re: #8 Sergey Romanov

I don’t know the details of the voting process, and I already asked this here once of one member and didn’t receive a reply: how, exactly, should one ensure that the voter is who (s)he says (s)he is if not by ID?

People are only allowed to vote at a few locations, those that are near their place of residence. They have to give their name, which is checked against the voter registration rolls. Then they cast their vote.

Weirdly enough, this on its own, works, mainly because ballot-level voter fraud on any large scale is just insanely difficult to do and easy to catch, and individuals on their own are not worth suborning.

Look at it this way: To have any real effect on the vote, you’d have to do something like acquiring the list of voters who are registered and then figuring out who will not actually make it to the polls. Then you have to hire people (of the correct gender) and transport them to that polling location so that they can walk in and vote in that person’s name. If you’re wrong, and some of those people actually show up to vote, then there’s a record of double-voting and people will start looking into what the hell happened. The same faces appearing at multiple polls (a lot of these places have purposeful or incidental CCV coverage) would get noticed and investigated.

Say you cover that possibility by paying off the people who would otherwise vote; you have to pay each and every one of them off, and the likelihood of one of them talking to the police is high. This did happen, back in the gangster-controlled areas in the 1920s, but that presupposes corruption of the political process already. Otherwise, you’re just begging to get caught.

And say your scheme is successful. You’ve committed two hundred felonies in order to get one hundred votes. And you still have no way of verifying how these people you’re sending in are actually voting in the voting booth.

Voter ID laws would only prevent crime in areas where the local government was already corrupt enough to overlook this sort of crime, and so it wouldn’t prevent it.

Yay.