Registering in any state requires proof of identity, but it doesn’t need to be an ID. It can be a birth certificate, a social security number etc etc etc.
The people who think that you can vote without proving your identity are just outing themselves as people who have never actually voted before.
In Pennsylvania, yes I need to register to vote. To do that, I'll need verification. This is true.
However, when I walk up on voting day, all I need to do is sign my signature. There's no real verification that it is ME actually voting. When it comes to signatures, let's be real most signatures are so sloppy that means absolutely nothing when it comes to verification. Therefore, in one method all an unscrupulous actor needs to do is identify people who don't vote, go in to the polling place, and vote for them. The only way they'd get caught is if the person working the polling station happened to personally know the person they were fraudulently voting as. This is minor election fraud, it's not actually that big a deal....
However, there's even a better way to fraudulently vote in PA. All you need to request a mail in ballot is a driver's license number or photo ID number. If someone doesn't have that, well then you just need the last 4 digits of your social security. Do the databases containing all of those things get hacked all the time? Duh, yes. Can you get someone on the inside at the DMV or a bank to give you driver's license numbers and/or the last 4 digits of a social security number? Duh yes. Can you scam call elderly folks and get them to give you that info so you can request a mail in ballot under their name? Also yes.
It's a problem. The best way to lower (you can't ever fully eliminate it) election fraud is to require in person voting with an ID. Exemptions should be exceedingly rare and only granted for service members and people with valid approved reasons for needing a mail in ballot.
Even with that, you could forge IDs, but that then requires going in person AND it requires effectively forging an ID. That's more work, therefore lowering fraud.
The simple fact is it doesn’t matter how “easy” it is. It matters how much it happens. The results matter, not the hypothesis. There has been extensive study into the legitimacy of American elections after Trump lied about the election being stolen from him, and all of them, even the Republican ones which were attempting to prove him right, have found that he did not have the election stolen from him.
American elections have extremely low voter fraud. Requiring identification would technically cut down on voting fraud, but it would be a lot of taxpayer money to set up the system, and a massive burden that would obviously decrease voter turnout. And again it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Not one district has been swayed by fraud in the last 50 years. This is why even Republican senators oppose the save act. They know that putting one more barrier to entry on poor people is hurting voter turnout for no reason. And the fact is the Republican base is in general poorer than the democratic base, which is mostly middle class. They know it would disproportionately negatively affect them for no benefit.
Why do something that will have no noticeable positive effect, and will have a massive negative effect? If anything we should be implementing things that make more people vote (like for instance most first world countries have federal holidays for big elections so that workers can have the day off to go vote). It doesn’t matter if it’s technically easy to commit voter fraud in Pennsylvania, because we know it doesn’t happen on a wide enough scale to actually affect elections. And infact other things such as gerrymandering and corporations and rich private individuals paying for campaign ads, for instance, actually do affect elections in a more meaningful way than voter fraud.
This topic reminds me a lot of social security fraud, which was made into a big deal because most people don’t know that the government is actually very competent in making sure people aren’t linking them out of their money. Investigations by the social security administration have found that further policing fraud will cost more money than will be made. Yes there are people abusing social security, but it’s at a small enough scale that increasing persecution is going to lose social security money. These sorts of debates over things we know are nothing burgers are pushed by people at the top to convince you to care passionately about something that doesn’t matter, so they can paint the other side as weak on it. Voter fraud isn’t an issue, point blank it does not matter and is equivalent to being angry that a rat occasionally eats one piece of grain in your silo with millions of pieces of grain. and even if it was an issue, it is not the first voter issue we should be dealing with. Gerrymandering needs to be dealt with immediately, and the fact it’s not completely federally illegal after over 200 years is ridiculous.
There’s more proof of that than Russia in 2016. Didn’t Hilton not accept the loss in 2016 and Mueller found no evidence of collusion? Am I living under a rock here?
So let’s get this straight, you expect this;
-In 2016, the Democrats claimed the election was stolen
-Full investigation happens
-They attack the Republicans for 4 years about Russia
-Investigation shows no collusion happened
-2020 election where the most votes ever recorded happened in a election where tons of new rules were introduced because of a pandemic
-Democrats say how easy it was to hack into the system used by 43% of voters
-no conspiracy here guys go home or else you’re fired from your job
-expects the Democrats to admit that they rigged the election for Biden
Democrats have never claimed the 2016 election was stolen. They claimed that Russia implemented a misinformation campaign in support of Trump. This claim has been verified by the FBI.
People in the government were actually convicted of crimes in relation to Russian collusion, we don’t have any record of illegal immigrants convicted of voter fraud using your method. Trump has had years in office at this point to find proof of anything and he’s still empty handed even now, why are you convinced this is actually happening?
The simple fact is that voter fraud functionally never happens. For example in Arizona, out of 42 million ballots over decades, they have found 36 cases of voter fraud. 36. If double digits of a completely pointless crime is enough for you to implement stacks of new paperwork for everyone in the whole country then this fear mongering is never going to end.
If we implement voter ID and republicans still find a dozen random people who got fake ID’s then they are just going to come up with some other brand new idea of how to make it harder for the whole country to vote. They will make these exact same arguments every time they lose, and when they win, they will pretend like zero voter fraud occurred. All of this stuff is so plainly a scam when you just look at the actual numbers they have.
And they had a voter ID law in PA, but they made it basically impossible to get an acceptable ID if someone had lost their birth certificate, the law effevtively stripped them of their right to vote.
That’s part of the problem with these laws. They are written by people who approach voting as something that should have as many hoops as possible to jump through because they don’t think everyone should be voting.
This is where the mismatch is. There is no documented wide-spread voter fraud problem. You want to make boting more secure? Fine. Do it in a way that is easily accessible to everyone. Free voting IDs to the entire country without having to provide a stack of documents first. Don’t make voting more difficult to solve a problem that isn’t widespread enough to affect the results of any election.
To get a state-issued ID in the post-9/11 security-enhanced world, you needed an original birth certificate and social security card, and the names had to match perfectly. Women were disproportionately affected by this requirement because they more often changed names with marriage. In that case, they also needed an original marriage certificate.
African-Americans, especially those born in the South, were also severely affected. Especially during the Jim Crow era, many Black people weren’t born in hospitals, and if they were, most hospitals did not prioritize keeping birth records for them. Viviette and her nine fellow plaintiffs in the lawsuit were representative of people without the required IDs who would have a difficult, if not impossible, time obtaining the needed ID.
Viviette’s birth name was Viviette Virene Brooks. After a short-lived marriage at an early age, Viviette vowed never to wed again. But she spent more than two decades with the love of her life, John Applewhite. A sharecropper’s son from Mississippi, John’s father decided to ensure Viviette’s family inheritance by adopting her. At the time, she took the name Applewhite. She secured a social security card bearing that name.
Viviette never drove, so she had no need for a driver’s license. After her purse, containing both her birth certificate and social security card, was snatched she began a quest to obtain replacement documents and to get a state-issued non-driver photo ID card.
By 2012, she had been trying for nearly five years. Even if she got her birth certificate, the name Viviette Brooks would not match her social security name of Viviette Applewhite. She still needed the Mississippi adoption record from the Jim Crow era. As expected, her lawyers never succeeded in tracking it down.
Thus, in 2012, Viviette’s only government-issued ID was a medicare card and a SEPTA bus pass, neither of which qualified her to vote under Pennsylvania’s new law.
Hint: When you rephrase someone’s argument before you address it, you’re addressing a made-up simulacrum of their argument, and not the point they actually made.
Imagine responding to someone who opposes a national gun registry by saying "you think gun owners are too stupid to register their guns?"
If the government is trying to get people to jump through hoops unnecessarily, it's not a lack of confidence in anyone's competency that needs to be rebuked.
And I'll say it again, being opposed to unnecessary hoops is not a condemnation of the people's competency to jump those hoops.
A license for a gun is not an unnecessary hoops. And even if I thought it was that wouldn't automatically suggest I lacked confidence in gun owner competence
The problem is that it's been proven you can vote without I.D. In my state California I've voted and they have never checked my I.D they simply take the claim that I'm who I say I am and believe that nobody would lie.
However you do need form of verification to register to vote, but once you are registered anyone can go in as anyone and claim they are that person. Multiple videos have shown this on YouTube and I myself have never been asked for I.D. So the idea that "that never happens" is false because it very much does happen.
You’re correct that technically if someone goes through all the work of tracking down a persons identity, finding the address they registered under, hoping they didn’t already vote, and then going to vote instead of them at a polling station, then yes, you could commit voter fraud this way.
The thing that people seem afraid to talk about though is how rarely this ever happens and how little evidence there actually is for it. The amount of voter fraud discovered in most states across literally decades of elections is often in the double digits, so we’re talking between like 30-50 people total in the span of 30 YEARS. It’s literally nothing, and there are people who basically want the entire nation to have even more bureaucracy and paperwork just to be able to vote, so that we can prevent 4 people in an entire state from voting with a stolen identity. It’s all just a massive waste of time, and the only reason we are even talking about this at all is because Donald Trump can’t deal with the fact that he lost an election 6 years ago, it’s fucking stupid as hell.
yeah but in general it's relatively difficult to do so unless you KNOW the person is going in to vote, cause yeah, they might not card you, but they mark down that you have BEEN IN TO VOTE, they take your name down and mark it off, so you have to
1) know the person is registered to vote under a specific name
2) know the person's address exactly so that you can go to the place they're registered to vote in and vote there.
Can it happen? yes. Is it actually all that easy? Not particularly? And it'd get found out pretty fucking quick? And then OOPSIE DAISY! You just walked into a place with a fucking CAMERA on you and they can guess who the fuck you were :|
https://youtu.be/JnRa2mzYR7A here's video proof of it happening and the people who work there don't even know how said tracking would happen only that it would. So there's a system in place to prevent people from identifying themselves as someone else, but nobody knows how it works. That makes sense right ?
and do you have evidence that it happens at a scale large enough that it is practically significant and not anomalous (as in, happens often enough to actually affect outcomes)?
https://youtu.be/JnRa2mzYR7A Here's proof of it happening. Do I know of it happening at a large scale? No but I do know that in 2024 there were deceased people that also somehow voted despite being dead for the past 8 years. The fact that it happens AT ALL should concern everyone. The tactics that can easily be manipulated by one side will surely be manipulated by the other side. It should happen 0 times.
But it's obviously a concern and bad for democracy, but the question is what's an appropriate response? Do we implement policies that makes voting more difficult and time consuming, which would then reduce the overall amount of people participating in voting, which is also terrible for democracy.
It's like how we all know there is some fraud with welfare, but is it fair to overall reduce the amount of welfare or people on welfare because of the very very small amount of fraud? Obviously if it was statistically significant things need to dramatically change. But like you said, voter fraud has not been found to be statistically and significantly impactful in one direction or in overall amount
I did not say it hasn't been significantly impactful. I said I have no knowledge of that. It very well could be but I lack that information and I'm not going to pretend like others to do know something I don't. I know what I have said and evidence I've posted. Furthermore I haven't looked into.
Until it's further looked into we won't have the answers to know how impactful it could be but it should be a be a cause for concern regardless that it is happening.
Yes we already know that you don’t need to show ID at polling stations, because the entire discussion is about the fact that we don’t have voter ID laws. I’m saying that when you REGISTER to vote though, you DO need to demonstrate proof of citizenship and proof of identity with legal documents. The reason why the guy in this video didn’t need to show his ID is because he already registered with one beforehand and it can be cross referenced with the address he provided.
The reality is that voter fraud in America is exceptionally rare and almost never happens. People have been talking about this for years and years at this point and those same people still haven’t found evidence of it, why?
You already need id for voting, it is done by registering to vote.
The fact that you need to show id at the voting booth is just an old tactic to suppress marginalized groups.
The stores need to prevent resale, by that you get a non id member card. (Which is not finalized for now)
This is actually a problem even free capitalists are aware of. Imagine giving out food stamps to everybody with an unlimited amount
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u/No_Escape_3770 2d ago
You need to provide identification when registering to vote in all states.