Do you think voter fraud is a serious issue?

Voter fraud is a serious issue but studies have shown that voter impersonation doesn’t happen to any significant extent. When a single improper vote can bring a $10,000 fine and three years in prison it is a crime with little appeal.

I suspect voter suppression is a bigger issue where for example black communities have fewer poll workers to assist voters and fewer voting machines to process votes in timely manner.

The issue of voter manipulation through social media is also becoming important. Fake news stories designed to appeal to the emotions flood the internet swaying public opinion. We have only begun to look at ways of tackling this issue.

Not as much as republican voter suppression efforts and drumpf’s collusion with russia.

What incentive is there for voter fraud? It is just one vote with a stiff penalty if caught.

When is the last time you heard anyone getting caught?

It isn’t a serious issue, as reflected in the number of incidents last November alone!

Hacking election systems is a much bigger concern.

And, @Yellowdog, you state TWO times you have been affected, but you only describe one instance. Yet for all you know, the one time you cite could well have been someone signing on the wrong line.

The only demonstrated attempt to commit voter fraud last November was in Florida and Virginia, four people total.

The entire process is corrupt, and fraudulent. From redistricting, to voter suppression, to all the crooked moves by each politician to maneuver themselves into position.

It seems ridiculous (to me) to focus on any one variable, when dishonesty is so rampant.

Of all the issues that I have with the electoral process, and the candidates, no. Voter fraud is not even close to relevant.

I’ve heard of Trump claiming millions of false votes were cast against him. Some of his estimates are beyond reason. As is the case with many statements the POTUS makes, there is no basis in reality. His inability to face the reality that he isn’t popular is one of many reasons people consider him vain, and insecure. His nonsensical ramblings are pathetic, for a man in his position. I wish he would focus on the many important issues that he is supposed to, rather than pouting about polling numbers, crowds, and approval ratings….

Of course. Elections should show the will of citizens. With that idiotic system that doesn’t reqire ID, you don’t even need voting. Just take one man and make him copy the votes for everyone. You may as well establish a monarchy and save time.

So how is it that voter ID laws discriminate against minorities? Is it because minorities are less likely to have ID on them? Why is that? That said, I don’t necessarily agree with voter ID laws. Voting is a right, not a privilege. It shouldn’t be made more difficult. If voting requires ID, then it should in all places in the country for all people, not just in “minority heavy” places. Whatever the reasons are for minorities not having ID on them, if that is true, then voter ID laws do seem like an attempt at voter suppression, given the often bloated claims of voter fraud that are supposedly the basis for these laws.

I actually had a conservative (he’s fairly extreme, to be fair) acquaintance of mine admit that voter ID laws are an attempt at suppressing minority votes. “Hey, you can’t discriminate against them openly, so we’ll try anything”, he said. Though he’d probably prefer an actual fascist state if it were possible.

I suppose it’s not at all possible that there’s someone else who legitimately shares the same name as your grandmother who votes?

We just had an incident where a guy was willing to kill people that he didn’t think should have been elected. The supposition that no one would perpetrate voter fraud is ludicrous We make it easy to do and hard to detect. Of course some will do it. Whether this is a big problem or a small one, why would we not shore up the system. Democrats resist any attempt to even qualify the extent of the problem. If you don’t have an ID, you should get one whether or not you vote.

“When I die, bury me in Chicago so I can still vote.”

@Jaxk “The supposition that no one would perpetrate voter fraud is ludicrous”

Except that nobody claims that.

So if it happens, why not fix it?

A: Voter fraud isn’t a significant issue. It happens, sure, but to a negligible degree.

B: The fixes proposed aren’t really fixes, but thinly veiled attempts at voter disenfranchisement.

Why Voter ID laws restrict voter access:

Homeless people may be willing and able to vote, but they often need a home address to secure identification, and states such as Illinois and Missouri require things like government documents, pay stubs or utility bills. If you’re homeless or living in transitional housing, you probably don’t have any of those things. Besides, you may have a host of other forms of identification if you aren’t homeless or elderly, like utility bills, birth certificates, credit cards, and government documents. But photo IDs when lost, stolen, or expired, require trips to DMVs and city halls, which tend to be open only on weekdays during work hours, precious hours to the working poor. – Forbes magazine (Nov 7, 2016)

I may be mistaken on this (I’m relying on memory of a radio segment, and I’m realizing that my recollection of number/name details is fuzzy), but I believe there have been at least two attempts to identify voter fraud in individual states, and in each case they got many times more false positives than they found actual voter fraud, since there are many people born on the same day with the same name in each state. I know one state was Florida, which ‘tried before the 2012 election and scrapped the effort amid many errors.’

The current federally-led voter fraud study does ask for the last four digits of citizen’s SSN, but for security reasons many states are not legally able to divulge that information. One major concern with this current voter fraud survey is that it will, once again, create many times more false positives than actual accounts of voter fraud—a result that seems more harmful to the integrity of our democracy than helpful, assuming the faulty results are pushed as “fact” and not discarded as was done in Florida. Plus, having a single database with all of that voter information seems like a bad idea.

There are surveys that have certain numbers of “noncitizens” claiming to vote (see PolitiFact article linked above), however, as statisticians in the article explain, those numbers are not statistically significant enough to draw any major conclusions, given the limited sample size, and the margin of error, etc. Here’s another article written by ‘a member of the team that produces the datasets upon which that study was based and . . . the co-author of an article published in the same journal that provides a clear “take down” of the study in question’ who explains in more detail why the “research” which cited his study and used it to “prove” voter fraud was “not only wrong,” but “irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place”—in short, much of the current evidence that purports to demonstrate voter fraud is faulty at best, and it seems wrong to use that erroneous data to try and argue for more studies (and more fear) of something for which there is no reliable evidence.

Yes, the occasional voter fraud occurs. However, it is statistically so insignificant in the larger picture that it might as well not happen. All reliable evidence, as far as I am aware, suggests that the methods recommended to “fix” the “problem” will make it harder for a larger number of legal voters to exercise their constitutional rights than people stopped from voting fraudulently. More harm done than good—that’s why, while I think voter fraud is inherently a serious issue, I don’t think it’s significant enough to warrant the reaction it receives from certain politicians.

I think not showing ID to vote is simpy crazy.

Every polling place has someone who can investigate, circumvent or override when voter fraud occurs. I don’t know how common it is, but it’s happened to me twice now.

zenvelo— I DID describe two incidents. One last March and once in 2009. Read the details

As for someone merely signing on the wrong line (2009)—they signed my name on a line and on a separate piece of paper saying they were me, since they didn’t have an I.D. . Pretty hard to make a mistake about that

As for my deceased grandma voting (2016 and 2017)— this individual has a voter registration card in my grandmother’s name—it has been used six times. It reopened the fact that my grandma can be reached for court appearances regarding her taxes and abandoned property

I will let them come to arrest her. I don’t care about going to the trouble to prove she is deceased. No matter how much legwork, red tape, and time— I’m sure she’ll keep on voting.

Aren’t any of you concerned this individual might vote Republican ???

Oh, of course I think the individual using your late grandmother’s name to vote should be stopped. I just assumed we all agreed on that fact already, and that you’d know I agreed with you on that fact, so I focused my response on the at-large political discussion surrounding voter fraud…. I guess I misunderstood the question, my apologies.

If it happened to me twice and there was someone on site who knew how to deal with it, it happens more than just ten times per election.

Some of you are saying its a Republican issue. Well, the reason SOME of you Democrats are not concerned about it, is you must believe, along with the Republicans, that they vote Democrat.

@zenvelo “Homeless people may be willing and able to vote, but they often need a home address to secure identification, and states such as Illinois and Missouri require things like government documents, pay stubs or utility bills. If you’re homeless or living in transitional housing, you probably don’t have any of those things. Besides, you may have a host of other forms of identification if you aren’t homeless or elderly, like utility bills, birth certificates, credit cards, and government documents. But photo IDs when lost, stolen, or expired, require trips to DMVs and city halls, which tend to be open only on weekdays during work hours, precious hours to the working poor.”

Yep. I had to deal with this yesterday. I live in Illinois. Had to get a new state ID card because I had let mine expire. Had to have – a certified copy of my birth certificate ($10 from the state of Kentucky), documents from the social Security Administration (I guess to prove that I’m a legal resident of the United States, despite having the birth certificate establishing that I am a natural born citizen?), documents to prove that I’m a resident of the state of Illinois, documents proving my current address. Now add in another $20 for the ID itself and it come out, for me, to $30 in cost. Not a small sum for someone who’s homeless or for someone who has to decide each week whether to eat, keep the lights on or get their prescriptions filled.

Then there’s the fact that the local DMV office is not well located if you do not have a car or otherwise have access to transportation. It’s also not located along a particularly safe route to walk or bike even if you are physically capable of walking/biking it. Then add in the fact that it’s closed on Sundays and Mondays and only open for a few hours every other day of the week…

@Yellowdog . The general thinking here seems to be that it is negligible, at worst. Nobody is claiming, or even thinking about which party is being misrepresented.

You need a State-issued I.D. to receive ANY social or government services (which all need to survive if they are poor—Medicare, medicaid, prescription drug programs). Unless you own your home you have to rent, and you need State I.D. for that. Cashing a check or buying Tobacco/alcohol also requires an I.D,

The State I.D. is the most relied-on document a low-income person possesses. They would die without it, because everyone needs food, medicine, and shelter for their survival.

You most certainly would not die without an ID. LOTS of people don’t have one. I run across them all the time. Mostly homeless people. Or the super poor. Some elderly. Some uh, I guess you could call mentally unstable.

“Unless you own your home you have to rent, and you need State I.D. for that.”

Odd, my landlord’s never asked to see my ID.

^^that is quite rare. Around here they will ask for a copy of your ID to run a credit check.

@Yellowdog If you have two cases of voter fraud in one family unit, and the rate of voter fraud of that type in the USA has been studied and estimated to be something like 1 in 100,000 votes cast (and you & your grandma didn’t even vote, so the frequency among all people is much lower), then I would say the odds are very good that the same person did both, probably someone who knows you well enough to know both you and your grandmother.

In my own anecdotal experience, I don’t know anyone (except, via Internet, you) who I’ve heard has had any contact with voter fraud. I was myself recently contacted by the voter registration board to investigate my recent votes because they noticed the signature on my ballot did not match the one on file, because I registered to vote decades ago and my signature has changed since then.

Voter fraud (in the form of people going to vote as other people) has been investigated quite a lot and it doesn’t seem to happen much at all. It seems to be less than the rate of error from mistakes, less than the rate of questionable discarding of votes, and any time a race is close enough, there are more careful recounts. Both your cases and my signature example show that the votes are being checked and taken seriously.

It’s also been assessed to my satisfaction that requiring people to present ID at a polling place would cause more impact on elections than any actual rate of people fraudulently voting in ways that ID would stop. So it’s harassment, and it adds a tone of suspicion and resentment and distrust and not treating people like adults, which we already have far too much of in this culture. It is also unfairly skewed against people who are struggling and will choose not to rather than vote. We did fine for over 200 years in this country with no such requirement.

If there is actual concern about the honesty and fairness of elections, it should be directed at:

* computerized voting machines
* the companies employed to provide and operate voting machines
* big money in politics
* revolving-door lobbyists, and other lobbyists
* the effect of the two-big-party domination on our elections
* the effect of our retardedly simple voting system, combined with the two-big-party system
* the effect of having giant co-owned megacorporations providing most “news” media

@Zaku Not to mention foreign intervention into our elections which should seem to be a much bigger concern for all citizens than the negligible number of instances of voter fraud.

It isn’t important since it isn’t enough of an issue. Trump wants it to be because he can’t stand the idea that not every single person is in love with him.

The fact that he lost the popular vote eats at him.

I think election fraud is a much larger issue than voter fraud.