Much more to reply to, but a few things between conference calls...
That's nice, but first you have to ensure the list of eligible voters is kept current. When people die, they must be removed. When people move, they must be removed. You also need to figure out how to keep ballots from being stolen out of people's mail boxes.
Dead voters generally do get removed, including even those who cast an otherwise valid absentee ballot but then die before Election Day. Details vary by state. There's pretty good data available on who's dead. If there's significant gaps to be found here, they can and should be fixed. For example, in brief research, I can see clearly that PA will remove voters who the PA Department of Health knows are dead. That said, I can't immediately confirm what happens if there's a non-PA issued death certificate, for example, if (God forbid) you might pass away in FL, whether your PA registration might persist until you miss two Presidential election cycles. I don't know if they ingest data from other sources, such as the
SSDI/DMF.
Using a PA example again, here's a group throwing database queries at the wall and coming up with quite a lot of noise, but only showing one (1) fully confirmed match for a dead voter, for which the judge was singularly unimpressed:
A misleading claim that more than 21,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania are dead is circulating online. The figure comes from a conservative group that failed to convince a federal judge in October that its list was accurate.
www.factcheck.org
Voters who
move are very difficult to solve quickly in an automated fashion, because there are many perfectly legal reasons to have a ballot sent out-of-state. USPS mail forwarding is NOT the same thing as establishing new residency. State tax returns won't work for this purpose. I think the most effective thing you could do is establish some level of interstate cooperation to make sure you can't be registered in two states at once, therefore limiting potential damage to someone voting in the "wrong" state but still only being able to vote once without high risk of getting busted. Reconciling with state driver's license or state ID records might have some merit, but it's not like people have a great record of updating those the day after they move either, and even if they do, they still have the choice of voting in their old state for up to 30 days after they move. This is a very easy problem to bitch about, but it's a very hard problem to fix, and there's been no showing of evidence it has a major impact.
Not directly on point for this conversation, but lacking a better place to mention it, here's some info on the post-election auditing done in PA, who are apparently ahead of the curve compared to other states:
https://www.votespa.com/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-Audits.aspx
Why not make Election Day a national holiday? Many (most?) other countries do this.
That sounds downright progressive of you.
In seriousness, a lot of people want this, but DV52 and Bruce make good points as well and I tend to agree. I don't know that it buys us much, that we don't already get from early in-person and early mail balloting, and those are always things we will need. As one example, you yourself may not be anywhere near Pennsylvania during their early in-person voting period. As another example, my wife will
never be able to vote in-person on Election Day, because she's the manager of a local library that serves as a polling place; it's not the polling place for our residence and she has to be there all day while the polls are open.
That doesn't solve all the problems with stealing ballots from mailboxes. It is possible to suppress voting via targeted theft by stealing the ballots from people who have lawn-signs for the candidate you don't like, or who you suspect will vote for that candidate, while leaving those who you think will vote for your candidate alone.
Stealing ballots out of mailboxes is a very high risk, very low return scheme for materially impacting the outcome of an election. Among other things, you have to get away with driving around a neighborhood checking a bunch of mailboxes that aren't yours while NOT driving a postal delivery truck, which is not something you'll get away with for very long in a world of ubiquitous camera phones and vehicle dashcams and Ring doorbells. And you could 10x the risk to the perp by mailing out ballots in random batches over the course of 10 days, making them have to sweep those mailboxes 10 times to get the same number of ballots, and I think they're already mailed out in batches today (though I have no cite for this).
So instead of signatures, why don't we require re-registration on the same schedule that a person renews their driver's license? In PA that's every four years, and along with your driver's license, you're issued a set of 8 randomly generated six-digit codes printed on the back of your voter registration card, so one for each election in the next four years. When you vote by some means other than in-person, you must verify your identity using the code you were assigned for that election. That's just one idea.....
This, or something like this, is worthy of some consideration. I still think it's a solution looking for a statistically significant problem, but it's low cost and might give some folks more confidence in the process. The only catch is that it CAN NOT be implemented in any way that looks, smells, feels, tastes, or sounds like a poll tax. There's been a lot of schemes in this country, from people who thought they were very clever, to make it more difficult for undesirables to vote, and many "Voter ID" laws fall squarely in that category.
* Live in a city with functioning mass transportation and expensive parking so you've never bothered to get a license? (what a good way to eliminate Philadelphia votes!)
* Got a suspended or confiscated license because you have no money to pay this or that civil fine?
* Can't pay your student loans? (
in some states)
* Have to choose between feeding your kids this week and paying the fees (and maybe fines) necessary to get a license/ID so you can vote?
PA issues non-driver's photo ID, but today it's only free if you're surrendering a previously issued driver's license., which is weird since they swore up and down in the Voter ID campaign they'd be free.
If,
IF IF IF, if there's a plan to make sure those codes are ALSO available on non-driver state ID cards that are made widely available free of charge in a way that isn't excessively burdensome to get hold of, then maybe it's something to talk about. But, if it takes someone without a license three hours one-way riding buses to get to a 90 minute wait at the one location in their area that does IDs so they can pay a fee for something they need because
and only because they want to participate in our democracy, then
everyone on both sides knows god damn good and well what it's really about.
The Corbett administration declined to say whether it would appeal the decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
www.post-gazette.com
Today, the first federal trial on Texas’ restrictive voter ID law begins examining how the measure could potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of minority voters.
www.brennancenter.org
