Obama: Maybe it's time for mandatory voting

requiring a photo ID would get rid of most of it.

 

Does this mean no more mail in voting?

 

surely we can find ways around it. we do it for passports.

 

Bingo! Passport Card.

 

Droski, if members here were ranking members of the 2 parties I am sure we could work something out. Just have to balance IDs with voter turnout

 

that's a problem as well and probably where a decent percentage of the fraud comes from. we can issue an unique ID for people wanting to absentee. similar to filing electronic taxes.

 

That percentage is still much, much higher than the percentage of voter fraud.

 

no chance in hell.

 

Why? Just because you believe it to be so or you have a couple of anecdotal pieces of evidence? Sorry, I'm going with the actual studies on this one and they definitely bear this one out.

 

what studies could possibly be done to prove what % of votes are cast by people who aren't the voter of record? you are only talking about the people convicted of it. that's like saying only 1% of the population smokes weed by looking at the arrest records.

 

Yeah. There's a significant number of folks that don't leave the state much less the country where I live. And I'm 20 minutes from the Virginia line, an hour from the NC line and and hour and a half from the KY line. Hell, there's more folks than you would ever believe that never leave the county where they live.

 

A record number of Americans have passports now, but it is still only about one third of people: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbender/2012/01/30/record-number-of-americans-now-hold-passports/

And I guarantee you it overlaps pretty well with people who already had photo IDs, since it takes one to get a passport.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/09/7-papers-4-government-inquiries-2-news-investigations-and-1-court-ruling-proving-voter-fraud-is-mostly-a-myth/

 

which contradicts my point how exactly?

from one of the papers in that article:

Measuring the extent of voter impersonation is extremely difficult. It is not something
that we can directly observe, apart from criminal investigations and prosecutions. Voters
would be unlikely to advertise the fact that they voted illegally,5 and those who commit
fraud have every incentive to conceal it.

 

I think having national ID cards could be useful for more than voting, now that I think about it. Just have to figure a way for everyone to have one.

And who says they necessarily have to be picture-based? Couldn't we use some biometric, like having a chip in the cards with finger print data and then presenting your card and providing a finger print scan? That's more secure than pictures. If we're going to go, let's go all out.

Could tie it to all federal systems, to be used to access national parks at a discount, jury duty, any federal aid ranging from WIC to federal disaster aid, etc.

 

It should be a one card for every thing type if deal.

 

You said he was only talking about people who were convicted of it. The studies included people/situations accused of being fraudulent that turned out to be legitimate, which was hte majority of the time. So no, the studies are not only looking at conviction numbers but also exoneration and vote accounting error. Did you read it?

 

Agreed. Forgot social security. Fold that in too.

 

btw in that article you posted this study did a survey of voters and found 2.5% admitted to committing voter fraud.

http://users.polisci.wisc.edu/behavior/Papers/AhlquistMayerJackman2013.pdf

 

Civil Service, I'm sure we'll keep adding to the list.