A mea culpa here. I mis-read that and thought the offices had just been closed but they have been shut down all year in some cases.
However, I do think as a whole people don’t take voting seriously. Millenials (sp) and others don’t register to vote because they don’t want to serve on juries. People of all races and ages are just to damn lazy to vote.
If you’re going to demand a picture ID you need to 1) make the ID free since you shouldn’t have to pay to vote, and 2) periodically have sign-ups in places like public libraries, community colleges, etc. Make it easy. Encourage people. It’s a public service and it’s worthy of our tax dollars.
That’s not the only problem. For certain groups and ages the verification process is a nightmare. Born in 1940… Hospital burned down and no record, you’ve voted forever and now you can barely make it around. For the older generation this can be real problem that takes years to solve.
According to that AL.com article from 2015, the voter ID law that we’re talking about, that passed in 2014, does provide Alabama voters the ability to get a free IDs.
It’s absolutely a problem that people don’t vote, and if they are given every opportunity and still don’t, then it’s probably for the best that they don’t.
But the problem lies in the fact that voting is not as easy as it should be, and anything that places a barrier to exercising such a fundamental right is bad.
Every person should be able to vote with the minimal possible effort. Absentee ballots should be made available to everyone, and you should be able to use them without any specific reason.
I also wish that we could vote on weekends. Tuesday is such a dumb day. Start voting at 9 am Saturday and end it at 7 pm Sunday.
I am probably spoiled as in California I have been voting by absentee ballot for at least 10 years.
I assume that not all states make it as easy to vote via absentee?
Also, a law passes in 2014 and we are complaining that in 2017 people still haven’t managed to get the ID’s necessary? I would have thought you would have got it for 2016.
I understand it is a hassle, I understand it shouldn’t even be required. But if you haven’t done it in three years maybe you just don’t want to vote. Especially as someone said above that it was free.
To give you a feel for how it works here in PA, you can’t use an absentee ballot at all unless you are traveling for the military, or possibly in the hospital.
Last election, I was unable to participate in the primary, because I was traveling for work, and that is not a legitimate reason under Pennsylvania law. It didn’t really matter, since Trump had it locked up at that point. Another reason why having primaries at different times sucks.
Maybe before you didn’t want to vote, but this year, maybe something is different about this year? Hmmmmm
I don’t know, maybe there’s a child molester running for one of the highest offices in the US? Nah, that’d be silly.
Maybe if folks voted more regularly, we wouldn’t get to the point where one party was Fielding a child molester.
I’m sure making it really hard for these people now will get them voting more in the future. All those stories of “Well, I got over the hump but I really had to vote against the child molester. Now I vote all the time. I’m glad they made it a hassle so that I really earned it”
Why not? In 28 years of voting, I’ve never needed to give anything more than my name. California has never required an ID to vote (that I know of) and somehow we keep ticking along without significant voter fraud.
So presidential election wasn’t enough to get excited. Any presidential election unless we are assuming all the people who aren’t voting just turned 18.
I don’t believe there is any massive fraud so I don’t like the voter ID laws, but given three years and the ID options available…
All Alabama voters must present photo identification at the polling booth in order to vote in Alabama, such as a valid:
Alabama driver's license or non-driver ID card. Alabama Photo Voter ID. A state issued ID (can be from any state) U.S. passport. Student/employee ID card issued by a public or private university.
There may be some people unable to prove who they are but I would imagine those people must have found some way around that in order to gain employment, buy alcohol, get into a school (any type of school), get a SS card etc…
OR is all mail. I don’t have to present a darn thing although I could. Guess which party keeps complaining about it? OR has one of the easiest elections systems there is. You don’t need a day off. You don’t even need a stamp. You can mail it but you can drop it off at a ballot box too. It seems like every year some white guy complains about fraud , and there is no proven case of it.
And do they check it, yes they do. I’ve had to validate my signature multiple times until they finally gave up and stopped trying to prove I was not who I was… jerks.
I do not believe fears of often unfounded voter fraud is enough to make voting harder like they often do.
We had a case here several years ago where ballots for a city councilman race were questioned. They went in and started checking signatures and someone at the county clerks office ended up getting charged with voter fraud. Apparently she really wanted that guy to win and many signatures were apparently done by her.
There are some obvious cases of political machines controlling areas, but I don’t think there are any cases of non-political groups doing organized voter fraud.
Well we had someone in Oregon dump a bunch of ballots into the trash too. The problem wasn’t the voter though, it was the employee. The way these discussions go they think there are bunch of illegals voting, and there is no real stat for that that suggests that’s a wide spread problem.
I think there was also a case of empty boxes being filled out by an employee somewhere. The solution is not to make voting harder. The solution is hire better employees.
Well, your legitimacy as a voter is checked by virtue of the fact they send your ballot to you in the mail, right?
Yes. They’re supposed to validate the voter as well as the address. I am not sure what methodology, but that was part of the Republican complaint, that a ballot would go to an old address and someone else would use it to commit voter fraud. The other is a bunch of illegals would get ballots, which they would not since the information is validated before ballots are sent. None of these scenarios have been found at aggregate volumes.
I guess the point is, there are ways to make voting a lot easier. There is only one group super motivated to make it hard.
Yeah, I’m not that worried about voter fraud that requires you to buy an extra house.
The President just dissolved the “Election Integrity Commission”, mostly on the grounds that it couldn’t actually do anything, because states refused to send their voter data.
Happy trails, Kris Kobach.