Do you think with 10+ million undocumented immigrants - a not insignificant portion of the population, but not citizenry - that people should not be concerned about ensuring only valid citizens can vote?
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You're absolutely right. There's a vast potential for very real problems.
When those problems manifest, we should deal with them. To try to address problems that don't actually exist is absurd overregulation and government overreach. It certainly is wasteful to expend resources on solving problems that don't need solving because they don't exist, isn't it?
Is there evidence of voter fraud by undocumented migrants that suggests we have a problem and should act?
> When those problems manifest, we should deal with them
I think this is one of the key problems with a hyper-conservative government.
If your default position is "don't change it" on every issue, then you have a very difficult time solving problems.
More liberal governments that frequently change the rules are like startups vs very large corporations. They are more agile and better able to quickly deal with problems as they arise. They are "responsive" in a way conservative government is not.
Look at recent statewide rent control measures in California. There was a lot of hand-wringing about what it could mean in this scenario or that scenario, but in the end the response is
> When those problems manifest, we should deal with them
Which I think is the sentiment of a people who really feel like they have a handle on their government and that it responds to their will.
Personally, I have found that engaging in political conversation with people in a framing they find comfortable and familiar makes it possible to change minds. Doing so makes it possible to address the position at hand without also trying to reorganize a person's worldview. Your experience may differ, but I've generally found that task a daunting prospect. Perhaps you are simply far more skilled than I at getting people to reorganize their worldviews - certainly not a high bar here.
Unfortunately, the results of this sometime goes over poorly with people outside the target audience. Such people are often reacting negatively to a framing they find problematic or otherwise objectionable. At times they prefer challenging the framing to advancing a particular position.
This is a very valuable thing to do! It's critically important to a functioning liberal democracy. It's just perhaps not always the most impactful thing to do in a given moment to advance the goal of swaying someone's position.
I could see that being true in some cases. The iterative process can work quite well if done correctly. You certainly don't want to solve problems that won't exist, but you also need to put a reasonable amount of forethought into the possible consequences of the changes so that you don't create more problems (push new bugs in with that code fix).
The problem with elections is a bit different. If the elections were manipulated either through people voting who shouldn't have, or foreign governments, do you think the people who benefited from that who are now in power will fix that issue? Probably not, especially when there is most likely close to 50% of the population who feel the person was their preferred candidate anyways.
Please cite any study that validates this ridiculous claim.
Have you ever voted? Are you even registered to vote? Reading this makes me think you have not and have never... Registration requires verification, address, name, etc. You dont just show up and cast your vote.
The problem is in many rural and poor communities. Many people do not have a birth certificate, many do not have a DL and believe it or not, it costs money and requires significant travel for many people to get these things.
You must live in or near a large city, be from a wealthy family and have never been outside of your geo-bubble. Most of this country is rural. Some people have to travel 100's of miles to the nearest government agency. But you knew that, right?
While I agree with your point, and this doesn't change that, saying most of this country is rural is misleading. Rural areas cover 97% of the nation’s land area but only contain 19.3% of the population (about 60 million people). And only 9% of that 19.3% live in what is classified as very rural, meaning their entire county is rural. [1]
[1]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210...
Many places let you register when you cast your vote. That's usually how I change my voter registration when I move. It should be far more widespread. I'm of the opinion that if you are given a social security card that you should be automatically registered to vote.
Has it been an actual problem in states that allow mail-in voting without also having voter ID laws? If it's a real issue, it ought to already be causing problems.
It has not. Oregon has had vote by mail exclusively for over twenty years and, in the 2016, with over two million votes cast, 54 problematic votes (according to an audit done by the then-republican secretary of state.)
54 across the state is good. In Philly, we have about 6k dead people voting in presidential elections.
I can't find any evidence of this with a search. Was this a joke? I can't tell.
It's not that they are fraudulent, but that people are voting as someone who may have the same name as them. The 6k article was probably a decade ago. This is a 2k article more recently. Maybe that's progess?
https://www.phillyvoice.com/6abc-reports-it-found-dead-peopl...
For those who don't want to click through, this is the thesis of the article:
> People with similar names — often a relative of the deceased voter — signed the poll book in the wrong spot, Schmidt said. In no case, he said, did the living voter then cast another vote under his or her actual name.
> Such mistakes most frequently occur when a deceased voter's name appears at the top or bottom of a poll book, Schmidt said.
That article doesn't appear to support 2k fraudulent votes, and may not even support a much smaller number. I gather a news organization put together a story claiming 2k maybe-fraudulent votes, then were asked to provide some examples for the election commission to look into, selected 20, those 20 were investigated, and zero were found to be related to election fraud.
Like my comment said, it's not that they are fraudulent. The voting system is inaccurate (leaving dead people on the roll and letting others vote as them accidently). We should modernization the voting system to reduce these inaccuracies. Photo ID is a cheaper bandaid.
Here is a non-comprehensive list that show a number of the know offenses. Keep in mind that most places don't do much monitoring for voter fraud (why else would they have thousands of dead people still listed).
No.
I live in a vote-by-mail state. You can only cast a ballot after you have registered. It is validated against your own registration. So at the time of voting, there is a hard limit on how much fraud is possible.
To have an undocumented immigrant casting a vote, they'd have to register to vote and not get caught. Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens are on them.
It is unnecessary to require ID every time you approach the ballot box. Invalid registrations are caught well before then.
Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens are on them.
Don't forget there are also tens of millions of felons who are not eligible to vote as well.
Which is a whole different problem altogether. I honestly have never understood what the purpose of even letting people out of prison was. Really, think about it.
Here you are, you've been 'punished' for a time the state has deemed appropriate. Now you're out. Very little support. No real integration plans, at least not formal ones. No oversight to see whether or not you fall into patterns of behavior from before. Undercut, actively, via loss of certain rights (gun ownership, voting as examples) in your attempts at integrating to society. And it's almost impossible to get anything but the most entry level, low paying jobs.
The US really has a hard on for kicking people when they make a mistake. It's almost a sport, it seems.
Yep, and it seems like more and more felony crimes are added to the law books, or lower crimes elevated to felonies. I knew a guy that gave a 20 year old alchohol, got caught, got a felony for it. He killed himself due to some of the stuff you listed above.
I currently work at a community college; one of my programs is a re-entry program. The ones that kill me are the people who have marijuana charges and can't get a job.
They're extremely brittle and bitter now that people are being celebrated as geniuses and business leaders for doing exactly what the felons were doing.
California already has vote by mail and a higher than normal share of undocumented immigrants. If this would be a problem nationwide, then there must be evidence that it's already a problem in CA (and other vote-by-mail states). I haven't seen any evidence that it's a problem. There's no need to speculate. So no, people shouldn't be concerned. There seems to be precedent for doing it right.
Do you think the government as it is setup right now is highly responsive to the will of voters?
Do you think that adding non-citizen voters will change the answer to the above?
If non-citizen voters made the government more responsive to the will of voters, do you think the will of non-citizen residents is significantly different than the will of citizen residents? How is it different?
Do you think will be inundated by immigrants who want sharia law? Is that where you're going with this? Do you think there could be enough immigrants to enact such a thing? Do you think that's possible given the basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution?
In theory maybe but from a practical standpoint this is not a serious problem for the country.
Voter fraud is a serious crime and most legal and illegal immigrants are trying to avoid commiting federal crimes that are highly visible. Voting by mail creates a paper trail, making it easy to audit and detect fraud (more so than checking a piece of plastic). All the research suggests that mail in voting has a neutral partisan effect (with a potentially slight win to conservatives since it favors rural and elderly populations).
Ultimately questions of fraud detection could be framed according to the cost of false positives vs false negatives. The reason that people on the left get upset over vote ID laws is that they create a lot of false negatives, for a very small decrease in the number of false positives - this is structural to voter turnout (~40% of people don't vote, vs. <1% voter fraud (0 convictions)).
No.