Quote:
Originally Posted by Montecore
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.
You are being entirely too reasonable. You're not from around here, are you?
I will now ramble for a bit.
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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.