Quote (Skinned @ Oct 19 2014 05:05pm)

Texas doesn't have same-day voter registration.

Against, request an un-derp-ing.

Quote (Santara @ Oct 19 2014 06:02pm)

Doesn't invalidate the legitimate point that college IDs can be held by non-citizens.

Quote (Skinned @ Oct 19 2014 06:16pm)

But that has nothing to do with the conversation.  Illegals who have college IDs have college IDs with their names on it.  Again, for the purpose of identifying who an individual is, why is a college ID insufficient?

Quote (Santara @ Oct 19 2014 06:21pm)

Because the discussion hinges on using ID to register to vote. Clearly, one form of ID confirms that the holder must be a legitimate voter, the other does not.

Quote (Skinned @ Oct 19 2014 06:44pm)

No it isn't, voter identification laws are for voter identification.  I never thought I'd ever have to actually say that.  This has nothing to do with registration.  Registration occurs before the day of voting.  Texas, the state we are discussing, doesn't allow same day voting.  This law is showing preference. 

Honestly I don't know why we're having this conversation.  If there is some voter ID law it ought to only accept state IDs and driver's licenses, with the state IDs being free of charge in places readily available.  Otherwise making people pay a registration fee to vote is illegal AFAIK.

Quote (Skinned @ Oct 19 2014 06:44pm)

No it isn't, voter identification laws are for voter identification.  I never thought I'd ever have to actually say that.  This has nothing to do with registration.  Registration occurs before the day of voting.  Texas, the state we are discussing, doesn't allow same day voting.  This law is showing preference. 

Honestly I don't know why we're having this conversation.  If there is some voter ID law it ought to only accept state IDs and driver's licenses, with the state IDs being free of charge in places readily available.  Otherwise making people pay a registration fee to vote is illegal AFAIK.

Quote (Mangix @ Oct 19 2014 07:05pm)

I can agree with what you're saying here I think.
For the purposes of voting and saying "this is who I am" a student ID should work fine. You are already registered and are just saying "see this registration, that is me".
For the purposes of registering however, a student ID would be useless. Or atleast should be.

Quote (Santara @ Oct 19 2014 07:07pm)

Derp retracted. 

Quote (Pollster @ Oct 19 2014 10:58am)

But the reality is that the system isn't being exploited in the manner that people who support the more suppression-esque ID laws are alleging. That's simply a fact. It can't rationally be denied at this point. Everyone outside the bubble is willing to concede this because millions of dollars have been spent at the local, state, and federal levels on investigating elections only to find that this is nowhere even remotely close to a systemic, regularly-occuring problem. You fix the system and improve its efficiency and integrity by pursuing reforms that go in literally the exact opposite direction that this does. Voter impersonation simply isn't happening in this country at a noticeable level so instituting voter ID isn't the way to solve the potential problem. These laws and the way they're being implemented clearly create more problems than they solve, and that's largely because the problem they were allegedly created to solve doesn't actually exist.

All of this of course ignores the fact that they're being implemented in an unethical way in most states, as noted in Skinned's post where states allow certain IDs used predominantly by certain demographics while not allowing other IDs used predominantly by other demographics. It's beyond clear why these laws are being pushed: a major political party that has existed in this country for 150 years could soon be on its death bed, and rather than adapting in an equitable and respectable manner the way the parties have adapted before they are just using every desperate ploy that's stashed away deep in their playbook to avoid having to account for population growth and demographic change.

Quote (Skinned @ Oct 19 2014 03:16pm)

But that has nothing to do with the conversation.  Illegals who have college IDs have college IDs with their names on it.  Again, for the purpose of identifying who an individual is, why is a college ID insufficient?

Quote

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

Quote

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin.

Quote

We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.

Quote (thundercock @ Oct 19 2014 07:52pm)

To me that's irrelevant. If it CAN be exploited, it should be fixed. I think it's wise to have forward-thinking policies instead of reacting every time something detrimental happens to the government. Yes, some state's are being dicks about it (and that should be corrected), but the concept is a very simple one. The fact that the rest of the modern world has voter ID is really sad to me because it means that America is seriously behind.