Something about voter fraud you may not have considered. When everyone with an agenda talks about disenfranchised voters, do they ever understand that every vote cast illegally disenfranchises another, legally cast vote?
Both Hindrocket and Glenn Reynolds have some examples from the last election, and offer suggestions for changes before the next.
People tend to talk about these things before elections, and then forget about them afterward. Now’s the time to address these issues, so that we can do something about them before 2008.
I agree with Professor Reynolds. The problem is that the issue is a political hot potato. Advocates for illegal immigrants claim that legal ones will be frightened about registering. The Jesse Jacksons of the world will find all kinds of arguments for how it would hurt their constituencies.
The voter rolls in this country are bloated. The listings contain the names of many people who no longer live in the same district, and names of people who no longer live. They contain names of people who never existed, and people who are not legally entitled to vote.
The problem is that each state must make the changes. The Constitution leaves that up to individual states–part of the reason for the problems we now have. No, I don’t mean the federal government would do a better job. But I believe there should be some standard applied for identification across the nation. It was not something that could even be envisioned in 1789, at a time when less than half the population was literate, and the primary requirement for voting was to be a land-owner.
When you have to present a photo ID to buy alcohol or tobacco or Playboy, doesn’t it make sense that you would need to show one to do something far more important, and something that affects everyone else?
You do statistics, Bunker. You know Type I and Type II errors. Type I is rejecting the null hypothesis when it’s actually valid, and Type II is accepting the null hypothesis when it’s really invalid. And the problem in stats is that it’s extremely difficult to reduce Type I without increasing Type II, and vice versa.
A lot of things work that way: you can’t reduce one bad thing without increasing another. In this case, you can’t easily reduce the number of invalid voters without increasing the incidence of legitimate voters denied the right to vote. As Glenn Reynolds and others have pointed out, the net effect of either is the same: if you’re denied the proper right to vote, your candidate loses one net vote; and if I’m improperly granted the right to vote and vote against your candidate, your candidate loses one net vote. (I can’t think of any other case where a Type I error and a Type II error can lead to such similar outcomes; but I’m too tired to think really hard.)
But when it comes to the media game, denying the right to vote is is a much more egregious sin, because there’s an actual victim with an actual face to put on TV. And if that face fits a traditional victim minority group, the TV impact goes way up. And we all know that the racial demagogues are willing to claim disenfranchisement even when there’s not one identifiable victim (cf. Florida 2000), because victim politics are a source of power for them. So it’s very difficult to make the push for positive identification, no matter how common sense the idea should be.
Comment by UML Guy — January 26, 2005 @ 10:06 am
And, once again, emotion trumps all.
Comment by Bunker — January 26, 2005 @ 2:40 pm