The Washington Post reports that other than for a handful of nuns and some college students from out-of-state, the state's Voter ID requirement upheld by the Supreme Court in Crawford does not appear to have created a significant obstacles to prospective voters' ability to cast ballots.
there were few other such incidents reported across the state, which has one of the strictest laws in the country, requiring voters to have a photo ID issued by the state or federal government. After the Supreme Court upheld the law by a 6-3 ruling last month, there was widespread speculation that the ruling could hurt Barack Obama in the primary, since he was counting on strong turnout among African American voters in inner city neighborhoods in Gary and Indianapolis where many residents lack drivers' licenses. But Obama spokesman Bill Burton said this evening that the campaign had received only scattered complaints on the voter hotline it set up to deal with problems at the polls. He credited the campaign's aggressive voter outreach effort to make sure supporters had the ID they would need. (Residents without driver's licenses can obtain free picture IDs at department of motor vehicle branches.)
Bethany Derringer, a spokeswoman for the Indiana Secretary of State's office, said the office also had not received many complaints on a hotline it set up for today's vote. She said that should not come as a surprise, given that the state's voters have had to contend with the strict law since 2005. "We've had nothing earth-shattering," she said. "We've done extensive education on this."
Related Posts (on one page):
- What About Those Nuns?
- Effects of Voter ID in Indiana Primary:
I think you mean does not, Jonathan.
I wonder how many fraudulent votes -- that we don't know about -- were discouraged by this policy.
Your "discouraged minorities" can be encouraged by educational efforts -- which will also further discourage fraudulent votes. Win/win.
Agree with those who suggest looking at the results after the general election. Will be much more interesting I suspect.
Here is some IN demographic data that can put the 22K number in perspective.
IN Population (2006) - 6,313,520
% under 18 - 25%
% black - 8.9%
That means that the total number of blacks eligible to vote in the entire state is approx 420K. (I didn't see a racial breakdown of the over/under 18 so I just assumed it was consistent across racial lines).
It is also reported that the total votes cast yesterday was about 1.6mm, giving a total turnout rate of 34%. Assuming a consistent racial breakdown for turnout (definitely a stretch), total black votes cast would be about 142K.
Now we have a range of black votes in IN from 142K to 420K, which means that anywhere from 5% to 15% of the black vote was discouraged from showing up due to lack of photo ID.
For another way to look at it, I saw that about 28% of blacks, or about 117K, in IN were estimated to lack proper photo ID as well. About 20% of the black population without ID would have wanted to vote, but didn't bother because of the new ID law to get to the 22K number.
I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing that those percentages are on the high side (but certainly not out of the realm of possibility) to make the ID law the cause of the 22K vote split. Everyone can feel free to draw their own conclusions from this, however.
Err, it's just as likely that this group simply decided NOT to vote, were busy, sick, or otherwise occupied. Look if I have to show a freakin' ID to buy a lousy six-pack, cash a check, get on a plane, or even enter a courthouse, and we can argue the validity of each separately, then the fact that an ID is required to vote is a minimal burden at best.
And those people crying a river now who don't have IDs (other than the legit scant few who may have recently moved in to the state, etc.) are just SOL as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know either, but you've just got to be wrong- the real number has to be, oh, a billion.
Why do you blithely assume that every single one of these 'disenfranchised' black voters was in the tank for Obama? I've been called a racist for much less.
It is nice to know that a law designed to combat a nearly nonexistent problem (people without ID going to the polls to cast fraudulent votes) does not have an excessively negative impact. I am sure that Republicans are disappointed that their attempts at disenfranchisement were not more successful.
On balance, ID requirements are still a net negative. The number of people disenfranchised is certainly much higher than the number of fraudulent votes prevented. I know that doesn't matter to elitist scum Republicans, who think that those who are somehow too defective to have an ID should not exercise the franchise.
The assumptions I made were to establish a floor value. I need every single one of the voters without ID to be in the tank for Obama for the numbers I calculated to be right. As the proportion of Obama support drops (as it rightly should), an even higher percentage of people would have wanted to vote but not done so due to the lack of ID.
I think that those percentages I gave were very high for the cause of the loss to be the ID law, particularly given that the law has been in effect since 2005. The cross section of people that want to vote, but don't have ID should be pretty small (and certainly smaller than the percentages I assumed in my earlier post, which was 100%). Of course, Obamania is a more recent phenomenon, but it has been going on long enough for almost anyone in IN who wanted to vote to get the proper ID.
By what means do you attain certainty on this subject? Can the certainty be reproduced in anyone aside from yourself?
As far as I can tell, there is no evidence for this conclusion. It seems much more reasonable to me to assume that the people who couldn't be bothered to get an ID wouldn't have bothered to vote anyway, even if there was no ID law, but I have no evidence for that, either.
In reality, I'm sure there were some blacks who were deterred by the ID law, but my point is, the number could be anywhere between 0 and 117K. Has anyone done any polling to pin this down?
Minority people aren't like you, are they? You can't expect them to do all the stuff you do, simple stuff like register to vote. You can't expect that of brown people. They're just not capable. As far as you're concerned brown people are like children, or monkeys.
The assumption that the percentage of under 18 year olds is the same in both the black and the white population is also in great need of support. Looking at census data available here, 23.5% of all white people are under the age of 18, while 31.4% of all black people are under 18.
Do we really want to start down the road of eligible voters who are "discouraged" from voting for want of an ID, rather than those actually prevented from voting? I wonder how many were "discouraged" from voting by the weather, bad traffic, or restless children?
If you read exit polls, you would know that the vast majority of black voters are voting for Obama. It is not mere speculation to infer that black voters who are disenfranchised due to the voter ID law would have voted for Obama.
Actually, it is not a leap of faith. It is basic economics.
I know you Republicans love to worship economists. So get this. The higher the marginal cost of voting, the fewer people who will vote.
If the marginal cost of voting is relatively low (because a person already has an ID) an individual is more likely to vote. If the marginal cost of voting is higher (because one most go through the hassle of waiting in line at the DMV to obtain an ID before going through the hassle of waiting in line at the voting booth) an individual is less likely to vote. This is especially true for individuals who have limited transportation options, making the marginal cost of travel to the DMV even higher. (Surprise surprise, people without ID are people who tend to have more limited transportation options. If it takes hours to get an ID when bus transportation and walking and waiting in line are factored in, fewer people are going to vote.)
So, it works like this.
Higher marginal cost equals less voting.
That is actually the point. Republicans want to make it more difficult for these Democratic voters to get to the polls, knowing that ID problems affect Democratic voters much more than Republican voters.
Combating the practically nonexistent problem of voters without ID casting fraudulent votes is not the point. Increasing the costs of voting for minorities who tend to vote Democratic is the point.
By the way, last time I checked, Indiana has absentee ballots.
I guess when you take someones ballot from the mail, vote it, and mail it in, you have to show ID. Oh wait, no you don't.
If this were really about voter fraud, Indiana Republicans would have done everything they could to ensure that individuals can easily obtain the ID they need. They would facilitate the obtaining of necessary documentation and transportation to numerous offices in convenient locations where such ID can be obtained. But they haven't done that.
This isn't about fraud. This is about winning elections by increasing the marginal cost of voting for voters who tend to vote for the other party.
Considering the state of TN requires me to show ID to buy beer in a supermarket (but not to buy liquor in a liquor store), I think voter ID for those wishing to exercise their franchise is a remarkably low obstacle.
right. because the racist identity card daemon (tm) blocked them.
Indiana's Voter ID bill supposedly passed on a party line vote. The parties that organize registration drives will have to organize photo ID drives as well. Perhaps the legislature could fund outreach vans to go to old folks' homes and take their pictures.
Considering the state of TN requires me to show ID to buy beer in a supermarket
Tennessee has 100% compliance? Would Santa Claus get carded in Tennessee?
I finally had to show ID the other day, paying for a couple of DVD's by credit card in a record store. First time in years -- I literally cannot remember the last time.
1) No one without an ideological axe to grind or otherwise immune to facts thinks that voter fraud of the kind the IN statute was ostensibly designed to prevent is a significant problem.
2) Posner's opinion upholding the statute honestly conceded that it was a solution in search of a problem and that it would on balance affect Democrats more so than Republicans--that is its intent, and behind the nationwide Republican campaign against the phantom problem of voter fraud, which spans from statutes like these to the firings of capable U.S. attorneys for declining to prosecute such nonexistent offenses.
3) One can agree with Posner and the Supreme Court that the statute is constitutional (and I do, though there is a 24th Amendment argument against it not raised at either level), which is the only court test it had to pass to stay on the books--why bother to pretend that it has any morally or democratically legitimate purpose?
4) The real empirical test of the effect of such laws will likely be in the general election, since general voters are generally less informed about such things and less committed to the electoral process than primary voters (an assumption on my part, but I think a fair one).
5) The quest to come up with a case of this kind of voter fraud resembles the Republicans' equally quixotic attempt to identify a single middle class family or family farmer adversely affected by the estate tax prior to its recent reform.
Anybody that understand economics should see that this will be the effect. The number of people who have been prosecuted for casting fraudulent ballots at the polls is minuscule. And it is not as if this sort of behavior would go undetected. X goes to the polls claiming to be Y. The real Y goes to the polls. X gets caught. If fraudulent voting by people lacking ID was a large problem, these sorts of prosecutions would be much higher.
So. We know we have a situation where we have practically no fraud occurring.
On the other hand, we do know from economics that when you increase the marginal cost of something, you get less of it. If you increase the marginal cost of voting, you will get less voting.
It is quite clear that the magnitude of the second effect (people not voting due to higher marginal costs) is much greater than the practically nonexistent magnitude of the first effect (fraudulent voting by people without ID).
No one without an ideological axe to grind really thinks that obtaining a free ID is a substantial burden.
How does X get caught? You have no idea who he is.
Just because the Republicans desire to disenfranchise is constitutional, that does not make it right.
First, you do not need ID to buy beer if you are clearly over the age of 21. I buy alcohol without being carded.
Second, the fact that you are seriously comparing the right to vote with the right to buy beer shows just how f***ed up your values are.
How does any criminal who doesn't show his ID get caught?
Can you say eyewitnesses? Also, even if the individual is not caught, we would at least know that the event occurred. The fact that these things are not detected very often is rather remarkable.
Agreed, even assuming difficulty because of their age and that none of them drove in traveling twelve miles to the DMV to get a free ID, the Indiana General Assembly passed PL 109-2005 in July of 2005 and they were told repeatedly by their fellow nuns about the need to get an ID. That’s nearly three years since the time Indiana passed their voter ID law to figure out a way to make arrangements to get to the DMV to get a free ID.
I agree, it was deliberate because twelve elderly nuns make a better photo op than someone caught registered to vote in two States so she could double-dip on her homestead exemption.
Except for economists, who know that if you increase the marginal cost of something, you get less of it.
The Republicans behind this law are not stupid. They know that if you increase the marginal cost of voting, you will get less of it.
It is not about it being a "substantial burden." It is about increasing the marginal cost of voting for one segment of the population (those currently lacking ID), while keeping the marginal cost of voting the same for another (those currently possessing ID).
More likely, because they did not have transportation to the DMV. Or extra time to go to the DMV. Or access to documents needed to demonstrate identity to the DMVs satisfaction.
You can argue against basic economics all you want whit, but I think you should stick to law enforcement, which is more your forte. If you increase the marginal cost of something, you get less of it. Period.
Fearless, get over it. You lost, voter ID is here to stay.
And I agree with your marginal cost. We wingnut repubs usually have a job, and the choice between making money and voting is a marginal cost. So there!
You’re forgetting that after casting a fraudulent vote while posing as Y, X decides to hang out at the polling station for the day shooting the breeze with the election judges until Y shows up.
And then when the camera crew from COPS shows up, X decides to make a run for it while intoxicated and handcuffed.
Due to transaction costs, most people do not sacrifice a significant amount of income to vote. While in theory your time may be worth X, in reality, transaction costs will often prevent you from realizing X as income.
In other words, if you have a salary and your employer lets you take a little time to vote (as most do) you do not lose any income from voting.
And when you increase the marginal cost of voting fraud...
In contrast, all the other criminals who are somehow caught always stick around at the scene of the crime in order to facilitate their apprehension. Criminals who engage in fraudulent voting are just somehow extra sneaky in that they do not stay at the scene.
Anyway, the issue is not one of apprehension, but of detection. Even if you did not apprehend these criminals because the police were too busy munching on donuts and could not be bothered with a proper investigation, you would at least detect that the voting occurred.
The fact that this is not even detected tells us all we need to know for the purposes of evaluating whether fraudulent voting without ID is a significant problem. And guess what. It is not.
Heaven help them if they should ever need to apply for and receive federal aid! (Or are we turning Social Security into a come-on-come-all soup line now?)
Economics has nothing to do with the major mistakes you are making in this analysis (although it fits fine with your earlier analysis of marginal costs).
# of convictions for fraud =/= # of instances of fraud.
It is very very simple to prove that fraud is happening on a much larger scale than the mere number of convictions can show. Take a look at the problems showing up in Milwaukee, such as the thousands of provisional ballots which were cast with nonexistent physical addresses, or the fact that more votes were counted than were actually cast. Look at numbers of votes cast by dead people, felons, or non-residents.
Even your example above is severely faulty (X votes as Y, Y votes, X gets caught). How, exactly, is X supposed to be caught? X didn't give any information that would allow authorities to discover his real identity to arrest him.
Why can't conservatives just "get over it" and realize that the right to choose abortion is here to stay.
Why can't libertarians just "get over it" and realize that drugs and sex with underage teenagers will remain illegal.
I am sorry, I am not going to "get over" the intentional disenfranchisement of voters. You will be playing defense on this law for the rest of your life until it is overturned.
Blatant category error. Voting fraud (the kind we're talking about here anyway) is an identity crime, not one determined by forensic evidence. The proper comparison is with criminals who engage in identity theft or credit card theft. If you can't challenge and verify the identity of a suspect, how do you expect to catch any criminals in this category?
"Regular" criminals usually leave forensic evidence at the scene, or are caught on videotape, which allows police to track them down later. Are you suggesting the better way to prevent fraud is video surveillance on all polling places, or taking fingerprints of voters and attaching them to ballots? What kind of chilling effect would that have?
However, failure to even detect fraud that WOULD typically and naturally be detected is an indication that the fraud is not occurring.
Even if you do not catch X, you certainly do find out that X has voted fraudulently by claiming to be Y, when the real Y shows up at the polls at tries to vote.
An easy claim, indeed, for someone who enjoys a class position above poverty level (yes, I'm assuming here; just try telling me with a straight face that I'm wrong in that assumption). Or when you don't possess a means of leaving work for up to 5-6 hours at a stretch during the DMV's normal business hours without risking leave without pay (something the poor cannot afford) or simply being terminated for failure to show.
(Yes, I said up to 5 to 6 hours. Remember, you have to locate accessible transportation, which for the poor likely means a bus, and buses run on their own schedules rather than the timing required by customers riding them. Where I live, a bus going anywhere at all comes only once every hour, and that doesn't begin to factor in waiting at a transfer point to leave one bus and board another where such transfers are necessary. Then there's the interminable line at the DMV itself; last time I had to get a new license because I moved from one state to another, I waited a full two hours. The time before that was marginally better: I was out of there in an hour and a half.)
Fearless seems to have it quite right in pointing out that requiring IDs is a solution without a problem.
I don't see a problem with video surveillance at polling places. As long as the ballot remains secret, I do not see a problem. I think it would have about as much of a "chilling effect" as video surveillance at 7-11 does for those who want to buy a Big Gulp.
Again, the issue is not one of apprehension. It is one of detection. We are not even detecting this sort of fraud, indicating that it is not a significant problem. Even if you were not able to find the perpetrator through the descriptions of eyewitnesses at the polling place, you would still detect the fraud.
Thank you for repeating silly dKos talking points.
X goes to the polls claiming to be Y. Y died and is still on the voter rolls. Y will not be showing up. X therefore will not be caught.
X goes to the polls claiming to be Y. Y moved away and is still on the voter rolls. Y will not be showing up. X therefore will not be caught.
X goes to the polls claiming to be Y. Y never existed and is a phony registration turned in by someone being paid to register voters. Y will not be showing up. X therefore will not be caught.
This sort of fraud was exposed after-the-fact in the 1993 Miami mayor's race, which was overturned by the courts, but they never identified or caught the people who showed up at the polls claiming to be dead people. It happened, and those criminals got away with it entirely.
And choosing dead registrants allows it to be far easier to prove afterward that fraud happened than choosing phony registrants or those who have moved away, because the government keeps and makes publicly available death records.
You can't enter a federal courthouse or federal building without a picture ID. It seeme to me that some pretty important rights are implicated there.
Nick
Your constant reference to "basic economics" leaves out--oddly?--that you are speaking entirely of individual CHOICES. If people CHOOSE not to vote for the candidates *you* like because of a small increase in marginal costs, you really should direct your bile at them. Not at Hoosier Republicans. Who's fault is it that your candidates don't inspire these "marginal" voters to get a state ID?
No one is requiring them to swim the length of the Wabash River. Why do they CHOOSE to stay at home on election day? Because they CHOSE not to get an ID? Really, that's a problem that goes much deeper than this law, and that is not causally to it.
"Basic economics": It's about CHOICES.
Hah. I would love to see the furor when that law gets suggested. But you still have the problem of associating the face with the fraudulent ballot, and video doesn't solve the problem of detecting the fraud in the first place. (Unless you tasked poll workers with taking each ballot, pulling up ID pictures from a database, and searching the faces until they find the person. And if you were going to do that, why not just check the ID in the first place?)
Identity theft is normally detected when a financial institution calls the victim to confirm some charges, or when "abnormal" charges are racked up when compared to a sophisticated algorithm analyzing the victim's past purchase history. Assuming a poll worker can't do the same because of a secret ballot, and assuming you're against ID checking at the polling place despite the identity-based nature of voting fraud, how do you propose to ever check if fraud has occurred?
I can walk to at least one DMV location. I can walk to the Post Office, where ID can also be obtained. To do so, I would need to walk through neighborhoods that are more down on their luck than the LMC to MC neighborhood I live in. So residents of those areas are nearer than I am to the source of ID.
The people most likely to be cut off from access are the *rural* poor and elderly. They are sometimes a great distance from the nearest DMV or major PO.
Rural Hoosiers? That doesn't seem to be the voting bloc that Fearless wants to get into the polls.
This is a real common problem. X knows that Y has died, knows that Y is registered, and has Y's information, and is just dying to cast an extra vote. That sounds like a common scenario.
This is a real common problem. X knows that Y has moved, knows that Y is registered, and has Y's information, and is just dying to cast an extra vote. That sounds like a common scenario.
The registrar of voters could verify the address of the phony registration from a database of real addresses. Say X uses a real address. When the people who really live at the address show up to vote and the poll workers casually mention that Y already voted today and the real voters say that no Y lives with them, X gets caught.
You want to combat voter fraud? Why don't we rein in absentee ballots. That is where the real fraud is. But Republicans wouldn't like that, because Republicans disproportionately benefit from absentee ballots.
I want to hear Republicans who favor ID requirements also speak up in favor of reining in absentee ballots. By the way, no ID is required in Indiana to vote by absentee ballot.
Why is it that a practically nonexistent form of fraud at the polling place is the target of so much Republican effort. Why not REALLY require everyone to show ID and forbid absentee ballots? I will tell you why. Because eliminating absentee ballots would disproportionately disenfranchise Republican voters.
This isn't about fraud. This is about increasing the marginal cost of voting for those who would tend to vote Democratic.
Why aren't you talking to Hoosier Democrats about this? Lake and Porter Counties have had serious absentee vote fraud issues. And they have NOT been perpetrated by Republicans trying to stuff ballot boxes.
Come to think of it, I think you make a good argument for TIGHTENING ID requirements in this state. I'd better get on the phone to my state rep.
There was nothing in place to even detect fraud before. Even if X came claiming to be Y and voted and Y showed later, there is no reporting system for that. So you can not claim that voter fraud was not taking place, and is not taking place in other states.
Wait a minute, your whole argument is that it doesn't matter if a burden is substantial, what matters is that even a slight increase in marginal costs will result in fewer votes.
So even if you are only sacrificing a small amount of income to vote, less people are still voting.
So tell me, why aren't you decrying the disenfranchisement of the working classes?
Would an independant do? I don't favor "reigning in" absentee ballots en bloc, but there are simple enough ways to prevent absentee ballot fraud that I would like to see implemented alongside ID laws. If we put the two proposals together would you drop your opposition to ID laws, or is this just random tu quoque?
That is totally false. I do not want anyone to be disenfranchised. I don't give a damn if they vote for Hillary or vote Republican.
You are also missing another variable besides transportation. That is, getting the proper documents together so an ID can be issued. That is a nontrivial task for those who do not have these documents handy. If you have to request a birth certificate from another state, that costs money and can take weeks to arrive. Getting a social security card when you do not have one handy can be a bit of effort too.
Even when these documents are available, if the only reason you are getting the ID is to vote, then the cost of obtaining the ID is basically a cost of voting. And, as I have mentioned before, if you increase the marginal cost of something, you get less of it. That is just basic economics.
I'm pretty sure there are millions of people living below the poverty line who have managed to get themselves to the DMV to get drivers licenses.
Having said that, isn't the real issue whether the problem these laws ostensibly solve have a greater cost than the side effect? i.e., is more fraudulent voting stopped than legitimate voting stopped? It seems to me that if the answer is yes, the laws are on balance good, but if the answer is no the laws are on balance bad. From what I can tell, nobody actually has that answer -- and some of the comments here are along the lines of, "Well, we can't know what level of fraud really existed in the first place, so we can't know what level of fraud this is really stopping." Despite my self-identification as "to the left," I've got enough libertarian in me to suspect that a law whose efficacy is apparently untestable is a law that maybe doesn't have any business being on the books.
Fraudulent votes are a form of voter disenfranchisement.
Showing ID when you vote is helping to ensure a fair election.
If you put the two together, that would prove that Republicans are actually concerned about fraud, rather than disenfranchising people for partisan advantage. That they propose only one shows what their true motives are.
However, even if the two were combined, I would still be opposed, because I believe that the number of legitimate Democrats and Republicans who would be disenfranchised by combining both proposals would far exceed the amount of fraud that would be eliminated.
The fact that the Democrats can get owned like this is why Will Rogers said "I don't belong to any organized political party -- I'm a Democrat!"
If obtaining a picture ID is hard, let's work to make it easier.
People with the lowest incomes are the least likely to move from state to state. So they would be, what, the goup LEAST likely to be affected by this? And college students the MOST likely?
A social security card? Those are not that hard to get, and allow you to do thigs like . . . well, work. Are you sure the people you are talking about would ever come to the polls for anything, ever?
Abnd what I said about rural Hoosiers is not "totally false," even thjough you have claimed that it is so. I never said YOU want to disenfranchise anyone. You have said that large numbers of Republicans in my state want to do so. But you've given only a theoretical argument for the way in which people might choose not to participate. No one is 'disenfranchised'.
By the way, no ID is required in Indiana to vote by absentee ballot.
That's what I thought. On the one hand, that leaves a huge and glaring loophole in Indiana's law that anyone actually interested in preventing election fraud ought to want plugged. On the other hand, it also means that all the allegedly-disfranchised ID-less in Indiana had to do is vote absentee. Problem solved; "marginal cost" (in terms of time taken from work, transportation cost, &c.) almost certainly less than that of voting in person without an ID requirement.
In other words: The law is poorly designed, but it's hard to see how it puts a substantial obstacle in the way of anyone's voting.
Incidentally, what do the opponents of voter ID requirements here think about jury duty? Now there's something that really is a pain in the butt if you're poor and car-less. What's more, it's illegal to shirk it, and even if you have a good case for a hardship exemption, you generally have to make said case in person before the judge — which means the better part of a day lost anyway, certainly as much as you'd lose going (once) to the DMV to get an ID.
(For that matter, as I understand it, most states compile their juror lists from DMV records and voter rolls, so that registering to vote, if you're car-less, entails the additional cost of being called for jury service. Has anyone argued that that is a de facto poll tax? Why not?)
I have an idea, Fearless. For all those folks who don't have an ID, why don't we just let the Obama campaign send staffers over to their homes to ask them who they want to vote for? Granted, there would still be some small marginal cost to voting, in that the person would have to open the door, and then nod, make a verbal response, or otherwise indicate his or her preference. I know you want to reduce the marginal cost to zero, since anyone who wants to impose any marginal cost on voting is a right-wing racist, but this is the best I can come up with.
Actually, I think the difference in marginal cost of voting that those earning an hourly wage face versus those who earn a salary is a significant issue.
However, I have not yet thought through the possible policy responses. I do not believe that the government should compensate people to vote, even if they can document that they lost some amount of income due to being paid hourly.
There will always be some cost to voting. Time is a valuable asset. But those costs should be minimized and not unnecessarily increased. Further, one should not artificially increase the costs to one group, while minimizing them for another. That is precisely what has happened in Indiana. Even though the serious fraud occurs with absentee ballots, reforms are aimed at the polling place.
One way to get a handle on it is to follow up with voters after an election cycle. Mail every registered voter a card after the election cycle, asking them to check off which elections they voted in. Cards will fall into four categories:
Returned as undeliverable-voter should be purged from rolls.
Not returned- voter sent two follow-up cards a month apart; failure to return both results in voter casting a provisional ballot at next election.
Returned, reported results consistent with voting records-no action taken
Returned, reported votes inconsistent with voting records-investigate to determine possibility of fraud (or faulty memory). Check signatures on voter sign in sheets vs. those on file.
This would at least give a bound on the scope of the potential fraudulent voting.
I don't know what the costs would be-$2-3 per voter per election cycle? Just doing it once would sure put a lot of this arguing back and forth to bed.
Exhibit A. Someone who is straight out advocating disenfranchisement.
Such scum do exist.
The normal business hours of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles include being open on Saturday and until 7pm on Tuesday. Moreover they have extended hours the day of and the day before the election to enable people to come in and get their IDs.
As far as arranging transportation, buses usually run about every fifteen minutes in metropolitan areas and since this is supposedly about the “disenfranchisement” of likely Democratic voters who tend to be more likely to live in metropolitan areas, that’s ample time to catch a bus and go in either early in the morning, at the end of work on Tuesday, on Saturday or earlier or later on the day of or before an election to get your ID.
And for retired people like these nuns who don’t have to be at work at all, they have even more time to get to the DMV to get their IDs.
But JURY DUTY--it has been a big, big problem, if you value the idea of a "jury of one's peers." By which I mean a potential cross-section of the county that runs the court.
Two years ago I was able to see this first-hand, instead of just reading about it in the paper. I was called for jury duty. The crime was drug-dealing. I was dismissed when the defense attorney found that I had "young children in the home." So I am assuming the accused was selling to kids or near a school. Or else dealing from a home with young children.
The accused was black. Of the 51 potential jurors who showed up to compose the pools, TWO were black. I can't say what this did to his chances of conviction or aquital, but that sure doesn't look like a jury of our peers was in the cards. So this strikes me as a real issue.
On the specifics: It made no difference. His attorney was Tony Zirkle, so I'm sure the guy is doing consecutive life-sentences in a Turkish prison right now.
But IN PRINCIPLE, this is upsetting.
There will always be some marginal cost to voting.
However, the fact is that Republicans have chosen to increase that cost for one group (those currently lacking ID) while it remains constant for another group (those currently possessing ID) all the while ignoring the 100-pound gorilla in the room where the real voter fraud occurs, absentee ballots.
Why should we even allow absentee ballots? If Republicans who disproportionately use absentee ballots are too lazy to bother to go to the polls, I am not sure I want them voting. At least according to your logic.
Absentee ballots don't do anything, except for decrease the marginal cost of voting. But guess what. You want to know where the real fraud is? In absentee ballots.
I don't see the Republicans in Indiana rushing to abolish absentee ballots in order to combat this fraud. I guess keeping marginal costs low makes sense, as long is disproportionately enables Republican voters to cast their ballots.
Exhibit A. Someone who is straight out advocating disenfranchisement.
Such scum do exist.
Not encouraging = Preventing?
I don't want to BAN internet porn. But I'm not going to link websites on my homepage either.
I think you need to look up "disenfrachisement"
That is funny. I never heard any Democrats say that disenfranchised rural voters do not matter. Can you say straw man.
At least you are consistent. If only the Republicans in Indiana were likewise consistent.
Then take up the cause. Once you get a block of people together pushing through "we want to stop absentee ballot fraud," there's no way someone could oppose you without looking like total jackasses.
There was nothing in place to even detect fraud before. Even if X came claiming to be Y and voted and Y showed later, there is no reporting system for that. So you can not claim that voter fraud was not taking place, and is not taking place in other states.
Back when Massachusetts used paper reporting, they checked off each person's name as they voted. So they did have a mean of detecting fraud. (Although I'm sure if they would've had a means of following it up; and the way their books were set up, I could easily glance over the sheet and claim to be "Joe Smith" who hasn't been checked off yet. Computers have ameliorated these issues.)
Uh, no. Libertarian and anarcho-capitalist fantasies aside, a government has to have some minimal contact with the governed. Whether it's via census taker, or tax collection, or whatever; there is a minimal expectation that your government knows you exist, or still exist. Requiring someone to visit the DMV (or tax collector or county clerk) once in their life, or even once every 10 years or so, is not an onerous burden for citizenship.
I haven't set foot in a DMV for 11 years, but all my IDs are up to date. I even picked up a new state ID by mail for a measly $3 last month. Indiana may have different rules, but calling someone "scum" because they don't agree with your assessment of costs is just plain silly.
If the only laws on the books were the ones which were enacted from pure motives, the law books would be pretty sparse reading. And, come to think of it, we'd be better off. But seeing to that isn't the judiciary's job.
To take a leaf from the liberal playbook, what concrete evidence is there that absentee voting is rife with fraud? How many people have been convicted of this crime?
Exhibit A. Someone who is straight out advocating disenfranchisement.
Such scum do exist.
I'm honored to be called scum by someone whose definition of "disenfranchised" is "can't be bothered." Perhaps "scum" is a compliment in his world. My question, however, remains unanswered -- why do we want these people to vote? Are we likely to get a more informed outcome because of their votes?
PS -- Oh, to preempt possible responses, "a$$hole," "d*&%^bag," "fascist," and the like are not really answers.
Can you provide any evidence that Republicans wouldn't like that, or is this simply you projecting again?
The fact that it's not a problem for the Democratic party is not the same thing as saying there is no problem.
In my experience, the young and poor tend to move around a lot. Which is good, because it lets them move to where the jobs are.
The costs involved with obtaining the needed documentation are at issue, and we shouldn't dismiss them just because Fearless said it.
I can certainly think of alternatives to requiring photo ID. I think that voter registration should basically give you a "ticket" that you need to bring to the voting booth and sign in person in order to gain admission. If my state were to pursue a voter-ID law, I would encourage my representatives to follow this route.
For instance
Depends on the tone, I suppose. Under some circumstances, I could see it as unflattering.
No, not really. The costs are inconsequential. If we're going to get hung up on the cost of ID, we should also mandate that the government provide everyone free transport to their voting place. After all, it costs money to get around. And some people may not be able to take time off work to vote, so election day should be a paid holiday for everyone.
The whole absentee ballot system seems practically designed to circumvent all the safeguards set up around in person voting, including the secret ballot.
"My question, however, remains unanswered -- why do we want these people to vote? Are we likely to get a more informed outcome because of their votes?"
I've noticed that there are two schools of thought where voting is concerned. One views the purpose of voting as selecting government officials and setting policy, and regards the uninformed vote as an undesirable source of 'noise' in the system. The other views voting as a kind of secular sacrement, where participation is the whole point, and the quality of the outcome is at best secondary.
Naturally, the latter school of thought values the votes of people who don't get interested in the election until election day, and who haven't got a clue about the candidates and issues. They may be ignorant, but at least they're voting.
I think it’s a fine idea to require that someone who asks for an absentee ballot to produce a valid photo ID to the clerk to check against the information on the application. I can’t recall if the clerk asked to see it when I last voted absentee (2002 which was a bit of a hassle as the ballots were changed after I voted) but as a matter of habit, I always keep my driver’s license ready whenever I’m paying with a credit card or signing any sort of official document.
Come to think of it, I don’t know anyone who opposes such a measure but I suspect the reason it hasn’t been made into law yet is that the people who keep bringing it up don’t really care about it either, they just want it as an excuse to justify opposing requiring a photo ID for people who vote in person.
Thales, I have served as an election inspector in two different municipalities in the State of Michigan.
I don't necessarily think that the kind of vote fraud dealt with by this law is a significant problem in the cities I worked in. But I know that it could have been a big problem in certain other cities in the State.
The fact that such fraud is incredibly easy when voters were not required to show picture ID is what causes me to support
such ID laws.
In one of the municipalities I worked in, I saw a political party operative who had full access to the list of people who had voted. He would call people from his Party who hadn't showed up yet.
I was new to that town, so I had no idea if the people he encouraged to come in actually were the people that they claimed to be. At the time, we could request ID but the voter could legally refuse to show ID and still vote. If they could fill out a document with a Name/Birthdate/Address that matched a listing in the Qualified Voter List, then we had to let them vote.
This particular sequence of events scared me. I had no way of knowing whether or not I was witnessing voter fraud. Thankfully, there were no other indications of fraud.
However, this is one reason that I suspect that the Indiana laws (and similar laws elsewhere) will make fraudulent voting much harder. I support such efforts; I also support efforts to make sure that absentee voting is done properly.
Does this make me a person with an ideological axe to grind?
I don't care whether the problem is significant or not. I do care that it was easy earlier, and is much harder now.
As a practical matter, however, I think most people who want to lower "obstacles" to voting do so for tactical reasons, because they think they have a pretty good idea how the "new" voters will vote. They don't want to increase participation, they want to increase participation for their side. Mock outrage at "disenfranchisement" is merely a helpful tool.
all of these can be prevented by maintaining more accurate voter roles. voter ID is not needed to prevent any of these.
Voter ID is needed to maintain more accurate voter rolls.
So what kind of voter fraud was it "ostensibly" designed to prevent?
After you answer that, perhaps you can explain how you know that it is not a significant problem.
This appears to be such a contentious issue we should let the Supreme Court rule on it. Oh, wait...6 to 3 as I recall.
IANAR [I am not a Republican], but your comment:...is a little bit over the top. Anyone who denies that there is rampant voter fraud in parts of the country is either being mendacious or foolish. It is doubtful that the SC would have ruled as they did, if they truly believed that voter fraud is a nonexistent problem.
Are we supposed to be convinced by an anonymous poster with an obvious political agenda pulling unsupported assertions out of thin air?
The response:
"The number of people who have been prosecuted for casting fraudulent ballots at the polls is minuscule. And it is not as if this sort of behavior would go undetected."
It is precisely the case that this sort of behavior goes undetected. Let me parse your scenario; in summary, your scenario is only one of many ways in-person vote fraud plays out.
"X goes to the polls claiming to be Y."
Granted: this is the only way requiring ID at the polls can help.
"The real Y goes to the polls."
Here you assume the worst sort of vote fraud, the one that not only casts a fraudulent vote, it also steals a legitimate one. Essentially, this fraud counts twice.
There are other types we've explained to you: simple fraudulent registration, voting for a willing accomplice, voting for the deceased, voting for a recently relocated person. All can be detected, but the resources required to detect them are considerable and require intergovernmental cooperation. All of them (contra a recent post) are simple to pull off -- for example, finding who has recently deceased is easy, simply look in the obits. In particular, if you run the city government doing all of these is a cakewalk.
"X gets caught."
Nonsense. There's little chance the perpetrator would ever get caught; the only evidence is the forged signature, and odds are that the 'forgery' is transparent (i.e. the person simply scrawled some words, not an actual signature).
"So. We know we have a situation where we have practically no fraud occurring."
Again, the situation is that we see only second-order evidence of such fraud -- an occasional person complaining that they were unable to vote (but no mechanism to correct that, after all, what could be done?), an occasional impossibly high vote total (even most large-scale fraud won't leave that kind of tracks, since actual voting isn't close to 100% of registered voters)... Who can tell?
"On the other hand, we do know from economics that when you increase the marginal cost of something, you get less of it. If you increase the marginal cost of voting, you will get less voting."
[parody of="Fearless", postID="12:48pm", smilingWhenISayThis="yes"]I know you Democrats hate economists.[/parody]
Marginal costs aren't relevant in this situation. Marginal cost is the change in total cost when the amount produced changes by one unit. It costs no more for me to go to the polls even if thousands of others do -- so we're not talking about marginal cost.
What you're actually concerned about is the profitability of voting: the value derived from voting minus the cost of voting. You're reasonably concerned that requiring ID raises the cost of voting, but you're totally ignoring that requiring ID also increases the return on voting, since it's not diluted by an unknown and unknowable amount; it also reassures the voter in a very immediate way that *this* vote is undiluted (as opposed to a law that somehow statistically reduced the incidence of vote fraud, perhaps by prosecuting it after the fact).
So it's NOT clear that requiring ID reduces the incentive to vote. It might, it might not.
-Wm
You don't work on campaigns much, do you?
While dead voters can be eliminated in most cases by proper use of the Social Security death tapes by the registrar, I have seen far too many incidences of dead voters remaining on the rolls to think that the problem would just go away by making the existing system work better.
Motor-Voter's provisions regarding reregistration when a postal change of address is filed are a huge problem in this area. If your personal representative or executor files a change of address for your mail after you die, this information from the post office is quite likely to arrive at the registrar and be used to update your registration before the death record arrives - and since the death record will no longer match the name and address of a registrant, the decedent stays on the rolls (at a new address).
If there is a misspelling on your voter registration (happens in about 1%-2% of registrations), your death record will not match either.
If you happen to die outside the U.S., you can almost forget getting the registration removed.
As for people who moved away, Motor-Voter was designed to deal with this problem by using postal records to update voter registration records. However, if the name listed on the postal records is not a perfect match to the name listed on voter registration records (nicknames/short forms of names, listing only last name or one member of a household's name, etc. on the postal form), the old registrations will remain. For people who get their mail at a P.O. Box or PMB, a move in the same geographic area may not even cause a postal record change to be sent to the registrar. And then there are the people who don't file a change-of-address form with the post office.
As for phony registrations, other than striking registrations when election materials come back undeliverable, what are you proposing that the registrars do? Are you asking them to have an investigative task force to ensure registrations are real, and budgeting for it?
Nick
Of course Republicans are doing this to get rid of Democratic voters, but what you're ignoring is that fraudulent voters are also disproportionately Democratic. So this can be a self-interested measure by Republicans to prevent Democrat votes, yet remain completely legitimate.
Tennessee does require package beer sales (supermarkets, conveniance stores) to check ID for every sale, regardless of how old the customer appears. WaPo article here: http://tinyurl.com/5qol9r. Citation is Tenn. Code Ann. Sec. 57-5-301(a)(1)(A).
It is. And campaign organizations, which have time, resources, and motivation, have gotten involved in doing it in elections around the country.
It is. And campaign organizations, which have time, resources, and motivation, have gotten involved in doing it in elections around the country.
You could try reading Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson's book Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics.
Ha ha ha. Poll workers casually mention? That's a good one. Never mind that you can do phony registrations at real addresses where no actual voters live, at addresses where the real voters vote absentee, at apartment complexes or residential hotels, at fictitious granny units, with the same last name as the real voter, etc. if you were even remotely worried that poll workers might ask.
I'm in favor of greatly tighening the requirements for an absentee ballot. There just aren't any laws recently put into place to do that, primarily because Motor-Voter BANNED states from tightening their absentee ballot application rules. That was a law passed through Congress by Democrats on a basically partisan basis in 1993 and signed into law by a Democrat.
There was 0 chance, even when there was a GOP majority in both houses of Congress and a GOP President, that a repeal of that part of Motor-Voter would have made it through a filibuster.
I'll focus on the acheivable, not the impossible.
Eliminating absentee ballots would take first an act of Congress and second an act of state law. The first is not going to happen, and your party would oppose it virtually unanimously a