A picture ID will not do anything about vote fraud because the vote fraud that matters would be done by the vote counters, and not the voters.

From what I remember of Chicago literature, the claim as too how this works is some guy rounds up a group of people and drives them from one pol station to another to another, etc. So yeah, a picture id would shut it down.

Counter fitting?

Spell checker.

Here's how voting systems work most places. A voter becomes registered by filing a document, and this is usually required to be done in the presence of a paid or volunteer poll worker. The voter is assigned a voting place based on his residence. Most election authorities send that registered voter a voter card with his polling place indicated. Most election authorities have computerized records so duplicate registrations could be detected and deleted.

When he goes in to vote, he shows the voter card and an ID to another poll worker. He gets a ballot, marks it and turns it in. Alternatively, he will push buttons on a voting machine or click his choices on a computer screen.

Re: Chicago

Supposing the voting authority does not purge duplicate regristrations and your van full of voters were all on the voter list at one poll after another. That's the likely scenario and a picture ID doesn't help the problem a bit. It's the voting authority situation that needs to change here.

Since the common perception is "dead people voting"...

Let's say I have a list of dead voters and where they're supposed to vote at. Say, 10 in each station. I pick up 10 bozos, and I tell them "this is what your name is at this station".

Too much work, and too complicated. Way too much effort and cost for too few votes. You wind up with a couple hundred votes when your bosses might need ten thousand to make up a deficit in real votes. It's easier and more productive to fix the machines, lose or find some ballots, misread a tally sheet, or purge the voter listings.

Entirely feasible. Worthwhile? Anybody's guess.

You wind up with a couple hundred votes when your bosses might need ten thousand to make up a deficit in real votes.

You're assuming that there's only one Van with 10 bozos out there. Try assuming there's 20. 10 bozos times 20 Vans times 20 poll stations. That's 4000 votes. Most of the *work* comes from the Van drivers and some computer somewhere which prints out a list.

It's easier and more productive to fix the machines, lose or find some ballots, misread a tally sheet, or purge the voter listings.

I expect that those sorts of things would happen as well. But this isn't an *either/or* type of situation, there's no reason they can't all be in use. All of these methods have strengths and weaknesses. Some are more backwards traceable, some rely on a single point of failure.

Granted, photo id doesn't deal with all these methods, but it's cheap and easy and a step in the right direction and should restore at least a little public confidence. I need a public id to drive, buy alcohol or cigarettes.

There's probably someone out there at every election doing every one of those things.

Call me cynical but I still can't understand how a photo ID requirement will help. In this era of really good cheap color printers, all of those bozos could have a picture ID for every dead/fake/whatever registered voter they are impersonating.

You have to remember that in most places, those bozos have to be giving the poll worker a name that is on a registered voter list - a picture ID with that name and a bozo's face on it wouldn't be that hard to do. I could do them, and in quantity but I would need access to the registered voter list.

So now I wonder what the smart crooks are up to. You should wonder about that as well.

No, it won't stop the enterprising from voting illegally, if it's worth it to them. As you say, this isn't breaking into Fort Knox. That's true, however, in more ways than one---there's only a little gold at the voting booth for the illegal voter. It's no Fort Knox.

The Democrats, of course, simply want as many illegals and repeaters voting as possible, and it's that "constituency" which they don't want to see "suppressed". If it's easy as pie, and worth a little something now or later to the frauds and trespassers, they'll be there in droves. If it's an uptight scene where official people want official ID from everybody, and INS types around, maybe, it may not be worth the trouble. For some reason, illegals disfavor official backdrops where their illegal status may actually result in something serious, something other than "How may we serve you, without offending your dignity by reminding you of your proper status under immigration law?"---you know, like it is for Guatemalans in Mexico. Yes, those sinister illegal-alien subversives, all six of them, will still find a way to slither through the deadly Photo ID net and cast their illicit vote. On the other hand, a large percentage of the other twenty million illegals may just decide to bypass the voting station altogether. As it should be.

Do you lock your doors when you leave home? Yes? Why bother? Anyone who was really determined could break in anyway.

That's the same argument you're using here. The answer is a small amount of protection and deterrence is better than no amount. The amount of inconvenience is very low, the cost to the state and to the voters also approaches zero.

Is it possible that somewhere out there are some people who live without every buying cigarettes, alcohol, driving a car, etc? Of course there are. I used to know one... but then he needed to have a State ID anyway, just to prove who he was.

It's not a poll tax. Even the Supremes said so. Whether it will work is a different matter, but you can't beat something with nothing. Having admitted that there's a problem, what do *you* think would be a better solution?

Here's what the Supreme Court said in 1965:

1. The District Court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to abstain: the state statutes are clearly and unambiguous, the rights allegedly impaired are the fundamental civil rights of a broad class of citizens, and the immediacy of the problem facing the District Court was evident. Pp. 380 U. S. 534-537.

2. The certificate of residence requirement is a material requirement imposed upon those who refuse to surrender their constitutional right to vote in federal elections without paying a poll tax, and thus constitutes an abridgment of the right to vote in violation of the Twenty-fourth Amendment. Pp. 380 U. S. 538-544.

(a) The poll tax is abolished absolutely as a prerequisite to voting in federal elections, and no equivalent or milder substitute may be imposed. P. 380 U. S. 542.

(b) The statutory scheme may not be saved on the ground that the certificate of residence requirement is a necessary method of proving residence, for constitutional deprivations may not be justified by some remote administrative benefit to the State. Pp. 380 U. S. 542-544.

Is there anything that requires elaboration about this? Do you really beliece that phrase "no equivalent or milder substitute may be imposed" can somehow be made inoperative by 33 years of really ugly politics? Apparently five US Supreme Court Justices did.

The world has changed a bit since 1965. At that time Universal ID wasn't universal. Since then it's snuck up on us. And this is assuming the purpose of the law they're talking about wasn't Jim Crow.

Help me out here. Give me the train of thought that let you assume the poll tax wasn't part of the Jim Crow laws.

Is that why people are so quick to niggle with the definitions instead of looking at the impact of the practices? Are that many people completely ignorant of the background for the Supreme Court cases?

The poll tax, the literacy test, lynchings, and beatings were primarily used to keep black people from registering and voting. Voter registration drives were a big part of the civil rights movement of the 60's. That just wasn't as flashy as marching across a bridge into a line of mounted, billy-club-swinging state police, or integrating a state university or a public high school with national guard troops.

Universal ID translates to Driver's License. A substantial minority of people don't drive. What do we do with them?

Well then, even better. Thank you. Knowing the background of the old law certainly makes a big difference... because that background is very different from the current one.

The purpose of the poll tax was to take the vote away from people who should have it. That's unconstitutional on the face of it, and it remains unconstitutional regardless of whatever flowery words are used to dress it up.

The purpose of this law is to take the vote away from people who should not have it (or at least not more than once).

Universal ID translates to Driver's License. A substantial minority of people don't drive. What do we do with them?

The functional people I've known in this situation have needed to have a state ID to function. Far too many of life's activities require it. Writing checks and using credit cards at various places, buying alcohol, cigarettes, dealing with official-dom, getting on a plane, etc, etc.

The dis-functional people I've known in this situation weren't interested in voting and were disfunctional with old picture IDs long before those old IDs expired.

My expectation is it's not going to be much of a problem, but if it is then we'll deal with it.

You made those first two statements like they couldn't be connected when the situations are identical. The whining about imaginary voter fraud by this or that group of undesirables ought to be enough to convince anyone that people haven't changed that much since the 1870's. Giving the states back a power that they misused for nearly a century in the face of three constitutional amendments is a bad thing.

You made those first two statements like they couldn't be connected when the situations are identical.

The point I'm making is that the situations & motives aren't identical.

The whining about imaginary voter fraud by this or that group of undesirables ought to be enough to convince anyone that people haven't changed that much since the 1870's.

Not "undesirables", or at least you haven't heard me say that. Voter fraud and it's prevention are legit government interests. As for being "imaginary", you yourself in this conversation have admitted it happens.

Giving the states back a power...

Back? We are *long* past the trust system. We already have voter lists, and we already require people to vote at one specific location. We also do things like purge the lists occasionally.