re: #12 Sergey Romanov

God damn I hate it when I close a window by accident.

I don’t see why. I see no evidence for this. A person should get off their ass, gather the necessary documents and present them to the officials. It’s extremely easy and it minimizes fraud.

It’s not good argument to say that you see no evidence for someone else’s view, and then present your own argument with no evidence. You say that it’s extremely easy, but in many cases, it is not. The problem is the daisy-chain of documentation. If you’ve had, for example, an apartment fire, a flood, a landlord who threw out your possessions, if you just moved and lost your papers, it can take a long time in order to re-establish yourself. I once had to dig out a high school yearbook from my parents house and meet with a state representative in order to get my ID verified.

On what grounds are you saying that it’s extremely easy?

And why are you overlooking that the easier it is, the easier it’s going to be to defraud?

It shouldn’t happen on any preventable scale.

Nor should the disenfranchisement of legal voters. No matter how easy you make acquiring an ID, if it has any security on it whatsoever, it’s going to take time. So you’re going to have some people who have lost their IDs in the period before the polls and are not able to replace them in time— or don’t realize they have lost them. So those people, who are legitimate citizens with the right to vote, are going to be unable to. In order to protect the putative voter from someone spite-voting— which would be a felony crime and I know of no recorded case of in history— you are going to inevitably disenfranchise others. Since both courses have the possibility of disenfranchisement, shouldn’t you pick the one that disenfranchises fewer people?

It should be free in terms of money. Otherwise, yes, it will require a minor effort of gathering documents and going to some office.

If it’s free in terms of money, what’s to prevent people from flooding agencies with requests for the documents? A birth certificate, for example, is provided by the city or county in which you were born. They have a limited ability to verify that the request is really coming from you— if you know someone’s social security number, and you know an address they have lived at, you can make the request from that address and will most likely be able to get the document. If the security on it is higher, then, again, a portion of the population will be left out in the cold. And that doesn’t address the question of people flooding the agencies with requests.

Oh, I’m sure something can be done in this case too.

That’s nice. And what is that something?

To me, this is a classic information problem, and, since it exists in the real world, there is no ideal solution where a negative outcome is impossible. Security and accessibility ore opposed; the more accessible the IDs are, the more insecure they are.

The current system, which has voting as the easiest thing to do and getting the ID the hardest, is a good system because the right to vote is not the only right of the citizen. Stealing someone’s ID is also a violation of their rights in a large number of ways, and making it easier to do that is going to be far more harmful than the (purely hypothetical) cases of spite-voting. There is very little incentive for anyone to commit in-person voter fraud; there is a lot of incentive for people to steal people’s identities. We know that the latter occurs on a large scale. Especially in the current age, it seems ludicrous to make getting IDs easier when we know that this occurs.