(Compulsory) national ID cards

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Meanwhile, the studies available show the kind of voter fraud ID laws would prevent occur at statistically-nonexistent levels. As discussed in the War on Voting thread and elsewhere, a 2004 Ohio study showed voter fraud like that was 0.00004%. An investigation into allegations of Wisconsin vote fraud (warning, PDF) found that mistakes and fraud by election workers were a far more significant risk.

Here's the crux of the matter for me. Any services provided by the government have a cost of either money, liberty, or both. Reasonable people can draw the line for acceptable cost/benefit tradeoffs in different places - for example, the extreme premium Libertarians place on liberty means they're unhappy with many government services I view as essential. Compulsory nationalized ID cards would require sacrificing money and liberty for benefits which seem speculative at best.

[Edit to fix parentheses, and replace payment with cost]

An investigation just got done in Maine that turned up one instance of illegal voting (I won't call it fraud since that, to me, requires that it be intentional and not just someone who didn't know they weren't allowed to vote): in 2002 an El Salvidorian, whom has since been deported, voted illegally. Despite the fact that not one of the 206 college students the Republican Chairman accused of potentially committing voter fraud did anything that was actually fraudulent, they still want to overhaul the voter registration system. Of the proposed plans, the only thing that doesn't seem unnecessarily burdensome will be a more accurate definition of who is defined as a resident of the state (and therefore able to vote in the state).

Right, and notice precisely who is being rendered unable to vote -- college students, who are reliably liberal.

It's vote suppression, and it's wrong, trying to shut people out of voting because you don't like how they vote.

It's more insidious than that, Malor. Having a voter ID system in place would actually be a stepping stone to actual vote control. At that point, you can't really call it a democracy anymore.

Malor wrote:

Right, and notice precisely who is being rendered unable to vote -- college students, who are reliably liberal.

It's vote suppression, and it's wrong, trying to shut people out of voting because you don't like how they vote.

You're jumping the gun Malor. College students can still vote, provided they actually are a resident of Maine.

Maine.gov[/url]]The registrar may consider the following factors (as set forth in section 112) in determining whether a person has established and maintains a voting residence in the municipality:

A direct statement of intention by the person pursuant to section 121.1 (an "oath");
The location of any dwelling currently occupied by the person;
The place where any motor vehicle owned by the person is registered;
The residence address, not a post office box, shown on a current income tax return;
The residence address, not a post office box, where the person receives mail;
The residence address, not a post office box, shown on any motor vehicle operator's license the person holds;
The receipt of any public benefit conditioned upon residency, defined substantially as provided in this subsection; or
Any other objective facts tending to indicate a person's place of residence.

The investigation into the college students was because some jerk got it into his head that college students from other states were voting here without meeting the resident qualification. It turns out he was very wrong, and none of them were (there were 76 that went the oath route, but never proved later that they were residents, but that's only illegal if they did so intentionally, and that'd be too expensive and difficult to prove to be worth perusing). There hasn't been a change to any laws concerning voting yet, though there is a change that would do away with same-day registration, but it's held up until after the election due to the citizens initiative to overturn it.
This was just a case of a massive waste of time and effort to satisfy the chairman of the state's Republican Party's paranoia. No one has been rendered unable to vote yet.

Stengah wrote:

The investigation into the college students was because some jerk got it into his head that college students from other states were voting here without meeting the resident qualification.

They live there for nine months of the year. I would say they should qualify as residents.

iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:

The investigation into the college students was because some jerk got it into his head that college students from other states were voting here without meeting the resident qualification.

They live there for nine months of the year. I would say they should qualify as residents.

If they meet the requirements for residency during those nine months, they do.

Stengah wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:

The investigation into the college students was because some jerk got it into his head that college students from other states were voting here without meeting the resident qualification.

They live there for nine months of the year. I would say they should qualify as residents.

If they meet the requirements for residency during those nine months, they do.

Is living in the state not the only requirement for residency?

clover wrote:
Phoenix Rev wrote:

In the U.S., you are not required to carry ID. If you are stopped by the police, you can only be forced to identify yourself if you are stopped for reasonable suspicion of a crime. If you are only being detained, you can identify yourself verbally. Only if you are arrested do you need to produce a physical ID. This has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

If a national ID card is compulsory, I worry that some would like to make it so that citizens are required to carry ID at all times and that is anathema to our constitution. A U.S. citizen, minding his or her own business, should not be required to carry an ID from the state just for walking down the street.

This is my main problem with the whole idea.

I agree. And we already have driver's licenses which serve the same purpose anyway.

iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:

The investigation into the college students was because some jerk got it into his head that college students from other states were voting here without meeting the resident qualification.

They live there for nine months of the year. I would say they should qualify as residents.

If they meet the requirements for residency during those nine months, they do.

Is living in the state not the only requirement for residency?

Many states have higher barriers for getting residency while you are going to college there. This is because in-state tuition is far lower than out of state tuition and they don't want you to go to school as a Freshman and pay the out of state tuition for one year, and then switch over to the lower in-state tuition for three (or more years). They want you to pay the higher tuition that entire time. (Which is understandable, since the idea is that residents have been paying taxes to make up the difference, so it would be a problem if that idea was so easily skirted.)

iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:

The investigation into the college students was because some jerk got it into his head that college students from other states were voting here without meeting the resident qualification.

They live there for nine months of the year. I would say they should qualify as residents.

If they meet the requirements for residency during those nine months, they do.

Is living in the state not the only requirement for residency?

My post above outlines what's required to prove residency, but here it is again:
A direct statement of intention by the person pursuant to section 121.1 (an "oath");
The location of any dwelling currently occupied by the person;
The place where any motor vehicle owned by the person is registered;
The residence address, not a post office box, shown on a current income tax return;
The residence address, not a post office box, where the person receives mail;
The residence address, not a post office box, shown on any motor vehicle operator's license the person holds;
The receipt of any public benefit conditioned upon residency, defined substantially as provided in this subsection; or
Any other objective facts tending to indicate a person's place of residence.

The only reason college students were investigated was because the chairman for the state's Republican Party is paranoid, and convinced himself that evil groups like MoveOn.org and ACORN were rounding up college kids and telling them to use the "oath" option and lie to get registered. The fact that they're attending college in the state is sort of a red herring. There's no special exceptions or extra-requirements for college students. So long as they can satisfy any one of the criteria, they can vote here.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Meanwhile, the studies available show the kind of voter fraud ID laws would prevent occur at statistically-nonexistent levels. As discussed in the War on Voting thread and elsewhere, a 2004 Ohio study showed voter fraud like that was 0.00004%.

Which isn't a problem unless elections are decided by a few hundred votes, which happens.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Here's the crux of the matter for me. Any services provided by the government have a cost of either money, liberty, or both. Reasonable people can draw the line for acceptable cost/benefit tradeoffs in different places - for example, the extreme premium Libertarians place on liberty means they're unhappy with many government services I view as essential. Compulsory nationalized ID cards would require sacrificing money and liberty for benefits which seem speculative at best.

Disagree, the government already issues half a dozen forms of identification and has redundancy across all 50 states but no economies of scale because they all do it slightly different... If you're concerned about cost to society then it makes sense to roll it up into a single, universally accepted ID.

Yonder wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:
Stengah wrote:

The investigation into the college students was because some jerk got it into his head that college students from other states were voting here without meeting the resident qualification.

They live there for nine months of the year. I would say they should qualify as residents.

If they meet the requirements for residency during those nine months, they do.

Is living in the state not the only requirement for residency?

Many states have higher barriers for getting residency while you are going to college there. This is because in-state tuition is far lower than out of state tuition and they don't want you to go to school as a Freshman and pay the out of state tuition for one year, and then switch over to the lower in-state tuition for three (or more years). They want you to pay the higher tuition that entire time. (Which is understandable, since the idea is that residents have been paying taxes to make up the difference, so it would be a problem if that idea was so easily skirted.)

What he said ^. Blame your corrupt higher education systems.

bandit0013 wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:

Meanwhile, the studies available show the kind of voter fraud ID laws would prevent occur at statistically-nonexistent levels. As discussed in the War on Voting thread and elsewhere, a 2004 Ohio study showed voter fraud like that was 0.00004%.

Which isn't a problem unless elections are decided by a few hundred votes, which happens.

At the rate found in the Ohio study, there would have been 53 fraudulent votes cast in the 2008 Presidential election (out of 132,618,580 ballots cast). As you may remember of from our discussion in the "War on Voting" thread, National Weather Service data shows that Americans are approximately as likely to be struck and killed by lightning as they are to commit the kinds of individual voter fraud ID laws would prevent.

Most fraud is found in local elections, but you keep going on picking the biggest election with the most turnout to minimize the impact of found fraud.

Was there some citation that backs up that assertion, or anything even close to it in some relevant way? Wait, never mind, I feel silly for asking.

bandit0013 wrote:

Most fraud is found in local elections, but you keep going on picking the biggest election with the most turnout to minimize the impact of found fraud.

Most fraud is also not preventable by requiring photo ID to vote.
I'll just quote myself in case you missed it from the last page.

I wrote:

Most of your examples of voter fraud were cases of actual fraud. Requiring a person to show a card to get into the voting booth would not have prevented them from occurring. They would not prevent the corrupt poll-worker from stuffing the ballot box, fraudulent absentee ballots, or someone installing vote switching software on a voting machine. All a voter ID would prevent is someone the people who vote when they aren't allowed to (illegal immigrants, college students who aren't residents of the state they vote in, people who live in the area but are non-citizens). It's an admirable goal, but the cost to implement it is far worse than the cost illegal voters actually cost us.

Most fraud is found in local elections,

But this stuff impacts national elections. If it were just local issues, that would be one thing, but it's not local, and it's highly systematic to make it hard for marginal people to vote.

You've never, to my memory, provided any actual evidence that this is a problem that needs to be solved; the error from fraud is so tiny it's lost in the counting noise. We're spending a ton of money and not getting more accurate results. In fact, we are getting less accurate results.

If you actually wanted to improve the accuracy of elections, spending money on more machines and better training would work far better. But that's not the actual goal.

bandit0013 wrote:

Most fraud is found in local elections, but you keep going on picking the biggest election with the most turnout to minimize the impact of found fraud.

I have to choose big elections for there to be a statistical expectation that individuals would be committing vote fraud in any numbers, based on the data we have available.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:

Was there some citation that backs up that assertion, or anything even close to it in some relevant way? Wait, never mind, I feel silly for asking.

In fairness, bandit0013 provided two links in the "War on Voting" thread: one for 1982 elections in Chicago, one for 2006 elections in Tennessee. (I remember there being a third one about an Orange County election, but it's possible that was in a different thread).

The links illustrate my point - namely, that when electoral fraud happens, it is far more likely to result from mistakes and fraud on the part of election workers. The kinds of individual vote fraud which would be prevented by ID reform does not appear to happen in statistically significant numbers (I'd support more studies to get a better picture of where we could improve the electoral process, but that's outside the scope of this thread).

There may be good reasons for a national ID, but vote fraud simply isn't one of them.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

The links illustrate my point - namely, that when electoral fraud happens, it is far more likely to result from mistakes and fraud on the part of election workers. The kinds of individual vote fraud which would be prevented by ID reform does not appear to happen in statistically significant numbers (I'd support more studies to get a better picture of where we could improve the electoral process, but that's outside the scope of this thread).

So what you're saying is that in this day and age where we have electronic voting machines and electronic information on ID cards that having to show and SWIPE your national ID card wouldn't prevent this kind of fraud? Bio-metrics anyone? Fingerprint on the booth machine? Fingerprint technology is readily available and cheap, and usage would absolutely guarantee a valid person was casting EVERY vote.

You guys really need to think this through better.

With respect, bandit, there is no such thing as a 0% error rate, and all of the things you're proposing are wasted time and money that could be spent on things that would actually make a difference.

bandit0013 wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:

The links illustrate my point - namely, that when electoral fraud happens, it is far more likely to result from mistakes and fraud on the part of election workers. The kinds of individual vote fraud which would be prevented by ID reform does not appear to happen in statistically significant numbers (I'd support more studies to get a better picture of where we could improve the electoral process, but that's outside the scope of this thread).

So what you're saying is that in this day and age where we have electronic voting machines and electronic information on ID cards that having to show and SWIPE your national ID card wouldn't prevent this kind of fraud? Bio-metrics anyone? Fingerprint on the booth machine? Fingerprint technology is readily available and cheap, and usage would absolutely guarantee a valid person was casting EVERY vote.

You guys really need to think this through better.

Actually I think you do since what you're proposing is a slippery slope to those sorts of technology uses for everything.

NSMike wrote:

With respect, bandit, there is no such thing as a 0% error rate, and all of the things you're proposing are wasted time and money that could be spent on things that would actually make a difference.

How is it a waste of time and money?

Today's system:

1. Fill out voter registration card, presenting ID at the time (often a photo id)
2. Card gets processed, polling station records get updated (hopefully, systems are in place to review and disseminate this info and they're error prone, humans mess with it, nasty business, expensive too)
3. Show up at polling station, wait in line, show photo id to poller
4. Receive card for electronic voting booth
5. Put card into booth, vote
6. Return card to polling station

National ID system:
1. Be born, issued national ID with photo to be updated at reasonable periods of time during childhood, longer for adulthood. ID is loaded with fingerprint and optical information. ID contains all current address information, drivers status, military (draft) registration, etc.
2. Vote time! Show up at your local polling station, because all systems are connected there is no need to register, update rolls or anything because the system knows your resident address and is automatically updated when you update the post office.
3. Walk directly to booth, swipe card, place finger on panel
4. Vote

That is all great if it just pops into existence, but there would be a tremendous cost of implementation.

The money would be better spent getting the voting systems out of corporate hands, getting the technology open-sourced, provide a standard for voting systems that is reasonable and not designed to be confusing in an effort to bewilder those who are afraid of new technology, including a verifiable paper record with your electronic vote.

Those are the things that make a difference in my opinion.

And with respect, I've been registered to vote for more than a decade. How is registering even remotely a big deal?

NSMike wrote:

The money would be better spent getting the voting systems out of corporate hands, getting the technology open-sourced, provide a standard for voting systems that is reasonable and not designed to be confusing in an effort to bewilder those who are afraid of new technology, including a verifiable paper record with your electronic vote.

I'm all for transparency in the source of voting machines. I don't think you can have a fair election without a degree of transparency.

NSMike wrote:

And with respect, I've been registered to vote for more than a decade. How is registering even remotely a big deal?

Don't ask me, there's a whole thread of people that claim that the very idea of registering and showing you are who you say you are at the polling station is disenfranchisement.

bandit0013 wrote:

Don't ask me, there's a whole thread of people that claim that the very idea of registering and showing you are who you say you are at the polling station is disenfranchisement.

Er, what?

No, we're saying that a national ID card is a stupid way to get around a minuscule amount of fraud. I hate moral relativism, so forgive me for using it, but personally, before we go for the rare screwups on the citizen side, I'd rather fix the glaring shortcomings on the bureaucratic side.

And the idea of a persistent ID system tied into biometrics seems a bit... overkill. And vulnerable to a whole lot of screwups. I'd rather not have something like that floating around.

Kannon wrote:
bandit0013 wrote:

Don't ask me, there's a whole thread of people that claim that the very idea of registering and showing you are who you say you are at the polling station is disenfranchisement.

Er, what?

Different thread

Kannon wrote:

And the idea of a persistent ID system tied into biometrics seems a bit... overkill. And vulnerable to a whole lot of screwups. I'd rather not have something like that floating around.

I love how people are so selective about technology advancement. I don't see vulnerability stopping you from purchasing a smartphone. Do you still use a paper planner/calendar? Still send all your mail through the post office? How's your driver's license working out for you? Maybe since computers can glitch we should roll back the BMV to a huge set of filing cabinets?

bandit0013 wrote:

I love how people are so selective about technology advancement. I don't see vulnerability stopping you from purchasing a smartphone. Do you still use a paper planner/calendar? Still send all your mail through the post office? How's your driver's license working out for you? Maybe since computers can glitch we should roll back the BMV to a huge set of filing cabinets?

What's wrong with being selective? If we weren't, we'd have the terrible scenario you concocted. But since we're selective, that scenario has nothing to do with anything. The 3rd option is blind trust of everything which is just as easy to make look asinine.

gregrampage wrote:
bandit0013 wrote:

I love how people are so selective about technology advancement. I don't see vulnerability stopping you from purchasing a smartphone. Do you still use a paper planner/calendar? Still send all your mail through the post office? How's your driver's license working out for you? Maybe since computers can glitch we should roll back the BMV to a huge set of filing cabinets?

What's wrong with being selective? If we weren't, we'd have the terrible scenario you concocted. But since we're selective, that scenario has nothing to do with anything. The 3rd option is blind trust of everything which is just as easy to make look asinine.

Because you're not being selective, there are already hundreds of persistent ID systems. Every bank has one, the local government has one, the state government has several (DL, voter id, birth cert, etc), the federal government has several (IRS, SSA, Draft Registrar, etc) not to mention all the agencies like police, passport, etc.

But combining these systems is "overkill" and "scary". Know what's scary? The FACT that my personal data is floating around in dozens of different systems which all have varying levels of security and the FACT that if someone wants to steal your identity they only have to crack the lowest common denominator.

I've had PCI training and been to identity theft security seminars. I tell you truly, in today's system if someone wants your info, there is NOTHING you can do to stop them. The privacy advocates in this and other threads have no idea what they're talking about, because if they think they have a shred of privacy today, they are exceptionally delusional. A good, biometric secured national id system would actually INCREASE your security and privacy.

Besides, re: making identity theft tougher through a single source with modern security, last year there was over $50 Billion (with a B) that was lost to businesses and consumers due to identity theft. Identity theft is the #1 growing category of crime in this country.

So is the cost worth it? Let's say that centralizing and distributing a national ID system costs the government $20 per person (which is exceptionally high) that would put the start up cost at $6.4 billion to issue an ID for every man, woman, and child in the United States assuming we don't charge a fee like the BMV. If it cut ID theft a mere 15%, it pays for itself, book it, done.

Are any of those biometric systems? You're trying to group existing systems with the proposed one, when the original post clearly stated the inclusion of biometrics.

Edit: I'm not saying you should (or should not) agree with the idea that it's overkill, but the concept you're refuting is not what's expressed.