ACLU lawsuit claims that over 80,000 people will be disenfranchised by this law — the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s very own estimate of the number of voters who will be disenfranchised, not the ACLU’s, the ACLU believes more will be disenfranchised.
Most of the disenfranchised are older minorities as well as the disabled, including disabled veterans. Virtually all of them have veteran’s ID cards, Medicare cards, or other government-issued documents demonstrating that they are who they are, but the Pennsylvania law does not accept those as ID and instead sets up a draconian set of requirements that many cannot meet. For example, large numbers of people no longer have a copy of their birth certificate and must pay to obtain a copy of their birth certificate in order to get the mandatory voter ID card, which is an unconstitutional and illegal poll tax, and most minorities born before 1950 don’t even have a birth certificate — birth registration was optional before the 1950′s, and people born at home with midwifes rarely had one.
Note that there has never in Pennsylvania history been *any* incident of voter fraud that would have been prevented by requiring a government-issued government ID. None. Zero. Zilch. There has been incidents where people registered to vote in the wrong district, but that would not be solved by the government ID requirement. There have been incidents where dead people voted, but they voted absentee from a nursing home, they didn’t show up at the polling station to have their ID checked.
So why the ID requirement? Hint: the fact that most minorities born before 1950 don’t have a birth certificate might be A Clue. You think?!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
(Sorry for posting the other comment in the wrong spot).
I certainly do not want to see anyone who should be able to vote, not be able to, but I am confident we can find some common sense solutions to those challenges. The current format is too easily manipulated. I think we can all agree we need to do what we can to make sure our elections are above board.
A quick search for voter fraud convictions showed me 50 convictions since 2002 in Texas. Minnesota, 113 convictions for 2008 general elections with over 200 more pending trials.
I suggest not attempting to make an argument that the two parties miraculously switched places based on an assumption of geography. Since 1950, the population of the USA has doubled with higher growth in the southern states and in minorities. I do suggest saying, “yes, the Democratic Party’s history of treating blacks is bad, but that has little to do with today. Just as German’s today are not guilty of what the Nazi’s did in the 40′s. Or as the English today are not guilty for the enslaving of Irish up until the early 1700′s.”
I do like pie.
Anymore, anyone who thinks that the purpose of these voter ID laws is not to prevent certain people from voting are at best naive. Let’s see. Indiana enacts it voter ID law and the DMV shuts down several branches in heavily democrat voting regions. Naaaaaw, that can’t be a coincidence. Darn near the same thing happened in Wisconsin recently. Nope, that’s just got to be a coincidence too eh?
Only fraud that these laws would prevent are those felonies committed by that conservative wannabe journalist.
About that supposed 50 convictions in Texas, none (zero) of them were for voter impersonation, the only thing stopped by a voter ID law. None of them at all. Virtually all of them were for mail-in ballots and were not cases of people illegally casting ballots but, rather, were cases of people mishandling absentee ballots, e.g., someone going into a nursing home and collecting the ballots of everybody voting absentee and helping them mark the ballots then taking them to the post office, an act which is illegal in Texas (only the voter and the mailman are allowed to touch the ballot), see this cached document for news stories on these convictions. In short, the majority of the fifty people who voted were eligible to vote and the people convicted were people who mis-handled their absentee ballots or who directed the voter to mark the absentee ballots in their presence. How does a voter ID law stop absentee ballot abuse? You’re not making sense.
Furthermore, you’re honestly saying that we should disenfranchise 80-90,000 people because you found 50 cases of voter fraud (absentee ballot voter fraud, no less)? Dude. That’s whack. Just sayin’.
I believe Americans have a right to vote, and that this right is guaranteed by the Constitution, and that anybody who interferes with that right — ANYBODY — is wrong, un-American, and fit for nothing but spitting upon. That is what I believe. And if 50 people really DID commit voter fraud in Texas, that does not at all change my belief in the unalienable right of EVERY American — whether picture-ID’ed or not — to vote. This is a Democracy, sir, not a tyranny where only the “right” people are allowed to vote. When you start disenfranchising voters who have the right to vote under our Constitution, you are advocating something anti-democratic, anti-American, and just plain wrong.
That’s my argument, sir. You can say “but, but…” but I am an old fashioned conservative. I believe that there’s right, and there’s wrong, and I believe in the Constitution of the United States and the rights that it guarantees. And unconstitutionally interfering with the right of Americans to vote in elections is WRONG and always will be.
- Badtux the Old-fashioned Penguin
PS — of course, you do realize that my belief in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution extends to the 2nd Amendment too, right? Pop *that* into your stereotype pipe and smoke it, heh
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- Badtux the Well-armed Penguin
As I said, nobody who should be able to vote should be allowed to miss out on the opportunity to. However, that does not mean we should just go on the honor system and let anyone vote as many times as they want under whatever name they wish to give.
Someone being convicted of voter fraud is not representative to one fraudulent vote. One person could be guilty of thousands of fraudulent votes. How many go uncaught since there is very little preventive measures in place now? Fraudsters only need concentrate in a few swing states to change the entire dynamic of the election.
I’m cognizant of the fact that a fraudulent vote cancels out, thus disenfranchises, an opposing vote. I just want a fair vote and we should do everything we can to ensure it.
So you don’t know how big the problem of voter impersonation is, you have no (zero) convictions for voter impersonation to show me (just the sources you sent me to, which are for absentee ballot fraud), and I show you evidence ADMITTED BY THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA THEMSELVES that their voter ID law will disenfranchise over 80,000 people who under our Constitution *do* have the right to vote, yet you still continue to insist that despite not knowing whether there’s any problem or not, you still want this voter ID law because *hypothetically* there *might* be a problem? Dude. Do you know how stupid that makes you sound? As well as the notion of a fraudulent vote “canceling” out a vote. How does it do that, with super-secret Kryptonite that sneaks out of the ballot into adjacent ballots and erases them? And given that all sides hypothetically do this fraud thing, wouldn’t the two sides end up cancelling out their respective frauds anyhow? Of course, since we’re talking hypothetical fraud in some alternate universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees, rather than some real thing that’s happened in *this* universe in U.S. elections in recent memory, I suppose anything’s possible. But shouldn’t we stick to things we can *prove* are happening in *our* universe — like over 80,000 people disenfranchised by the PA voter ID law?
How does voting work in your area, anyhow? In mine, I originally registered at the courthouse showing them my apartment lease as my proof of residence, and swearing that I was an American citizen. They then mailed me a card at that address on the lease, a card that I show at the door to vote. When I moved, I sent them a change of address form and they sent me a card via the U.S. Mail for my *new* place to vote and struck me off the rolls at my *old* place to vote, so even if I showed up at the old place with my card with that address on it, I couldn’t vote there. So you’re saying that the U.S. Postal Service is part of this conspiracy of yours to impersonate voters, instead funneling these voter registration cards to an evil overlord who hires body doubles to use them to vote? What about the Illuminati, the Queen of England, and the Reptilian aliens in flying saucers, are they involved? Just wonderin’.
- Badtux the Voting Penguin
yes this is all about keeping the “other” from voting. all the “Ifs” and no real cases that would justify imposing more poll tax like laws to keep the “riff-raff” from “interfering” in voting.
the way this guy says all these “possible” things just might happen. throw enough dirt and cast all kind of aspersions on the “Other.” the voting system used to work, at least until Diebold and money and Party Politics. Just so full of BS about what might happen, and not what really does.
i hear the sound of someone trying to keep “others” from voting, that is mostly what i hear when i read such unfounded scaremongering reptilian fear based BS. not much facts, a lot of fears about what might happen, but hasn’t.
but that it is just my bias living in a state where “certain” types of “people” were kept away from the voting booth until the Civil Right Acts were passed.
Keeping this Writer from voting would be what i might suggest, but that would just based on all kinds of pretentious distrust of those who want to limit others’ right to be part of our society, however amoral such a thought might be. Anyone who presumes the worst with no facts and casts all kinds of aspertions is the kind to prevent from voting.
as they say, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Keep people like him from any kind of voting booth or power, period. making the world safe for all people, one voter at a time.
Nah, the Constitution guarantees even the stupid the right to vote. Thing is, his supposed thing that’s happening all the time (voter impersonation) simply isn’t the way elections are stolen. Elections are stolen via blatantly stuffing ballot boxes (Box 13, anybody?) or by manipulating the voting machines. I remember as a kid going to where they kept the 1-armed bandit voting machines (beloved by the crooks who ran our state because they kept no paper trail that could be used for a recount, meaning it was easy to fraudulently “fix” them), and finding the door open. I crept in and had the dickens scared out of me by a couple of men who came in talking about how to fix the machines. I slipped behind some old gym equipment and hid as they came in and started “fixing” the machines. See, the way to “fix” the one-armed bandit machines was to file the wheel that counted votes for the candidate you wanted to lose so that every 5 or 6 votes cast for him, the wheel would “skip” upping his tally. If the “fix” was ever detected, it was a shrug and a “gosh, they’re old machines, they’re just worn out, what do you want me to do?” The machines were rigged to throw elections, and the new electronic “black box” voting machines are no less easily rigged to throw elections.
The most important tool to use against vote fraud is voting methods that have a paper trail (if you relied on an accounting method that had no paper trail you would go to jail, why is accounting for votes less important than accounting for money?!) and voting mechanisms that allow all candidates to have representatives that watch the ballot all the way from the time it is dropped into the ballot box (or arrives at the voter registrar’s office via the U.S. Mail if it’s an absentee ballot) until the time it is counted. But you’ll never hear anything like this from the right-wing, which is more concerned about imaginary voter impersonation than against the very real issue of votes being miscounted by (perhaps deliberately rigged) voting machines and ballot boxes stuffed with fraudulent ballots (or do you *really* think that 200 voters of Alice, TX, lined up in alphabetical order to drop their ballots 198-2 for LBJ into Box 13? Really?).
- Badtux the “Voter Impersonation Scare Is A Fraud” Penguin
Jeez Tux, I’m on my feet cheering you on. (Well, in my mind that’s happening. IRL I’m at my desk at work.)
In my state the machines threw the election for governor. Not only that, but the voter turnout was epic. I lived in a black working class part of the city at the time. It took over five hours to vote, that’s how long the lines were.
Also, thanks for using conservative in the older decent sense of the word. If it were even possible for a candidate like Eisenhower to exist these days, I would vote for him instead of Obama without hesitation.
Given that a certificate of birth is one of the pieces of paper required to get a social security card, I doubt that “most minorities born before 1950″ lack access to them. Home birth and a midwife don’t preclude keeping records. My mother and my S.O. were both born at home in a rural area and both had their births recorded at the courthouse (in 1922 and 1947, respectively). Cost might be the bigger an issue — fees seem to run around $20 and, although that doesn’t strike me as particularly high, if my budget was tighter, it might.
Every state website I looked at, incidentally, allows a person to request copies through the mail or online, which kind of kills the argument that it’s a major burden to have to travel to a courthouse to get one.
IMHO, the real problem isn’t who’s voting, but, as you noted, who’s counting the votes.
“Every state website I looked at, incidentally, allows a person to request copies through the mail or online, which kind of kills the argument that it’s a major burden to have to travel to a courthouse to get one.”
As you said, you used your computer to look this information up. The types of people that are targeted by these voter ID law shenanigans are those who do not have that luxury. At best, they get to use the computer at the library. Do you think that this information makes it way to them? I have a hard time believing that especially considering the fact that the workers of the BMV in Wisconsin are not allowed to let someone know that they can get a free ID for voting.
Nan, when I got my social security card, I didn’t need a certificate of birth. I didn’t even have a physical certificate of birth in my possession until I applied for my teaching certificate at age 25 after passing through several other careers. All that happened was that I showed up at the SSA office with my parents, they attested that the little penguin was their child and was born X day Y month Z year, I showed the nice man my library card to prove that yes I did have some sort of ID with my name on it, and I was issued a card. Same deal with draft registration. I simply didn’t need my birth certificate for anything until the State of Texas demanded a copy to prove I wasn’t a Messican tryin’ to impersonate a Texican for one of them thare high-falutin’ teaching jobs (where I could get paid the awesome salary of 15,000/year, that thare’s big money, honey!). Birth certificate mania is fairly recent, within the past thirty years. Until birth records were computerized there simply wasn’t the manpower needed to manually compare submitted birth certificates with facts on file with state birth registrars, so birth certificates were easily forged and not particularly useful as proof of anything.
Regarding your midwife tales, you apparently were not born in the South prior to 1950. Birth certificate registration was quite spotty in most of the South prior to the Fifties. My father and mother were born in hospitals and thus had a birth certificate, but both of my grandfathers were born via midwives and did not have birth certificates. Well, actually, my oldest grandfather did because he tried to enlist for service in WW1, and got someone at the courthouse to issue him one. It was hilarious seeing the “19″ struck out in the “19__” and “18″ written above it. The hilarity is that my grandfather’s clearly hacked after-the-fact birth certificate, issued twenty-three years after he was born in 1897, would be legal proof of his citizenship in the eyes of the PA law, despite being clearly hacked, because it has an official seal on it and documentation attesting to its validity. Well, there’s the slight fact that he’s been dead for close to thirty years now, but there’s nothing in the PA law that would stop him from voting absentee — I suppose PA is fine with dead people voting, it’s just live people showing up at the polls who scare them
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Oh yeah, forgot one thing. I recently looked into what it’d take to get a replacement copy of my birth certificate. I got my current copies by mail when I applied for my U.S. Passport (I had misplaced the copy I got for applying for my teaching certificate though now I’ve re-located it), but apparently the State of Louisiana will no longer issue copies by mail — I would have to go down to New Orleans and show photo ID to get any more copies. If the purpose of getting your birth certificate is to get photo ID, clearly that’s not going to work. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
Interesting remake, from the boiling-ice- girl state, I suppose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls
In 1982, 100,000 fraudulent votes were cast in Chicago alone per a Federal Grand Jury.
Bob Dornan lost to Loretta Sanchez by 984 votes where an INS investigation found 4,023 illegal aliens registered to vote in the district with an estimate of over 2,000 having voted.
Based on a 2005 audit by Utah’s Legislative Auditor General, State Senator Mark Madsen said that an extrapolation of the audit numbers suggested that 5,000 to 7,000 aliens were registered to vote.
I don’t care if it is specifically voter ID laws or something else, but efforts need to be made to ensure the integrity of our elections.
There isn’t a need for conservatives (classical liberals) to suppress minority votes since education reform is on the horizon. Freedom of choice in education is the civil rights issue of our time. Once achieved, a better education along with the myriad of information available thanks to the internet, the principles that personal responsibility best leads to individual liberty, and a fiscally responsible government leads to a better a economy will win out.
Again, I asked you for *SPECIFIC* references. Repeating talking points making vague assertions as to a “grand jury” or whatever is *NOT* references. I gave you a court filing in a court of law sworn under penalty of perjury about how many people are being disenfranchised in Pennsylvania by their voter ID law. Your response is apparently regurgitating right-wing talking points that you read on some web site somewhere about how gagillions, gagillions I say, of space aliens from planet Arcturus voted in the Chicago elections last year. Hint: It’s illegal to lie under oath to a judge. It is *NOT* illegal to lie on a web site.
Regarding “freedom of choice in education”, sounds like more right wing bullshit. I think what you mean is, “freedom to use MY taxpayer money to educate YOUR children with bullshit nonsense like the Earth is only 16,000 years old, at MY expense.” I’m sorry, sir. NO SALE. Facts are facts. Reality is reality. The only choice that matters in education is choice of quality of funding, facilities, and extracurriculars, once you’re past that all schools should be teaching the same curriculum — the general consensus of scholars in a specific field as to what needs to be taught in that field, i.e., FACTS. I’m tired of seeing my taxpayer money going to fund the segregation brainwashing academies of the Christian Taliban (WTF is Liberty University doing getting ANY taxpayer money in the first place?!). And lest you say “nonsense”, this is how *EVERY* nation that surpasses us on international comparisons does it. Every single one of them has a national curriculum set by scholars. The United States has the poorest educational system as measured by educational achievement in reading and mathematics of all OECD nations other than Great Britain, Turkey, and Mexico, and coincidentally has the most decentralized educational system with the most choice of all those nations other than Great Britain, Turkey, and Mexico But that’s a topic for another post.
- Badtux the “Where’s your references?” Penguin
Well, you won’t allow me to post links, so I make references hoping people are smart enough to use a search engine. I could copy and paste the findings, but it would take up a lot of space. How about searching these terms:
100,000 fraudulent votes 1982 Chicago grand jury
(here’s a bonus one) Ballot Box 13 Lyndon Johnson
School choice benefits the urban poor the most. Many charter schools are non-religious. Empowering families to choose the school that fits their child’s needs hold teachers and schools accountable and has shown to improve public schools as well. Milwaukee has been doing it for years to great success. If you prefer foreign countries to model it after, you can look at Belgium which has had great success with their freedom of school choice.
Uhm , I already mentioned Box 13 as an example of fraud that would *not* be stopped by a voter ID law, since it was a corrupt election official stuffing a ballot box with fraudulent ballots. My guess is that the Chicago fraud you’re referencing is similar in nature — corrupt elections officials stuffing ballot boxes or “losing” votes for the person they want to lose, or “voting the nursing home” by having all the residents of a nursing home fill out the absentee ballot form, then collecting the ballots at the nursing home office and filling them out and turning them in, or so forth. None of which would be stopped by a voter ID law.
So I mention plenty of vote integrity stuff, like protecting the ballot boxes, having all political candidates’ designated representatives watching the ballot boxes and counting process at all time, a PAPER TRAIL so there can be recounts if there are any questionable shenanigans, better ways of handling absentee ballot verification, etc…. and you focus on the one and only thing that WON’T stop ballot box stuff, that WON’T stop voting machine rigging, that WON’T stop absentee ballot fraud, the ONLY THREE THINGS WE HAVE CONVICTIONS FOR, but you claim that it’s only COINCIDENTAL that the people disenfranchised by a voter ID law that’s necessary in order to stop fraud that it WON’T stop are mostly poor, brown and Democratic? Dude. Doesn’t pass the laugh and giggle test. Only COINCIDENTAL that the disenfranchised are mostly poor, brown, and Democratic? Really? You should be ashamed of yourself trying to sell that crock of shit to gullible people.
Regarding charter schools, that’s another post. I’ll note that I am a firm supporter of charter schools — and adamantly oppose vouchers. You’ll find out why shortly. Let’s just say that the data is in… and it doesn’t support the right wing advocates of charter schools and vouchers at all, and mostly doesn’t support the left wing objections to charter schools either. The data is the data. Reality simply is, regardless of ideology. More later.
- Badtux the Data Penguin
Nice. We are finding common ground.
We both admit that there are vote irregularities and we want them corrected. I understand your concerns with Voter ID laws, and I believe we can find ways to get those people proper identification. As for the Chicago story, a canvass of voter records by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners projects that 36,000 to 52,000 people were permitted by election judges to improperly cast ballots that day.
U.S. attorney Dan Webb supervised a two-year grand jury inquiry that found that more than 100,000 fraudulent votes were cast in November, 1982, said a comprehensive investigation of the 1987 mayoral primary and aldermanic elections could yield similiar results.
The majority of the “improperly cast ballots” were by people who are legally eligible to vote in the United States, but who had moved and not updated their address. It doesn’t surprise me that you want to disenfranchise them, but the fact is that they’re Americans and have a right to vote — just in the next precinct over, the one they live in *now*, not in the one they voted in, the one they *used* to live in. They still only voted in one precinct and their vote still only counted once, and this would *not* be stopped by a picture ID because they are who they say they are — they just live at a different address now.
The fraudulent votes were primarily absentee ballots cast by family members or by Machine officials in the name of dead people and nursing home residents. There are some nursing homes in Chicago that vote more people in Chicago elections than they have beds
. This is a problem of corrupt elections officials, not something that a picture ID would stop.
None of this — zero — would be resolved by voter ID laws, because none of it has anything to do with voter impersonation (the *ONLY* thing that a voter ID law would address). We already have a mechanism for assuring that a person only votes once in an election — voter registration rolls and voter registration cards, which are mailed to the address of the registered voter after the voter signs up to vote and which are required for the voter to be able to vote (though most states allow a state-issued picture ID also as long as you’re on the voter rolls at that precinct). The only reason to add more ID requirement than that is a desire to filter “undesirables” out of the voting pool, period. I.e., the poor and them thare darkies.
So, from what I have gathered, we have agreed that our elections at local levels are horribly deficient. At the state level, very susceptible to inaccuracies. And at the national level, arguably inaccurate, pending how close the elections are in the swing states.
So, I guess what we can agree on is we need comprehensive election reform, which to finalize it will need to involve some sort of voter identification enactment, while at the same time providing agreeable safeguards to ensure all American citizens are able to vote.
Fair?
No. You’re looking for voters who you believe should not vote (we’ve already dealt with the duplicate voter nonsense — it’s called voter registration cards, and unless the U.S. Postal Service is running a scheme, they’re delivered one per voter). Whereas I’m looking for votes stolen by corrupt elections officials rigging voting machines, ballot boxes, and fraudulent absentee ballots — i.e. wholesale voter fraud, not retail. The reality is that spending too much time worrying about a single individual maybe voting in the wrong district or maybe confused about his green card and thinking it allows him to vote is talking about nickels and dimes, there will never be enough of that to make any real difference. It’s the corrupt elections officials stealing votes by the box-full that are the real elections thieves.
Look, I grew up in one of the most corrupt states of the country. I know all about how elections are stolen. And they are *not* stolen retail. They just aren’t. As one politician explained it to me, when indignantly denying charges of paying people to vote for him in a “voter hauling” scandal, “look, I have no way of controlling how people vote when they enter the voting booth, I’d be *stupid* to do what I’m accused of doing!” Leaving unsaid, of course, that there are better ways to steal elections, and they start at the county level with individual elections officials… why pay people to vote, when you can pay off the person who *counts* the votes? Why pay one person to vote for you, when you can pay off the nursing home administrator who gets the absentee ballots for the nursing home residents (both dead and alive) to fill in those ballots the way you want them without the nursing home residents ever seeing them?
So when you focus on retail fraud and ignore wholesale fraud, I have to look for motives besides a desire for clean elections, because it makes no sense to focus on retail fraud when there is no — zero — evidence that it is a problem. And when I note that voter ID laws are requiring documentation that a large number of minority and poor voters have no ability to obtain… ding ding ding! We have a winner in the motives race!
- Badtux the Elections Penguin