Well the obvious way that it prevents voter fraud is I walk into where you are registered and say "Hi, I'm suzzer99, and I am here to vote." Note: I don't think this actually happens, but to say it can't prevent any voter fraud is obviously false.

The asterisk is fine, but I imagine there would be some saying that you shouldn't have to have ID to have the right to case your vote by secret ballot.

It seems obvious that the simplest solution is to just do away with the government so no voting is needed.

It's much harder to find out whether "John Smith*" is a legitimate voter than for "John Smith" to get an ID. What exactly are you going to do? Search through video surveillance tapes? It would be probably be a lot cheaper to invest those resources into making it as easy as possible to get ID.

Ah, Boa Hancock. Popping in, not reading the OP, posting a GOP fearmongering talking point that is demonstrably false, and then getting belligerent when called on it.

Boa, if you come back into this thread, please tell us how much vote fraud you think is occurring, how you learned that this level of vote fraud is occurring, and then post a link to that evidence.

So what happens when the real suzzer99 shows up to vote later on? How do you plan to perpetrate this fraud on any kind of scale w/o being detected?

This makes no sense. Please tell me how this would apply in a real life voter fraud situation.

The main security feature in Illinois is voters get their signature checked against the signature on file. My vote casting was held up once when the judges didn't feel my signatures matched. They eventually let me vote.

Wait, what? You don't "have a problem" with not allowing student IDs because they have less information than, say, a passport. While you are correctly identifying a difference, why does that difference matter?

I'll tell you the actual reason is because the Republicans who wrote those laws are aware that college students vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

(P.S. I haven't had a student ID that was just laminated paper ever, even my highschool ID was the same credit-card style material as a driver's license)

Probably the best way would be to register a bunch of phony people, or to somehow inhibit the actual voters from showing up. I do know that in the last Canadian Federal election members of different parties tried to trick people into not showing up, although I think they just wanted them to not vote rather than substituting their vote for a phony voter.

Tricking people into not voting is utterly standard behavior for sleazy political parties(tell them the election is on a different date, etc.), but you can't guarantee which people will be fooled.

Registering phony people and then having standins vote would work, but how do you get the phony registrations to work? You'd need people on the inside to process the fake registrations, but if you have people on the inside you can just **** with the numbers directly and no laws will fix that.

How could you seriously register enough phony people in volume, then provide the fake IDs to sway an election and never be detected? This isn't Tammany Hall days.

Now compare the risk of a few extra votes happening this way vs. the known effects of disenfranchising 1000s or elderly minorities. Seems fair.

This is funny, but not for the reasons that you probably think it is.

suzzer, I'm 99% sure that none of the people who support voter-ID laws are really aware of how voting/voter registration works.

Or don't use "Captain Planet" as your name, and nobody is ever the wiser?

It would take me approximately 3 minutes to photoshop a paycheck stub and utility bill to hand to a voter registration booth and get a fake name on the voter rolls. Once you're on it, you're on it forever.

Maybe they do it differently in your state, but when I took some of my younger employees to vote in the 2010 election, that's all they needed to do.

Hell, truly "legit" pay stubs can be created with a pirated copy of Quickbooks and a $10 starter package from a business stationery website. Then all you need is a piece of mail with that name on it.


Personally, I think the blue finger idea is the best if voter fraud is really the problem we're trying to stop.

I think the difference matters because the college ID I had, and most college IDs of which I am aware, is more easily forged than a government document. I think that distinction is important, you obviously don't.

I think everyone on Earth is aware that college students vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but I never met anyone at college that didn't have a government issued ID though (and a fake ID or two, come to think of it), so I'm not sure which college students are being prevented from voting with this portion law. I can't speak to CC or University of Phoenix students; I am sure someone will post data that shows that millions of students have the potential to be or have been prevented from voting by this part of the law though.

I think I just talked myself back into pvn's RFID idea, maybe one's SSN should be tattooed on their forearm at 16 too just to be safe. Might as well get to the end of that slippery slope as soon as possible, after all.

OK, but no one is actually committing voter fraud now, so why not accept student IDs now with a note that you expect them to become more secure over the next 4 years?

I mean the concept in play is:

1, zomg, no one is stealing votes, but next year they might despite no evidence they will, we need to ID people
2, yeah, so we can use passports, gun licenses, student IDs, driving licenses
3, oh, no, not student IDs, they are sometimes easy to forge and even though no one is committing voter fraud whilst we require no ID everyone knows when we require some ID they will start forging IDs to commit voter fraud
4, oh, so, just passports, gun licenses and driving licenses?
5, nope, illegals can get driving licenses, so just guns and passports
6, i see no flaws in this plan

Well, don't get too far ahead of yourself.

The voter fraud hall of shame: Milwaukee voter fraud conviction makes ACORN’s 2010 total at least 15

Voter fraud doesn't get prosecuted very often because A: it's hard to prove and B: the damage is already done.

Phill --

Standardizing/securing college IDs would be a fine compromise.

I feel like some people in this thread (you and Fly) don't care about my actual position, and are using me as an archetypal evil Republican blindy supporting this law -- I'm not and I don't, as my posts pretty clearly indicate. Voting has never been particularly important to me personally, but any law that is disenfranchising large segments of voters is obviously wrong. That current voter ID laws may do this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to ensure the security of future elections through reasonable means, it just means the current laws are partisan and should be changed. Whether that eventually means accepting more secure college IDs or putting ink on fingers or retinal scans is up to more interested and civic minded people than myself.

I have pretty clearly stated that I think those who think that getting a government ID is a slippery slope to jackbooted thuggery to be overly paranoid, but given your worldview it seems like a perfectly reasonable point of view to have, and you're welcome to it. I pretty clearly don't agree with that point of view, and neither of us is going to change, I'm sure.

In every one of these cases it was ACORN employees signing up extra non-existent people to get more money from sponsors. Please show actual voter fraud, not just registration fraud.

You provided evidence of voter registration fraud. There is NO evidence, despite extensive investigation, that anyone actually tried to vote using the fraudulent credentials submitted by ACORN employees.

15 people and they were caught doing a different type of fraud. The system works.

Meanwhile for $10 you can hack electronic voting machines to manipulate the votes and there is a case working its way through the system in Michigan (if i remember correctly) where someone testified he was hired to do this on a widescale - this was the core of the previous vote rigging thread we had on here.

As i said before the solution is really obvious, if you want to secure the votes then awesome, sounds good, but not at the cost of millions of voters who will be stripped of their voting rights. How can you be so for democracy that you consider disenfranchising millions to be a cost of "securing elections"? That just makes no sense to me.

The one democrat I respect on defending the rights of voters against the Democrat war on voters is Joe Lieberman. He was the only democrat who stood up for the counting of votes of overseas voters in the Florida recount.

Democrats of course never forgave him for defending voting rights against their efforts to disenfranchise voters. And they defeated him in his next Democratic primary, as we may well remember.

Its time for Democrats to join us in the defense of counting all valid votes and only valid votes, and insisting on proper ID will help ensure that this happens.

The only conservatives i respect in the war on voting are the founding fathers cos they never hid their efforts to stop blacks from casting votes.

Welcome back to the thread, Boa. As I asked earlier (if you missed it), please tell us how much vote fraud you think is occurring and share with us the evidence you used to come to that conclusion.

You guys are absolutely right about the story I linked to.

But c'mon. It took two seconds to find stories like this: Channel 2 found that in the last eight elections during the last 10 years 232 people with death certificates had voted after they had died – some more than once.

Very few people are caught in the act of voter fraud because nobody is looking. Plus, the only way that so called "fake" names would be caught is if we KNEW to look for them.

All these stories about dead people voting are out there because it's easy to cross check the "people who voted" database with the "people who died before voting day" one. The Social Security Administration maintains a death database.

If I signed Charles Henderson up as a voter from an address that I made up and printed documented proof via Photoshop, nobody is ever going to be the wiser. Because Charles Henderson will be living at 123 Fake Street until the day he dies, which will be never, because he doesn't exist.

In the 2008 presidential election, I almost voted for someone else because the 98 year old poll worker mis-heard my name. They were already crossing the guy with a similar last name as mine off the list and handing me a ballot before I corrected it.

It's absurdly easy to walk in and give a fake name if you already know the name is in the registration book.

You guys are both intelligent individuals and should be able to acknowledge that anyone with an 8th grade education and access to TPB.org could pull this off without trying very hard.

When elections are decided by a couple hundred votes out of hundreds of thousands cast (see recent WI Supreme Court race) the incentive to cheat like this is definitely there.

Completely irrelevant.

The rest of my post was good, too. Click the little arrow.