Minnesota’s Republicans are in a quandary. While other midwestern states appear poised to elect Republican governors, Minnesota appears likely to shun state Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, in favor of former Sen. Mark Dayton, DFL-Minn. This comes on the heels of two consecutive disastrous elections, in which Republicans lost both senate seats and control of the Minnesota House of Representatives.
What really sticks in the craw of Republicans, though, is the seat they lost to Sen. Al Franken, DFL-Minn. They know if they could have kept just a few hundred Democrats from voting that they would have re-elected Norm Coleman. They know that if Norm had been re-elected, Democrats wouldn’t have been able to squeeze health care reform through the Senate.
The people who put Franken over the top are not the type of voters who Republicans see as legitimate. They’re not white. They’re not rich. Many of them are not men. And while Republicans would be horrified at anyone trying to keep a rich white guy from exercising his right to vote, they feel much different when they have the chance to keep a poor Latina from the polls.
And so that’s what they’re gearing up to do:
A coalition of conservative groups says it’s enlisting volunteers to become “voter surveillance teams” at polling places on Election Day, to watch for possible cases of voter fraud. The groups, led by one called Minnesota Majority, say they want to reduce illegal attempts at voting.
But others say the effort appears to have less to do with election fraud and more to do with suppressing voter turnout.
The conservative group, Minnesota Majority, has been raising the issue of election fraud since 2008. Some of its claims haven’t been validated. Others have prompted county attorneys to investigate possible cases of voter fraud. Now the group’s president Jeff Davis, says the goal is to prevent voter fraud.
“Once a ballot is cast it’s almost impossible to undo that,” said Davis. “So our program is intended to prevent those illegitimate ballots from being cast in the first place.”
Davis’ group has been pushing to require people to present photo identification at the polls. State law allows Minnesotans to vote without a photo ID, if they have a utility bill showing their current address or someone vouches for their residency.
Davis says his group is joining with a tea party group and the Minnesota Voters Alliance to ensure that individuals know who they’re vouching for, and to videotape and track buses and vans that deliver large numbers of voters to the polls.
Now, nobody wants non-registered voters to vote. But this goes rather beyond putting together a poll-watching group to make sure that state laws are followed. This goes straight through to intimidation. After all, how exactly are they going to ensure that I know who I’m vouching for? Okay, that’s a silly hypothetical — I’m white, and I live in the suburbs. How exactly are they going to ensure that Jane Voter in St. Paul knows who she’s vouching for? Are they going to ask questions? Hook her up to a polygraph? Ask for photographic evidence?
And even if she’s successful in showing that yes, she knows Mrs. Nguyen, they live next door to each other — well, the damage is done. Because Jane Voter has been intimidated into not vouching for Mr. Hernandez who lives down the block. And Mr. Hernandez and Mrs. Nguyen are going to go back and tell their friends that trying to vote is an invitation to harassment. And as we learned in 2008, it doesn’t take many discouraged voters to swing an election.
Moreover, we’re going to have these groups videotaping vans bringing in voters — a practice that is pretty much as old as voting. The DFL and the GOP have been running vans from senior centers and apartment buildings for decades. It’s part of GOTV — a way of ensuring your voters turn out at the polls. There’s nothing illegal or wrong about it. But if you’re a private individual, you may not want a conservative group videotaping your every movement, all while demanding to know if you really are Mabel Gunderson or not.
Now, the people putting this thuggery together will tell you that they’re doing it for a good cause. They just want the right people to vote. Nothing more, nothing less. But to anyone familiar with the tactics of the right, it’s pretty clear that this is meant to be quite a bit more. No, as my friend and former colleague Robin Marty noted, these actions bear a striking similarity to the tactics of abortion clinic protesters — the ones who “just want to tell women the truth,” by forcing them to run a gantlet of protesters in order to get an abortion. Or prenatal care. Or birth control. Whatever.
Just as anti-choice groups try to intimidate women out of exercising their rights, so Minnesota Majority is trying to help its friends in the Republican party by intimidating voters out of exercising their rights. It is, as always, the right attempting to bully people when they don’t get their way. And only by standing up to these ghouls on the right can we on the left ensure that the rights of our fellow citizens are upheld.
There are, generally speaking, two categories of voting malfeasance. Fraudulent votes are one; vote suppression is the other. Fraudulent voting schemes generally don’t actually accomplish much outside the rare, razor-thin margin election–at most, they shore up the winner’s mandate (or trim it a bit if the fraud is on the part of the losing candidate). Suppression, however, works to actually harm an individual voter, stealing his or her constitutional right to participate in government. Of the two, suppression is infinitely worse–it’s also what the GOP usually prefers.
EDIT TO ADD:
One other point–something that frequently gets CALLED election fraud–registering bogus names–usually isn’t. This was part of the ACORN flap. Sure, bogus names got turned in on the forms, because the ACORN workers were paid per-name. But no one actually voted using those names–at most, it made it seem like the election turn-out was lower than it actually was.
Well, of course. If you’re not careful Lizard People just might take that seat next time, and nobody wants that.
I’m sure there are going to be some people out videotaping the videotapers. A few reports of Minnesota Majority activists being too obnoxious, and there will be pushback.
I don’t think this is really that inappropriate.
If the state wants to allow me to vouch for Amp–which seems like a pretty minimal way to verify voting, FWIW–by saying “yeah, he’s a citizen,” then it doesn’t seem really unreasonably to require me to know Amp’s name, or where he lives, or at least something about him other than “I’ve seen him in town before” or “he asked, so why not?” or “he looks trustworthy.”
Asking those questions isn’t itself the problem. The problem is that the process needs to be official; these folks shouldn’t self-deputize and insert themselves into the voting enforcement process.
Minnesota is one of the few states that will let voters register on election day.
My kid will likely take advantage of this, and I’ll let you know if we’re challenged. We live near a college, so I wouldn’t be surprised if MM has a volunteer watching things at our polling place.
If I recall correctly, there are places inside the polling station where poll watchers can stand fairly close to the registration table.
Most likely, the Democrats already have identified the polling stations that are going to come under the most scrutiny, and will have people in place to watch the Minnesota Majority volunteers.
“Now, nobody wants non-registered voters to vote.”
What would be an ok way of trying to make sure that non-registered voters don’t vote? The Minnesota rules frankly seem crazy to me. The same day “I know this guy, I’m sure he is a citizen” method seems a bit on the “maybe some people really do want non-registered voters to vote” side. Doesn’t it?
I dunno. You have to be a registered voter in the precinct, and then sign an oath, to vouch for someone else; your signed oath will be attached to the registration of the person you’re voting for for at least 22 months. That’s not a circumstance in which many people will feel free to lie.
Furthermore, with a few exceptions (i.e., if you’re the manager of a state-recognized residential building vouching for your residents), you can vouch for no more than 15 people, so it wouldn’t be good for large-scale vote fraud, which is generally what you’d need to do to change an election outcome. The law has record-keeping requirements.
Yes, someone could find someone who’s willing to lie when signing an oath; but someone could also find someone who’s willing to make a fake photo ID. (In fact, I suspect it would be easier to find someone who makes fake IDs.)
Signed oaths, taken before a witness, have been a part of the US legal system for centuries. Why shouldn’t they be good enough for voter registration?
You are relying on: ” by having a person who is registered to vote in the precinct and knows the applicant is a resident of the precinct sign the oath in part 8200.9939″
But since there is no ID requirement for that either, that person doesn’t have to be the person purported either. They just have to give a name that appears on the registered voters list. And as we know, dead people can very easily appear on the voter list for long periods of time, so that doesn’t have to be a particularly dangerous proposition. What are the authorities going to do? They can’t track down the person who falsely swore the oath.
Record keeping requirements aren’t very exciting when there is nothing to link the records to a particular person.
But there’s no ID requirement for voting, either (or only a weak one). Nothing except the risk of being caught prevents anyone from coming and voting as a dead person.
How many actual, proven instances of large-scale false voting — due to people voting as dead people, for instance, or voting under made-up names — have there been in the last few decades? Is this a significant real-world problem?
I recently registered to vote in the state of Oregon (hi Amp! Portland is cool!) and I pretty much filled out a little form, and as I understand it, voting will be done by mail, so I don’t even have to show my face anywhere, let alone provide picture ID. It seems to me that if this is OK, then having someone stand next to you and swear an oath that they know you and that you live here has got to be sufficient.
Voting is a fundamental part of a democracy. We should always be trying to get more people to vote, which is why it is generally so easy to register to vote. Absent any evidence of voter fraud, we should be lowering the bar to voting, not raising it. What’s the point of trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, especially if said solution results in fewer legitimate voters casting ballots?
How many actual, proven instances of large-scale false voting — due to people voting as dead people, for instance, or voting under made-up names — have there been in the last few decades? Is this a significant real-world problem?
It’s a significant problem but more in the potential than in the actual. The actual proven instances have been relatively minor. It’s significant because of the nature of the crime and the potential backlash, not because it actually happens a lot. Also, a great deal of the non-occurrence of the crime has to do with the vigilance against it. I would analogize it to presidential assassinations – not a significant real day to day issue, but lots of people nonetheless spend lots of time and money forestalling it, because if it does happen its Very Bad.
Do we get a lot of dead presidents? Nope. Would we get a lot more dead presidents if we closed down the Secret Service? Yep.
Accordingly, my thinking is that the reputation and credibility of the voting system are on the line, perpetually, just as much when there is little fraud as when it seems rampant. Nobody has ever stolen my credit card, but I still like it when the clerk asks to see an ID when I try to use it.
@Denise, the desire to expand the franchise is emotionally understandable but at least to me illogical. Voting is already relatively easy; nobody has to climb to the top of the mountain in a snowstorm. Accordingly, non-voters are generally speaking the least motivated members of the electorate, apathy that often extends to their education and knowledge levels about the issues involved. (With some exceptions for the standard stereotype of the guy/gal who is very aware but so disgusted that they just don’t vote.)
What group-based decisions in life have you ever noticed being improved by the addition of new input from the people least connected to and aware of the process?
I would think the amount of voting fraud is significantly less than the actual number of votes thrown out for specious reasons (hanging chads, provisional ballots, etc.) Besides, most voting machines have been proven to be able to be hacked in the time it takes to cast a vote
“Absent any evidence of voter fraud, we should be lowering the bar to voting, not raising it. ”
and
“How many actual, proven instances of large-scale false voting — due to people voting as dead people, for instance, or voting under made-up names — have there been in the last few decades? ”
I’m not even sure what you would take as legitimate evidence. You’ve shut down all of the normal ways of detecting people who are impersonating other people while voting.
It cannot be proven by ID or false ID because you won’t allow for the ID.
It cannot be proven by false oath because you won’t allow for an ID of the person making the oath.
Pretty much the only way I can see that it could be even *detected* is if a registered voter comes into the polls and someone has already voted for them. And that is easily avoided by voting with dead people (which has a long history in the United States).
And frankly I cannot believe, that here on amptoons, we are going to have an appeal to reporting a crime, with the very likely underreporting cited as hardcore evidence that the crime is not in fact being committed, coupled with the fact that the entire system is designed in such a way to completely remove checks on accountability. After all the rape reporting discussions, the prison abuse reporting discussions, and the prison rape reporting discussions, that kind of appeal to authority cannot possibly be considered a strong argument here.
“Voting is a fundamental part of a democracy. We should always be trying to get more people to vote, which is why it is generally so easy to register to vote. ”
Voting is fundamental part of a democracy. Which is why we should want people to take it seriously.
And the counterpoint to the question about documented instances is: how many instances are there of disenfranchising a legitimate vote over ID? When opposing the most restrictive law (Indiana), the ACLU couldn’t find a single person. And even the most restrictive law (Indiana) provided provisional voting which would be counted if the person could show within 10 days that they were who they claimed. And all the incentives work the other way in that question. The ACLU wanted to find someone who was disenfranchised or was likely to be disenfranchised. We can have a discussion about why voters who were disenfranchised by an ID requirement might not want to be found, but it is certainly true that they are more likely to want to be found than a fraudulent voter. So if you are willing to accept the lack of discovery of large scale fraudulent voters as evidence of a lack of a problem you should certainly be willing to accept the lack of discovery of legitimate voters with voter ID issues as a lack of a problem.
This strikes me as a balance issue. It is already very easy to register to vote in all 50 states. Very easy. In many of the larger states you almost have to work hard not to get registered. Opportunities to get registered will regularly occur at supermarkets, various government agencies, and with local drives. We are well past the point where making it easier to register to vote is a necessity.
I’m not arguing that there never was such a time in the US. I’m not arguing that we should be limiting voter drives or banning registrations in front of supermarkets. But I am saying that need for ever laxer standards (which is what the frontier of MN represents) is past.
While he wrote it in dissent to the Indiana case, I think that Breyer’s opinion could certainly form the core of a good ID system:
here
So while he didn’t find for the Indiana statute itself, I think he makes a good argument about a) why voter ID requirements aren’t bad, and b) how they could be properly implemented.
Sebastian H,
You determine that dead people have voted in large numbers by comparing the list of voters who voted to lists of people who are dead. You can also do it by, after the election, calling a random sample of the people who voted. If you get more than a tiny number of households where the person who answers the phone says, “No, you can’t speak to my spouse, she died in 1982,” you know something is going on. Detecting vote fraud of the dead people voting type is relatively easy (you just use the same method to find dead people on the rolls that the people running the vote fraud used), which is why it only happens in areas where the political structure is sufficiently corrupt that nobody investigates it.
You say that it “has a long history in the United States,” but you ignore Amp’s point that its long history ended many decades ago. We know it used to happen, so clearly it was detectable, so where are the examples of it happening more recently?
On the other hand, we know that voter suppression based on intimidation and faulty voter roll purges are an active method of election manipulation used by the Republican party (particularly in Florida) in recent elections.
Sebastian H,
I don’t have a major problem with ID requirements (although I think the requirement that the ID be free to acquire is a necessary one), although they are pretty clearly unnecessary (since we aren’t seeing fraud where the ID requirements don’t exist). Certainly, ID requirements are preferable to vote suppression by voter intimidation (which is what is going on in MN, and has gone on in many other places in recent elections). On the other hand, ID requirements aren’t going to lead to a decrease in vote suppression by harassment and intimidation (or the more significant vote suppression by faulty voter roll purges), so they are largely irrelevant to the major election tampering method that is currently active in the US.
Is it worth it to point out that ID requirements discriminate against the very poor and homeless (who often do not have driver’s licenses or state IDs, and lack the extra funds to pay for them), the rural (who lack access to places to get government IDs), and the elderly (particularly the poor, rural elderly, many of whom do not even have birth certificates)? Oh let’s also not forget transgender people, whose IDs may not match their gender presentation, opening them to challenge, disenfranchisement, and harassment. And college students, who may be legitimately registered to vote in the district where they live most of the year, but whose IDs are likely from “home.” And multiple analyses that show that ID requirements suppress voting by African-Americans and Latin@s.
Voter ID requirements are, essentially, the new “Southern Strategy.”
From that link:
“A 2006 study by the Brennan Center found as many as 10 percent of eligible voters do not have a driver’s license or state-issued non-driver’s identification card. It also found that 18% of citizens 65 and over, 25% of African American citizens, and 15% of voters earning under $35,000/year don’t have government-issued photo identification. A study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that among African-Americans in Wisconsin, only 45 percent of males and 51 percent of females had a valid driver’s license; the study also found that only 22 percent of black men age 18-24 had a valid driver’s license.” (This study also found that women are disproportionately impacted by ID requirements, presumably because women are still primarily the ones who change their name upon marriage, and it can take a great deal of time and money to get one’s IDs all changed. Woe unto the bride who marries a couple of weeks before Election Day.)
Because this point is made again and again when the subject of requiring ID for voters comes up, but it’s routinely ignored by the Right.
Here’s just one person’s example.
Access issues for trans people.
Language-based voter discrimination/suppression.
An excellent page on voter ID issues, including a link to a page with seven alternatives to ID requirements.
Amp, @9:
A search on “dead voter” gave me some quick links. Here’s one:
Ballots cast in Houston using dead voters’ names
Now, is this large scale? One instance isn’t. But how many instances are there? As pointed out above, just because it hasn’t been reported doesn’t mean it’s not happening, all it means is that it hasn’t been reported. That’s no excuse for taking steps to ensure that unqualified people don’t vote.
Voting is a privilege extended to qualified people. Today it’s less restricted than it once was, but it’s still limited to citizens, and they must be over the age of 18 and not convicted of a felony. Yes, everyone who qualifies under the law must be permitted to vote, but the law decides who votes. It can be restricted to (or from) whole classes of people by law, unlike, say, the right to freedom of speech or the right to worship freely (rights that people who have either lost the privilege of voting or have yet to gain it still have). If you want to argue that it’s a civil right, then explain to me how a President who ought to be particularly sensitive to restrictions on civil rights and the right to vote is allowing his Department of Justice to grant waivers to states permitting them tofail to comply with the MOVE act in getting ballots out to service members overseas, or even failing to prosecute the ones who don’t even bother to seek waivers but simply don’t send the ballots out in time for them to be returned and counted?
In a follow-up post, Texas Watchdog downgraded their original claim that they could show that “dozens” of fraudulent votes happened… to six fraudulent votes. And if I’m understanding this correctly, that’s not in one election — that’s across multiple elections.
Virtually all the cases that Texas Watchdog found were either cases of a legitimate voter having the same name as a dead voter, or of clerical errors.
So that’s not a “proven instance of large-scale false voting.” On the contrary, it’s a proven instance of how ordinary coincidences and clerical errors get exaggerated by conservatives into a nonexistent false voting problem.
Oh, and regarding grating waivers to states: I don’t have time to look up every state, but the state of Washington, for example, has some very reasonable seeming arguments for why they need a waiver, and why their state laws will in fact make it easier for soldiers to have a chance to vote. Waivers aren’t automatically bad things.
More importantly, though, I think it’s a little weird that you bring it up at all. If voters were being kept from voting due to ID requirements, would that somehow be made okay if Obama’s Justice department is acting like an asshole? I think it’s a non sequitor. Even if you’re right that there are severe problems in the implementation of the MOVE act — and your source for that seems pretty partisan — that wouldn’t make it okay to pass laws which selectively make poor voters and voters of color less likely to be able to vote.
Thanks, Elusis. All those points are good ones.
I was looking into the academic research on the effects of voter ID on voter turnout, and they seem to be highly variable. This one, for instance, found a significant effect among poor voters but not among black voters (except for those black voters who are also poor, of course). But this one found that voter id requirements are disproportionately enforced against voters of color, this one found that voter id laws suppress poor and POC voting (but not by a huge amount), while this one found more significant effects among minority voters. But I also found a few that found no effect at all.
One possible reason is that these papers are often using different data sets — sometimes even from different states, or different election years. So although voter ID requirements do suppress voting, they don’t always do so by the same amount, and not always to the same voters — although clearly the effect most often happens to lower-class voters and to voters of color. (At least in the studies I read.)
One last reply, to Rob this time, and then I have to go do cartooning work.
Robert, if the purpose of voter ID laws is to safeguard the percieved legitimacy of our voting system, then they’re not effective:
So from a cost/benefit analysis, these laws have some cost (in that some voters don’t vote, and also these laws cost money to administer and make voting slower, thereby increasing line length) but little benefit.
Robert wrote:
Let’s ignore, for argument’s sake, all the reasons that people who aren’t apathetic schmucks might lack ID. Would an ID requirement be a good idea because it weeds out apathetic schmucks?
But voter IDs aren’t distributed randomly across the population. Totally apathetic schmucks who are well-off and fly a few times a year all have photo ID; otherwise similar apathetic schmucks who are poor and have nothing in their life forcing them to have ID, are less likely to have ID. Moreover, we know that IDs are also more likely to be held by non-hispanic white people than by black or hispanic people. And (as a study I cited upthread indicates), the laws are selectively enforced, so that an apathetic black schmuck is more likely to be asked to show ID at the polls than an equally apathetic white schmuck.
So your system doesn’t weed out the apathetic schmucks in a neutral fashion. It selectively creates a higher barrier for poor, non-white apathetic schmucks, compared to the much lower barriers created for middle-class and rich white apathetic schmucks. Even if I could agree to the idea that we should discourage apathetic schmucks from voting, I certainly can’t agree that a system that selectively discourages schmucks from voting according to their wealth and race is acceptable.
Just one more response…
Hi, Denise! Welcome to Portland!
Agreed! (And well put.)
Personally, I want voting to be legally required (if you’re eligible to vote), just like everyone is required to pay taxes (if they earned income) or report for jury duty. If we require citizens to fulfill their duties in those other areas, we can require it for voting, too. (This actually is the law in some places — Australia has legally mandated voting, I think.)
Of course there are lots of people with little money who don’t have government ID. If they don’t own cars they don’t need drivers’ licenses, and have no other reason to get government issued ID. “Does not currently have gov’t ID” != “Cannot get gov’t ID” or “Won’t be able to get gov’t ID if they have some other reason to do so.” The fact that they don’t have ID now doesn’t mean that they will be disenfranchised if a Voter ID law passes in the future. Just as those who want to drive get licenses, those who want to vote will get state ID. Rural people lack places to get ID? They get them the same place they get their drivers’ licenses. If a place is convenient enough for them to get to for a drivers’ license, it ought to be convenient enough for them to get a voter’s ID. And if it’s not, then the State can set up such places.
As far as college students go, I need to see where they a) are required to vote where they live most of the year but b) cannot register to vote there because of a voter ID requirement. My guess is that they’ll be perfectly eligible to vote where their ID says they live. If that means that they have to take an absentee ballot from home, so what? If they are legally transient in their college town and resident at their parents’ home, then I have no problem with them not being able to vote in their college town. I should think a college student can manage to figure out getting an absentee ballot. I remember back when I was a student that there was absolutely nothing procedural to stop me from voting both in Illinois and in Massachusetts for President, Senator, etc. That’s wrong.
From one of your citations:
I tried to look at the report referenced in that link but it’s a 404, so I can’t make any comment on what’s in it directly. But I can at least suggest that in the case of “Hispanics appeared to be 10% less likely to vote under those requirements” it’s worth considering that this may well be the evidence for vote fraud that you’ve been demanding. It seems very likely to me that a goodly number of them may not be voting in states that require voter ID because they are in fact ineligible for such ID. I wonder if the methodology for the missing report took that into account.
Apathetic schmucks aren’t voting anyway, so I don’t see this as an issue.
I think requiring people to vote is an absolutely horrible idea. Do you seriously think that compelling people to vote will improve the electoral process? How? We compel people to pay taxes because public services need to be paid for and nobody should be privileged against sharing the cost. We compel people to serve on juries because otherwise we’d have no jury system – and note that the burden is NOT equitably shared at all, most states take their jury lists from voter lists and the vast majority of people who are called don’t serve. But those who aren’t voting are not forcing elections to be cancelled.
“Does not currently have ID” != “could easily get an ID if they just wanted to make the effort.” Particularly if state IDs are not free of charge.
As for registration, there has long been right-wing opposition to ‘motor voter’ laws – which allow people to register to vote “in the same place they get their driver’s licenses”. I remember the screaming from the GOP about voting fraud when the NVRA was first passed, and apparently the whambulance continues unabated:
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-js031401.html
*koffMegWhitmankoff*
RonF, it really bugs me that your response to my saying “poor and rural people are disproportionately impacted by ID requirements because there are substantial barriers to them getting IDs” is to say, basically “well if they want one, they’ll get one.”
If you’re living on a fixed income, the amount of money needed for document searches, travel (if there is no DMV in your holler/hamlet), and ID purchase is far from insignificant. If you’re living on $410 a month from SSI (the amount a friend recently got when she suffered a major injury that kept her from working for 3 months), $40 for a state ID is ten percent of your monthly income.
Some college students choose to vote absentee in their district where their parents live and their ID originates, but let’s not pretend that system is perfect either – I am on “permanent absentee” status as a voter because I prefer to vote from the comfort of my own home with plenty of time to research my choices and then mail in my ballot, but for the primaries I had to call the League of Women Voters and ask for a re-issue when my ballot never turned up originally.
Other college students choose to re-register in the place where they live 8-9 months of the year because they feel they are most impacted by city, county, and state politics that affect their “home away from home.” You seem to advocate taking that choice away from them, a strange position for someone who is usually in favor of increased personal choice and reduced government interference.
““Does not currently have ID” != “could easily get an ID if they just wanted to make the effort.” Particularly if state IDs are not free of charge.”
Is this an argument against voter ID or an argument that the voter ID ought not have a price attached?
I’m also curious about the argument that IDs ought not be required because we haven’t sufficiently proven in-person violations. (You seem to have ignored how similar arguments play out in say underreporting as I talk about above but I’ll just point that out and move on.)
Does this mean that we should be taking the proposed steps against absentee voter fraud (which has been well proven)? Because I *strongly* suspect that we would see all the same objections from you in those cases, which definitely are a proven problem.
Say we wanted to have an ID check every other election in the absentee case? Essentially isn’t your objection to the level of proof just a distraction–you’re going to have all the same problems with ID difficulty-of-access in the absentee ballot situation–and more. Right?
I don’t know (or particularly care) whether ID requirements would deter non-voters from attempting to participate or not. My point about turnout was general, not specific to ID; in general, I oppose efforts to make voting easier at the margin.
Racial and other disparities in ID availability bother me, to the degree that they are reflective of an actual barrier to obtaining ID rather than a demographic preference. If black men in Shaw, MS cannot get an ID card to vote, then there is a problem with a MS law requiring an ID to vote. If black men can get an ID card to vote, but some percentage of them simply haven’t, then this concerns me not at all, even if that percentage is different than the percentage of men of other skin tones.
I cannot speak exhaustively to every ID requirement in the United States, but the relative handful that I have seen have always made provision for voters without standard forms of ID. There have been times when I have not had or carried government ID; the idea that if, having made that decision I still wanted to vote, I would have to take some additional procedural step like signing an affidavit of eligibility, does not seem excessively burdensome. In looking at disparate impact from such requirements, I am again alarmed by any requirement that imposes an empirical restriction on voters, unalarmed by theoretical or statistical differences.
Without knowing particular data, it nonetheless seems quite likely that different segments of the population will not vote at the same rate.
In order to be suppressed, you not only have to be affected by the denial, but you have to be in the class of “was otherwise going to vote.”
That makes it harder to measure.
mythago:
Which is not what I said. What I said was that the fact that certain numbers or groups of people do not currently have ID doesn’t mean that they would not have that ID if they needed them to register to vote or cast a vote. If anything, it means that people who don’t need ID don’t bother to get it. So it’s not valid to presume that the fact that such people do not currently have ID means that they would be restricted from voting by laws that would require them to have such ID.
I’ll posit that any such law should provide that such IDs are cheap or free; Elusis, please note as well.
I’m not talking about registration, I’m talking about State ID. States will issue picture IDs on the same basis as they issue drivers’ licenses (absent the drivers’ test and the privilege of driving), and they issue them at the same places. For purposes of then registering to vote or actually casting one’s vote they work the same way.
Ten percent of her monthly income for those 3 months. Given that it seems she was working before and after then it seems she would have had opportunity and money to get an ID. But, again, the laws I’ve seen have had provision for people not having the money for an ID and for people who have had issues coming up with documentation. Although I have to question how many people in the U.S. these days can’t come up with a birth certificate or other documentation, and don’t already have one that they’ve needed for some other purpose.
I won’t pretend any system is perfect. And yes, I am in favor of reducing government interference in one’s life, but the government has a legitimate interest in determing where you are eligible to vote. I’m not particularly concerned about college students’ feelings. Presuming that we’re talking about a student here who is still dependent on their parents, tying their vote to where the majority of their income and other support comes from – and where local positions on taxes, etc., influence how much of their parents’ income is available for that support – seems a reasonable position for the government to take to me. It also seems to me that the permanent residents of a town (who are paying property taxes, etc. to that town, unlike the students) should have more say on how that town is taxed, zoned and otherwise governed than transients do.
Let’s say I live in some unincorporated area an hour west of Chicago, but I take the train in and work in Chicago 5 or 6 days a week and am away from home for a good 10 or 12 hours a day. I may well feel that I (and the business whose economic health I am dependent upon) am more impacted by Chicago politics than I am by the politics where I live. Should I be able to register and vote in the upcoming Mayoral and Aldermanic election? I don’t credit feelings much in this regard.