Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

211–220 of 244 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). No one seems t…

> If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" me…

By "truly inactive" I mean voters who can't vote because they're dead, no longer live in that voting district, never actually existed, or are ineligible to vote. If these names appear as having voted, those are invalid and might be an indication of fraud.

There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place.

Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody has an ID. Find a study that shows differently (for example [1]) and you'll be able to see how obviously synthetic it is. I have no doubt that the people who are opposing Voter ID have no nefarious motive, but there's a lot of confirmation bias at work that creates a false narrative that getting a photo ID is "difficult" and that people without photo IDs are common and disproportionately minorities. [1] htt…

I'm not sure I understand what objections would be to the study you cite.

A telephone survey of 982 people called on landlines. How many total calls were made -- what was the response rate, and what has been done to de-bias any correlation between response rate and the outcome? And a self-reporting survey, over the phone, about government photo ids, without any mention being made of how they convinced people that the survey was genuine?

And then there's just the standard phone survey stuff, where you up-multiply based on (once again, self-reported) attributes to match population demographics, causing everything to be wildly out of whack.

This level of obfuscation of methodology is pretty high even by the standards of regular polling.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one should be praised other than the people who discovered "the mistakes". The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Republicans and has been around since forever. The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive . There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered a…

> "citizen ID" cards We call them passports :)

Those are halfway there.

The problem is they're out-of-reach financially to many people ($145~) and they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.

I am thinking of something akin to the Chinese Resident Identity Card, which does track enough info to determine voter eligibility, I think.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing dead or moved voters is much, much less important than making sure that valid voters can still vote.

Can you explain why? If any voter is found to have voted twice (even by accident), then that voter will be disenfranchised. So -- as happened to me -- if a state mails your ballot to an old address and someone votes there (even inadvertently), the states may decide to void both ballots (even the valid one cast by you) to prevent double voting. This means it's incredibly important to get rid of old registrations and k…

Because double-voting is a very rare thing, while disenfranchising 50k voters in a single purge could easily swing an election in a competitive race.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the state has an effective mechanism that doesn't disenfranchise voters, and that those moved or dead voters aren't voting, the motives are suspect.

> the motives are suspect. Um, no they're not. Simply wanting to maintain a clean record is a personality difference that it is unreasonable to get suspicious over given the varying personalities of the various secretaries of state (the one who ultimately decides such policies).

It's not unreasonable when the party they're a part of has a long history of disenfranchising voters to gain an electoral edge.

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

#216
post #33

> She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls. > “I voted three times last year,” said Ms. Miller. I am still baffled at the election system in this country. Every state does its own thing. One state uses paper, other uses some machines which can be easily hacked, some use both. Somehow voter ID is controver…

> Why can't they issue free IDs and track every voter in a database and call it a day? In a very real sense: because that would make it easy to vote. Free IDs are directly inimical to the effort to prevent people from voting . That prevention is a major effort of one major American political party because it's seen as the only way they can win in an increasingly diverse country. The folks who are against free IDs--wh…

Purging voter rolls is something parties can do tactically to help improve their chances of winning. For instance, in Florida:

https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712

The GOP learned a long time ago that if you win it doesn't matter how dirty you are. You're not going to prosecute yourself after all. By the time the leadership changes hands everybody will have forgotten about it.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So require ID-issuing authorities to keep certain hours. This is a trivial problem; I don't understand the compulsion to paint this as a dichotomy--there's lots of middleground between Evil Racist voter ID requirements and no voter ID requirements at all; it's not even a slippery slope.

This wouldn't solve the problem of too many inner city residents voting and messing up your legislative majority. In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.

> This wouldn't solve the problem of too many inner city residents voting and messing up your legislative majority.

I'm not a Republican, and I'm not advocating for a legislative majority for any party. You're not participating in good faith.

> In-person fraudulent voting is one of those problems that basically doesn't exist. People have looked for cases of it happening and have come up empty handed. Attempting to solve that problem is a waste of time. The only point of these laws is to suppress voting blocks.

Maybe. It's probably an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to implement some basic voter ID reqs (you know, like so many Europeans enjoy) than to continually validate that voter fraud is a non-issue _and_ persuade the country that it's a non issue. The idea that these laws only exist to "suppress [legitimate] voting blocks" is absurd; many countries have them, including those enviable European countries. How can securing our Democracy be a bad thing, any way? Recall which party was paranoid about foreign meddling in the last election, after all.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10% of households don't have a computer Does this include smart phones? Seems like percent of people with Internet access would be more relevant. I would think public libraries would also provide a lot of coverage here. > 15% of adults don't have a driver's license What's the statistic for adults with any kind of government issued identification? Surely that's more relevant for this debate than the driver's license…

> What's the statistic for adults with any kind of government issued identification? Surely that's more relevant for this debate than the driver's license statistic? A factor to keep in mind here is that it's an established tactic for Republicans to specifically allow alternative IDs used by whites for voting purposes, while banning alternative IDs used by blacks for voting purposes. A North Carolina law was struck d…

Sure. Let's strike that shit down. Make sure ID requirements are even across the board. Seems like a pretty tractable problem.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's no problem. Now, things get complicated and we would have to do work to get it right in that we have inconsistent rules on residency in terms of students and temporary housing, and we have a significant number of people who don't want to see a national registry of citizens (see issues with using SSN as a national ID) but there's nothing spe…

> So long as it isn't used to disenfranchise people from a single vote, there's no problem. And you believe it's the Republicans who are hating on immigration enforcement? The proposal for tracking everyone's residence not going to fly(coincidentally another thing you need id to do) with those people.

Immigration enforcement is easy. Jail every CEO and executive team that hires undocumented immigrants, and fine the company or individual $100 per hour of work from undocumented labor. If you have a threat of jail time or bankruptcy, you won't hire undocumented workers.

If you are a farmer who uses undocumented workers, same thing. Put the onus on wealthy citizens for doing the wrong thing and have real consequences. Have sting operations. Yes, there's a basic underground economy of labor like maids, but that's a small portion of the undocumented economy.

Then, create a Real immigration system that does not have 15 year wait systems. (http://www.openlawlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMmigra...) Fix the H-2A guest worker program. (See https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/advocacy-and-programs/gues... ) Provide pathways to citizenship. Replace the H1-B program with one that is not exploitative. (permission to change jobs? Immediate deportation if you lose a job and don't immediately have another?) Accept that grocery and dining prices will rise.

Oh, and don't put kids in cages. Treat asylum claimants as human. Provide pathways to legal status.

The problem is that every Republican solution is based on punishing those who are poor and turns a blind eye to those who are wealthy.

Post reply on HN