Just for the record, Trump can’t do this. The Constitution is very clear that the “times, places, and manner“ of elections for federal office are determined by individual states (though can be altered by Congress).
The president simply has no role in US elections (except to sign into law or veto whatever election-related bills that congress might pass).
@mattblaze Throw into the brew the situation a few years ago when states tried to require that presidential candidates publish tax returns and were shot down by courts saying that states can not modify the requirements to hold office.
Although that is not directly germane to the voter ID situation, it does reflect a policy that when it comes to election stuff, the Constitution occupies almost the entire space leaving little room for additional Federal or state regulation.
With regard to voter ID - that is an issue that is hard to oppose because it is not irrational. I believe the D's would be better off not opposing voter ID but, instead, using those resources to make sure that every likely D voter has a proper voter ID.
@SteveBellovin @mattblaze I am far from having expertise in the art of issuing IDs. So I do not understand when you say "Providing IDs to every voter is a really hard problem."
??
(I do remember back when Dave Kaufman and I were trying to figure out operating system access control matrices that we always seemed to back into the question of "how do we know who the actor is?" [Especially when a person or thing was acting as an agent with delegated authorities from another.])
I also keep bumping into the old national ID card issue - and the fears that a person could be "vanished" by a government agency. But then again, we seem to be moving pretty close to a national ID card with things like SecureID driver's licenses.
@aarbrk @karlauerbach @mattblaze This is the key point: lack of what are known as "breeder documents"; error handling is the other big point. I outline some of the issues in https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf, with a more complete analysis in Section §V.C of https://scholar.smu.edu/scitech/vol26/iss2/2/. There's a very good analysis of the ID card issue in Crawford v. Marion Count Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), especially the dissents. For a general discussion of what questions would have to be answered (in the U.S.) by anyone proposing a national ID card before the question could even be discussed intelligently, see the National Academies report "IDs Not Easy", https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/10346/ids-not-that-easy-questions-about-nationwide-identity-systems (I was on the committee). I should add: one of the things I learned while on that committee was that while the US has a pretty good national registry of deaths (the Social Security Administration's Master Death File), birth records are decentralized and are of varying quality and accuracy.
The problem falls disproportionately on certain groups: the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless, etc. Quoting Justice Souter's dissent in _Crawford_: "The need to travel to a BMV branch will affect voters according to their circumstances, with the average person probably viewing it as nothing more than an inconvenience. Poor, old, and disabled voters who do not drive a car, however, may find the trip prohibitive, witness the fact that the BMV has far fewer license branches in
each county than there are voting precincts." Corruption can be a problem—in Hudson County in New Jersey, birth certificates from the county office were not accepted by the state because a scheme to issue fraudulent documents (https://hudsoncountyview.com/after-nearly-two-decades-jersey-city-residents-can-now-obtain-birth-certificates-at-city-hall/). Malice can be an issue: Alabama closed almost half of its motor vehicles offices, mostly in poor, Black counties (https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/alabamas-dmv-shutdown-has-everything-do-race), and I have exactly one guess why.
RealID doesn't solve the problem, it makes it worse: you need more documents to show your identity and address (and if you're poor and unlikely to fly somewhere, you don't actually need it). I just went through this when I went to get a Maryland license after moving: how do I demonstrate that I live where I said? Proving my identity was easy, for me—I have a passport (though only about half of Americans do, and that's up sharply from not long ago; see https://www.apolloacademy.com/48-of-americans-have-a-passport/), NY license, Social Security Card (though it's a replacement I had to get not all that long ago because I thought I'd lost mine), New York City ID card, etc. But my address? For various reasons, I wanted to get my new license very soon after I moved. I hadn't received any bank statements, credit card bills, etc., at my new address yet. Cable TV is included here, so I had no cable bill. I did have an electric bill, and I suppose I could have brought the purchase deed for my condo (though that only shows ownership, not residence). Now translate all of that to someone who's very poor or is living on the streets. Passport? Hah. Electric bill for your park bench or homeless shelter? Etc.
Yes, some of these issues can be worked around, especially in states with good will. In Massachusetts, staff at a homeless shelter can sign affidavits of residence. But a lot does depend on state politics. In Texas, you can vote with a state firearms license—but not with an ID from a public university, even though legally those are government-issued IDs. (Aside: ~20 years ago, I had a Homeland Security ID card for my service on an advisory committee. When I got to the airport the first time after received that ID, I asked the TSA agent if I could use it. "You can, but we won't like it." I took the hint and dug out my driver's license instead…)
I could go on—as you can see, this is an area where I have worked professionally. The bottom line, though, is that while it's not a problem for the majority of Americans (the issues are very different in other countries)—and that likely includes the overwhelming majority of Americans reading this post—for a significant number of people it is quite difficult.
@SteveBellovin @aarbrk @karlauerbach (Thanks for the extensive references)
Requiring ID to vote is similar in this respect to literacy tests for voters. It might seem like a sensible idea in a vacuum, until the political context in which it’s implemented comes into play.
@SteveBellovin @mattblaze @aarbrk On our first day at law school we had to buy a copy of that not-so-little booklet that defines the proper form of a legal citation. I wonder if that little book still exists (I suspect it does) and whether law schools hand it out on Day One.
I was always a fan of reaching into non-US law when facing a vacuum in US law. I do remember once needing to cite some material from the statutes of English King Charles I. (To make it worse, the material was in Latin. And, since a bad - in this case horrible - pun is required, it lacked headnotes.) I've also cited some ecclesiastical stuff, like the ban on unauthorized books from the Fifth Lateran Council, 1512-1517.
@SteveBellovin @mattblaze @aarbrk @karlauerbach
https://www.greenbag.org/v16n1/v16n1_ex_post_kerr.pdf
(Mastodon decided to include your elipsis as part of the URL)
@Dss @SteveBellovin @aarbrk @mattblaze For UBI magnitude of erroneous or fraudulent overpayments will probably not break any bank. And the world will not explode if a poor or homeless person gets an extra payment. That's better than someone not getting paid at all.
So in the UBI case, erring on the side of overpaying or over-coverage is probably safe for our society. Perfection in that system is not necessary.
I have long railed against the risking tide of abandoning human-based one-person-one-vote democracy to membership in group based "stakeholder" decisionmaking. That trend rather moots the need for individual IDs and replaces it more with claims that one is a member of one (or more) enfranchised "stakeholder" groups.
That trend towards "stakeholders" who can get multiple votes because they have multiple kinds of "stake" tends to slightly anesthetize me against the risk of an individual human having multiple votes due to fake IDs.
@karlauerbach @SteveBellovin @aarbrk @mattblaze It's a very difficult problem. I spent a lot of yesterday arguing the details of a UBI system versus a "lowest 50% of income" model. The UBI proponent had no idea how to prevent basic issues, like the rentier economy simply increasing all rents by the UBI, causing a massive wealth transfer to the richest in society, nor whether (illegal?) immigrants, children, etc would get it, nor could answer questions about the unbanked in society. The only answer they had was "taxes".
UBI could be a total disaster for the homeless or un/poorly documented - how would they even claim? And then rents have all jumped by +$ubi, leaving them even worse off.
It's an idea that needs careful work.
@Dss @karlauerbach @SteveBellovin @aarbrk
It seems notable that Monopoly, the game of capitalism run amok, offers universal basic income payouts whenever Go is passed. It's also a game in which wealthy real estate moguls are regularly sent to jail (though they can buy their way out).
@Dss @SteveBellovin @aarbrk @mattblaze I think your concerns about UBI are real, but I think that the benefits outweigh them.
For instance, the arguments you make could equally be made about any government benefit, from school vouchers to military pensions to social security payments (or for any of the various "incentives" granted to corporations.)
@SteveBellovin @aarbrk @mattblaze Thanks for that, and the references.
Some years back when I had to dredge up birth and marriage certificates for my mother and birth certificate for my maternal grandfather.
My mother's birth certificate was hand written by a priest in Quebec - and was not acceptable to the Canadian federal government. Fortunately I could get a modern one from Quebec.
My grandfather was born before WW-I in what was then part of Austro-Hungry, which became part of Germany, then Ukraine, then Soviet Union, then Germany, then Ukraine/USSR, then Ukraine. Eventually I got a certificate from Russia but with the CCCP and hammer and sickle on it.
Once upon a time, for a US corporate governance case (against ICANN) I got an "official" report from a US agency that had embossed pages, had a blue ribbon, and a wax seal - nobody had seen anything like it.
(I've seen actively used, 18th century looking, large, wooden embossing presses in some court clerk offices.)
@karlauerbach @SteveBellovin @aarbrk @mattblaze the real scenarios are all over the map. It wasn't until the late 20th century that lack of approved documents really became an issue. And you can't create documents that never existed.
Sometimes even getting new ones issued when the old ones get lost or destroyed becomes super hard. Many jurisdictions have been digitizing their official documents. This is a great thing, but transcription doesn't always work out well. Try to find your birth certificate when it was transcribed wrong! The database swears you were never born, but it's just a case of someone typing something wrong into a computer.
@mweiss @SteveBellovin @aarbrk @mattblaze My sense is that the issue is even more broad than the cases you mention.
Our governments have found that then can circumvent various kinds of Constitutional and other constraints by farming out jobs to private actors. I saw this at close hand in internet governance matters.
Those private actors seem to be more sloppy about data integrity than government actors. For instance, I seem to have morphed into multiple people because information aggregation companies have conflated me with my ex (our names differed by one character) and because some scanner sometime in the past mis-scanned my name and thought an 'a" was a 'u' character. This has caused me no end of troubles.
What are we going to end up with? Will each birth be assigned a GUID that links to the child's DNA sequence? (Could this revive the practice of signing documents in blood? ;-)
Corporate ID is potentially worse given sub-corporations, linked trusts, etc.
@oclsc @SteveBellovin @mattblaze I am not making that assumption. My comment about SecureID is intended to reflect that national ID cards are sneaking up on us.
BTW, as far as I know, many (perhaps most?) will issue ID cards to those who can't get (or do not want) a driver's license. I'm not sure whether there is a SecureID version of those.
@karlauerbach @SteveBellovin @mattblaze In my salad days, when I lived in the States and the President was a B-list actor with dementia, it was a real nuisance not to have a photo ID, eg when paying by cheque (remember that?). I had a non-driver ID from California DMV for a while, but that seemed stupid. Then I attended a conference in Toronto so I got a passport, and thereafter carried that.
But in recent decades I can hardly remember being asked for ID except when crossing borders or checking into US hotels. (The latter seems new since the Reagan years--maybe it started after 9/11?)
One exception is when voting in Canada but the requirements are quite loose--provincial health card and a utility bill will do. Another recent one: when I signed my will, lawyer wanted to see ID for obvious reasons. I still had my decades-old, rather ratty Canadian citizenship card in my wallet, and that was enough. If I'd known she was going to ask I'd have brought my passport.
But the need now is annual or less, not daily.
@oclsc @SteveBellovin @mattblaze Some states in the US are allowing drivers licenses to be inserted into the Apple iPhone Wallet. I've done it. So far I have not used it.
Some stores (such as cannabis stores) around here want (or rather, require) a scan of the barcode on the back of the California driver's license.
@SteveBellovin @oclsc @mattblaze Apple's documentation says that it tells you what data will be transferred before you do the double-click to allow the transfer.
I've never used the iPhone based drivers license thing so I can't attest to the accuracy of the documentation.
@karlauerbach @SteveBellovin @mattblaze Some specific issues of providing voter ID is access to where IDs are issued. For rural areas in the south, that location might be hours away with limited hours.
There’s also the cost in acquiring official documentation that may be required to get an ID.
If you’re poor and without access to reliable transportation, it’s difficult, and some local governments seem to want it that way.
Another issue is with tribal voter registration. Not having traditional addresses, names entered into systems that don’t match official documentation—they’re used to deny otherwise eligible voters.
And on the subject of requiring in-person voting, the boundaries of states do not always reflect geographic boundaries. I’ve read of a tribe in the southwest that literally has no access to cities within the state without first driving through another state and around a mountain range. Vote-by-mail is the most practical option.
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