It's a solution in search of a problem. And as an aside, Trump is completely full of shit to claim that his popular vote LOSS to Clinton is due to voter fraud and the States telling him to go fuck himself with his voter commission's request for personal info on voters is totally appropriate. Go ahead, defend the latter.
Lastly you've conflated a lot of 'registrations' with a franchise that is Constitutionally guaranteed and which requires, yes, that you be registered to exercise.
Lastly you've conflated a lot of 'registrations' with a franchise that is Constitutionally guaranteed and which requires, yes, that you be registered to exercise.
Quote:There are a lot of things wrong with Voter ID laws in the United States, but they all stem from one major, overarching theme:
Voter ID laws are a cumbersome solution in desperate search of a problem.
There are many variations of The Voter-Fraud Myth, but the most common claims hinge on the idea that our electoral systems are vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by large cabals of devious fraudsters bent on perverting the democratic process, and that the only way to combat the unseen legions of ineligible voters casting fraudulent ballots in our elections is to demand additional documentation from each voter in order to verify their identity and legitimacy.
Unfortunately, voter impersonation, which is literally the only form of Electoral fraud that is effectively mitigated or prevented by voter ID laws, also happens to be the single rarest and least effective form of election fraud in existence.
For example in Texas, a state which recently adopted some of the most stringent voter ID laws in the country, state officials were hard-pressed to produce even a handful of instances of suspected voter fraud--over the previous decade.
In fact, in 2014 Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, reported that he had independently identified only 31 credible cases of voter impersonation since 2000, out of literally billions of ballots cast in both state, local, and federal elections in the intervening decade and a half.
And if you put any stock in self-reported anonymous responses to double-blind surveys, alien abduction and voter impersonation were reported at equal rates in the 2012 U.S. General Election.
In contrast, other forms of electoral fraud--such as tampering with ballots, manipulating Absentee ballots, stuffing ballot boxes, or electronic hacking of voting machines--are much easier, more effective, and more potentially damaging*.
*(In addition to being impossible to prevent with voter ID laws).
Indeed, this latter form of electoral fraud--tampering with voting machines--was recently discovered to be shockingly easy due to relatively lax standards and practices in the voting machine industry that proponents of voter ID laws seem to have inexplicably overlooked in their apparent zeal for safeguarding the democratic process.
In Virginia, for example, voting machine password hacks were as easy as 'abcde'--a fact that is even more troubling when you consider the same systems were used in Mississippi and Pennsylvania for their elections. And in 2007, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen withdrew approval from Sequoia Voting Systems, after uncovering "significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system."
You might remember the name Sequoia Voting Systems from the notorious "hanging chads" controversy from the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and a 2007 investigative report by Dan Rather, which charged that Sequoia deliberately supplied poor quality punch-card ballots to Palm Beach County, Florida for the election.
As an aside, I'll also briefly mention that voter ID laws have--completely incidentally and by pure coincidence--also had the unintended side-effect of making casting a ballot increasingly difficult for certain segments of the electorate.
I would never dream of insinuating that mass disenfranchisement is the ultimate goal and intended purpose behind most voter ID laws.
Fortunately, Jon Stewart and the good folks at the Daily Show, would.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/dxhtvk/the-dail...g-the-vote
Suppressing the Vote
If that's not to your liking, I can also highly recommend this video by comedian John Oliver, which addresses the issue of voting, and gives rather important (and humorous) context to the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHFOwlMCdto
