Suppression of voters' rights.

[Al B. Sure!]

I'll accept the argument that it is technically a poll tax to charge for the ID, but let's be fair here, it's pretty negligible.

The ID's are free. Now Oerdin is claiming the documents you need to get the free ID may cost money... but at what point are we going to ask someone WHY DO THEY HAVE NO LEGAL DOCUMENTS?!

[Imran Siddiqui]

I'll accept the argument that it is technically a poll tax to charge for the ID, but let's be fair here, it's pretty negligible.

Negligible is still something. I imagine that free ID's are the way to go to avoid such a thing if you want an ID requirement.

[Imran Siddiqui]

The ID's are free. Now Oerdin is claiming the documents you need to get the free ID may cost money... but at what point are we going to ask someone WHY DO THEY HAVE NO LEGAL DOCUMENTS?!

You think homeless people carry around their birth certificates? In this age, I think birth certificates should be uploaded to a federal database to prevent issue with that.

[Al B. Sure!]

Voter fraud is not nearly as serious of a problem as some Republicans make it out to be, Slowwy.

Holy crap! Come to Philly. Holy **** come to Philly. The dead vote in Philly by the thousands.

Look up the Stinson case when a judge gave the state senate seat to the losing Republican because voter fraud was so pervasive. But that was just the last time action was taken against what is a political way of life here.

[Al B. Sure!]

You think homeless people carry around their birth certificates? In this age, I think birth certificates should be uploaded to a federal database to prevent issue with that.

I ALREADY said if we're talking this law disenfranchises homeless people, that's a legitimate concern but this debate is NOT being framed in such terms!

[DinoDoc]

You think homeless people carry around their birth certificates? In this age, I think birth certificates should be uploaded to a federal database to prevent issue with that.

Homeless people vote? In what numbers?

[Al B. Sure!]

Read this guy's account:

In the spring of 2006, I reviewed portions of the city of Philadelphia’s 2005 voting list. I found that underaged voters, deceased voters, and incarcerated felons were registered to vote and had remained on the voting list, despite the fact that none of them were eligible to vote in Pennsylvania (or, in most cases, anywhere else).

In Pennsylvania, a voter must be 18 or older as of the date of the election to be eligible to vote. Yet at least 130 voters on the list were under the age of 18. Thirty-four of whom had a birth year of 2004 — the year of the election. And 215 voters on the list had a birthdate of: “00-00-00.”

Just looking at the years of birth for the registered voters, I found 54 voters listed with years of birth ranging from 1825 – 1899. While it is possible that a voter born in 1899 could still be alive in 2004 (he or she would be 105), it is clearly impossible that someone born in 1825 would.

Digging a little bit deeper, I was able to find confirmed deceased voters still on the list. I took a sample of 385 registrants born between the years 1900 and 1905, and found that 51 (thirteen percent!) were in fact dead, according to the Social Security Death Index.

It was not simply the deceased, underaged, and age-unknown who remained on the voter list: incarcerated felons (who are ineligible to vote in Pennsylvania) were on there too. My research showed that at least 12 incarcerated felons were on the 2005 official voter list, and were still incarcerated when I conducted my analysis in 2006.

Leaving names on the official voter list of ineligible voters invites fraud. While I did not witness this, a reliable person “on the ground” during the 2004 presidential election told me that he saw the signatures in the poll books of these same 12 incarcerated felons — indicating that they actually voted on Election Day.

My sampling of just a small portion of one city’s data from the 2005 official voting list uncovered 408 definite or highly likely ineligible voters. And that number does not account for all of the voters who may have been ineligible due to a change in residence. The true number of ineligible voters could easily be in the thousands — just from this small sample.

Assume that there were just 400 or so ineligible voters from all of Philadelphia, and not just from a small sample. Philadelphia is just one of 67 counties in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If every county had 400 or more ineligible voters on their lists for any given election, and those voters actually voted, roughly 26,800 votes would be ineligible. Multiply that by 50 states and one would be hard-pressed to successfully argue that a problem doesn’t exist when relevant portions of the National Voter Registration Act, such as Section 8, are not enforced — as the DOJ’s Julie Fernandes instructed.

I can't check the veracity of this guy's account but this is something that is well-known in Philly but the government has long turned a blind-eye to it because they benefit from it. Republicans don't make a stink because they can't win even without the fraud and they have control of the Parking Authority.

The machine keeps churning.

[SlowwHand]

You think homeless people carry around their birth certificates? In this age, I think birth certificates should be uploaded to a federal database to prevent issue with that.

They're filed at the County Records building. Here, they are. Besides which, states, speaking for Texas, have I.D. cards to substitute for a person merely missing to establish identity, not drive.

[Aeson]

Holy crap! Come to Philly. Holy **** come to Philly. The dead vote in Philly by the thousands.

Disenfranchising zombies

[DaShi]

It's amusing how many republicans here have turned on their own "values" concerning this issue.

[Al B. Sure!]

It's amusing how many republicans here have turned on their own "values" concerning this issue.

Not understanding what this means... The voting corruption of Democratic machines are well-known.

[DaShi]

Hmm...you're not even in the right place. Think harder?

[Dinner]

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/faultlines/2012/04/20124312352119619.html

That's a good video on this issue, how voter fraud essentially doesn't exist, yet Republicans nation wide are trying to make it harder and harder to vote. They're reducing or eliminating early voting, they're making it harder to register to vote (like eliminating same day registration), requiring people to register months before the elections or their vote won't count, making it harder to impossible for 3rd party groups to have voter registration drives, "scrubing" voter rolls where hundreds of thousands of people who were registered suddenly get unregistered but not told about it so they show up and are told they can't vote, and dozens of other dirty tricks.

This is a massive nationwide push by Republicans to make sure as few minorities as possible are able to vote. It's all strategic restrictions on voting rights designed to swing elections towards Republicans and people need to go to jail for this bull****.

[MrFun]

The ID's are free. Now Oerdin is claiming the documents you need to get the free ID may cost money... but at what point are we going to ask someone WHY DO THEY HAVE NO LEGAL DOCUMENTS?!

So in other words, Republicans want to decrease government spending, by increasing government spending, in order to provide free IDs because of new anti-voting rights laws.

[regexcellent]

The cost of this probably rounds to zero on the state budget.