Comment Re: Prop 200 (Score 1) 197
Well, so civil a reply deserves one in kind, even if no one is reading any more.
Your next issue is showing photo ID at voters booths. This, with all due respect, I feel is a radical belief if you do not feel that voters should show ID when they vote. You may speak about the "mythical" voting fraud that occurs (but everybody here has an opinion when the subject of electronic voting comes up), but if it doesn't exist (which I'm just giving you the benefit of the doubt), why allow the potential?
Just to make sure we're clear: vote fraud, of all sorts, is probably pretty common. Exactly how common is obviously unknown. But vote fraud by means of having unregistered people vote or people vote more than once is a vanishingly small problem. It's not just me saying this; there are no known election-changing cases of this happening in, at a minimum, decades, and it isn't particularly hard to detect after the fact if you go look. If you think about it, stealing an election by getting enough people to vote illegally and not getting caught is pretty difficult, certainly compared to other methods availible.
Now, I consider the vote sacred and election fraud to be high treason. I would be thrilled to ID everyone infallibly at the polls. But there aren't any freebies here; measures like this that attempt to catch fake voters are going to stop a much larger number of real voters from voting.
I don't know for sure, since my state (New York) requires you change your address on your license within 10 days of moving, but isn't this the case in Arizona? There is no fee to do this. I don't think this is a big request.
Changing your address is free, but actually getting a license with your new address - which is all that will help you - is not; I think it's $15. Little enough to you and me, maybe, but... And I don't think anyone seriously expects that students will replace their driver's licenses every September and June. Should they, legally? Sure. Will they? No. Is not getting to vote an appropriate penalty for that? Absolutely not.
By the way, one more thing, McCain is not a conservative, he is a liberal with an "R" on his name. I'm sure you'd say the opposite about former Senator Zell Miller, and I would agree
Well, that's a bit silly - McCain is a stout conservative on just about every issue of fundamental importance to conservatives; he just doesn't always march in step on more debatable issues. But its' beside the point; I was just picking a name /.ers would know. Almost all republicans holding elected office in AZ distanced themselves from Prop 200, though I admit some were just holding their tongues so's not to anger constituents.
How come we didn't hear about this five percent when Clinton was in office?
People who are in this game for purely partisan reasons are certainly making more noise about it these days, and DREs have raised the general conciousness about election problems in general, but plenty of groups interested purely in a legitimate election process - People for the American Way, say - have been pointing to this for a long time.
Quite frankly, I feel this is one of those "lies, damn lies, and statistics" polls.
This is pretty much hard data. We know the fraction of ballots that are 'spoiled' and never counted - varies widely, but worth 1-2% on average; from things like provisional ballots and records of people turned away at polls we know a lot about how many people try to vote and fail because of ID or address problems. 5% certainly isn't an exact figure, but it's the ballpark we're in; it's clearly more than the margin of many elections.
I don't see how anyone without a motive (and Democrats' motive is to make sure their poor, students, and non-English speakers vote without problems, no matter what fraud may occur) can think that the people disenfranchised by requiring a proper ID when you vote outweighs the potential fraud that is prevented. Honestly, it's not that hard to get an ID, or a utility bill, or some other form of ID.
It seems to me that any citizen has an extraordinarily fundamental right to vote - it may be the most fundamental of all our rights, unenumerated though it may be. I don't think any barrier that results in some people not voting is "reasonable"; we have no right to declare anything such. We impose barriers only as is necessary to produce an election result that reflects the will of the voters as accurately as possible. So it's very hard, from my perspective, to make a case that a change that makes an election demonstrably less accurate
is justified.
Your next issue is showing photo ID at voters booths. This, with all due respect, I feel is a radical belief if you do not feel that voters should show ID when they vote. You may speak about the "mythical" voting fraud that occurs (but everybody here has an opinion when the subject of electronic voting comes up), but if it doesn't exist (which I'm just giving you the benefit of the doubt), why allow the potential?
Just to make sure we're clear: vote fraud, of all sorts, is probably pretty common. Exactly how common is obviously unknown. But vote fraud by means of having unregistered people vote or people vote more than once is a vanishingly small problem. It's not just me saying this; there are no known election-changing cases of this happening in, at a minimum, decades, and it isn't particularly hard to detect after the fact if you go look. If you think about it, stealing an election by getting enough people to vote illegally and not getting caught is pretty difficult, certainly compared to other methods availible.
Now, I consider the vote sacred and election fraud to be high treason. I would be thrilled to ID everyone infallibly at the polls. But there aren't any freebies here; measures like this that attempt to catch fake voters are going to stop a much larger number of real voters from voting.
I don't know for sure, since my state (New York) requires you change your address on your license within 10 days of moving, but isn't this the case in Arizona? There is no fee to do this. I don't think this is a big request.
Changing your address is free, but actually getting a license with your new address - which is all that will help you - is not; I think it's $15. Little enough to you and me, maybe, but... And I don't think anyone seriously expects that students will replace their driver's licenses every September and June. Should they, legally? Sure. Will they? No. Is not getting to vote an appropriate penalty for that? Absolutely not.
By the way, one more thing, McCain is not a conservative, he is a liberal with an "R" on his name. I'm sure you'd say the opposite about former Senator Zell Miller, and I would agree
Well, that's a bit silly - McCain is a stout conservative on just about every issue of fundamental importance to conservatives; he just doesn't always march in step on more debatable issues. But its' beside the point; I was just picking a name
How come we didn't hear about this five percent when Clinton was in office?
People who are in this game for purely partisan reasons are certainly making more noise about it these days, and DREs have raised the general conciousness about election problems in general, but plenty of groups interested purely in a legitimate election process - People for the American Way, say - have been pointing to this for a long time.
Quite frankly, I feel this is one of those "lies, damn lies, and statistics" polls.
This is pretty much hard data. We know the fraction of ballots that are 'spoiled' and never counted - varies widely, but worth 1-2% on average; from things like provisional ballots and records of people turned away at polls we know a lot about how many people try to vote and fail because of ID or address problems. 5% certainly isn't an exact figure, but it's the ballpark we're in; it's clearly more than the margin of many elections.
I don't see how anyone without a motive (and Democrats' motive is to make sure their poor, students, and non-English speakers vote without problems, no matter what fraud may occur) can think that the people disenfranchised by requiring a proper ID when you vote outweighs the potential fraud that is prevented. Honestly, it's not that hard to get an ID, or a utility bill, or some other form of ID.
It seems to me that any citizen has an extraordinarily fundamental right to vote - it may be the most fundamental of all our rights, unenumerated though it may be. I don't think any barrier that results in some people not voting is "reasonable"; we have no right to declare anything such. We impose barriers only as is necessary to produce an election result that reflects the will of the voters as accurately as possible. So it's very hard, from my perspective, to make a case that a change that makes an election demonstrably less accurate
is justified.
