France has too many French

[Lord Jim]

Man, you are really hard up for evidence to support your argument if you have to resort to citing the work of a leftist hack like Lorraine Minnite....

Next you'll be quoting Michael Moore...

If I cited the work of someone as shamelessly right-wing as Minnite is left-wing as proof for some position, you'd be on me like a cheap suit...

[Sue U]

So a university political science professor at a prestigious institution whose research material is vetted through a university press at another prestigious instution is unqualified to present that analysis of information in her field?

Do you have some contrary academic (or otherwise professional) analysis?

Note I didn't cite Michael Moore.

[Lord Jim]

The "myth" here is the idea that registration and voting by non-citizens is a myth. It is well documented, and widespread.:

In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens. While that may not seem like many, just 3 percent of registered voters would have been more than enough to provide the winning presiden­tial vote margin in Florida in 2000. Indeed, the Cen­sus Bureau estimates that there are over a million illegal aliens in Florida, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has prosecuted more non-citizen voting cases in Florida than in any other state.

Florida is not unique. Thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may be present on the voter rolls nationwide. These numbers are significant: Local elections are often decided by only a handful of votes, and even national elections have likely been within the margin of the number of non-citizens ille­gally registered to vote.

Yet there is no reliable method to determine the number of non-citizens registered or actually voting because most laws to ensure that only citizens vote are ignored, are inadequate, or are systematically undermined by government officials. Those who ignore the implications of non-citizen registration and voting either are willfully blind to the problem or may actually favor this form of illegal voting.

Americans may disagree on many areas of immi­gration policy, but not on the basic principle that only citizens—and not non-citizens, whether legally present or not—should be able to vote in elections. Unless and until immigrants become citizens, they must respect the laws that bar non-citizen voting. To keep non-citizens from diluting citizens' votes, immigration and election officials must cooperate far more effectively than they have to date, and state and federal officials must increase their efforts to enforce the laws against non-citizen voting that are already on the books.

An Enduring Problem

Costas Bakouris, head of the Greek chapter of Transparency International, says in an interview that ending corruption is easy: enforce the law. Illegal voting by immigrants in America is noth­ing new. Almost as long as there have been elec­tions, there have been Tammany Halls trying to game the ballot box. Well into the 20th century, the political machines asserted their ascendancy on Election Day, stealing elections in the boroughs of New York and the wards of Chicago. Quite regu­larly, Irish immigrants were lined up and counted in canvasses long before the term "citizen" ever applied to them—and today it is little different.

Yet in the debates over what to do about the 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens estimated to be in the United States, there has been virtually no discus­sion of how to ensure that they (and millions of legal aliens) do not register and vote in elections.

Citizenship is and should be a basic requirement for voting. Citizenship is a legal requirement to vote in federal and state elections, except for a small number of local elections in a few jurisdictions.

Some Americans argue that alien voting is a non­existent problem or dismiss reported cases of non-citizen voting as unimportant because, they claim, there are no cases in which non-citizens "intention­ally" registered to vote or voted "while knowing that they were ineligible." Even if this latter claim were true—which it is not—every vote cast by a non-citizen, whether an illegal alien or a resident alien legally in the country, dilutes or cancels the vote of a citizen and thus disenfranchises him or her. To dismiss such stolen votes because the non-citizens supposedly did not know they were acting illegally when they cast a vote debases one of the most important rights of citizens.

The evidence is indisputable that aliens, both legal and illegal, are registering and voting in federal, state, and local elections. Following a mayor's race in Compton, California, for example, aliens testi­fied under oath in court that they voted in the elec­tion. In that case, a candidate who was elected to the city council was permanently disqualified from holding public office in California for soliciting non-citizens to register and vote. The fact that non-citizens registered and voted in the election would never have been discovered except for the fact that it was a very close election and the in­cumbent mayor, who lost by less than 300 votes, contested it.

Similarly, a 1996 congressional race in California may have been stolen by non-citizen voting. Republican incumbent Bob Dornan was defending himself against a spirited challenger, Democrat Lor­etta Sanchez. Sanchez won the election by just 979 votes, and Dornan contested the election in the U.S. House of Representatives. His challenge was dismissed after an investigation by the House Com­mittee on Oversight and Government Reform turned up only 624 invalid votes by non-citizens who were present in the U.S. Immigration and Nat­uralization Service (INS) database because they had applied for citizenship, as well as another 124 improper absentee ballots. The investigation, however, could not detect illegal aliens, who were not in the INS records.

The Oversight Committee pointed out the ele­phant in the room: "If there is a significant num­ber of ‘documented aliens,' aliens in INS records, on the Orange County voter registration rolls, how many illegal or undocumented aliens may be regis­tered to vote in Orange County?" There is a strong possibility that, with only about 200 votes determining the winner, enough undetected aliens registered and voted to change the outcome of the election. This is particularly true since the California Secretary of State complained that the INS refused his request to check the entire Orange County voter registration file, and no complete check of all of the individuals who voted in the congressional race was ever made.

The "Quick Ticket"

Non-citizen voting is likely growing at the same rate as the alien population in the United States; but because of deficiencies in state law and the failure of federal agencies to comply with federal law, there are almost no procedures in place that allow election officials to detect, deter, and prevent non-citizens from registering and voting. Instead, officials are largely dependent on an "honor sys­tem" that expects aliens to follow the law. There are numerous cases showing the failure of this honor system.

The frequent claim that illegal aliens do not reg­ister in order "to stay below the radar" misses the fact that many aliens apparently believe that the potential benefit of registering far outweighs the chances of being caught and prosecuted. Many district attorneys will not prosecute what they see as a "victimless and non-violent" crime that is not a priority.

On the benefit side of the equation, a voter regis­tration card is an easily obtainable document—they are routinely issued without any checking of identi­fication—that an illegal alien can use for many dif­ferent purposes, including obtaining a driver's license, qualifying for a job, and even voting. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, for example, requires employers to verify that all newly hired employees present documentation verifying their identity and legal authorization to work in the United States. In essence, this means that new employees have to present evidence that they are either U.S. citizens or legal aliens with a work per­mit. The federal I-9 form that employers must com­plete for all new employees provides a list of documentation that can be used to establish iden­tity—including a voter registration card.

How aliens view the importance of this benefit was illustrated by the work of a federal grand jury in 1984 that found large numbers of aliens regis­tered to vote in Chicago. As the grand jury reported, many aliens "register to vote so that they can obtain documents identifying them as U.S. citizens" and have "used their voters' cards to obtain a myriad of benefits, from social security to jobs with the De­fense Department." The U.S. Attorney at the time estimated that there were at least 80,000 illegal aliens registered to vote in Chicago, and dozens were indicted and convicted for registering and voting.

The grand jury's report resulted in a limited cleanup of the voter registration rolls in Chicago, but just one year later, INS District Director A. D. Moyer testified before a state legislative task force that 25,000 illegal and 40,000 legal aliens remained on the rolls in Chicago. Moyer told the Illinois Senate that non-citizens registered so they could get a voter registration card for identification, adding that the card was "a quick ticket into the unemployment compensation system." An alien from Belize, for example, testified that he and his two sisters were able to register easily because they were not asked for any identification or proof of citizenship and lied about where they were born. After securing registration, he voted in Chicago.

Once such aliens are registered, of course, they receive the same encouragement to vote from campaigns' and parties' get-out-the-vote programs and advertisements that all other registered voters receive. Political actors have no way to distinguish between individuals who are properly registered and non-citizens who are illegally registered.

A Failure to Cooperate

Obtaining an accurate assessment of the size of this problem is difficult. There is no systematic review of voter registration rolls by states to find non-citizens, and the relevant federal agencies—in direct violation of federal law—refuse to cooperate with state election officials seeking to verify the citi­zenship status of registered voters. Federal immigra­tion law requires these agencies to "respond to an inquiry by a Federal, State, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency for any purpose autho­rized by law, by providing the requested verification or status information," regardless of any other pro­vision of federal law, such as the Privacy Act. However, examples of refusal to cooperate are legion:

-- In declining to cooperate with a request by Maryland to check the citizenship status of individuals registered to vote there, a spokes­man for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) mistakenly declared that the agency could not release that information because "it is important to safeguard the confidentiality of each legal immigrant, especially in light of the federal Privacy Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act."

One surprising result of this policy: In 2004, a guilty verdict in a murder trial in Maryland was jeopardized because a non-citizen was discov­ered on the jury—which had been chosen from the voter rolls.

-- In 2005, Sam Reed, the Secretary of State of Washington, asked the CIS to check the immi­gration status of registered voters in Washing­ton; the agency refused to cooperate.

-- A request from the Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Registration and Elections in 1998 to the old Immigration and Naturalization Service to check the immigration status of 775 regis­tered voters was likewise refused for want of a notarized consent from each voter because of "federal privacy act" concerns.

-- In 1997, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office in Dallas were investigating voting by non-citi­zens. They sent a computerized tape of the names of individuals who had voted to the INS requesting a check against INS records, but the INS refused to cooperate with the criminal investigation. An INS official was quoted as saying that the INS bureaucracy did not "want to open a Pandora's Box…. If word got out that this is a substantial problem, it could tie up all sorts of manpower. There might be a few thou­sand [illegal voters] in Dallas, for example, but there could be tens of thousands in places like New York, Chicago or Miami."

These incidents show that the CIS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the successor agencies to the INS, are either igno­rant of federal legal requirements or deliberately ignoring them. An inquiry by a state or local election official regarding voter eligibility based on citizenship falls squarely within their statu­tory authority.

To be sure, CIS and ICE databases are not comprehensive; they contain information only about legal immigrants who have applied for the documentation necessary to be in the United States and illegal immigrants who have been detained. But even access to that information would be a big step forward for election officials in their attempts to try to clean up registration lists and find those aliens who are illegally registered and voting in elections.

The Honor System

The refusal of federal agencies to obey the law compels local election officials to rely almost en­tirely on the "honor system" to keep non-citizens from the polls. As Maryland's state election adminis­trator has complained, "There is no way of check­ing…. We have no access to any information about who is in the United States legally or otherwise."

Most discoveries of non-citizens on the registra­tion rolls are therefore accidental. Though the Department of Justice has no procedures in place for a systematic investigation of these types of crim­inal violations, in just a three year period, it prose­cuted and convicted more than a dozen non-citizens who registered and voted in federal elec­tions in Alaska, Florida, the District of Columbia, and Colorado. Among them was an alien in southern Florida, Rafael Velasquez, who not only voted, but even ran for the state legislature. Eight of the 19 September 11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida—registrations that were probably obtained when they applied for driver's licenses.

In 1994, Mario Aburto Martinez, a Mexican national and the assassin of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, was found to have registered twice to vote in California. A random sample of just 10 percent of the 3,000 Hispanics registered to vote in California's 39th Assembly District by an independent group "revealed phony addresses and large numbers of registrants who admitted they were not U.S. citi­zens." This problem may be partially explained by the testimony of a Hispanic member of the Los Angeles Police Department who had been a volun­teer for the California-based Southwest Voter Reg­istration Education Project. When she reported to her supervisor that her fellow volunteers were not asking potential voters whether they were citizens, she was reprimanded "and told that she was not to ask that question…only whether the person wished to register to vote." Similarly, the Dor­nan–Sanchez investigation produced an affidavit from a non-citizen stating that the Sanchez cam­paign's field director, an elected member of the Anaheim Board of Education, told him that it "didn't matter" that he was not a U.S. citizen—he should register and vote anyway.

In 2006, Paul Bettencourt, Voter Registrar for Harris County, Texas, testified before the U.S. Com­mittee on House Administration that the extent of illegal voting by foreign citizens in Harris County was impossible to determine but "that it has and will continue to occur." Twenty-two percent of county residents, he explained, were born outside of the United States, and more than 500,000 were non-citizens. Bettencourt noted that he cancelled the registration of a Brazilian citizen in 1996 after she acknowledged on a jury summons that she was not a U.S. citizen. Despite that cancellation, how­ever, "She then reapplied in 1997, again claiming to be a U.S. citizen, and was again given a voter card, which was again cancelled. Records show she was able to vote at least four times in general and primary elections."

In 2005, Bettencourt's office turned up at least 35 cases in which foreign nationals applied for or received voter cards, and he pointed out that Harris County regularly had "elections decided by one, two, or just a handful of votes." In fact, a Norwe­gian citizen was discovered to have voted in a state legislative race in Harris County that was decided by only 33 votes. Nor is this problem unique to Harris County. Recent reports indicate that hun­dreds of illegal aliens registered to vote in Bexar County, Texas, and that at least 41 of them have voted, some several times, in a dozen local, state, and federal elections.

In 2005, Arizona passed Proposition 200, which requires anyone registering to vote to provide "sat­isfactory evidence of United States citizenship," such as a driver's license, a birth certificate, a pass­port, naturalization documents, or any other docu­ments accepted by the federal government to prove citizenship for employment purposes. The state issues a "Type F" driver's license to individuals who are legally present in the United States but are not citizens. Since Proposition 200 took effect, 2,177 non-citizens applying for such licenses have attempted to register to vote. Another 30,000 have been denied registration because they could not produce evidence of citizenship.

The constitutionality of Arizona's requirement is currently being litigated in federal court. The dis­trict court hearing the case refused to issue a pre­liminary injunction against enforcement of the law, and the Supreme Court vacated a preliminary injunction issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Trial is scheduled for July 2008. The plaintiffs will have to convince the presiding judge that the very same proof of citizenship required by the federal government before an individual can work is somehow unlawful when imposed by a state before a person can vote.

Some non-citizen registrations can be detected through the jury process. The vast majority of state and federal courts draw their jury pools from voter registration lists, and the jury questionnaires used by court clerks ask potential jurors whether they are U.S. citizens. In most states, however, and throughout the federal court system, court clerks rarely notify local election officials that potential jurors have sworn under oath that they are not U.S. citizens. In jurisdictions that share that informa­tion, election officials routinely discover non-citi­zens on the voter rolls. For example, the district attorney in Maricopa County, Arizona, testified that after receiving a list of potential jurors who admit­ted they were not citizens, he indicted 10 who had registered to vote. (All had sworn on their registra­tion forms that they were U.S. citizens.) Four had actually voted in elections. The district attorney was investigating 149 other cases.

The county recorder in Maricopa County had also received inquiries from aliens seeking verifica­tion, for their citizenship applications, that they had not registered or voted. Thirty-seven of those aliens had registered to vote, and 15 of them had actually voted. As the county's district attorney explained, these numbers come "from a relatively small universe of individuals—legal immigrants who seek to become citizens…. These numbers do not tell us how many illegal immigrants have regis­tered and voted." Even these small numbers, though, could have been enough to sway an elec­tion. A 2004 Arizona primary election, explained the district attorney, was determined by just 13 votes. Clearly, non-citizens who illegally registered and voted in Maricopa County could have deter­mined the outcome of the election.

These numbers become more alarming when one considers that only a very small percentage of regis­tered voters are called for jury duty in most jurisdic­tions. The California Secretary of State reported in 1998 that 2,000 to 3,000 of the individuals sum­moned for jury duty in Orange County each month claimed an exemption from jury service because they were not U.S. citizens, and 85 percent to 90 percent of those individuals were summoned from the voter registration list, rather than Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records. While some of those individuals may have simply committed per­jury to avoid jury service, this represents a signifi­cant number of potentially illegal voters: 20,400 to 30,600 non-citizens summoned from the voter reg­istration list over a one-year period.

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=691

And what's recorded here is obviously just the tip of the iceberg, given the way the Feds have tried to block and derail every serious effort to investigate this in a systematic way.

[Gob]

PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened in a key election rally to pull France out of Europe's 26-nation visa free zone unless the European Union does more to keep out illegal immigrants.

Mr Sarkozy, who this week said France had too many foreigners, made the threat at a mass meeting which he hopes will turn the tide against front-running Socialist Francois Hollande with just 42 days to go before election day.

The so-called Schengen passport-free zone must urgently be overhauled to fight the flow of illegal immigration, said the right-wing leader, returning to a constant theme in his bid for five more years at the Elysee palace.

To chants of "Nicolas, president!" from the tens of thousands in the flag-waving audience, Mr Sarkozy said unchecked immigration would put extra strain on social safety nets for Europe's poorest.

"In the coming 12 months, (if) there is no serious progress towards this (reforming Schengen), France would then suspend its participation in the Schengen accords until negotiations conclude," he declared.
...The Schengen area is home to 400 million Europeans who can cross borders without a passport, and once inside the area illegal immigrants can theoretically move freely between the participating states.

Mr Sarkozy accuses some EU states of having lax border controls that let in illegals who may later turn up in France.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/wo ... 6296812361

I wish Cameron would do the same.

[dgs49]

It is not necessary to prove past voter fraud in order to justify requiring a photo ID, any more than it is necessary to have been the victim of burglary to justify putting in a home security system.

There is simply no rational reason to oppose a photo ID requirement (provided the State provides a photo ID for free upon request and verification of identity). The Left has jumped on the "argument" that there is no proof of systemic fraud in the past, but so what? Most of us know personal examples of voter fraud in our own experience (I certainly do, dead people in Allegheny County have a higher participation rate than living people do), and the opportunities are rampant.

The hysterical reaction of Lefties to photo ID laws is very, very telling.

[Scooter]

As I posted before, when it went completely unanswered:

There are something like 3 million people in NYC alone who do not have a driver's licence. Obviously, most of them have managed to get through life until now without photo ID.

Much of the claim that photo ID requirement would not be much of a barrier for those who don't currently have rests on the assumption that it would be easy and cheap to obtain. But, think about this for a sec, if it were easy for people without ID to get ID, wouldn't that pretty much defeat the purpose of an ID requirement?

Let's look at an example that would not be at all uncommon - someone born in the U.S., without a driver's licence or passport, not in the military, school, or on the dole, who doesn't own a gun, isn't a member of a union, has no health or life insurance, and lives someplace where the utility bills are in someone else's name. In New York State, that person would be hard pressed to come up with the necessary "points requirement" from the documents they would possess in order to provide proof of name. Even if they did, they would still have to provide proof of date of birth, and since they don't have a driver's licence, passport, etc., the only option is a birth certificate. What if they don't have a copy of their birth certificate? What are the ID requirements to get one?:

A.One (1) of the following forms of valid photo-ID:
•Driver license
•State issued non-driver photo-ID card
•Passport
•U.S. Military issued photo-ID


B.Two (2) of the following showing the applicant's name and address:
•Utility or telephone bills
•Letter from a government agency dated within the last six (6) months

Anyone seeing the catch-22 yet?

It's never been about stopping voter fraud. It's all about trying to put roadblocks in the way of people who are unlikely to vote Republican.

[dgs49]

If you have the resources to get to the polls, then you have the resources to get a photo ID. If you lack the resources to get to the polls, then it's not an issue, is it?

People with no driver's license (and I have known many of them) typically carry around several alternative pieces of ID because you simply cannot get by without something. Under current banking laws, you cannot open a bank account with a photo ID. You cannot buy a drink or get a pack of smokes. EVERY U.S. employer is required to get a photo ID from EVERY NEW EMPLOYEE, in order to fill out the I-9 form. You cannot apply for welfare or unemployment compensation. The idea that there are millions of potential, U.S. citizen-voters who either don't have, or cannot get a photo ID is total B.S. People without driver's licenses? Sure. People without any photo ID? Maybe a couple.

But of course, ALL of such misfits would be voting Dem, which explains their reaction to these measures.

[Lord Jim]

If you have the resources to get to the polls, then you have the resources to get a photo ID.

I would disagree with that, (a lot polling places are within walking distance and many campaigns provide election day transportation free of charge) but it's irrelevant, because as I showed with research I posted here a while back, the vast majority (perhaps all at this point) of the states requiring voter IDs provide them free of charge when needed and are modeled on the Indiana law which has been upheld by the Supreme Court.

There's also growing evidence that the real "myth" here is that voter ID laws somehow "suppress" minority voting:

Laws requiring photo IDs suppress minority voting, Democrats charge. The facts say otherwise. In Georgia, black voter turnout for the midterm election in 2006 was 42.9 percent. After Georgia passed photo ID, black turnout in the 2010 midterm rose to 50.4 percent. Black turnout also rose in Indiana and Mississippi after photo IDs were required.

"Concerns about voter identification laws affecting turnout are much ado about nothing," concluded researchers at the universities of Delaware and Nebraska after examining election data from 2000 through 2006.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 12546.html

[Scooter]

People with no driver's license (and I have known many of them) typically carry around several alternative pieces of ID because you simply cannot get by without something. Under current banking laws, you cannot open a bank account with a photo ID. You cannot buy a drink or get a pack of smokes. EVERY U.S. employer is required to get a photo ID from EVERY NEW EMPLOYEE, in order to fill out the I-9 form. You cannot apply for welfare or unemployment compensation. The idea that there are millions of potential, U.S. citizen-voters who either don't have, or cannot get a photo ID is total B.S. People without driver's licenses? Sure. People without any photo ID? Maybe a couple.

So you say. And yet you are completely unable to refute what is evident from what I posted, that in New York State it would be virtually impossible for someone falling into the very common scenario which I described to get a state photo ID. Care to identify some other photo ID they would be eligible to receive that could be used as proof of elligibilty to vote? Didn't think so.

Thanks for playing.

[Andrew D]

This stuff is not designed to make voting impossible for any significant number of people who are entitled to vote. This stuff is designed to make voting an inconvenience for a significant number of people who are entitled to vote. Suppression, if one sees it that way, but even if so, supression of a very different kind.

Let's look at an example that would not be at all uncommon - someone born in the U.S., without a driver's licence or passport, not in the military, school, or on the dole, who doesn't own a gun, isn't a member of a union, has no health or life insurance, and lives someplace where the utility bills are in someone else's name. In New York State, that person would be hard pressed to come up with the necessary "points requirement" from the documents they would possess in order to provide proof of name.

Consider even someone in that situation. On what basis you describe that situation as "not ... at all uncommon" is not clear, and on what basis you have subsequently described it as "very common" is entirely mysterious.

But set that aside.

On the "points" part, a person needs four. (I'll get back to the "proof of date of birth" part later.)

Any person who has ever been married or divorced in the US gets two points. ("US Marriage or Divorce Record".)

Any person who has a Social Security card gets two points. ("US Social Security Card".) And if you can't find your Social Security card? Get a new one: Send the Social Security Administration your marriage or divorce record. Presto! Two points for the marriage or divorce record, that record gets you the new Social Security card, that's another two points, and you're done!

Any person who has a Social Security number (which is almost everyone, including those of us who cannot find our actual cards) and who has (legally) earned any taxable wages gets one point. ("W-2 Form (must have your social security number on it)".)

Any person who has ever finished high school (or even passed the "equivalency" test, which almost any competent eighth-grader could pass easily) in the US gets one point. ("US High School Diploma OR GED (General Equivalency Diploma)".)

Any person whose paystubs are printed by computer with her or his name on it -- careful about that one; after all, handwritten paystubs made out to no one in particular are so common these days --gets one point. ("US Computer Printed Paystub (must have your name)".)

Any person who has a bank account -- you know, the ones that various large banks will actually pay you to open with them -- gets one point. ("US Bank Statement".)

Any person who has a major credit card -- you know, the ones whose "pre-approved" applications show up in your mailbox every few days -- gets one point. ("Valid Major US Credit Card".) (Just get your credit card from a bank other than the one where you have your checking or savings account.)

Even for a person who has neither "a driver's licence or passport, [who is] not in the military, school, or on the dole, who doesn't own a gun, isn't a member of a union, has no health or life insurance, and lives someplace where the utility bills are in someone else's name," that's more than twice the points necessary. And unless one is living entirely off the grid -- in which case, why would one bother voting anyway? -- they are easy to get.

In fact, people who are not eligible to vote can (and do) get marriage licenses, divorce decrees, high-school diplomas, GEDs, computer-printed paystubs, bank statements and credit cards. Many non-citizens would have no difficulty amassing the required four points.

Hence, the original point: Yes, such measures will make it more inconvenient for some people than for others to qualify themselves as electors. And, yes, that burden of inconvenience will fall disproportionately on some groups. (Although I rather I doubt that the disproportion will be great as between poor white people and poor black people, and the former considerably outnumber the latter.) And there ought to be ways to make qualifying oneself as an elector easier.

But the notion that such measures will make voting "virtually impossible," as distinct from imposing a non-trivial -- and I emphasize non-trivial -- inconvenience, for a significant number of people is wildly overblown.

[Scooter]

they would still have to provide proof of date of birth, and since they don't have a driver's licence, passport, etc., the only option is a birth certificate. What if they don't have a copy of their birth certificate? What are the ID requirements to get one?:

A.One (1) of the following forms of valid photo-ID:
•Driver license
•State issued non-driver photo-ID card
•Passport
•U.S. Military issued photo-ID


B.Two (2) of the following showing the applicant's name and address:
•Utility or telephone bills
•Letter from a government agency dated within the last six (6) months

Anyone seeing the catch-22 yet?

[Jarlaxle]

You did not actually read Andrew's post, did you?

[Scooter]

Every word. Unfortunately, he only read the first portion of mine. Even if someone manages to have enough points to provide proof of name, they still have to provide proof of date of birth. And for someone in the situation I put forward, a birth certificate is the only way to do that, and the only way to do that is to have ID or other documentation that a person in the situation I put forward would not have.

As to the part he actually addressed, yes, anyone who can vote should have a Social Security card, so there's two points. High school diploma - I have no idea where mine is, it probably got thrown out when my parents moved out of the house I grew up in, and I suspect most people do not have them framed and on their walls, either. Someone who has always been a stay-at-home spouse/parents will not have paystubs. Someone who has all of their bank accounts/credit cards in their spouse's name will not get points that way. And someone who was not legally married to that spouse would not have a marriage certificate. So in those cases the potential eight points become only two.

[Jarlaxle]

Haven't checked personally, but I recall my brother was able to get a copy of his HS diploma a few years ago.

[Andrew D]

So now we're talking about a hypothetical person who has all of her or his bank and credit accounts in the name of a pseudo-spouse to whom he or she is not actually married? A person who has no bank or credit accounts in her or his own name, despite having bank and/or credit accounts, because he or she has placed them all in the name of a person who is not her or his spouse?

And whose high school is unable to produce her or his diploma?

Etc.?

How many such people should we imagine to exist?

As I posted, non-trivial but still wildly overblown.

Even if someone manages to have enough points to provide proof of name, they still have to provide proof of date of birth.

(I'll get back to the "proof of date of birth" part later.)

That particular "later" has not yet arrived.

[Scooter]

And whose high school is unable to produce her or his diploma?

And what ID would his/her high school require in order to release a copy of said diploma to him/her? Would it be ID that he/she doesn't have or else would not be needing to retrieve said diploma i.e. yet another catch-22?

[Andrew D]

Well, at least according to this

You may have to provide personal information, such as your full name, birth date, Social Security Number, date of graduation or when you left and your current contact information.

Mail the completed form, fee and a self-addressed and stamped envelope to the school. Once your request is processed, you should receive your school records in the mail.

Nothing there about having to show any ID of any sort to anyone.

[dgs49]

Or how about this: any adult who has gone through at least 18 years of existence in the U.S. and leaves an insufficient paper trail to get a free, state-provided Photo ID has done so intentionally, and should not be voting anyway.

A couple generations ago, mainly in The South, there were states that required that potential voters pass a "literacy test" in order to vote. These were ultimately tossed out by the Supreme Court, but I don't believe it was because the SC thought it was unreasonable to expect that voters be literate, but because they were often used as a subterfuge to deny "Negros" the right to vote.

But honestly, is it not entirely reasonable to demand a minimum level of awareness for someone to cast a vote? Can they read basic English? Do they have a basic understanding of the three branches of Government? Do they understand that the Federal Government and the State Governments have different powers and responsibilities? Do they understand the difference between a congressman, a governor, and a judge?

The people that Dems and the ACLU are fighting for - those with no paper trail in life - SHOULD NOT BE VOTING!

There. I said it.

[Scooter]

leaves an insufficient paper trail to get a free, state-provided Photo ID

Nice straw man.