Voting ID, the problems it purports to solve, and the problems it might create

The New Yorker had a nice article on Hans von Spakovsky, the man who pretty much single-handedly created the voter fraud myth.

OG_slinger wrote:

The New Yorker had a nice article on Hans von Spakovsky, the man who pretty much single-handedly created the voter fraud myth.

But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.
He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.

So once again, nothing. No fraud. 0. Yet they claim 5k over a couple decades. Ugh.

And even if you grant the wrong figures, it's still not worth worrying about. 5000 votes out of how many tens of millions in twenty years?

The voting ID thing is not about voter fraud. It's about keeping people who don't conform with social expectations away from the ballot box.... who happen to fairly reliably vote Democratic.

One of the guys mentioned in the article, John Fund, was on Bill Maher Fri night, promoting his new book from last week Who's Counting. Bill tried to call him on some of his bullsh*t statistics, but mostly there was a lot of yelling. I used to enjoy Politically Incorrect back when, but the last couple years of Real Time it's just been "who can yell the loudest." I'm not sure which focus group they found enjoys that, but it's not me. I'd like to see actual discussion.

Stele wrote:

One of the guys mentioned in the article, John Fund, was on Bill Maher Fri night, promoting his new book from last week Who's Counting. Bill tried to call him on some of his bullsh*t statistics, but mostly there was a lot of yelling. I used to enjoy Politically Incorrect back when, but the last couple years of Real Time it's just been "who can yell the loudest." I'm not sure which focus group they found enjoys that, but it's not me. I'd like to see actual discussion.

Normally there is, but that episode was one of the worst ones i've seen in a long time. I catch about every other one usually... i ended up and turned it off about half way through that one.

Will photo IDs even work? What if the person can't recognize you in the photo? The lady made me smile today when I went to vote because she couldn't recognize me on my driver's license. I'm smiling in the photo. But when I'm not interacting with anybody, all emotion leaves my face, and I'm told I look grumpy or pissed off. Couldn't be further from the truth. That's just how I look, apparently.

So to give some real world in here. I dropped off my fiancee's absentee ballot request form. Short story, she just now got around to changing her address after our move (in June), but that the change would not be in time for voting. It is not feasible for her to get to the polling place in our old district given she works an hour from there, and the roads are all under construction, and she hates me because I am fat.

As a stroke of luck I happen to work and go to school a block from the county election center, Detroit City Hall. I dropped it off, and she will get her ballot in the mail some time by Monday.

Here is what I revisited in my mind. Online filing works for the IRS, for the Dept. of Ed, Social Security, etc. Why are we not getting online voting? Even simply printing out a Ballot and Mailing it would ease a lot of headaches for people, especially on special and mid term elections.

We've got criminally sponsored trojans infecting systems all the way down to specialized gaming keypads and mice, major Federal and state government databases being hacked, no national government computer security oversight, government agencies slurping up all Internet traffic with little oversight, credible evidence of electronic voting fraud in the last decade, and you want to put voting out on the Internet? Dude, WTF?

Well like I said, even getting the ballot as a PDF would be a major help to the voting public.

Also, we have illegal aliens casting votes for dead people on the way back from the social security office to vote just before they get a Medicare sponsored abortion in the current system.

And coordinating it all on a government phone!

I checked, and NJ has a lot of counties offering sample ballots for download. Middlesex, Cape May, Camden, Gloucester, Union, Sussex, probably others. Probably most states do, by now.

Reading this thread it just amazes me that you guys don't have some sort of standardised state or federal identification.

Here when someone turns 16, or someone becomes a citizen or permanent resident, you get one of these. It's pretty worn, I'm still on my first one, unlike most people I've never sent it through the washing machine.

IMAGE(http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll120/MrDeVil_909/ID_outside.jpg)

My serious 16 year old face. Identity number and barcode obscured.

IMAGE(http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll120/MrDeVil_909/ID_inside.jpg)

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Reading this thread it just amazes me that you guys don't have some sort of standardised state or federal identification.
...

In the United States the vast majority of people will have a driver's license issued by the state. (There are also non-driver's ids)
That said, it still doesn't solve the problem in that your voting area to which you should be registered is relatively small. (For example one side of town might have a different member of the US House of Representatives and that's before getting down to the state or city election levels) We tend to have a fairly mobile populous with people moving frequently and while you are required to update it when you move it would still look valid unless it has passed an expiration date.

Voting is a more enshrined right that having a government issued piece of paper anyway and with the history of discriminatory laws to try and block people from voting, a lot of us would rather give the benefit of the doubt to the voter until a better example of fraud can be found.

The big problem with a central ID system is that it's a single point of control. The Federal goverment could literally, instantly, and electronically make you an 'unperson', just like they can deny your right to fly permanently, for secret reasons that you aren't allowed to know, and have no reasonable method of contesting.

It's already illegal to 'aid terrorists'; if they simply tell people that anyone without an ID card should be considered to be a terrorist, and they could be legally liable for assisting them in any way, voila, we have 1984. It wouldn't require expansion of terrorism legislation, just a new interpretation of old statutes.

Once we have a national ID system, all that would be required for the reinterpretation would be one more major terrorist strike. A false flag operation would do nicely. See: Reichstag Fire. They could probably get explicit laws passed; we could move, as a society, from default-permit to default-deny overnight.

Without a national ID, that would be enormously harder, and that's the biggest reason to fight it.

Malor wrote:

The big problem with a central ID system is that it's a single point of control. The Federal goverment could literally, instantly, and electronically make you an 'unperson', just like they can deny your right to fly permanently, for secret reasons that you aren't allowed to know, and have no reasonable method of contesting.

It's already illegal to 'aid terrorists'; if they simply tell people that anyone without an ID card should be considered to be a terrorist, and they could be legally liable for assisting them in any way, voila, we have 1984. It wouldn't require expansion of terrorism legislation, just a new interpretation of old statutes.

Once we have a national ID system, all that would be required for the reinterpretation would be one more major terrorist strike. A false flag operation would do nicely. See: Reichstag Fire. They could probably get explicit laws passed; we could move, as a society, from default-permit to default-deny overnight.

Without a national ID, that would be enormously harder, and that's the biggest reason to fight it.

Reading that is like a Twilight Zone episode. The fact that any of these things is a concern makes your country seem far more broken than mine.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

The fact that any of these things is a concern makes your country seem far more broken than mine.

Personally I can't wait! As a government employee it will be nice to finally be a member of the ruling class.

The fact that any of these things is a concern makes your country seem far more broken than mine.

This is not a *mainstream* concern in the US, Mr. DeVil. Although some will say that's because the sheeple have not awoken...

MrDeVil909 wrote:

The fact that any of these things is a concern makes your country seem far more broken than mine.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/k1a9p.jpg)

Guys, we have a no fly list.

We have the government actively assassinating US citizens without a trial.

How the f*ck can you sit there and post pictures of tinfoil hats? What the f*ck is wrong with you?

Robear wrote:

Although some will say that's because the sheeple have not awoken... :-)

Good call.

I'm an ID nutbar too, I just don't talk about it as much as Malor does.

I have way more reason to mistrust my state than the Feds.

So we already have one, it is called a social security number. You cannot really do anything without one. As far as the last 85 years go, it seems to have been an innocuous ID system. But you need one to be employed, apply for a loan, enroll in schools, get a driving license, Passport, etc. The FBI and other agencies also have access to the Driving License and Passport databases.

I am not sure why cutting out a middle man to get a more comprehensive ID is so bad.

Also I am really struggling to tie the death of an enemy agent, living among terrorists, who was born and was educated partly in the US, with a national photo ID system.

The No Fly list is in Federal Court in a variety of cases. If your qualm is that congress can pass legislation that might violate the constitution. They have been for the last 240 years. So far as I can tell, we are still here. And if the system of judicial review falls apart, a national ID is the least of our worries.

Or if your qualm is that the president in times of war or combat will engage in unconstitutional actions. Again, from Bush to Washington, the president has done unconstitutional actions during war. And we are here today.

This isn't a war, KG. Wars end.

Malor wrote:

This isn't a war, KG. Wars end.

Your pretty consistent claim across nearly every thread here in P&R is that we're (the US) completely screwed anyways. That being the case, I'm not sure why small stuff like this ID thing remotely matters.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
A little company whose name is a homophone with a notorious Batman villain.

Man, Penguin Publishing is awfully dastardly!

Not a homophone!

You ask me, all this homophonic behavior is ruining the moral fiber of this country.

kazooka wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
A little company whose name is a homophone with a notorious Batman villain.

Man, Penguin Publishing is awfully dastardly!

Not a homophone!

You ask me, all this homophonic behavior is runeing the moral fiber of this country.

Fixed.

edosan wrote:
kazooka wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
A little company whose name is a homophone with a notorious Batman villain.

Man, Penguin Publishing is awfully dastardly!

Not a homophone!

You ask me, all this homophonic behavior is runeing the moral fiber of this country.

Fixed.

Homophonic behavior? The bible explicitly states it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eave.

Homophonic behavior? The bible explicitly states it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eave.

That's just a translation error from Heironymous's Greek edition, which of course shows his ignorance of Aramaic, but was adapted in 373 at the Council of Pompeii and passed by the Vetigensian Order into the Bulgarate, with it's notoriously bad Latin interpretations which we now know were done by a syphilitic cook in the monastery of Ignaros. I can't believe you made that argument.

clover wrote:

I'm an ID nutbar too, I just don't talk about it as much as Malor does.

My own personal take on things is that ID itself is not a bad thing--it's the stuff that we do with it that causes problems. There are a lot of things you need to provide ID for--and a variety of forms of ID which you can use for those things. I think that for the things that are reasonable to provide ID for, it would be very nice to have a more consistent system. At the same time, when things like Arizona SB 1070 are going on, it's easy to see how stuff can be misused pretty horribly.

The issue is not so much about who issues ID as about how the ID should be used. ID for employment, in order to verify tax info? Not unreasonable. License which happens to also be ID for certain activities? (Hunting, gun ownership, driving.) Sure. ID for air travel? Iffy, still annoys me. ID has to be carried at all times and provided at law enforcement request? Right out. ID doesn't have to be carried at all times, but law enforcement can request it of you and arrest you if you don't have it and they think you look Mexican? WAY out.

Anyway... I'm okay with people being ID nutbars. The thing that makes Malor open to mockery is that he is very... strident in how he talks about it. It's one thing to say "Hey, maybe government-issued ID isn't such a good idea, because it has the potential to be abused". It's another to say "federally-issued ID can result in problems if the single system breaks down, and the same problem could be created intentionally, therefore 1984." And that's... not really very far off from the train of thought in Malor's post here. (In fact, he pretty much skips the "if the system breaks down" part straight to the assumption of malefactors intentionally messing up peoples' lives.)

In short: Malor does himself a great injustice, and invites mockery, by taking the most extreme stance possible on this and a handful of other topics. If he argued in a way that didn't jump over the concerns that anyone might reasonably have straight to the concerns that only make sense if you believe that we're already living under Big Brother, more people would bother to read what he's saying, and might even be convinced by it. In the meantime, those of us who [em]don't[/em] believe that we're even close to such a scenario will continue to go cross-eyed after we hit the second half of his first sentence.