We’ve debated this before.
We’ll debate it again.
It seems like a matter of common sense, but experience shows common sense often makes no sense. In a better world, our political system and electoral process would do its best to enfranchise everyone to vote. We don’t live in a better world, of course. We live in a democracy that has never given voters what they deserve and that is controlled by parties (mostly, but not always, Republican) that will use any legal means necessary to suppress the vote for their own benefit.
Voter ID laws are meant to suppress the vote of minority voters likely to support Democrats. It accomplishes this goal not by creating laws requiring ID’s to vote, but by creating regulations which make it difficult, sometimes extraordinarily so, to obtain an ID.
That’s what happened to Thelma Mitchell, a 93 year-old woman who cleaned the Capitol building in Memphis, TN.
Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification (http://bit.ly/tVUFjr).
Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.
Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification.
But a spokesman for the House Republican Caucus said Mitchell was given bad information. Brent Leatherwood said even an expired state ID will allow her to vote.
Asked about why Mitchell might have been confused or received incorrect information about the new voter ID law, Leatherwood said only that the provision that allows for the use of state employee IDs is “pretty straight-forward.”
What this case shows is that Voter ID rules increase the opportunity for voter suppression. The incentive, it is clear, already exists. Think Progress has more on Voter ID making it more likely for voters to be deprived of the franchise in Tennessee:
The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.
As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.
The devil is in the details.
“It accomplishes this goal not by creating laws requiring ID’s to vote, but by creating regulations which make it difficult, sometimes extraordinarily so, to obtain an ID.”
That’s right. Instead of fighting the voter ID laws, we need to address that problem. People need IDs for more than just voting, they need to be able to open bank accounts, cash checks, rent apartments, buy a computer on credit at Best Buy, drive a car legally, and on and on. It shouldn’t just be easier to get an ID, it should be downright impossible NOT to have an ID. We should have ID drives, like voter registration drives, where volunteers seek out people who do not have ID’s and get one to them. And they shouldn’t cost anything, because it is for the public benefit that everyone has an ID, so the public should bear the cost.
to the regulations problem.
I can, however, envision less noble people changing regulations, such requiring ID’s that need to be regularly updated or “misinformed” registrars misrepresenting the law.
I suspect, but don’t know for a fact, that Tennessee registrars are using the ID requirement to disenfranchise voters.
How about shifting the burden of identification from the person to the polling place? Instead of having to bring along a state-issued ID, when you register to vote you have a photo taken, and when you go to vote they pull up that photo if someone doesn’t know who you are (the same people work the polls where I live every year, they know me by now).
Of course, the people who want the ID want to make it very, very hard to get that ID – they want you to produce a birth certificate to prove that you are who you say you are, along with a marriage license if you’re a woman who took the name of your husband. This is allegedly done to “make sure that you are who you say you are”, but in reality it is done to make it really hard for casual voters to vote.
And they still presumably need an ID when they register, don’t they?
I really don’t think that anyone who works in government wants to limit the number of people who might vote for Democrats. They want to stop fraud.
what you think, but it’s really not the case. Voter suppression has been a Republican strategy for decades. Aside from purging voter rolls, Republicans have used voter caging.
The classic case was in the 1980s:
Voter suppression has been a Democratic strategy in the past, mainly used by white, urban Democrats that felt their electoral chances endangered by growing black populations in cities.
How do you explain that? Why should those names be on the rolls?
This would remove the need to carry an ID to the polling place – you’d be photographed when you registered to vote, and the poll worker could call up that photograph when you check in.
Of course, the whole “photo ID” thing – regardless of whether the photo is kept at the polling place or by the person – puts another element into play – the judgement of the poll worker. Let’s say that you got your photo taken when you had a lot of hair, but you had chemotherapy and lost it. The poll worker might not think you’re the same person. How could you prove it?
Do you know how they did it in the old days? Signatures. So why not just go back to that method? Sign the card when you register, sign again when you vote. If they match, you can vote. Although again, you have the problem of the judgement of the poll worker to match the signatures.
How about we just go with the “purple thumb” method that they use in other countries?
Again, we’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. You know what strikes me as odd? Why aren’t conservatives putting this much energy into trying to stop felons from possessing firearms? They are adamantly against any type of registration, background check, etc., the lack of which allows felons to buy firearms, but they want to put in the most stringent rules to prevent someone from pretending they are someone else and voting (under threat of jail if they are caught).
I would say that in a democracy, the right to vote comes before the right to bear arms.
Why is a birth certificate proof of identity? Mine does not have any unique-to-me features on it – no fingerprints or anything. Even if it did, would polling-place workers or RMV workers be able to verify that information?
I believe it’s possible to get a duplicate certificate, even for someone other than the subject of it.
When I talked to my town clerk about the Show ID to Vote folks she said that her biggest issue is that we have open vital records in Massachusetts – you can go in and get any birth (or death) certificate you want. If I recall correctly, all you need to get a drivers license is your birth certificate, social security card, and a utility bill for proof of address. A SS card seems easy to counterfeit, a utility bill would be easy to fake, and you can get anyone’s birth certificate…
It’s a bad system and any voter ID law targeting fraud would be meaningless without fixing vital records access first. But this was never about voter fraud, it’s about voter intimidation.
On that same note, it’s not cool that you can get anyone’s death certificate, either. Sometimes a family doesn’t want the cause of death to be public and they should have that right.
legal repercussions. That’s why they are public. Imagine the mischief that could be wrought if they weren’t public. I can’t recall ever seeing a death certificate, but I didn’t know they listed cause of death. The voter list is public too. Anyone can purchase one at cost.
An underlying assumptions of this discussion is that we can somehow have an completely secure system for voting, and that Voter ID will make it more secure. Several years ago, my town had a fire department employee embezzle about $275,000. He had been given the opportunity/responsibility of depositing insurance checks for ambulance calls. He was caught when we hired a new fire chief who wouldn’t take the job until an audit was done.
People ask, how do we know this isn’t happening now? Good practices were put into place. When I asked our police chief the question people were asking me, he said, people forget it’s against the law. That’s the biggest deterrent. The biggest prevention.
I suspect that our concern about voter identity ignores how the system actually works, what checks and balances currently exist, and effectiveness of the law. The fact is any security measure can be beaten, and each comes with its own costs and benefits. If the incentive were strong enough, Voter ID wouldn’t stop fraud. The incentive is minimal.
The aphorism about the devil and the details says Be very careful to get everything right, because this is tricky, and could fail or blow up in your face if you overlook something.
I think the aphorism does not apply in this case. Voter ID is about denying the franchise, period. It’s not a redeemable idea. (You could probably dream up some “details” to soften its impact, but those are only good insofar as they thwart the basic purpose.)
I think I also disagree with whatever point you are making about regulations not laws. The only way I can make sense of this is that you think the laws are okay as long as the regulations are reasonable.
In democracies, voters select the leaders. Voter ID is a method for leaders to select the voters. That’s just wrong whatever the fine print says.
Just trying to have a polite conversation with Don’t Get Cute. I don’t think there’s a need for Voter ID at all. We had a long thread about it a couple of weeks ago and I’ve written about Voter ID in comments and and in posts.
Voter ID appeals to “common sense.” Making sense is rarely common, and in this case, it is completely wrong. Common sense occurs when someone has decided not to look too carefully at something. Empirically speaking, Voter ID has proven to be voter suppression pure and simple. Just getting an ID is difficult. We also know that voter fraud ranges between insignificant and non-existent.
How does it suppress voting? This post and my previous posts document the ways this happens. My point is that you can’t exorcise the devil from details. There is no way to separate Voter ID from voter suppression.
that, on election day, I lean over a sheet of paper, read upside down, and say “I’m that guy right there” and then vote. There is more effort to make sure I am me in picking up a prescription for pennicillin, especially if I want to write a $10 check for the copay.
my address is:, then my name is:. I’ve never been given the opportunity to look at a list open on a table, then reading upside down, choose one, saying yes, that’s me, then vote.
If that is what is going on in your town, you should be going after your election workers.
Here’s how it works in Springfield.
1) You go to the polling place.
2) You go to the table corresponding to your ward.
3) You give your street address.
4) You give your name.
5) They find it and cross your name off the list.
You give this to people in your community who live in your neighborhood and who very likely know you, or know many of the voters on the list.
It is not a system that invites voting fraud because you’d have to:
1) Not know any poll worker.
2) Know a person who hasn’t voted yet, and who isn’t likely to show up to vote.
3) Make sure that person isn’t known by a poll worker.
What’s the payoff? An extra vote for a candidate? What’s the penalty for being caught? Jail.
It’s a non-existent crime that makes no sense to commit. The real issue here — why ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded organization) is pushing these laws across the country is to make it harder for the young, the old, and the poor to vote – the very groups that tend to vote against the interests of the wealthy.
It has been that way in every town I have ever lived in. The poll worker is some kindly elderly person. I have never once known the poll worker by name, not once in over 20 years. I vote 10 minutes after the polls open. No one has voted yet. I tell them a street, an address, and my name. They don’t recognize my name, because it doesn’t look like it sounds. So they sit there, staring at their list open to my street. I’m looking down at my name, upside down. I say “that one” and then they check me off and I vote, the end.
The town makes more of an effort to determine my identity when I pay a tax bill than they do on election day.
So, the argument that this is a non-issue relies on the fact that the value of a vote is zero; i.e., that people who vote are in reality wasting their time. And then one wonders why voter turnout is low. Why would you assume that people will foolishly waste their time on such a trifling matter as voting?
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Are you seriously suggesting that you think folks are gaming the elections in your town? Please offer some specifics — how many improper votes do you think were cast, and by whom?
There is NOTHING “broken” about the current system. There is no evidence of any problem, and a great deal of evidence to show that these sorts of proposals deter minority, elderly, and poor voters from exercising their right to vote. Nobody here has said that a vote is worthless, that’s your invention. What has instead been said here is that the vote of each and every citizen is valuable — valuable enough that it must not be impeded except with strong evidence of a problem.
These voterID proposals are no different from the poll taxes and literacy tests of the Jim Crow era. They are promoted by the same political forces for the same purposes. They are part of the right-wing/Tea Party strategy to pander to our nation’s worst fears, and should be summarily put aside to provide oddities for our great-grandchildren to laugh about in museums — right alongside the rest of our shameful heritage of racism.
that the value of a vote is zero. No Politician’s point is that the cost-benefit ratio of fraudulent voting doesn’t warrant the risk.
To commit election fraud, someone would have to know you were not going to vote, and then use your name. If they used your name, and then you showed up, there would be a detectable problem. We could say, perhaps someone committed a case of voter fraud. How come no one ever says this?
It’s more likely someone would vote in place of a dead person. They’d have to know a person died and had yet to be wiped from the rolls. (I don’t know how deceased are wiped from the voter lists, but it’s required by law). They could still vote illegally if they looked like the deceased and had his ID or had a fake ID. And if fraud were a real problem or actually worth it, people certainly could produce fake ID’s for voting.
What if instead of voting as dead people, people were voting as made-up people? Do we every do any spot checks that all the people on the rolls actually exist and really live where they say they live? Or is it possible for city clerks to add a few hundred fake residents and then recruit a team of people to go around voting as all these made up people? It does seem like a lot of work for just a few hundred extra votes, and would be too hard to keep everyone quiet about it. But do we do any spot checks?
City clerks adding a “few hundred fake residents”? Recruiting a “team of people to go around voting as all these made up people”?
Please, we’re in tin-foil hat land.
A “solution” that actually serves an antidemocratic agenda.
It’s not as if everyone who doesn’t have an ID is a liberal democrat. They might be elderly or religious and would vote for the Republican. We only have something like 50% turnout, why worry about including the people on the fringe of society who don’t even participate in normal living? The rest of us vote on behalf of them.
I appreciate your candor that you DO, in fact, actually want to disenfranchise “people on the fringe of society” — that’s been our contention all along. And you close by suggesting that you’ll vote “on behalf of them” — that’s rich.
In this one comment, you have epitomized precisely the actual intent of this despicable movement.
Everyone should certainly be franchised and encouraged to vote and able to vote and assisted to vote, but it’s not so bad if some people fail to register or fail to show up or show up but are not allowed to vote because they cannot prove they are the person they claim to be. It’s a non-existent problem that elections are being thrown because legitimate voters are being kept from voting.
And it’s good to vote on behalf of others, to remember that only 40% of us vote, and those of us that do have to remember that others are affected by our votes. Voting purely for self-interest is anti-social.
If there was corruption, a few corrupt officials with a few union cronies, that’s what it’d be, right? I agreed that it would be too hard to keep everyone quiet, but asked if we ever do any spot checks to verify that the people who voted all really exist.
in place for elections. Maybe there are spot checks. Next time I have a chance to talk with my town clerk, I’ll ask her. You could call your city clerk and ask too.
I did some searching and couldn’t find anything much on what procedures are required for elections. I think it goes beyond the people that check you off when you vote. I do know there is a lot of checking and that the town has to work with the secretary of state.
voter suppression. There are immoral, often legal, ways to prevent voters from voting. Here’s one from Georgia:
This is an example of a state using sensible sounding law–purging voter lists of people who have moved–to prevent people from voting.
Did she get a provisional ballot?
The book is always already open to the page with your address on it when you walk up? Does your precinct all fit on one page, then? If it doesn’t, you must have had to tell them your address at least some of the time. When I go to the polls, they always have to turn some pages to get to my name.
Are there any anecdotal cases where a voter has gone to the polls, identified themselves, and found that someone else has claimed their name and voted?
Unless ID advocates can produce people who’ve had this happen, there is no reason to change the system the way they want to.
That’d be a dumb way to swing an election, since people might show up to find their name crossed off already. Obviously they’d use names of people that they know won’t show up.
They would have to use names of people they know won’t show up who also aren’t known by any random poll workers. If they say they are “John Smith at 123 Main St.” and the poll worker says “no, I know John Smith”, the cop arrests them on the spot.
Would you play that lottery in order to cast a vote? Of course not. That’s what makes it very unlikely to happen.
that they are “John Smith at 7353 Broadway Apt 24” who appears on the rolls but doesn’t really exist, will the poll worker argue with the rolls? Even if she herself lives across the street from 7353 Broadway and knows it’s a triple decker, and there is no Apt 24, is she really going to call the police over when the rolls say that there is an Apr 24 and John Smith lives there? Who is the cop going to believe? What if she’s wrong, she’d be disenfrachising the guy. But maybe you are right, they’d catch that.
I didn’t know that the job of the poll worker was to know what everyone looks like and do a personal identification of everyone. Like, why would they do that if there was no need to do that?
Bazinga.
“The real issue here — why ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded organization) is pushing these laws across the country is to make it harder for the young, the old, and the poor to vote – the very groups that tend to vote against the interests of the wealthy.”
ALEC is something of which too few are aware.
That has always been my thought exactly. I’m actually not in favor of a lot of the specific legislation that has been proposed this year as much of it DOES strike me as trying to make it unnecessarily difficult. However, in my mind it IS common sense to require SOMETHING for verification on a matter this important. Seems like that somewhere in all this we should be able to strike the right balance.
Re-remember the US Census stories about how hard it is to count Americans. Not 99%, not even 99.99%. The other folks. The ones who live in illegal apartments or under a bridge or in a car or work two jobs and are never home or just pain never answer their door or their mail.
It’s hard enough to find them to count them. Now somebody wants to go find them and get them an ID — develop that much more trust, get a photo, etc etc.? No chance. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t get to vote.
Don’t create a hurdle to prevent legal votes in an effort to prevent illegal votes for which there’s no evidence even happen. It doesn’t makes sense. You’re actively suppressing actual votes to prevent phantom false votes.
Do they work, or can the ink be easily washed off? If there is some kind of permanent ink that took a week to wash off, that’d prove people only vote once.
Why bother to spend five seconds doing a Google search, when it would answer your incredibly profound question?
have you actually read the many studies, notably by the Brennan Center, on this issue? Over and over again you comment on this topic based on your gut feelings, but you seem never to have gone out and read the real investigations that are out there – and that have been linked on many previous threads. Sometimes things are more complicated than what your gut instinct tells you.
Actaully, this issue is about gut feelings. The crisis is that lots of people have no faith in elections or government, because they see how easy it is to vote as someone else.
I enthusiastically agree that “this issue is about gut feelings”.
Yes — the “gut feelings” of racism, elitism, xenophobia, and scapegoating. Since there is no evidence of any actual problem, such racism and bigotry is the obvious — and best — explanation.
Deja vu indeed … the deja vu of the Jim Crow era in the deep south.
If there is large scale fraudulent voting, I don’t think it is on behalf of blacks or xenos, I think it is on behalf of union bosses (and their corporate partners) and Democrat machine politicians (and their corporate partners).
I think the 45,000 letters to names on the voting list that were returned undeliverable – in ONE city, is evidence that it would be very easy to line up a few hundred sworn-to-secrecy corrupt thugs to go around voting as those people and swing the election.
It’s interesting.
I can’t find much online about Democratic voter suppression. Frances Fox Piven has a book called Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters. She talks about it happening in Boston. I can’t find my book and can’t recall the details.
Here’s an excerpt from a Kirkus Review:
. America is a piss poor example of electoral democracy.
Yes, I have read the Brennan Center stuff that you (or someone) linked to last time we discussed this. No, I am NOT making any claim as to how often this happens. I really wish you would stop casting aspersions on what I have and have not read. Turns out I registered to vote just today because I’ve recently moved and even then no ID was requested. Sure I signed a perjury statement, but especially with false information that would be tough to track down if I had stated anything falsely. It should be noted that it would have been perfectly legal for me to have mailed in that form, or to in fact turn it in on someone else’s behalf. I have yet to vote in my new community, but in my previous one I’d just have to know someone not likely to vote and give their information. Like CMD above I have never known the poll checker personally as far as I can recall. My argument all along has never been that it does happen, but rather that it could too easily happen and I stand by that. Note also that in my town you don’t give full address first, just street. Once they open to that page you can point to any name on the street and say that’s me. If the real person matching that name does happen to show up later, that person is the one out of luck in terms of being able to vote. Even if that person is carrying ID to prove who he is I’m long gone with no way of tracking me down, hence my skepticism with the argument that the penalties are so heavy IF you get caught.
Great, we have a new standards that conservatives will allow laws to be written against.
I think that we should have a gun registration system with gun owners bringing their weapons down to the police station on an annual basis for inspections to make sure that the owners still have the guns they bought, because someone could be straw-purchasing guns and then selling them to criminals. If people aren’t willing to do that, then they can’t own guns. But hey – people register their cars and bring them to the inspection station every year, so this shouldn’t be an issue, right?
OK, great. So, what did you think of it? Do you reject its data? The conclusions that it draws from the data? Or do you think that your sense that “it could too easily happen,” even though it apparently hardly ever does, is more important? I am not trying to be obnoxious – I really want to know.
First this on 12/13:
That is my position also – we need to help people get ID’s because they are needed for so many things and not having an ID pushes people to the fringes of society, voting is the least of their concerns. Then Mark Bail asked him about the page on alternatives, and both christopher and I answered:
and mine:
I favor tight registration/licensing of firearms. I sense you were being snarky, but what you propose isn’t the worst idea in the world.