Voter ID

[SomeDude]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

[pp4me]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

Interesting question. I know there are people who scream that this is a form of voter suppression but I really don't get that at all.

If anyone here has an objection I'd be interested in hearing the reasoning.

[doodle]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

I oppose this because illegal immigrants work really hard, do shitty jobs Americans don’t want to do (for $3 an hour), and should have a say in local government of the place they live.

Also, Orangeman Bad and illegal immigrants will vote against Orangeman.

Id be very surprised if any illegal immigrants voted. I taught immigrant populations for close to a decade they were genuinely terrified of any paperwork that they would have to sign their name to and put down any identifying information.

[pp4me]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

I oppose this because illegal immigrants work really hard, do shitty jobs Americans don’t want to do (for $3 an hour), and should have a say in local government of the place they live.

Also, Orangeman Bad and illegal immigrants will vote against Orangeman.

Id be very surprised if any illegal immigrants voted. I taught immigrant populations for close to a decade they were genuinely terrified of any paperwork that they would have to sign their name to and put down any identifying information.

A number of states are allowing illegal immigrants to get Driver's Licenses. If your assertion is true then I would think not many have done that. I don't know the statistics but if those states issuing Driver's Licenses also don't require proof of citizenship then we will never know the answer to that question. The Driver's license will become a de-facto proof of citizenship and I think that is probably the point.

[doodle]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

I oppose this because illegal immigrants work really hard, do shitty jobs Americans don’t want to do (for $3 an hour), and should have a say in local government of the place they live.

Also, Orangeman Bad and illegal immigrants will vote against Orangeman.

Id be very surprised if any illegal immigrants voted. I taught immigrant populations for close to a decade they were genuinely terrified of any paperwork that they would have to sign their name to and put down any identifying information.

A number of states are allowing illegal immigrants to get Driver's Licenses. If your assertion is true then I would think not many have done that. I don't know the statistics but if those states issuing Driver's Licenses also don't require proof of citizenship then we will never know the answer to that question. The Driver's license will become a de-facto proof of citizenship and I think that is probably the point.

I don't know why this is so complicated....why don't they just use social security numbers to identify voters?

I thought driver's licenses were moving towards real ID.

I don't know, I don't see how this is so complicated since every American citizen is assigned a unique number.

My point was that based on my experience with immigrant populations I highly doubt that even if they did mistakenly receive a ballot, very very few would vote.

"Pennsylvania officials estimated that the noncitizens they identified cast 544 votes from 2000 through 2017, out of 93 million overall votes cast."

We definitely aren't talking about millions and millions like Trump tries to create the impression of.

[doodle]

"Pennsylvania officials estimated that the noncitizens they identified cast 544 votes from 2000 through 2017, out of 93 million overall votes cast."

We definitely aren't talking about millions and millions like Trump tries to create the impression of.

Definitely not. As your non-attributed quote clearly proves.

Hmmm...seems to convince you when it comes out of Trump's mouth.

[europeanwizard]

We have this in The Netherlands. You definitely must bring your ID card or your passport. On these, the issuing city is printed.

But then again, we don't havea huge illegal immigrants groups here. We do have immigrants from our former colonies, but they're not illegal and more or less integrated meaning paid minimum wage, social securities, education etc.

[sophie]

I also don't see the problem with requiring ID, and I'm very much in favor - have been for a long time even when I was mostly voting Democratic, because I never thought it was fair to allow noncitizens to vote, or for people to register to vote in multiple states simultaneously (there's no way currently to detect this).

The ID should also be federally issued and specify the current residence. Basically that's a passport (book or card). I think it would be a good idea to provide separate passport colors/types for minors (< 18) instead of the current < age 16, and to make the card free. And for the 3 months prior to elections, add temporary staff to reduce the turnaround time.

It's a bit of a logistical barrier, but my idea is that if you can't negotiate applying for a passport and planning ahead enough to have it in your hand on Election Day, you have no business casting a vote.

[Mountaineer]

I also don't see the problem with requiring ID, and I'm very much in favor - have been for a long time even when I was mostly voting Democratic, because I never thought it was fair to allow noncitizens to vote, or for people to register to vote in multiple states simultaneously (there's no way currently to detect this).

The ID should also be federally issued and specify the current residence. Basically that's a passport (book or card). I think it would be a good idea to provide separate passport colors/types for minors (< 18) instead of the current < age 16, and to make the card free. And for the 3 months prior to elections, add temporary staff to reduce the turnaround time.

It's a bit of a logistical barrier, but my idea is that if you can't negotiate applying for a passport and planning ahead enough to have it in your hand on Election Day, you have no business casting a vote.

[Lonestar]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

I oppose this because illegal immigrants work really hard, do shitty jobs Americans don’t want to do (for $3 an hour), and should have a say in local government of the place they live.

Also, Orangeman Bad and illegal immigrants will vote against Orangeman.

Id be very surprised if any illegal immigrants voted. I taught immigrant populations for close to a decade they were genuinely terrified of any paperwork that they would have to sign their name to and put down any identifying information.

How long ago was that? We now see illegal immigrants marching in the streets while waving the flag of Mexico demanding their rights on many issues. Doesn't look like they are trying to keep under the radar! I honestly don't see the concern from this group that I saw 20 years ago.

Am I mistaken, or have we not seen politicians and community activists call for allowing the illegals to have voting rights?

It seems we have to provide our Social Security number in all aspects of life, from getting health care to opening a bank account. Why are we opposed to using it for voter I.D.

[doodle]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

I oppose this because illegal immigrants work really hard, do shitty jobs Americans don’t want to do (for $3 an hour), and should have a say in local government of the place they live.

Also, Orangeman Bad and illegal immigrants will vote against Orangeman.

Id be very surprised if any illegal immigrants voted. I taught immigrant populations for close to a decade they were genuinely terrified of any paperwork that they would have to sign their name to and put down any identifying information.

How long ago was that? We now see illegal immigrants marching in the streets while waving the flag of Mexico demanding their rights on many issues. Doesn't look like they are trying to keep under the radar! I honestly don't see the concern from this group that I saw 20 years ago.

Am I mistaken, or have we not seen politicians and community activists call for allowing the illegals to have voting rights?

It seems we have to provide our Social Security number in all aspects of life, from getting health care to opening a bank account. Why are we opposed to using it for voter I.D.

How do you know they are illegals? Cause they are waving an Mexican flag? First off, I don't see why that is even seen as threating considering people here support others rights to wave the flag of an army that literally fought a war against the United States and represents ideas that run counter to our constitution. Secondly, perhaps they are chicanos and have family ancestry that traces back many more hundreds of years to Texas, arizona, new mexico, california, than any invading Gringo who stole the land out from underneath them.

[doodle]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

I oppose this because illegal immigrants work really hard, do shitty jobs Americans don’t want to do (for $3 an hour), and should have a say in local government of the place they live.

Also, Orangeman Bad and illegal immigrants will vote against Orangeman.

Id be very surprised if any illegal immigrants voted. I taught immigrant populations for close to a decade they were genuinely terrified of any paperwork that they would have to sign their name to and put down any identifying information.

Am I mistaken, or have we not seen politicians and community activists call for allowing the illegals to have voting rights?

It seems we have to provide our Social Security number in all aspects of life, from getting health care to opening a bank account. Why are we opposed to using it for voter I.D.

Yes...some politicians....like Ronald Reagan.

"I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally,"

I don't know why we don't just use social for voting. Seems like it would make perfect sense.

[Lonestar]

Anyone against the idea that voters should have to prove identity and residency?

I oppose this because illegal immigrants work really hard, do shitty jobs Americans don’t want to do (for $3 an hour), and should have a say in local government of the place they live.

Also, Orangeman Bad and illegal immigrants will vote against Orangeman.

Id be very surprised if any illegal immigrants voted. I taught immigrant populations for close to a decade they were genuinely terrified of any paperwork that they would have to sign their name to and put down any identifying information.

How long ago was that? We now see illegal immigrants marching in the streets while waving the flag of Mexico demanding their rights on many issues. Doesn't look like they are trying to keep under the radar! I honestly don't see the concern from this group that I saw 20 years ago.

Am I mistaken, or have we not seen politicians and community activists call for allowing the illegals to have voting rights?

It seems we have to provide our Social Security number in all aspects of life, from getting health care to opening a bank account. Why are we opposed to using it for voter I.D.

How do you know they are illegals? Cause they are waving an Mexican flag? First off, I don't see why that is even seen as threating considering people here support others rights to wave the flag of an army that literally fought a war against the United States and represents ideas that run counter to our constitution. Secondly, perhaps they are chicanos and have family ancestry that traces back many more hundreds of years to Texas, arizona, new mexico, california, than any invading Gringo who stole the land out from underneath them.

Well, I just assumed that the liberal left-leaning news outlet I was watching that was reporting them to be "undocumented workers" was telling the truth. This was reported on more than one occasion.

I have absolutely no problem with waving a flag, and do not see it as threatening. It is a First Amendment right to citizens of this country.

[pmward]

One thing I will say, being someone that architects secure systems for a living, that there are many ways one can authenticate identity. A physical card is one way. Physical ID cards however are a) not foolproof, they can be faked and b) not always the best form of ID for every situation. The most secure form of authentication is always going to be multi-factor, not single factor. An ID card is a single factor, as such it is actually a weak form of authentication by itself. I mean I had the state send me an ID 2 years ago in which they misspelled my name... like is this state ID really "secure" and fool-proof? Mail in ballots, while not requiring showing someone a physical ID, did use multi-factor authentication. You can see the thread from about a month ago where I dug in depth into the way it was handled in AZ and was able to prove the security of the process was at least equal to voting in person with an ID card. I cannot vouch for all states, as I have not reviewed all states processes. I'm sure some out there are weaker than AZ, especially since mail-in voting has been the norm here in AZ for many years now, so AZ had the luxury of time to iterate on the system. But in AZ what they did was at the very least as secure of a form of authentication as a state id.

Second, I will say that there is also a difference between authentication and authorization. Authentication is authenticating you are who you say you are. Authorization is the authority granting you the permission to do something, like voting. These are two separate issues. Increasing security of authentication does not necessarily mean the authorization layer is fixed. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If you ask me, the authorization level (voter registration) leaves more to be desired from a security standpoint than the authentication layer, since mail-in ballots still used multi-factor authentication in some form combined with serialization of anonymous paper ballots to prevent ballot spoofing and have full traceability and immutability (a paper ballot is a document that can always be re-reviewed in the future). Not to mention, that the authentication required to register to vote was equal to the authentication required to vote by mail.

Lastly, I will state that all of these things vary by state. Each state is in charge of their own election. The federal government has no oversight into this stuff currently. They give a state a certain amount of electors, and it's on the state to decide how to use and secure them. This shows one of the weaknesses in a distributed government. Each states processes, laws, etc are completely different from anothers. What is legal in one state is illegal in another. So that means that it would be incredibly difficult to change things across the whole country... as you have to make changes separately in 50 individual states instead of changes in 1 federal government. So while elections are a cross-cutting concern, they are not run that way. There are 50 completely separate elections that happen. There is a lot of complexity in this distributed system, and as such there really is no such thing as a perfect across the board solution.

So, you can all see that even though I do believe that a) the election outcome on the whole was not fraudulent and b) that the 2020 election was MUCH MORE secure than the 2016 election, I'm still definitely in the camp that election security can and should be increased to prevent these kinds of issues in the future. Security is always an evolving topic. There are always new threats that come up. We always will have to be agile and iterate on these changes over time to stay ahead of the curve. There also is no such thing as a 100% perfectly secure system. At some point you always reach that cost/benefit point of deciding when is the right amount of investment to secure a system vs the potential risks of the system being compromised. If there were infinite dollars and time every systems security could always be improved. But at what point is it "good enough"?

[Mark Leavy]

The ID should also be federally issued and specify the current residence. Basically that's a passport (book or card).

My passport book and card don't show residency.

Edit: Passport photo removed. To avoid setting a bad example.

[sophie]

Um Mark...posting your passport on the internet?????

You're right it just shows place of birth. You'd have to have a second ID showing residence. That would bring us back to the problem of duplicate voting across state lines, but at least it would prevent non-citizens from voting.

Also with a federal document you could in fact detect duplicate voting. You wouldn't know which vote was legit, but you could make a statute that anyone caught duplicate voting would have all their votes disqualified, be barred from voting for a set period, and face criminal charges as well.

Until something like this is implemented, we will never know the extent of duplicate voting. Could be pretty substantial, especially when a densely populated state (e.g. CA) neighbors thinly populated states (NV, AZ).

[Mark Leavy]

Um Mark...posting your passport on the internet?????

Yea
I'll take it down in a bit. But I'm not hard to dox, so it isn't much additional risk for me.

[pmward]

Um Mark...posting your passport on the internet?????

You're right it just shows place of birth. You'd have to have a second ID showing residence. That would bring us back to the problem of duplicate voting across state lines, but at least it would prevent non-citizens from voting.

Also with a federal document you could in fact detect duplicate voting. You wouldn't know which vote was legit, but you could make a statute that anyone caught duplicate voting would have all their votes disqualified, be barred from voting for a set period, and face criminal charges as well.

Until something like this is implemented, we will never know the extent of duplicate voting. Could be pretty substantial, especially when a densely populated state (e.g. CA) neighbors thinly populated states (NV, AZ).

Yeah, the multi-state thing is difficult. As I mentioned in my own post the difficulty of having 50 separate elections is really problematic. Without the federal government assuming control over the elections it's very difficult to combat that potential vulnerability. It would require all 50 states to work together. Chalk this one up in the column of why libertarian distributed government can be incredibly inefficient. The same exact potential security threat has to be solved 50 times instead of just once.

This is also part of what I was referring to when I said it's the "authorization" part that I see as more problematic than the "authentication" part. Just proving someone is who they say they are is only half the battle. And since the form of authentication required to register to vote is the same authentication required to vote by mail, we can't really beat up the voting authentication side of the coin too much. The other half of the battle is how a state authorizes voting permissions (ie voter registration). If someone is registered to vote in 2 separate states for example, that's an authorization problem not an authentication problem. Requiring a physical ID does nothing to close that potential threat. This also begs the question of has this vulnerability been compromised? I don't think we have the data either way right now to say that it has. So it would be wrong to assume it has without proof. That being said, even if it wasn't exploited doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find a way to close the potential vulnerability if it exists.

[sophie]

Two paragraphs pmward? Outstanding! It made it possible for me to read your post. Thanks.

I completely agree that there are two separate issues here, and that the current methods are not adequate to safeguard the voting system.

Requiring a federal ID (with passport # recorded along with the vote) would help for both the issues you named, if accompanied by an oversight program similar to E-verify. Duplicate voting would be very simple to catch. For authentication, the federal ID could be compared to the voter name on the rolls, and discrepancies flagged automatically. Also, federal IDs are harder to get than driver's licenses and there is less likelihood of a non-citizen getting one and using it to vote. Also ,the federal IDs should be linked to the National Death Index so they can be cancelled automatically after a person is deceased.

Just identifying the extent of these types of voter fraud completely worthwhile all by itself. And the increased probability of getting caught might also reduce the problem.

[pmward]

Two paragraphs pmward? Outstanding! It made it possible for me to read your post. Thanks.

I completely agree that there are two separate issues here, and that the current methods are not adequate to safeguard the voting system.

Requiring a federal ID (with passport # recorded along with the vote) would help for both the issues you named, if accompanied by an oversight program similar to E-verify. Duplicate voting would be very simple to catch. For authentication, the federal ID could be compared to the voter name on the rolls, and discrepancies flagged automatically. Also, federal IDs are harder to get than driver's licenses and there is less likelihood of a non-citizen getting one and using it to vote. Also ,the federal IDs should be linked to the National Death Index so they can be cancelled automatically after a person is deceased.

Just identifying the extent of these types of voter fraud completely worthwhile all by itself. And the increased probability of getting caught might also reduce the problem.

Federal ID would only count for authentication not authorization. Also, you then would have a disparity in that the authentication required to vote is higher than the authentication required to register to vote. This really doesn't make sense. So my point is still that Federal ID does nothing for authorization. Now using a federal ID in conjunction with a state ID (or some other form of 2 factor authentication) would definitely make the authentication side of things stronger. It's more difficult to create both a fraudulent federal ID and a fraudulent state ID than it is to create one or the other for instance. But I personally think that when I put my security hat on that the authorization side of things is still the weakest link in the chain. There are a few ways to improve the authorization issues. You can create a federal database that states audit agains, have a separate federal registration, create some centralized block chain token system with 1 token per social, or having the Federal government take over the presidential election entirely.

Personally, I think the most secure way is the centralized block chain token system. Each social gets issued 1 token to vote. It's impossible to spoof tokens. The blockchain ledger is fool-proof, the entire audit trail is immutable, distributed, replicated, and fully traceable. Nobody could ever dispute the result, as the entire ledger with every single transaction would be logged each step of the way. This token holds your authorization. The authorization is centralized and standard for all 50 states. Then authentication really is only necessary to receive your token from the state.