I just voted in NY without ID - good thing or bad thing?

Wtfbbq wrote:

agerawegfasdf wrote:

Wejo himself gave a perfectly reasonable argument for not needing an ID: sometimes people forget. Some people (especially New Yorkers) don't carry around a driver's license.

It also keeps people with extremely limited resources from voting.

Voter fraud can happen but it’s really difficult and really unlikely.

This. My mother never had a driver's license or passport or anything that would count as official identification. She always voted. Around the time my dad died there was talk in her state of requiring some official identification to vote. The idea, as I recall, was that you'd get the ID at the motor vehicle registry and it would look like a driver's license. My dad always drove my mum everywhere. The registry is about ten miles from her house and not on a bus route. She had no real way to get there and she was on a very limited income and reluctant to cough up the fee that would have been charged.

She had voted all of her life in the same polling place. There had never been any issues with fraud and she was not happy that she'd have to figure a way to get herself an ID and spend money doing so in order to vote. She said "If they don't want me to vote, fine. I won't." Luckily for her the voter ID thing was never implemented so she continued voting. Personally, I think the concern about voter fraud is way overblown but wouldn't object to taking some REASONABLE precautions to prevent it. But the kind of thing my mum was possibly facing would have eliminated people like her, people for whom getting to a place issuing IDs and charging for them are an issue. If you're going to require IDs to vote you need to issue them for free and do it from locations that are accessible to everyone.

Voter ID laws target low income elderly people who are typically strong supporters of the Democratic party because they are very dependent on SS and Medicare. They tend to let their driver's license expire because they stop driving and cannot get to the DMV office to renew their driver's license or switch to a state ID. Poor people also tend to let their driver's license expire or have it revoked when they do not pay their tickets. Most will not go through the trouble of getting a state ID or getting their license renewed/reinstated just so they can go vote. Instead, they will skip voting and won't resolve their driver's license situation until they need it to rent an apartment, get on an airplane or cash a check (but you would be surprised how easy it is to cash a check in the hood without an ID if you are willing to pay a premium to the check casher).

The kind of voter fraud that ID laws seek to prevent is very rare. It really only stops someone from voting for another registered voter. The only chance for voter fraud to be large enough to make a difference requires someone inside the clerk's office helping people register to vote who are not eligible or coordinating with large numbers of people to vote for people who are deceased or have moved out of the district. that kind of fraud is also rare because it is easy to audit the results and figure out what happened.

UsedToBeKnowItAll wrote:

To commit voter fraud, you would have to know someone that is registered to vote in that precinct and then vote before them. Pretty unlikely. The scrutiny, if there is much needed, is on the registration side.

And honestly, I don't know why anyone "goes to vote" anymore. Colorado does state-wide mail-in ballots. Vote at your convenience. Forcing people to go to a polling center on a certain day, between certain times, disenfranchises a lot of voters.

I witnessed a voter fraud issue last night. Guy came in, someone had already signed for him and voted. They gave this second guy a provisional, and he voted, and they made a call for the earlier ballot, which they knew by ID. This isn't hard, we can do this.

Also, I noticed that several of the "voter ID" folks lost last night. There's NO reason to make voting in this country more difficult than it already is, unless your goal is to disenfranchise a certain voting block, that is.

The voting process in the US is so difficult. Have to drive some where to register. Have to then spend time registering. Then have to drive to voting place. Then stand in long lines, often in horrible weather. Then vote. Then have to drive back home. Its very disinfranchizing and inconvenient. Its borderline rascist.

Maybe instead of propagating fears about voter fraud which has been never been shown to be a legitimate issue, you should talk about the rampant voter suppression republican run state governments have implemented in the last few years. That actually effects hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Also, they guy that said not having same day registration and voter ID laws are good to prevent “against the emotional decisions of the voting-on-a-whimmers.” Wtf are you talking about? It’s not up to you to decide if someone gets to vote based on how and when they made their decision.

Democrats lose again

We have to stop these guys!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co_Ph6zvPNY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYNEu6v6AE

Easy solution. Polling places set up a camera for voters when they register. Photos go into a database. Now each time they come to vote, they provide a name and a photo pops up for them. Satisfies people concerned about voter fraud and doesn’t disinfranchise low income voters that may not be able to get an ID for some reason.

If Planet Fitness can do this and only charge $10 a month, it can’t be that hard or costly to implement. But then again, if we don’t do it, it can continue to be an issue used to galvanize the bases.

You sign your name to match up with the signature provided at time of registration you dope.

UsedToBeKnowItAll wrote:

And honestly, I don't know why anyone "goes to vote" anymore. Colorado does state-wide mail-in ballots. Vote at your convenience. Forcing people to go to a polling center on a certain day, between certain times, disenfranchises a lot of voters.

Wish we could do this, but outside of absentee ballots, my state (PA) doesn't do any kind of early voting. It varies state by state on what is available to vote.

I've heard that the Colorado state-wide mail-in ballots has the highest voting participation attendance.

OR and WA are mandatory mail-in.

CA is largely mail-in as well.

We're talking about the wrong thing, though. Ever hear of demographics?

My solution was to satisfy the arguments for both sides regardless of what side you are on. Yours only satisfies one.

Voter id laws don't prevent voter fraud, which is so rare as to be virtually non-existent and in any case is absolutely minuscule in comparison to voter suppression, which has a marked impact on elections. In FL, they require picture voter id with matching signature. I brought a passport. The old woman spent five minutes looking over it and then announced that it was expired. It had two years left. Republicans are listed first on the ballot for every race each time. 1.4 million Floridians are likely to regain their voting rights after a ballot initiative passed overwhelmingly. Statewide, DeSantis won by 0.7% over Gillum and Rick Scott is up by 0.4% over Bill Nelson, pending a likely recount where they'll look at all the provisional ballots cast by those who showed up with no id or id judged inadequate. Major structural issues, in other words, have a much greater effect on the results.

Voter fraud is a crime...and the penalties are quite stiff. In the same way, it's a crime to rob a bank. You don't have to undergo a strip search to enter a bank, even though robberies somewhat frequently occur in them. In-person voter fraud hardly ever occurs, for very obvious reasons. There's no good argument for why someone who is duly registered (with all that entails) should have to jump through another hoop to vote, unless the point is to prevent them from lawfully voting.

While I think that there is no real need for a voter ID, if you mandate one, you need to have a mechanism to ensure that it is automatic to get one. Your solution here is a reasonable one, though I'm sure it would be prone to the same issues as other technological solutions, which means underfunding, undertesting and unequal application to disenfranchise poor people. If proponents of voter ID would combine their laws/amendments with rights to vote that are stronger legally than the need to carry ID then I think they would only be controversial in that they are expensive. Automatic registration and mail in ballots seems like an easier and cheaper solution to ensure the right to vote.

Common Cents wrote:

Easy solution. Polling places set up a camera for voters when they register. Photos go into a database. Now each time they come to vote, they provide a name and a photo pops up for them. Satisfies people concerned about voter fraud and doesn’t disinfranchise low income voters that may not be able to get an ID for some reason.

If Planet Fitness can do this and only charge $10 a month, it can’t be that hard or costly to implement. But then again, if we don’t do it, it can continue to be an issue used to galvanize the bases.

agerawegfasdf wrote:

theJeff wrote:

You'd still have to have access to the names of all of the potential voters in the area, AND hope none of them show up. Not impossible, obviously, but not easy.

My argument for Voter IDs (and against same-day registration) is that it forces the citizen to decide before the election that they want to vote. In other words, it helps protect against the emotional decisions of the voting-on-a-whimmers.

Wow that would be horrible!

Wejo himself gave a perfectly reasonable argument for not needing an ID: sometimes people forget. Some people (especially New Yorkers) don't carry around a driver's license.

I agree, leaving the fate of the Republic up to the whims of people who do not prioritize it would be pretty bad.

Good talk.

I voted in Deep blue CT. I showed my ID, we have to show something.

the old lady in front of me had a different address, she didn't vote.

I think you have to sign in case there is fraud...they can get you for fraudulently certifying that you are the person.

Caffeine and 8:00 miles aside, you are very low energy so it’s totally bad that you voted at all. I’m sure you probably wrote W or Jeb in for every office. Bush acolytes are bad hombres.

UsedToBeKnowItAll wrote:

To commit voter fraud, you would have to know someone that is registered to vote in that precinct and then vote before them. Pretty unlikely. The scrutiny, if there is much needed, is on the registration side.

And honestly, I don't know why anyone "goes to vote" anymore. Colorado does state-wide mail-in ballots. Vote at your convenience. Forcing people to go to a polling center on a certain day, between certain times, disenfranchises a lot of voters.

+1

Seriously are you that scared that you needed to start this thread. If there was evidence that mass voter fraud occurs because of this I think it would have been changed by now.

A better click bait thread and a better conversation would be why one party seems to be against voting rights and one for them. What do Republicans fear about people voting? Why do they try to purge voters in their states?