Voter fraud

[carlfense]

What's the solution? I spelled one out earlier. Thoughts?

I'd be OK with a reset of voter registration if (and only if) we passed a constitutional amendment protecting an affirmative right to vote. (With specific exceptions carved out of course.)

[BigRedBuster]

What's the solution? I spelled one out earlier. Thoughts?

I'd be OK with a reset of voter registration if (and only if) we passed a constitutional amendment protecting an affirmative right to vote. (With specific exceptions carved out of course.)

 

 

Please explain.

[carlfense]

Please explain.

Which part?

[BigRedBuster]

Please explain.

Which part?

 

 

a constitutional amendment protecting an affirmative right to vote. (With specific exceptions carved out of course.)

[carlfense]

Please explain.

Which part?

a constitutional amendment protecting an affirmative right to vote. (With specific exceptions carved out of course.)

Something along these lines:

The right to vote is the foundation of any democracy. Yet most Americans do not realize that we do not have a constitutionally protected right to vote. While there are amendments to the U.S. Constitution that prohibit discrimination based on race (15th), sex (19th) and age (26th), no affirmative right to vote exists.

 

The 2000 Presidential Election was the first time many Americans realized the necessity of a constitutional right to vote. The majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore (2000), wrote, "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States." The U.S. is one of only 11 other democracies in the world with no affirmative right to vote enshrined in its constitution.

 

 

Because there is no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, individual states set their own electoral policies and procedures. This leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory policies regarding ballot design, polling hours, voting equipment, voter registration requirements, and ex-felon voting rights. As a result, our electoral system is divided into 50 states, more than 3,000 counties and approximately 13,000 voting districts, all separate and unequal.

. . .

The addition of a Right to Vote Amendment to the U.S Constitution would:

• Guarantee the right of every citizen 18 and over to vote [i think that certain exceptions should apply. -carl]
  
• Empower Congress to set national minimum electoral standards for all states to follow
  
• Provide protection against attempts to disenfranchise individual voters
  
• Ensure that every vote cast is counted correctly
  

 

http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=205

[BigRedBuster]

I could support that.

 

Problem is, the people we have in Washington running both the Democratic and Republican parties won't ever want the voter registration reset because both sides have used it to their advantage. Both would absolutely be scared to death about how much lower their voter registration would be.

[strigori]

What I think is being over looked is how terminology is used. "Voter Fraud" tends to be a term used by republicans. Generally being used to try to create a line of defense for the various Voter ID laws they keep trying to pass.

 

"Disenfranchisement" on the other hand is a form of 'fraud' but as its not one perpetrated by a 'voter' and instead by a government they dismiss it. And easily the more damaging of the two.

[Junior]

Strike a blow against voter ID laws:

 

http://www.slate.com...nservative.html

 

Citing research on the incidence of in-person voter fraud in American elections, Adelman notes that, in eight years of Wisconsin elections—2004, 2008, 2010, and 2012—researchers could identify only “one case of voter-impersonation fraud.” And in that case, it was a man who “applied for and cast his recently deceased wife’s absentee ballot.” Likewise, after “comparing a database of deceased registered voters to a database of persons who had cast ballots in a recent election,” in Georgia, another researcher found “no evidence of ballots being illegally cast in the name of deceased voters.”

 

Adelman even notes the sheer difficulty of committing in-person voter fraud, throwing water on the claim that this could ever be common. “To commit voter-impersonation fraud,” he says, “a person would need to know the name of another person who is registered at a particular polling place, know the address of that person, know that the person has not yet voted, and also know that no one at the polls will realize that the impersonator is not the individual being impersonated.” He ends with a note that sounds like sarcasm, “Given that a person would have to be insane to commit voter-impersonation fraud, [the law] cannot be deemed a reasonable response to a potential problem.”