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Originally Posted by
Aimless
I do not.
We know that voter fraud does occur. We don't have any strong evidence of in-person voter fraud (the kind primarily at issue in a discussion about voter ID laws) being a large problem. Our prior belief should be that it is a very small problem, or at least a smaller one than voter suppression: it is far more difficult to commit significant levels of in-person voter fraud than it is to implement various strategies for reducing turnout in various groups. The importance of looking at convictions--when trying to assess the significance of voter fraud--is a necessary consequence of the phenomenon being investigated: voter fraud is illegal and it's difficult to identify in-person voter fraud without looking at convictions. If you have a better indicator feel free to share.
It's not hard to identify without conditions. Most of that fraud is detected without ever identifying the person who voted and hence getting a conviction. But you don't want to look at the number of tossed ballots for some reason.
We should strive to avoid reducing valid turnout, yes. And if a measure is going to reduce turnout more than it is estimated to reduce fraud we should go back to the drawing board because, as I said, they actually have an identical individual impact. I'm opposed to the various ID measures proposed here in the US because they make much effort to reduce the impact on turnout. But this is the Brexit thread, you might have noticed that. We're not talking about the states, we're talking about the UK where the partisan efforts to suppress voters is not a big topic and where, as near as I can tell, the proposal DID include efforts to reduce the impact on valid voting. But you've joined Khend, Loki, etc. in seeing a global right-wing conspiracy to suppress voters.
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Even if that were the only metric used for identifying voter suppression it would still show suppression to be a more serious problem.
However, we don't have to only theorize about suppression or only rely on data about successful convictions--we can also attempt to identify and characterize it scientifically independent of the judiciary's views (which is of course a necessity given that this discussion is at least partly about legal methods for restricting the vote).
For example, the scientific consensus seems to be that strict voter ID laws seem to reduce turnout in US elections by a couple of percent. Based on available information about the characteristics of Republican and Democratic voters we should expect such laws to have a differential impact on turnout which, in turn, should have a differential impact on the results.
We're not talking about the US. We're talking about a proposal made in the UK.
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That is not the only definition of "broken".
But is is the definition you have reached for, EVERY TIME, in saying that voter fraud is not an issue worth acting against.
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Even if it were, we would expect voter suppression to be more likely to alter the outcome of a major election--both the final tallies and the winner--than in-person voter fraud. Voter suppression comes closer to breaking the democratic process than in-person voter fraud does.
Why? Why would we expect that? I'll tell you this though (and I say this as someone who has argued against every ID proposal we've seen made in the US). I'll take suppression over fraud because suppression is something the state can tabulate, control and try to minimize, while fraud is more opaque and less controllable by the state. And voting is one area where I suspect even the libertarians acknowledge needs to see strict state control. We are talking about an ID requirement, not an attempt to suppress voters. Your own Sweden has such a requirement and I haven't gotten the impression you think that's a bad thing. Is it the case that you just see "conservative" and assume that any ID requirement must be about suppressing voters?
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No, what I said was:
You said exactly what I pointed out. Maybe you didn't mean it but you said it.
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Whether you take the individual perspective or the aggregate perspective, in-person voter fraud is a lesser harm than voter suppression, esp. if we're talking about "harm" in the form of disenfranchisement.
No. Literally CANNOT be.
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Are you somehow laboring under the misapprehension that I am (or should be) a strict utilitarianist AI or something? I'm not. To borrow a familiar example, the effect of in-person voter fraud on an honest voter, wrt disenfranchisement, is equivalent to getting a tiny speck of dust in the eye for a fraction of a second--whereas not being able to vote comes closer to being subjected to fifty years of torture. But you could certainly randomly choose someone who got a speck of dust in their eye and say, "You've just been tortured for fifty years."
All right, how does saying "you can't cast a vote" disenfranchise someone more than saying "you can vote but we're not going to count it"? At the individual level, they have precisely the same effect. You insist on dividing the impact of any fraudulent vote across the aggregate total and then applying that result to the individual, but not doing so with suppression. Why? I know you're not that stupid, so I can only see that you're either being willfully blind or you're being dishonest. One fraudulent vote and one suppressed vote are exactly the same, they each nullify one valid voter. If you want to look at things individually, you need to actually do so for both sides, not divide the individual vote by the aggregate total in one case (which is an aggregate look, not an individual look) and then divide the individual vote by the individual vote in the other case.
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[Have I really said this or is one of us experiencing some form of the Mandela Effect?
If I have said something of the sort then it's not particularly strange. The burden of evidence should be high when justifying measures that infringe upon individuals' right to participate in the democratic process.
So. . . you think Sweden SHOULD scrap its current id requirement for voting?
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I don't believe you'd find anywhere near as many people wholly disenfranchised--based on that one-to-one matching you proposed--by fraud as by voter suppression.
I bet I'd find more, actually. Particularly in places like the US where turnout is already low.
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So, even if I were to accept your reasoning--and I'll say that I have my reservations about its usefulness--I would be left with the problem of choosing between disenfranchising a small handful of people or a much larger handful of people.
You have not BEGUN to have any substantiation for your concept that either existing suppression or new suppression from an ID law is much larger than fraudulent voting. If you did, you've be calling out to scrap the id requirements already on the books in many countries including your own.
