This "Obamacare" for which you need an ID to sign up must only be available in the same "California" where you need an ID to vote.

Apparently so. Why do you suppose there's so much misinformation and ignorance about this stuff? For instance, I've signed up people in Oregon to vote. It's interesting that the Oregon GOP never does voter registration drives. It's always Democrats. But when I hand out registration forms, all you have to do is provide your name, address, and one of the following.

https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/vr/register.do?lang=eng&source=SOS

photo identification
a utility bill
a government document
a paycheck stub
a bank statement
proof of eligibility under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) or the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act (VAEH)

From that point, we can vote by mail. You'd think with a system this lax, GOPers could find endless instances of fraud.

And yet...?

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/04/vote_fraud_is_extremely_rare_a.html
 
This statement got me curious, so I googled "GOP voter registration drive".

The results were hilariously ironic.

Ha! I found a PDF of the form you need to vote by mail here.

http://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Documents/SEL500.pdf

Note again, that even though this system is incredibly open, the penalties for fraud are stiff and there have been just a handful of cases over many, many years. And yet, the GOP keeps pushing these laws. It's almost as if they have another agenda here?

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2...-laws-are-gonna-allow-governor-romney-to-win/

“We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we’ve talked about for years,” said Turzai in a speech to committee members Saturday. He mentioned the law among a laundry list of accomplishments made by the GOP-run legislature.
“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
 
If I recall correctly, the last time I saw the numbers, there's only one state that's gerrymandered in favor of Democrats, while there are a fair few gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.

It's only Illinois, where politicians are so corrupt that any party in charge would be doing it.

http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-1-busting-the-both-sides-do-it-myth/

Okay, let's not go into partisan overload. Gerrymandering is a tradition in state houses. Since the mid 70s the GOP had a nationwide policy of running to take control of the state houses just so they'd be there when the inevitable redistricting occurred after the various national census(es).

But you really can't limit it to Illinois as the Dems have written some creative districts of their own in various other states throughout the years. It's the party in power that seems to do it and the GOP controls more states. And, I suppose, kudos to them for recognizing this and spending tens of millions targeting those states so they could actually do so. They gamed the system and as long as the system is in place, what's to prevent the vaunted DNC polling and motivating sector from doing the same thing? We need to do nationwide like they did in California - turn the redistricting over to a neutral body.
 
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So there is no fraud now, but there might be, sometime, somewhere, in the future. So we need to do this proactively.
And statistics on the claim that fraud is virtually non-existent can be misleading because there's severe under enforcement and under reporting by the same election boards that provide the data to support it. New York's Moreland Commission on Public Corruption for example found that election fraud complaints were hardly investigated, languishing for years without any action.

Further, as one other member pointed out, what motivation is there to a congressman who benefits from this kind of thing to ameliorate it?

it's not a secret the only reason they support voter ID laws is to disenfranchise voters. There are plenty of Republican politicians that have been caught on tape saying so.
Maybe instead of asserting that all of the voter ID law concepts are racist and motivated to disenfranchise voters you can actually substantiate it? I'm open to giving leeway that there are a some politicians that would want it to do just that, but where's your proof that this is a disease to the whole argument? This University survey of voters in the states of Maryland, Indiana, and Mississippi found that fewer the 0.5 percent of respondents had neither photo ID nor citizenship documentation. Given that proper ID is required for such everyday errands as buying alcohol, cigarettes, entering certain commercial buildings and registering a vehicle one's anecdotal evidence would back up the findings.

I just signed up for health insurance (there's no policy called "Obamacare") and I didn't have to provide ID. I did it over the phone. Do you support voting by phone, since the two are the same in your mind?

This "Obamacare" for which you need an ID to sign up must only be available in the same "California" where you need an ID to vote.

You already have an ID card for your health insurance. It's called an insurance ID card. You know, the one you get a membership card from your health insurance that stipulates what coverage you have. Most doctors offices with an insurance network already require that you have this if you want to use it to apply your coverage to the treatments rendered. I assume you both must know this or otherwise you wouldn't be benefiting from whatever coverage you purchased when you visit them.

Further, the ACA marketplace requires you to verify your identity using a social security number and your place of address before you can select an insurance option. You also have to verify your identity which was done through a series of questions that confirm you know certain things that are public record, like your license plate number (which ties to you through your vehicle registration), or what high school you attended (which is in transcripts).

Further still, the IRS also already has records from the above that you've registered or otherwise you get slapped with a tax penalty.

So in effect, you already meet ID requirements the moment you signed up for it. Do you think having to provide these identifying informational details as a form of ID would disenfranchise the poor and/or non-insured from signing up? Apparently not if the success rates for Obama-care are categorically positive as you all cite in those ACA threads, especially if the signups are meeting or exceeding the Obama admin's estimates.

Apparently so. Why do you suppose there's so much misinformation and ignorance about this stuff? For instance, I've signed up people in Oregon to vote. It's interesting that the Oregon GOP never does voter registration drives. It's always Democrats. But when I hand out registration forms, all you have to do is provide your name, address, and one of the following.
You say it as if democrats have no ulterior motive to do the voter drives. There's a very heavily legitimate component to them so I'm not attributing all kinds of malice to the idea, but the key is that they also benefit by getting the vote out because more turnout overall means that they can count on at least some of that being more turnout for them and by consequence they have better success at the polls. It's an undeniable fact that if republicans don't get the vote out that they need they're making a huge mistake because just how do they expect to win elections if they can't even give their voting base sufficient drive to turnout at the polls? Seems obvious to me that the party would take advantage of the republicans' lack of an organized get out the vote campaign. It benefits them naturally which provides the motivation to do it.
 
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And statistics on the claim that fraud is virtually non-existent can be misleading because there's severe under enforcement and under reporting by the same election boards that provide the data to support it. New York's Moreland Commission on Public Corruption for example found that election fraud complaints were hardly investigated, languishing for years without any action.

You have republicans at every level of government, and every level of the voting process. It has been many years now that the GOP has been pushing voter ID and other restrictive voting laws. They've spend untold amounts drafting, passing, and promoting these laws as well as going through numerous courts every time it keeps getting struck down. You can bet your ass they have been looking very hard and doing everything they can to find cases to point to because it would solidify their argument. In all that time, in the entire country, they have come up with jack squat. For your argument to make sense the entire population of republicans must be so incompetent that despite their certainty it is occurring everywhere they can't find it even when looking intently. That or some massive conspiracy to not investigate voter fraud, even in republican controlled areas in which it is the republican AG's job to find such things. Either way I'm not buying it. And as others have mentioned, there are instances in which republican (incumbents or candidates, can't recall off top of my head) have slipped and said voter ID is to punish Dems in elections.

Or to go back to my intentionally ridiculous counter-example. It's really hard to prove those farmers aren't really terrorists in disguise. It can be hard to prove since they have all those carefully forged documents. I mean it must be hard to find them if they keep carrying out terrorist attacks. We need those new Terrorist Farm Inspection laws.
 
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And statistics on the claim that fraud is virtually non-existent can be misleading because there's severe under enforcement and under reporting by the same election boards that provide the data to support it. New York's Moreland Commission on Public Corruption for example found that election fraud complaints were hardly investigated, languishing for years without any action.
Claims of underenforcement were examined by the court in Frank v. Walker, and found to be without merit--in fact, Wisconsin is highly vigilant and proactive about detection and enforcement. Generalizing from claims about a specific board of election to all boards of election is therefore a mistake. At least some states actively search for in-person voter impersonation fraud, and they don't find it.

(Also, you plagiarized the second sentence of that paragraph, which I note only to point out how much easier it is than people sometimes imagine to detect fraud.)

Further, as one other member pointed out, what motivation is there to a congressman who benefits from this kind of thing to ameliorate it?
If you take a completely cynical view, he would be motivated if the other guy benefits more. If you think politicians are occasionally motivated by something other than pure self-interest, then he would be motivated to do something about it in the name of free and fair elections.

This University survey of voters in the states of Maryland, Indiana, and Mississippi found that fewer the 0.5 percent of respondents had neither photo ID nor citizenship documentation.
An obvious problem with this survey is that it makes no attempt to determine whether respondents have a valid photo ID, which is one reason it disagrees with every other survey I've seen on the topic. We know from those other surveys (including the survey of Milwaukee voters examined by the court) that people significantly over-report possessing valid (for the purposes of these laws) photo IDs. In Wisconsin, about 9.5% of eligible voters do not possess a valid ID, and 32% of those do not possess a birth certificate or other means of establishing citizenship.

Given that proper ID is required for such everyday errands as buying alcohol, cigarettes, entering certain commercial buildings and registering a vehicle one's anecdotal evidence would back up the findings.
This doesn't rise to the level of anecdotal evidence. It's rank speculation based on limited personal experience and at least one misconception, which is contradicted by the best available evidence.
 
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Okay, let's not go into partisan overload.

Partisan overload? Not in the least. I'm speaking about the current situation. I generally deplore gerrymandering, regardless, however, and hold little love for either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Yet, the recent Republican party seems to be more objectionable than it used to be and the gap in the number of states which are gerrymandered by each is disproportionately large.
 
Partisan overload? Not in the least. I'm speaking about the current situation. I generally deplore gerrymandering, regardless, however, and hold little love for either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Yet, the recent Republican party seems to be more objectionable than it used to be and the gap in the number of states which are gerrymandered by each is disproportionately large.

I'm not disagreeing with you,... well, not all that much... But it's certainly not solely Illinois and the ebil Democratic machine that's doing it on the Dem side. Take a look at NJ's 12th and NY's 6th, for examples.

I agree, though, that the GOP has made a concerted effort and that the results are a far worse distortion of the public's voting than the voter ID movement. I'm trying to find a NYT article that put some great figures together. (Gimme a sec, here.)

Ah, Google really is my friend... Here's the article I was thinking of...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all

And here's an interesting counterpoint, also from the Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-geography-stupid.html?_r=0

It should be noted that the counterpoint does not really disagree with the first article. It's just pointing out that the GOP majority in the House would not be as great as it is, but they'd still win, even with more Dem votes state and nationwide...

Ultimately, though, isn't that the intention of the House? To give representation across the states. I've seen proposals that we apportion the House seats according to the statewide vote. How is that different from the Senatorial elections, other than in numbers and the fact that it's the lower house?

I think neither article gives enough credit (blame) to the GOP efforts in Ohio, though. You've got an area Cleveland/Akron/Canton, that has almost 1/3 of the state. By nice line-drawing, they managed to weaken the Democratic districts in that area and the Dems got 46% of the votes (for House) statewide, but 25% of the seats! And, somewhat counter to the point in the second (counter) article, if you squared off some of the Gerrymandered house districts, you'd probably get a Dem seat out of the northwest (Toledo is included in a district with suburban Cleveland, fer crissake!!) and probably another in the northeast. But that'd be two additional seats... maybe a third (Congressional District 16, I'm looking at you!)...

So instead of four House seats, the Dems would get six (of 16) or maybe 7. Since the GOP and Libertarians polled 53% of the state, 7 would be the most accurate, but I could live with 6. But 4?? That's absurd.
 
Yes, just like all those other racist and ageist countries throughout the world.

Do you have a reason why we need voter ID yet, or is pointless responses like this your way of conceding that not one good argument has been made yet in this thread for why its needed?
 
Do you have a reason why we need voter ID yet, or is pointless responses like this your way of conceding that not one good argument has been made yet in this thread for why its needed?
Just trying to make a little effort to improve the process, a little fraud protection and get stop the folk in cemeteries from still voting. I refuse to believe that people are too dumb to have or get an ID.
 
Just trying to make a little effort to improve the process
Restricting people’s right to vote in the interest of preventing something that doesn’t happen is the opposite of making things a little better ;)
 
Restricting people’s right to vote in the interest of preventing something that doesn’t happen is the opposite of making things a little better ;)

Wrong! It improves the probability of Republican wins in elections.
 
Just trying to make a little effort to improve the process, a little fraud protection and get stop the folk in cemeteries from still voting. I refuse to believe that people are too dumb to have or get an ID.

Your response has been thoroughly addressed several times by several people in this thread.

Keep trying.
 
Do you have a reason why we need voter ID yet, or is pointless responses like this your way of conceding that not one good argument has been made yet in this thread for why its needed?
Reasonable requirements to help insure honest elections. Like all the other countries that do it.

Restricting people’s right to vote in the interest of preventing something that doesn’t happen is the opposite of making things a little better ;)
Funny how all the other countries that have voter ID laws on the books don't have issues with restricting peoples right to vote. The left wing in the US is of the opinion that old people and certain races are too stupid to acquire any of the many forms of ID that these voter ID laws propose.
 
Funny how all the other countries that have voter ID laws on the books don't have issues with restricting peoples right to vote. The left wing in the US is of the opinion that old people and certain races are too stupid to acquire any of the many forms of ID that these voter ID laws propose.

Funny how pointing to other countries as examples for writing laws is something the right wing used to hate.

But even if other countries do have voter ID laws, it's already been pointed out to you that they have much more lax requirements to obtain the IDs, and that more importantly, they don't have our history of racists in the South doing everything they can to keep "certain races" from voting. It's not a happy coincidence that nearly all of the states that want to pass these laws are the same ones who promoted segregation and Jim Crow laws.

But you're still left with this steaming pile of turds that you're trying to dress up with perfume: a law passed to address a non-existent problem, focused primarily in states with histories of racial discrimination, that come with vague promises of future legislation that will alleviate all the pain they'll cause people right now.
 
Reasonable requirements to help insure honest elections. Like all the other countries that do it.

Your response has been thoroughly addressed several times by several people in this thread.

Keep trying.
 
Have you noticed the straw-man here? They believe that showing evidence that there are plenty of people that would be disenfranchised if Voter ID was passed is saying "minorities and old people are too stupid to get ID's." I wonder if they actually believe this trickery will work.
 
But even if other countries do have voter ID laws, it's already been pointed out to you that they have much more lax requirements to obtain the IDs,
And as has been pointed out, the states trying pass voter ID have multiple ID options in addition to many of them offering provisional voting with the ID to follow. The difficulty of obtaining ID is a bogus argument. It's simply the liberal excuse for their hidden belief that some races aren't smart enough to meet the requirements.


But you're still left with this steaming pile of turds that you're trying to dress up with perfume: a law passed to address a non-existent problem,
Yep that same non-existent problem that most other countries seem to be concerned with.


Your response has been thoroughly addressed several times by several people in this thread.
See the above and keep trying trying to convince yourself that most other countries are somehow not racist while the US is.
 

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