best, at least right now), more that having a DL/state ID seems to me to be a pretty minimal societal standard that most citizens somehow find a way to live up to. That it may or may not be unconstitutional to mandate all citizens have one is immaterial to my opinion, as is whether or not it's "difficult" for some people -- it's difficult/unpleasant/inconvenient for me to do a decent number of things that I have to do in my day to day life, and they still manage to get done, for the most part. I recognize that this opinion is forged mostly by my upbringing; I'm not claiming I'd feel the same way if I was brought up in Appalachia by a long line of moonshiners. Regardless, I feel the way I feel, and however well reasoned the argument is against voter ID, I still disagree with the conclusion (if that makes sense).

As an aside, this thread finally inspired me to register to vote in my current state of residence (I've lived here almost 3 years now). I have never voted and probably won't vote this time around (mostly for the reason you stated above, and also laziness) but at least there's a chance now. Yes, I also realize the hypocrisy in talking about doing inconvient things because it's the right thing to do, and then talking about never voting in the next paragraph. Lol me I guess.

"minimal societal standard" is just some subjective thing you made up, you realise that, right?

And my problem with requiring people to show ID (aside from the fact that 25% of the population can't live up to it) is that my grandfather went to war with a nation that required every citizen to carry their papers and present them to the police/SS/KGB upon demand. His generation didn't want to live in a place like that and neither do I, and yet now fast forward 50 years and the right wing is trying to sneak that very thing in. The amazing thing to me is just how rapidly everyone is falling for it.

BTW, don't you think it would be wise for the police to station an officer with a computer at each polling station, then run the names of everyone who shows up to vote. Originally that could be just to see if they have 'outstanding warrants', of course, but give it time and see where it leads.

I went out of my way to make it patently obvious that "minimal societal standard" was my opinion only; I'd appreciate not being talked down to, as I have made every effort to be clear and courteous throughout. I fully admit/realize that I am not as experienced/savvy in these political social sciency issues as most posters in this forum (nor do I care to be). The posts in this thread have been very enlightening, though, and even though I haven't changed my opinion, it has certainly been softened.