Selective voter suppression and exclusion, which the US has had in a significant way for centuries, mitigated somewhat for a time by the voting rights act before it was gutted, is a pretty enormous issue with the integrity of democratic elections.
The idea that the US doesn't have election integrity issues is simply false.
This is just your cognitive bias away from an extreme position. Actually election integrity in the US is pretty close to perfect. 10s of cases out of 100s of millions/low billions of votes cast. This has be exhaustively studied, MIT has produced papers.
The closest thing to a widespread problem is voter suppression, where states administer elections in regionally uneven ways to suppress one party's turnout. This is predominately against black citizens in the south after Shelby v Holder.
Your premise that mail-in ballots were a source of significant fraud has been proven false.
Edit: Election integrity is important. So is access to voting. It seems completely obvious to me (and millions of others, it seems) that the so-called election integrity measures taken by places like Florida and Texas are blatant attempts to restrict access to legitimate voting for the kinds of people that tend to vote Democrat.
Send in my ballot by mail for all elections and sign it. Election fraud is a miniscule problem in the USA, there's probably a bigger problem with e-voting not counting the votes correctly with all the unauditable systems being used currently. The only people who claim the USA has a signficant voter fraud problem are trying to suppress turnout among minorities.
There are many ways to negatively affect election integrity, both illegal and legal.
For example, in Georgia, US, one of the candidates himself blocked 53,000 voter registrations just 3 weeks before the election. The demographics of the 53,000 is 70% black.
Gerrymandering, strict voter id laws (e.g. requiring drivers license but removing all but one DMV in the entire county in opponent's strongholds) and similar are also various ways to negatively affect election integrity.
Well, yes; look at the decades of voter rights litigation. There's a long history of trying to suppress Black voting. So long as that's still going on there will be voting integrity problems coming from within state legislatures.
Most western democracies don’t have a problem with fraud allegations in voting. It’s really only the US. And even there, the allegations are mostly a political ploy to push for policies that disenfranchis voters of other parties. Which again doesn’t exist in other Western democracies.
If it didn’t suppress Democratic votes then you wouldn’t have Republican politicians nearly universally in favor and Democratic politicians nearly universally opposed. I take that as prima facie evidence.
We have the same debate with early voting, how long polling places are open, and where they are located.
For whatever reason, conservative voters tend to be more motivated to vote. So any friction in the voting process tends to disproportionately affect Democrats.
As an aside, there are structurally racist policies that suppress Democratic votes both historically and today. To give one example, most states do not allow exconvicts to vote.
As to why many Americans are opposed? Because for so long this country has tried to prevent anyone but white men from voting.
Besides that, voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. There’s just not a plausible way to commit large scale fraud at the polls. You’d have to round up bus loads of people willing to commit voter fraud, take them from polling place to place, then have them sign their names as some other voter on the rolls at that polling location and hope that the real voter hasn’t and won’t show up to vote. I lack the imagination to see how this could occur without detection.
In any case, what everyone should actually be concerned with is that the voting system accurately captures the will of the people. In which case, voter fraud at the polls, in America, is the least of our problems. Our attention should be focused on things gerrymandering, first past the post, and for presidential elections, the electoral college, among other issues.
There absolutely are people in the United States today who do not have government issued ID, do not want it, and still are and should be entitled to vote.
What are some steps to make it more transparent? That critically both protect secret ballot and not suppress the vote?
Republicans have been ruthlessly effective here and there are plenty of laws that are passed under the guise of 'anti-fraud' but really are to suppress the vote usually in favor of southern Republicans. Copy of license, very very restrictive rules on who can request a ballot, reducing drop off locations etc Same playbook for a century, different rules
>Fair enough. But again you're basing your argument on conveniently skipping over the real question which is not "was there at least one fraudulent vote in America in the last 41 years?" (the question you're trying hard to answer over and over with "yes!").
>The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.
>It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.
We're just going in circles here. Have a nice evening :)
The idea that the US doesn't have election integrity issues is simply false.
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