Racists and Republicans (not identical groups, but groups with significant overlap) everywhere are disappointed.
I’m not convinced that there’s a significant voter fraud problem to be solved by requiring IDs. (And if there were, it could be solved with less extreme measures, such as provisional ballots). But if we must have voter ID, it should be combined with free, proactive government programs to get IDs into the hands of every single eligible voter in time for election day. But Republicans have shown zero interest in any anti-fraud program that doesn’t promise to disenfranchise eligible voters.
This is an issue that should matter to everyone who favors democracy; but anti-voter laws like Missouri’s disproportionately effect the elderly, the disabled, and poor people (who are disproportionately people of color). I also wonder if it disproportionately effects transsexuals, not only because transsexuals are more likely to be poor, but in addition because being transsexual could create additional issues in acquiring ID. (But it could be that I’m completely off-base about that.)
From the Court’s opinion:
[The Voter ID law] requires each of the individual plaintiffs in this case to present a Missouri driver’s license, a Missouri non-driver’s license, or a United States passport on election day in order to vote. The record reveals that between 3 and 4 percent of Missouri citizens (estimates vary from 169,215 to 240,000 individuals) lack the requisite photo ID. Appellants concede that many of these citizens, including all of the individual plaintiffs in this case, are eligible to vote and, in many cases, are already registered to vote. […]
It is to these citizens that the Court directs its attention, as it determines whether this statute places into jeopardy their ability to exercise their fundamental right to vote under article I, section 25 of the Missouri Constitution. To do so, the Court must examine the required processes for them to obtain a photo ID to determine the extent of the burden it imposes on their right to vote.
1. SB 1014’s Photo-ID Requirement requires payment of money to exercise the right to vote.
Those citizens who do not possess the requisite photo ID, with few exceptions, must expend money to gather the necessary documentation to obtain it in order to exercise their right to vote. […] Many voters who presently lack one of the required photo IDs would have to, at the very least, expend money to obtain a birth certificate. In Missouri, obtaining a birth certificate requires at least a $15 payment, which, Appellants conceded at oral argument, is not a de minimis cost. If the citizen requires documentation beyond a birth certificate, the costs are greater.Although this Court has not previously had occasion to evaluate the validity of putting a direct or indirect price or fee on the franchise under the Missouri Constitution, the United States Supreme Court held, in the context of addressing a $1.50 poll tax: “Wealth or fee-paying has . . . no relation to voting qualifications; the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened.” Harper, 383 U.S. at 670. While requiring payment to obtain a birth certificate is not a poll tax, as was the $1.50 in Harper, it is a fee that qualified, eligible, registered voters who lack an approved photo ID are required to pay in order to exercise their right to free suffrage under the Missouri Constitution. Harper makes clear that all fees that impose financial burdens on eligible citizens’ right to vote, not merely poll taxes, are impermissible under federal law. There can be no lesser requirement under Missouri law.[…]
The trial court also found that the citizens who currently lack the requisite photo ID are generally “the least equipped to bear the costs.” For Missourians who live beneath the poverty line, the $15 they must pay in order to obtain their birth certificates and vote is $15 that they must subtract from their meager ability to feed, shelter, and clothe their families. The exercise of fundamental rights cannot be conditioned upon financial expense. […]
2. SB 1014’s Photo-ID Requirement requires time and ability to navigate bureaucracies in order to vote.
Persons who wish to vote who do not already have the requisite photo IDs must arrange to obtain them by presenting a birth certificate or passport and, if necessary, proof of name changes. To do so requires both funds and advance planning to allow for the six to eight weeks that the record shows it takes to obtain a Missouri birth certificate (which is more time than exists between the date of this decision and the next general election). Once the birth certificate is in hand, the voter must use it to obtain one of the requisite photo IDs. “This is plainly a cumbersome procedure.” […]Evaluating a similar procedure mandated by the Georgia photo ID law (which was found to violate the federal constitution), a Georgia federal district court concluded that “many voters who are elderly, disabled, or have certain physical or mental problems simply cannot navigate that process or any long waits successfully.”
Curtsy: BlackProf.com.
[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]
I think it’s absurd and dangerous that someone who seeks to exercise the quintessential right of citizenship – voting – shouldn’t have to prove they are a citizen to vote.
Having said that, I agree completely with the first part of this court’s ruling. Charging people for a voter ID (when that ID has no other purpose, such as a passport or a driver’s license) is akin to a poll tax. Anyone who can meet a means test should be able to get a free voter ID.
Their concept of what constitutes a cumbersome bureaucracy, though, seems much less valid. Asking people to plan 6 or 8 weeks ahead of an election to get the requisite ID to vote simply does not seem to me to be that much of a burden, especially since they only have to do it once in their lives. There’s lots of very important things that you have to plan in advance for in life. I don’t see why having to do that once to be eligible to vote should be considered excessively burdensome. I agree that it’s possible for a government to put in an excessively cumbersome procedure that would discourage people from voting, and that in some cases someone in government might design such a system specifically to keep certain groups of people from voting. I just don’t think that this procedure is such a procedure.
If I read the blockquote correctly, the MO law requires a MO ID, which cost money. Most states’ drivers licenses expire and must be renewed. I assume the same holds true of state ID’s. So, this isn’t a once in a lifetime requirement. A person who doesn’t drive and doesn’t need a passport would be required to go through the process of renewing the ID each time it expires. If each renewal involves paying a fee, they would be required to pay some amount each year simply to retain their franchise.
Unless the renewal process is very swift and painless and the renewal fee very small, forcing people who don’t drive to get these ID’s might be cumbersome enough to discourage voting.
RonF:
The problem with this is that most of those who don’t have valid picture IDs, don’t have drivers licenses and for people who live in rural areas there is no mass transit. What’s easy for you may be nearly impossible for other legal and registered voters.
And what happens to those voters who have their wallets stolen shortly before an election? Those with passports still get to vote even if they’ve never applied for a Missouri-issued picture ID , but those without passports are out of luck even if everyone in town knows who they are and knows they are eligible to vote.
The PR for these laws maybe fraud prevention, but they are often passed by people who have less support among groups who are the least likely to have driver’s licenses and passports. The right to vote is one of the few ways the poorest of US citizens have to make politicians consider them as they decide what to do while in office. So the intent is not fraud prevention, but political gain.
I find the laws stripping voting rights from convicted felons to be just as problematic for the same reasons. Consider felony drug use, the statistics show that whites are as likely to be guilty, but they are much less likely to be charged let alone convicted of felony drug charges.
I consider myself to be very conservative on this issue, which is to say, that before you require people to “prove” the legitimacy of their vote the least you can do is try to document that there is an issue with non-citizens voting. And if you are going to require citizens to prove their citizenship that you make it free and easy to do so. The fact that it is not free and easy to do so more or less belies the asserted purpose of these laws, making it rather clear that the goal is to prevent certain citizens from voting. My favorite is the Georgia statute that required voters to obtain a type of identification that could only be issued by specified state offices of which there was not a single one in all of Fulton County — yes, Atlanta, where a large concentration of African-Americans reside. You have to get an id — but we only put id issuers in places where white people live. Oh yeah, that’s a plan for protecting true democracy.
RonF, there are a lot of people who never had birth certificates issued or cannot possibly get a copy of one. Did you know that South Carolina refused to issue birth certificates to African-Americans at one point? Or that children who go through foster care can often access their original records with great difficulty, depending on the ultimate disposition? I’ll bet Missouri and Georgia legislators not only don’t know these things but that they don’t give a rat’s ass whether they disenfranchise elderly black folks — plus ca change and all that.
Wanna bet MO Republican legislators don’t know that they could be disenfranchising black votes? C’mon, we’re a Confederate state here. Of course they know that they could disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, the handicapped and less mobile, the rural Democrats who will be mysteriously overlooked in any attempt to get rural folks registered. After all, the state lege. wants to discontinue any federal matching-funds health care. No Medicaid, no supplemental for kids or for handicapped working adults. The state needs the money to give pork to the contractors.
Anything that requires a fee, be it a drivers’ license fee, a fee for a birth certificate (anywhere from 5 to 75 bucks), passport fee (80 bucks minimum), etc to vote is by definition a POLL TAX. If the state wishes to enact such a law, they would have to have a registration program that went to the people, paid their birth certificate fees if needed, and paid the photo ID fee. Not bloody likely.
Anyway, how many illegal aliens are there in Missouri, of all places? Some, but by and large, they head elsewhere after growing season, or go to ground for the winter – the last thing they are likely to do is go to official government sites! Just one angry neighbor sees them, calls la migra (INS), and they are outta there! Deported. The reasoning is specious. The more problematic issue has been purging from the rolls of recently voting frequent voters in the strongly Democratic City of St. Louis, particularly the north side (black).
I’d have taken the argument more seriously if it had included a crackdown on absentee voting at the same time. There is no effort to verify the IDs of those who vote by mail. Given the urban legends about dead people voting and the like, it seems like a cleanup should start there. (Of course, that shifts the burden back to the state…)
There is no effort to verify the IDs of those who vote by mail.
How do you get the mail-in ballot to begin with? Don’t you have to show an ID then? I believe you do in Illinois, anyway.
And what happens to those voters who have their wallets stolen shortly before an election?
If you have to prove your citizenship every single time you vote, I can see where that might cause a problem. Let’s see how this might work otherwise.
Here in Illinois you can register to vote when you get your driver’s license or State ID. At that time, you implicitly have to prove your citizenship status, because you have to show either a birth certificate or passport or other such document, or you have to show your INS documentation that you are in the U.S. legally. You can also register at your town hall/township office/county office, etc., but they seem to be primarily concerned with residence, not citizenship. I’d change that so that you have to show the same ID that you have to show to get a drivers’ license or State ID.
At that point, you are a registered voter. You’ll then get a voter’s card in the mail from the County Registrar. However, you’ll never have to show it. When you go to your polling place, they already have documentation on you, a sheet that shows who you are, where you live and what ballot you are eligible to receive. They rip it out, you sign it, and they hand you your ballot (the much-maligned punch card that the Florida voters had problems with but that Illinois voters seem to manage just fine).
If no one recognizes you, you might have to show ID, but not a passport or birth certificate; you showed that to get registered, so they already know you are a citizen. If you lose your wallet, and thus lose your ID, then you might have a problem if no one knows who you are, but that’s the same situation as before you were asked to prove your citizenship to be able to vote, so there’s no change there. Certainly it’s reasonable to ask people to prove who they are when they vote, isn’t it?
My point being that this way, you only have to prove your citizenship once, when you register to vote. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, given that voting is, by law, limited to citizens.
A similar law was passed in Arizona. The District Court declined to put a stay on it’s enforcement. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did impose a stay. Today the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the 9th Circuit’s stay; the State of Arizona is free to enforce the law as enacted. See here for details.
Anyone who can meet a means test should be able to get a free voter ID.
Why should anyone have to pay to get their voter ID? In other words, why should you have to pay in order to exercise one of the basic rights of citizenship? It’s not just the nominal fee for the voter card—it’s also having to take the day off of work to go get a voter card, which costs a helluva lot more. If you are fortunate enough to have a job with personal leave or sick leave, you don’t think about that because you can get paid for your absentee time. Those of us who don’t have those provisions end up shelling out considerable money for our right to vote. The places where you register to vote aren’t open outside of normal business hours, M-F. Also, when I obtained my daughter’s birth certificate (in order to prove to the insurance company that yes, she actually is my daughter—the very same insurance company that had no problem paying for her delivery—*sigh*. See what bureaucracy gets you!), it cost $15 from the Dept. of Public Health. So, the cost of voting is a little higher than that nominal fee you think it would be.
And let’s be real—-who do you think is most likely to be challenged as perhaps not being a citizen? Ya think those of us with “et’ nick” names and/or appearance might have a little more scrutiny than others?
RonF said:
“Here in Illinois you can register to vote when you get your driver’s license or State ID. At that time, you implicitly have to prove your citizenship status, because you have to show either a birth certificate or passport or other such document, or you have to show your INS documentation that you are in the U.S. legally.”
Huh? I’ve voted absentee in Du Page County Illinois. I did not have to show my citizen status in any way shape or form. I phoned in and had the ballot mailed to my house! Rules here.
Specifically:
I’m sure they check the mailing address for the voter requesting the ballot, but having worked the polls, I know loads of people never cancel their registration when they move. I’d suspect it’s quite possible for people to take advantage of this system should they wish to do so.
You don’t have to show ID in MA either. You can go to your town or city hall and get a whole stack of absentee ballot applications, no questions asked. Then you mail in the application from wherever you are. There’s probably some kind of address verification when they get the ballot to make sure you didn’t vote twice, but I don’t even know about that.
No non-citizen I know (and I do know several, all here legally) would try to vote; most would like to become citizens at some point, and wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that. For similar reasons I would think an illegal alien would be even less inclined to try it.
Why should anyone have to pay to get their voter ID? In other words, why should you have to pay in order to exercise one of the basic rights of citizenship?
They shouldn’t – I was just allowing that it might be legitimate for those who can afford to pay a minimal fee to do so. It’s like my FOID card (Firearms Owners Identification Card); I have to pay $5 for a permit to exercise my right to own and bear arms. It’s a right, not a privilege, but I have to pay a minimal fee anyway for the paperwork. But I can easily go along with “no charge”.
It’s not just the nominal fee for the voter card—it’s also having to take the day off of work to go get a voter card, which costs a helluva lot more. If you are fortunate enough to have a job with personal leave or sick leave, you don’t think about that because you can get paid for your absentee time. Those of us who don’t have those provisions end up shelling out considerable money for our right to vote. The places where you register to vote aren’t open outside of normal business hours, M-F.
That’s something that can be fixed; your municipality can keep it’s town hall open outside of regular weekday business hours. I registered to vote on a Saturday morning at my village hall, and Illinois has Motor Voter Registration, where you can register to vote when you get your Drivers’ License.
Lucia, if they check that absentee ballot against the voter list, then you had to have had to register to vote in the 1st place for your vote to be counted. At that point, it then becomes an issue of whether or not you had to prove your citizenship when you initially registered to vote.
Barbara:
Did you know that South Carolina refused to issue birth certificates to African-Americans at one point? Or that children who go through foster care can often access their original records with great difficulty, depending on the ultimate disposition?
No, I had no idea of this. That means that the system would have to allow for this. But it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make sure that the franchise is limited to citizens.
You all may be interested to know that a stay that was put on the Arizona Voter ID by the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was struck down by the Supreme Court. Voters in Arizona can be required to show ID to vote in the upcoming elections. The stay was not struck down on the merits of the law, but on the basis that the 9th Circuit issued the stay without quoting any legal reason to justify the stay, which they are required to do. here’s a story on it, and the text of the decision is here.
RonF said:
If checking the voters registration list were all the MO law required I’d have no problem with it. The MO seems to require that in addition to checking against the voter list, poll workers will require voters to provide a drivers license, passport or MO state ID on election day when voting. Illinois has no equivalent requirement.
As astonishing as it may seem, you don’t have to prove citizenship when you registered!
When you move, you can just go to the county clerk and fill out a form. At which point you need to bring “a current valid photo id” and a bill addressed to you to prove residency. A driver’s license will do for photo id — but bear in mind, even though the dmv makes you bring all sorts of proof of identification, these are used to prove who you are — you don’t need to prove you are a citizen to get a drivers license. Non-citizens can get licenses– they just bring different proofs of ID.
After you get your drivers license, the license doesn’t indicate your citizenship. So if you trot down to the county clerks office and register to vote, the county clerk cannot verify your citizenship from the drivers license. They certainly can’t tell from your gas bill!
I don’t know how little the clerks check now, but I know they really didn’t check in 1977 back when I turned 18. I remember what happened very clearly because, I was stunned. Expecting to be asked to prove my citizenship, I took my passport. I filled out the form, the person at the clerk’s office asked: “Where were you born?” I said “El Salvador”. They blinked and said: “Oh, well, are you an American citizen?” I said “Yes!” They said something like “All right then!
I went home and told my parents and siblings. My carrot top freckle faced older sister said “Yeah. They didn’t bat an eye when they saw I was born in Guatemala either.”
I think the basic concept that a) you should have to prove you’re a citizen to register to vote and b) you should have to be able to show an ID when you vote are reasonable. If changes have to be made to make the implementation of this as simple for people as possible, fine. Arrangements should be made that will ensure that an ID is free to those unable to afford it. There must be places to go during both business hours and non-business hours to obtain such ID. A procedure will have to be worked out for those people who are native-born but have an issue with being able to obtain a birth certificate, etc. But that’s something to be worked out. The concept itself needs to be implemented.
If the poll watchers are checking against the voter list to see if you are registered, then what are they checking it against? I know in my case they’re checking it against my face, because I know them by name (and you should have seen their reaction when I asked for a Democratic ballot when I voted in the primary!). But what does someone do in the City of Chicago? Simply accept the applicant’s bald assertion that they are who they say they are? Dang, no wonder voter fraud is common there.
Great. Someone knows that you are foreign-born and makes absolutely no verification of your citizenship other than your word? Folks, this has to be fixed. Give me a good reason why this should be allowed to continue.
People are expected to have a government-issued picture ID for so many purposes that you have to figure that damn few people don’t already have one. For those that don’t, or are having problems obtaining the records needed to verify their citizenship, then some kind of procedure will have to be developed to ensure that their rights are protected with every assistance the various levels of governments can lend. If some group of 80-year olds in South Carolina didn’t have their births recorded, I’m willing to take their word for it. It’s a self-limiting problem.
But making as many people as possible verify their citizenship when they register to vote, and verify their identity when they do vote is an idea whose time has come.
That’s something that can be fixed; your municipality can keep it’s town hall open outside of regular weekday business hours. I registered to vote on a Saturday morning at my village hall, and Illinois has Motor Voter Registration, where you can register to vote when you get your Drivers’ License.
Your municipality can keep it’s doors open to accommodate nonstandard working hours, but that doesn’t mean it will. I’m thinking most municpalities, like mine, will balk at the idea of paying overtime or hiring part-time workers to cover these “extra” hours as “unnecessary” expenses. Here, they already balk at paying overtime for basic life safety issues, like getting streetlights up and running again after an accident! (no, I’m not kidding. City hall came up with the brilliant idea of setting out temporary stop signs at intersections for after-hours and weekend accidents, so they could save money by not having electricians out there working overtime.) And Motor Voter doesn’t give you access to all elections.
Expecting to be asked to prove my citizenship, I took my passport. I filled out the form, the person at the clerk’s office asked: “Where were you born?” I said “El Salvador”. They blinked and said: “Oh, well, are you an American citizen?” I said “Yes!” They said something like “All right then!
I went home and told my parents and siblings. My carrot top freckle faced older sister said “Yeah. They didn’t bat an eye when they saw I was born in Guatemala either.”
Of course not. Whiteness gets you a pass. Light skin, light hair, and Anglo facial features don’t get much of the once-over by authorities. Try having black hair, olive skin, and non-Anglo facial features. Oh, and a last name that ends in a vowel. See how much “joking” you can get away with then. Your illustration is nothing more than a demonstration of white privilege. I’m also a U.S. citizen, but if I had tried a stunt like that, I’d’a found my legitimate, State-issued I.D. assumed to be fake, and I would have had to come up with my “Salvadoran” or “Guatemalan” paperwork. “But….but…I was only joking! Can’t you people take a joke?!” I would have had to come up with my parents birth certificates, to prove my citizenship. “No really, I was joking! look at my birth certificate! It doesn’t say “Guatemala!”
Sheesh Ron. **head/desk**
For the record, I agree.
I has expected they would ask verification. I carried my passport for that purpose. They didn’t even ask. The reason I remember it so well is I was shocked.
La Lubu,
Rereading your comment, I think you may think my sister and I were joking or pulling a stunt when we stated our place of birth. I was born in El Salvador, as was my younger sister. My older sister was born in Guatemala. We weren’t joking or pulling a stunt when we registered to vote.
Ron F.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with people verifying citizenship to vote, provided it is really cost free for the voter, the procedure is made relatively easy and people don’t get the run-around. ( The ‘run around’ would include having to spend hours trying to convince office workers that a ‘consular report of birth’, i.e. FS-240 really is proof of American citizenship, and/or being required to show a currently valid passport because office workers think your citizenship expires when your passport does! Yes, I have been sent away from the DMV and had to return while the workers conferred with absent higher ups on the validity of these things. That was to get a license — not to vote! )
Making the process both cost free to the voter and relatively easy would cost the State of Illinois a lot of money. The cost would include keeping every county clerk’s office open evenings and weekends, issuing birth certificates for free, paying the cost of ordering FS-240’s and educating office workers to recognize every possible variation of proof of american citizenship to ensure no one is sent away for a day while the office workers “confer”. Finally, someone needs to make sure the office workers assist those wishing to register in an equitable manner. (For example: No deciding to give me a pass because I’m white while giving La Lubu a hard time because she’s dark.)
What would be gain by spending all this money to verify citizenship? I doubt many non-citizens are registering to vote illegally in Illinois. Everyone knows Illinois’s real problem: dead people vote!
I suspect state legislators will decide the costs of really verifying citizenship isn’t worth the expenditure. I know I do.
Your municipality can keep it’s doors open to accommodate nonstandard working hours, but that doesn’t mean it will.
It will if the law is crafted properly. Federal law is designed all the time to put unfunded requirements on state and municipal governments, so it wouldn’t be hard to tie funding for this to operational requirements.
And Motor Voter doesn’t give you access to all elections.
Hm. I was unaware of that. What elections does Motor Voter registration not make you eligible for?
What would be gain by spending all this money to verify citizenship? I doubt many non-citizens are registering to vote illegally in Illinois. Everyone knows Illinois’s real problem: dead people vote!
Dead people vote, live people vote multiple times, votes for Candidate A dissapear or magically change into votes for Candidate B, etc. There’s lots of problems. Tightening up registration procedures would probably help out some of these as well. As far as whether non-citizens vote in Illinois, I don’t know the extent of the problem. It’s certainly occurred elsewhere in the country where there’s a lot of immigrants; in the Sanchez vs. Dornan election back in 1998 (I think), a Congressional investigation found that at least more than 600 non-citizens voted in an election decided by fewer than 900 votes. I don’t expect that problem to decrease.
Many of the problems you outline are real, but can be ameliorated. You don’t have to keep City Hall open every weekday; having a registrar one or two evenings a week would suffice, and maybe Saturday morning once or twice a month. Not everything has to be free; gun ownership is a right (thank you 2nd Amendment), but I have to pay a minimal fee for my FOID card. If you think about it, there are lots of things that are a right that you have to pay for. Hell, private property ownership is a right, but right now I’m paying $5K/year for the right to continue to own my house and yard, or it’ll be seized and sold. I’ll agree that there should be a waiver process for low-income people, but people like me should have to pay.
Your stories of … procedurally-challenged … county employees are depressingly credible, but again fixable. Yes, this would all cost money. Not as much as you might think, perhaps. As far as whether the majority of the public would support the expense for the purpose, I’d like to hope so. But then, lots of things that are charged to the public don’t have majority support, so that’s not necessarily a show-stopper when consideration of people’s exercise of rights is involved.
RonF. I didn’t say the problem couldn’t be ameliorated. I simply say to gain my support law must be specifically crafted to do so.
This particular thread began with the issue of MO law. It appears their legislators did not craft the law to make sure there is no cost. Interestingly, the fact the MO law could have been crafted to avoid this things, but was not disturbs me.
In some sense, I think we aren’t all that far apart here though. The difference is I am much, much more concerned about the potential for disenfranchisment that you are.
I realize you see nothing wrong with making people pay fees to vote, but I do. I realize you think paying fees to vote is somehow analogous to making people pay a fee register individual guns or levying property taxes. I don’t.
I know you may find this puzzling, but I simply do not see all rights as equally interfered with by imposing taxes or fees.
In a democratic republic, placing unnecessary obstacles in the way of legal voting by legal voters perverts the political process. So, I see this right as having a unique features which must be protected from interference by over regulation that results in high hurdles for some legal voters, or imposition of any monetary fee by a government agency, be it hidden or direct. I won’t support one that could have been crafted to avoid both but was not.
BTW. I found the Congressional report and reviewed. Based on the numbers contained in the report, if I understand it correctly, the upper bound estimate for the number of non-citizens who may have voted in the Dornan-Sanchez race is 542. (I subtracted the 82 us citizens who naturalized after registering. It’s a no-no, but they were citizens when they voted. At least one of these people who naturalized and registered in the wrong order had been a us citizen for over 20 years before voting in that particular election. )
The lower bound of non-citizens who voted was zero.
The reason for the range is the process began by creating a suspected list which included a huge number of false positive matches, and then was pretty lax about getting people off the list. The problems are discussed in the minority portion of the document. (You can read the examples etc. under the section called “D. THE MAJORITY’S FAULTY ANALYSIS GROSSLY INFLATED THE NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS ON THEIR SUSPECT LIST” )
The minority portion of the document explains in some detail how the method used by the majority might classify citizens as “indicated non-citizens”. Other sections indicat the method actually did result in false positives because the minority found a number of unambigiously american citizens in the list of “indicated non-citizens”. (A better term would be “people our method could not confirm as Americans”. )
For those interested in reading the document, it’s here:
http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/R?cp105:FLD010:@1(hr416)> http://www.congress.gov report
I won’t support one that could have been crafted to avoid both but was not.
Fair enough.
Thanks for the link, Lucia. Good reading; I had only seen a summary. Nonetheless, despite the minority opinion it seems that there’s excellent evidence to support the proposition that there’s a strong probability that there were a significant number (to the winning margin) of illicit votes cast in that election. I wonder what an investigation at an equivalent level of detail would find in other elections?
I differ with your opinion there is a strong probability there were a significant number who cast illicit votes. I read it to say there is a moderate change a fair number cast illicit votes. I read it this way because the term “indicated non-citizen voter” does not appear to be strongly correlated with “probable non-citizen”. But of course, we can differ on that– in part because the investigation ended before anyone nailed that down further.
The investigation ended because the election outcome wouldn’t be affected by our different interpretations of the meaning of “indicated non-citizen” as defined by the task force. Even if every single one of the sois-dissant “indicated non-citizen” was an honest to goodness “non-citizen”, Sanchez remained the winner.
I wonder what an investigation at an equivalent level of detail would find in other elections?
Obviously, I don’t know. Unfortunately, absent a candidate constesting results, no-one seems to want to spend the money to find out. (It would be costly.) So these things are only going to be done during an election contest– which is the worst possible time to get accurate results. During a contest, partisan tendencies coupled with incompetence is likely to make it impossible to determine what really happened.
I’m not trying to grind an axe here– but let’s face it, when there is a Congressional seat at stake, at least some members of both parties want the outcome to skew their way. On top of that, you have the difficulty that Congressional reps — or for that matter, ordinary people– aren’t exactly experts at figuring out how to do these things. There is little time to learn because the election contest must be done immediately.
So, it would be surprising if Congress set up an investigation properly right from the get go. If you really wanted this done right, you’d need to fund some third party who you thought was unbiased and give them a calendar year to figure out the right methodology, do some testing to figure out if it resulted in false positives and negatives, and then fund them to implement the method over the course of another year!
La Lubu,
Rereading your comment, I think you may think my sister and I were joking or pulling a stunt when we stated our place of birth. I was born in El Salvador, as was my younger sister. My older sister was born in Guatemala. We weren’t joking or pulling a stunt when we registered to vote.
I’m sorry, Lucia. Without the background, it did sound to me as if you were trying to get a rise out of the clerks. I got a pretty thorough once-over when obtaining my driver’s license (which required a birth certificate), so it just boggled my mind that you didn’t have to produce any proof of citizenship.
Hm. I was unaware of that. What elections does Motor Voter registration not make you eligible for?
In Illinois, Motor Voter registration only allows a person to vote in federal elections—not State or local.
La Lubu,
No problems. It was only on rereading that I thought: “Oh! She thinks I was making it up!”
At first, I focused on the “white privilege” bit first, and I agree with that. Because my sisters and I are entirely, completely totally Irish-Scots-Anglo looking whites, people assume we are citizens even after we get them to believe we were born in Latin America. Our appearance almost always makes things easier rather than harder.
In my life, I experienced exactly one incident of direct anti-hispanic racism taunting. I It occurred during the third grade and amounted to pretty much nothing — except in so far that I’ve always known what being a real target would have meant.
La Lubu; this is from the Illinois Board of Elections’ web site
So it seems that de facto, someone who registers via Motor Voter in Illinois can vote for State and municipal officials as well as the Federal officials in all elections.
Lucia, I’d go along with the methodology you propose. I think it would be well to implement it in locations where there’s a high concentration of non-citizens, both legal and non-legal, and try to get some definitive answers about this. The one problem I’d see is that awareness of where the project was being carried out might skew the numbers (non-citizens who might otherwise be inclined to try to vote would avoid those locations).
Amp,
Your inference about transsexuals is correct. See the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition website where they discuss potential problems – and provide solutions – for trans folks voting in states where photo IDs are needed.
So it seems that de facto, someone who registers via Motor Voter in Illinois can vote for State and municipal officials as well as the Federal officials in all elections.
Thanks, Ron, I didn’t know this. It wasn’t that long ago that this wasn’t the case—and it just may have been a matter of downstate not following the interpretation made by the Board of Elections. I know when I volunteered in Missouri, there was a big push there to (re)register people who were “motor voters”, because at the time, Missouri wasn’t recognizing motor votor for anything other than federal elections, too.