Restricting democracy: Republicans trying to prevent college-age students from voting

Except no one is legitimately concerned about voter fraud, they're concerned about Barack Obama getting a second term. Voter fraud has been a non-issue for 235 years and it's not one now, either.

Do you need me to link to a litany of US elections that have been won - or significantly impacted - by fraudulent votes or something? Considering your opaque partisanship on display here I'd think you were one of those W-stole-the-2000-election types anyway. Everyone who cares about the outcome of an election, regardless of their ideology (and assuming the slightest ethics) has an interest in maintaining free and fair elections.

I've read all of your posts and you've provided no real evidence that this is a serious issue or reason to be concerned and that's because there isn't any.

I'm here because people who agree with you are making the argument that what these states are doing is a poll tax. As a matter of fact I don't consider eligibility regulations a "serious issue". I consider it extremely mundane regulation that the states have done forever. And yet here, it's being branded as a(n unconstitutional) vast right wing conspiracy instead of being reviewed on its merits. I'm arguing that its legal and constitutional, and if you want to read a giant conspiracy into the background that's certainly your prerogative, but not the least bit persuasive.

Presumably, federal restrictions on voting laws maintain as fair an election as we can muster, so if a state follows them, the only sort of depressed turnout is of the fraudulent variety. And of course, people who don't care enough about the election to register to vote in the first place.

Something that hasn't been touched on here is how some of the states are eliminating same-day voter registration, to which I say thank god, because those people on the street corner registering voters rarely had an interest in ensuring people were who they say they are or are eligible to vote in the first place.

Will this disproportionately fall on college students? Probably. But that's because they were a disproportionately large group of ineligible voters in the first place.

While at school I'm fairly sure I was registered to vote in two states at the same time. Could I have committed fraud? Yup. Did I? No, but the temptation shouldn't exist in the first place, and thats what changes like these will help prevent.

People don't like to vote; how many people exactly do you expect are going to go out of their way to cheat the system to vote TWICE OR THREE TIMES.

There are easier ways to commit voter fraud of course, but people tend to want to vote in the same extremity as they care about elections. Just think about all the people you think are dumber than you, voting for the opposing candidate, it's maddening!

Repeats the same thing with no new information, explanation, or justification and insults me

Seeing as this behavior is a repeat of a previous discussion, you're getting pretty close to ignore status.

So I was out for two days and I see this topic shift from Republicans attempting to change laws to exclude a certain group of people from voting --> ID cards. Wat.

Yeah, I tend to prefer a policy discussion to an echo chamber of baseless accusations against politicians people disagree with.

The decision of whether this is constitutional or not will depend on legal merits, not how absolutely sure any of you are that this is an evil right wing conspiracy against college students.

While at school I'm fairly sure I was registered to vote in two states at the same time. Could I have committed fraud? Yup. Did I? No, but the temptation shouldn't exist in the first place, and thats what changes like these will help prevent.

Could you have committed fraud? Yup. Had you tried, would you have succeeded? I'll leave that for you to decide.

To be completely honest with you, I don't hold the government in high regards when it comes to competency, but get this, it is NOT hard to restrict a citizen to one vote.

I hate to revive old threads but there has been something that I read that is relevant to this topic. While I do not think that this occurs on a wide scale the fact that it can occur is enough for me to say you should have to present ID in order to vote. We can argue over the standards of what should constitute valid ID's but some form ID should be necessary.

original article from the daily caller http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/11/video-...les-names/

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Video footage provided exclusively to The Daily Caller shows election workers in New Hampshire giving out ballots in the names of dead voters at multiple voting precincts during the state’s primary election on Tuesday.

The bombshell video is the work of conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas.

Voters in the Granite State are not required to present identification to vote. O’Keefe’s investigators were able to obtain ballots under the names of dead voters at polling locations Tuesday by simply asking for them, he said.

“Live free or die,” an election worker told one of the investigators in the video. “This is New Hampshire. No ID needed.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/11/video-...z1jBFZgFxq



MANCHESTER, N.H. — Video footage provided exclusively to The Daily Caller shows election workers in New Hampshire giving out ballots in the names of dead voters at multiple voting precincts during the state’s primary election on Tuesday.

The bombshell video is the work of conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas.

Voters in the Granite State are not required to present identification to vote. O’Keefe’s investigators were able to obtain ballots under the names of dead voters at polling locations Tuesday by simply asking for them, he said.

“Live free or die,” an election worker told one of the investigators in the video. “This is New Hampshire. No ID needed.”


In an interview with TheDC on Wednesday, O’Keefe said the exposé shows how voter fraud can be easier to perpetrate when identification isn’t required.

“There is fraud going on and our goal is to visualize it for people,” he said. (RELATED: Complete election coverage on The Daily Caller)

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/11/video-...z1jBFiR1lL

O’Keefe said he eventually plans to post full, unedited videos of the encounters. “It shows the integrity of the elections process is severely comprised,” the filmmaker said.

He said no laws were broken during the investigation and that his team members never claimed to be the dead people whose ballots they were trying to obtain. Instead, they carefully worded the way they asked for ballots, phrasing it like: “Do you have Earnest Chavanelle?” and “Do you have Paul Soucy?”

“We decided to go in there without using any false pretenses,” he said. “There’s no misrepresentation in these videos if you watch them — we didn’t lie about who we were.”

The investigators never actually voted when they were given ballots. Sting artists who received ballots would leave the voting precincts after saying they left their identification in the car.

“We were very careful about that,” he said.

The investigation worked this way: O’Keefe and his team obtained names of recently deceased New Hampshirites through published obituaries, and used publicly available voter roll information to find dead people still on the voting rolls.

With that information, O’Keefe’s investigators went to the polls on Tuesday and requested ballots in the names of the deceased.

“Some of them died a few months ago, some of them died a few weeks ago,” he said.

In many cases, ballots were handed over by the poll workers without any skepticism. In only one case did a poll worker realize that the investigator wasn’t the person the ballot was meant for — because the woman giving out the ballots knew the dead person in question.

That incident made it into the Boston Herald.

In one instance, the sting artist told a poll worker that he voluntarily wants to show his ID. But the female poll worker responds that “the state says we’re not allowed to ask for identification.”

O’Keefe said the investigation stemmed from discovering that “there are people who have voted who are dead.”

“We found many, many people who are both dead and registered to vote. … How is it that dead people are voting? Someone’s committing fraud.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/11/video-...z1jBFr0gen

About 35/51 states have ID requirments, which no one is against, the problem is the strict ID requirment Wisconsin currently has, and NY is trying to pass following in example. What exidous refused to acknowledge the entire time is that you have to pay essentially to vote under a "strict ID" law because you have to have a drivers license specifically to the state or renounce your previous domicile, which would mean renouncing your previous drivers license.

So no matter what, if a state has a Strict ID law, and are a non-resident you are forced to pay for the drivers license either in your non-resident state or your resident state. The strict ID law really restricts students from voting without forking up some amount of money, which is just wrong to be honest.