Live data from Hacker News

Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

nytimes.com

181–190 of 244 posts

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure where you live but in the U.S. flying without an ID of some sort is impossible, and an accepted ID other than a drivers license all have an arguably larger barrier to entry than going to the DMV and paying the ~$10 and an hour+ of your time. That or you are someone with an inordinate amount of resources available to you and are looking at this problem through rose colored glasses.

Consider places like the town where the DMV is only open four days per year, and the closest alternative is 20 miles away and only open two days per week. https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/19/... There are a lot of people for whom the 'small' barrier to entry of dealing with state bureaucracy is much larger than it is in your world.

Then by all means make them stay open more often instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Voter ID is important and should certainly include provisions in the legislation to help make it easier for people to get a government issued ID. However, for most people in America I would wager that this is not the case at all and you have just cherry picked an edge case to suit your argument.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. For an example direct quote from a court case: https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280

> Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All w…

>... All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. Also, your source is not substantiated.

Ah, so we are still acting like Republicans aren't the legacy bearers of Jim Crow.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All w…

How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative? Let me put it into computer terms: when your program isn't fast enough and you've got a nice profile trace, do you start your analysis with the functions using up a lot of time? Or do…

>How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative?

None of those things make any sense. A church is more than welcome to only accept people with a passport. I can't imagin that will be going on for long. The post office is a service, and they will sell to whoever can pay. Sending a letter to your representative - you'd probably get a bigger impact if you somehow managed to convince him you voted regularly for different parties. As for "access to a free press", I don't know what you mean. They want your eyeballs as long as they can make some dosh there.

The rest of your post doesn't make sense. The computer analogy breaks down as you don't have a nice evidence log for voting and possible illegal voters, so you start trying different things.

> The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted

That's begging the question. You're asserting the point you're trying to prove, which is what "begging the question" means.

> Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.

Yes. First, the plural of anecdote is not data. Second, just because something helps in that situation, doesn't mean it will help in the problem you want to solve right now. You _can_ do both. Nuance and stacked solutions are important.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#184
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure where you live but in the U.S. flying without an ID of some sort is impossible, and an accepted ID other than a drivers license all have an arguably larger barrier to entry than going to the DMV and paying the ~$10 and an hour+ of your time. That or you are someone with an inordinate amount of resources available to you and are looking at this problem through rose colored glasses.

Once again, it is highly suggested you use an ID, but it isn't 100% required. From TSA's website[1]: >In the event you arrive at the airport without valid identification, because it is lost or at home, you may still be allowed to fly. The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name, current address, and other personal information to conf…

Ah yes, get to the airport 5 hours early everytime you want to fly so you can go through that process buddy. That's a huge barrier to entry, one that is clearly not taken advantage of very often because the vast majority of Americans have an ID..

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#185
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these things listed are constitutional rights like voting and most of the things listed are more difficult but not impossible without ID.

This one is: "12. Purchase a gun" On the other hand, unless you are one of the 538 electors, you don't have a constitutional right to vote for the president. So if "constitutional rights" is the determining factor, it's the ID requirement for guns that you should be fighting against.

I'm not a legal scholar, but I believe there are more restrictions on the 2nd Amendment than there are on the amendments related to voting. Specifically the 24th Amendment prohibits the poll tax and requiring a voter to pay for an ID is in practice a poll tax.

Also this topic isn't limited to presidential elections, so that Electoral College logic loophole doesn't apply to all elections.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The US is strange: It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote. Hint: the people wringing their hands and the people making it more difficult to vote are not the same groups.

> It will wring its hands over low voter turnout while also actively making it more difficult to vote. The republicans generally would prefer that lower-income folks don't vote because they generally vote for democrats, so of course they would like to see voter turn-out to be low.

Are we sure it's lower-income? Because if that were the case, then these Republican shenanigans in states like Ohio and Michigan would focus on rural areas. But we don't see that, we see them focusing almost exclusively on urban areas.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider places like the town where the DMV is only open four days per year, and the closest alternative is 20 miles away and only open two days per week. https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/19/... There are a lot of people for whom the 'small' barrier to entry of dealing with state bureaucracy is much larger than it is in your world.

Then by all means make them stay open more often instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Voter ID is important and should certainly include provisions in the legislation to help make it easier for people to get a government issued ID. However, for most people in America I would wager that this is not the case at all and you have just cherry picked an edge case to suit your argument.

> Voter ID is important

Voter ID would be important, but unfortunately, the Republican Party has repurposed the concept as a tool of oppression rather than a way to secure the vote. People are rightly wary of the idea because of this, and will continue to be wary of it until free and no-hassle IDs are available to everyone first.

> However, for most people in America I would wager that this is not the case at all

Most? Probably. But "most" doesn't matter. Voting is a fundamental part of the democratic process, and "most" still leaves millions of people in the lurch. Make it "all" and then I'll stop being upset about it.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the goal of the Republican Party is explicitly to use these laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, not to actually secure the vote. Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. Does not prove your point about Republicans using voter id laws to suppress the votes of certain demographics, or that it's a point of the Republican party as a national organization to do that. All w…

> Your linked source is talking about an entirely different issue. It's a court ruling that shut down North Carolina voter ID and early voting laws, in part because the defense of those laws included that that literal quote about it making harder for black people to vote. > All we know is that some Republicans are biased, just as all people have biases. When 'some' is enough to control a state legislature, and simila…

> When 'some' is enough to control a state legislature, and similar things happen across the country (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su...), it's a logical conclusion.

I don't see how it follows that a state legislature's cupidity directly translates to a national party's intentions. That's a bridge too far. If there's a smoking gun, such as a leaked internal memo, I would agree totally. People are scumbags and are biased to try to make their side win in most situations.

>It literally links directly to the court judgement.

Yes, for closing the polls early, not for voter id laws.

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#189

In Germany we do not have this problem (neither voter suppression nor voter fraud), for a multitude of reasons: 1) everyone has a government-provided ID document: a passport, for German nationals the ID card Personalausweis also works, and for EU nationals (who can vote in municipal and EU elections) their country's ID document 2) the legal requirement to register at the city/region office ("Meldebehörde") where you…

Yeah, from the European perspective the American situation is hard to understand. In the U.S., requiring everyone to register their address is going to be met with cries of Big Brother and small but vocal resistance. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of people have to declare an address to file their tax return and/or to have a driver's license. The other piece is that the constitution, written before d…

> And it's politically intractable to fix these silly things in the constitution.

Which is why I had originally hoped not for Warren or Sanders to end up as Democrat candidate but Biden (which is very unrealistic at the moment)... the general idea was having a left-moderate candidate like Biden get enough votes in 2020 to have a strong Congressional majority in order to fix voter suppression, gerrymandering, electoral college, campaign finance and media ownership (e.g. breaking up Sinclair, re-establishing something like the Fairness Doctrine).

Then in 2024 a proper leftie candidate could compete on fair and even terms against whatever the Republicans put up.

But since Biden is pretty much toast now thanks to the Ukraine scandal it will probably be Warren who ends up as Democrat candidate and I fear that the Republicans will launch an all-out anti-communist war campaign, aided by Fox, Sinclair and "conservative" rags - pitting 'Trump vs "Communism"' in the 2020 elections may yield a victory for Trump in the current situation...

Re: Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no requirement to inform your old state you left, so millions of inactive voters are left in the database In Germany when you arrive somewhere we know that you are coming from somewhere. So when you register at your new address that usually involves your new city hall informing your old one that you moved. I guess that doesn't really work if registration isn't universal (in Germany we track you place of res…

> (in Germany we track you place of residence basically from birth, it's used not just for voting but also for determining where your taxes go, for government communication, to make sure nobody skips out on bills by moving, etc). If we tried to institute that kind of system, the political party which currently is all against voter id would be up in arms too.

Hardly. The Republicans are against databases, population registration, ID cards, and gun tracking databases. It's only the voter ID they're in favour of.
Post reply on HN