Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls and a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying citizenship.
One person voting who is not allowed is as bad (in terms of fidelity of the vote to legal voters' intentions) as one person being kept from voting who is allowed. There is copious evidence that these purges, and the atmosphere of fear they create, cause far more harm than they prevent.
From one of the articles about what happened in Virginia[0]:
> “Governor Youngkin has been clear: every eligible Virginia citizen who wants to vote can do so by Same Day Registering through Election Day—that’s what our law says,” said Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez.
> A “final failsafe,” Martinez added, is the ability for residents to use same day registration to vote early or on Election Day.
I’m trying to think of this from the point of view of the “null hypothesis”. Typically, I have heard that you want to design your system so that Type II errors are more serious.
This is where it gets confusing for me because your comment makes me think that people can’t agree on whether it’s a more serious mistake to allow an ineligible person to vote or whether we end up stopping (hopefully temporarily) an eligible voter from exercising their right.
Maybe the best answer would be to just create a system where only people who are legally allowed to vote, and those that aren't allowed can't, and the provenance of any given ballot is very clear and secure.
It's hard to build it, but some countries (like mine) have universal government-issued IDs, called identity cards. You get your ID card when you turn 14 (voting starts at 18), based on your birth certificate, or when you become a legal citizen through immigration. This ID card includes a photograph, and has to be changed every ~10 years (slightly more often at first, slightly less often as you age). Whenever the government wants to confirm your identity, you present this card, including elections. On election day, if your ID card is lost/stolen, you can get one at any police station within the same day (if both your ID card and your birth certificate are also lost, however, that is going to take far more time to get back and get a new ID, and you will not be able to vote - which is a problem, but it affects very few people, fortunately).
This whole system is easy to maintain if you've had it in place. However, it's very hard to emit ID cards for a whole population that hasn't had one before. I'm not suggesting this is an easy fix for the USA, even beyond the cultural issues that would arise if trying to do a federal ID for every citizen like this.
Are we talking about "Voter ID"? If so, isn't that being constantly derailed by the democrats? Just like all the issues with illegals and the border wall, which they don't seem to want to fix and make it impossible.
> Just like all the issues with illegals and the border wall, which they don't seem to want to fix and make it impossible.
How do you reconcile that with:
Senate Republicans block border security bill as they campaign on border chaos ( May 24, 2024 )
Nearly every GOP senator, along with six Democrats, voted to filibuster a bipartisan bill designed to crack down on migration and reduce border crossings.
The vote caps a peculiar sequence of events after Senate Republican leaders insisted on a border security agreement last year and signed off on a compromise bill before they knifed it. Democrats, wary of their political vulnerability when it comes to migration, had acceded to a variety of GOP demands to raise the bar for asylum-seekers and tighten border controls.
~ multiple US news outlets.
FWiW I'm not American, and it seems pretty clear that US Republicans vastly overhype the risks associated with the southern border, campaign hard on fear mongering, and tank any efforts by the Democrats to address those problems.
Politically it's a common conservative tactic having been used in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere.
What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details.
That's the bill that would have facilitated illegal immigration, not stopped it. It sounds decent at first, providing a mechanism to lock down the border, but the "average of 4000 encounters" are 4000 who apply for asylum with a hearing at some future date and are released into the country in the meantime.
You really should read the bill. Our bills are never single subject and always have completely unrelated items in them. The title is also arbitrary marketing speak that is no indication of what the bill is intended to do.
Even more so we should use AI and probe the actual contents of these bills seeing as they're all-encompassing. This is like a giant PR that includes changes to 23% of your system, touching everything from every level including config files.
I'll bet money that none of the changes are grouped into any sort of easy-to-digest format with cross-referencing and other mechanisms to make it easy for people to introspect it.
As you are not an American, let me educate on what that bill did.
Much like the "Inflation Reduction Act" which was a clean energy bill that had nothing to do with inflation, the bill did the exact opposite of what it claimed.
- It funded billions of dollars for the NGOs which were aiding illegal immigration
- It normalized and allowed historically high illegal levels of immigration (10x normal)
- It removed the standard process for adjudicating asylum by judges and made it part of the federal ICE
- Required the US to fund lawyers for all people who were charged with illegal immigration (12 million in the last 4 years)
- It gave $60 billion to Ukraine, 3x more than border security [1]
- It gave $14 billion to Israel, $10B to Gaza, $2B for conflicts in the Red Sea, $4B to Taiwan
During this period where 12 million (3.4% of US population) people have crossed the border for residency illegally, many of which have been flown in by the US federal government, the federal government has sued Texas repeatedly while they are trying to build a border wall. They have flown in percentages of whole populations to US swing states to try to build voters. And illegal immigrants count in the census which determines US electoral votes.
The reason the GOP voted against it is because it was a wishlist for the Democratic party. There is nothing more complicated about it than that. If the GOP was such fear mongers, as you say, they'd vote for a bill that ameliorated their concerns.
Not even 3 or 4 months ago, I would have expected the responses to this message to all be 'yassss queen slay', despite the glaring fact that the 'bi-partison' bill just enshrined the current democrat-party policy into law, while ensuring it could only be challenged in a court they control.
I am happy to see that the entirety of responses are effectively 'lol, actually read the law it is a disaster'.
My heart grew 1 size today.
"What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details."
Pot, meet Kettle.
You mean the system we have already? The number of ineligible voters actively voting is inconsequential. Yes there are a few. Literally a few. It’s not the booger man the GOP would have is believe.
In theory, yes, she can re-register at her polling place But that isn’t real-time - it’s a provisional ballot that gets certified later. This whole purge process (and related “citizen only” measures which are literally redundant) is designed to create friction and uncertainty among immigrant populations and marginally reduce their turnout.
I have to assume same day registration would require documentation to (re) prove your citizenship. If you can't find your birth certificate or similar on that day it would be an issue that your previously valid registration was removed and you aren't able to go through the process again in one day.
Typically not. Just an ID (depending on state, might require a photo, might not) and a sworn affidavit that you are eligible (ie a citizen, not a felon in some states, etc). The ballot would be provisional and the board of elections runs a more thorough check after the fact. The voter gets a phone number and transaction ID to check back to see their status.
But, as I've noted elsewhere, while this is an option in VA, it isn't in all states (the same-day reg part - they all have some form of provisional ballot). And it creates friction and uncertainty among the electorate. If your state sent you a letter that said you were ineligible, would you jump through hoops to prove them wrong, or would you punt this cycle and fix the issue later? The latter is what the GOP hopes will happen, effectively disenfranchising a specific group of left-leaning voters (most immigrant groups lean left to some extent).
Edit to add - states that have RealID implemented (not sure if they all do yet), all the paperwork required to get the RealID stamp on your DL would prove your citizenship as well, so that's on record with the state. In the case of the 1600 voters in VA, they all have pre-RealID licenses (and many have naturalized in the time since their DL was issued). But, quite a few were selected erroneously based on scant evidence.
Oh that's interesting. I don't remember the last time I had to register to vote but it was probably done at the DMV who would already have on record my birth certificate or similar.
If just an ID is used, how do they confirm someone is a citizen? Can you only get an Illinois ID if you are eligible to vote?
My experience is that in getting a state ID, you need birth certificate or another document.
In the case of a state without voter ID, there is no check — you literally just have to bring an electric bill. A non citizen could easily vote. It would be illegal, but the odds of being caught are slim to none.
If there was a suspicion that the voter was illegal, a poll worker could have them cast a provisional ballot. In places like California, it is a felony to require a provisional ballot without evidence.
> Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls and a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying citizenship.
Over the last 20 years there's no record of a non citizen voting in VA.
As a poll worker myself, there's nothing we would check election day that was that wasn't already checked during registration. Asking me to "verify" day of, beyond what we already do, isn't really feasible.
Recommend you work the polls and educate yourself on how your particular locale operates.
This would be my expectation as well. Poll workers can verify that a person is registered to vote in this election, whether the registration was valid is an upstream problem.
If a state is allowing intelligible people to register to vote that's a much, much bigger issue and one that can't be solved by poll workers.
Understood. The point of verifying citizenship at the polls is a stop gap response to intelligible voters being on the rolls. The registration is broken. To ensure everybody is a legal voter something additional needs to be done until the rolls can be fixed.
1600 alleged non-citizens. There were absolutely citizens on the list.
And purging them within 60 days of the election is illegal per federal statute.
Youngkin and the GOP are
flat out wrong here. The courts have said as much so far. And yet here we are again having to explain all this to somebody who watches too much Fox News.
And which is this mythical group of people that will be disenfranchised if the rule of showing photo id is implemented? How many US citizens don't have any form of valid id?
I worked a total of eleven elections, from primarily elections to general elections. I even worked a special recall election where the recall was the only thing on the ballot. I was a volunteer for all of them. I worked as a "Polling Place Inspector", which means I was 'in charge' of a single polling place: I did the setup & teardown, reached out to the other polling place's poll workers to confirm they'll be there, and scheduled breaks etc..
I worked in Orange County, California, which is the county between Los Angeles and San Diego. At the time, it was very right-leaning. It may be so today, but that doesn't matter for this post.
Fun fact: In Orange County, poll workers are the only people who are allowed to question (or "challenge") a person's right to vote. The general public are not. How do I know that? Because it's one of the things I was taught during training. You can see it mentioned in [2], on page 11, under "What Are Observers NOT Allowed To Do?". (In the document, "precinct board" means "the poll workers".)
Now, three situational "pop quizzes" related to the situation from the article. In all three, you are a poll worker. Note that I will refer to procedures that were in place in Orange County, CA, not Fairfax County, VA:
Pop Quiz #1: Someone has arrived to vote, and you do not believe they are eligible to vote, what do you do?
Answer #1: You are challenging a voter. You have the voter vote provisionally. Their ballot would be sealed in the envelope, and their information (plus an explanation of why you're having them vote provisionally) would be on the envelope. The challenged voter would take a receipt with them, giving them a phone number to call, should they want to check up on the status of their vote after the election.
Fun Fact: Challenging a voter without probable cause is a felony in the State of California. How do I know that? Because it's in the instructional handbook that every poll worker gets, when they go through training. You can find Orange County's handbook for the 2018 election at [1].
Pop Quiz #2: Someone at the polling place, who is not a poll worker, is challenging peoples' right to vote. What do you do?
Answer #2: Call the dedicated polling place helpdesk, letting them know about the incident. Depending on the person's behavior, you may ask them to leave, or you may skip directly to calling the police. Your polling place inspector would have already looked up the phone number of the nearest police station, or you could just call 911.
Fun Fact: As part of polling place supplies, I received a county mobile phone. I was specifically instructed to charge it up in advance of election day. They were always chunky Nokia phones, which felt like they could be used as a weapon in an emergency.
Finally, to address your question…
Pop Quiz #3: Another poll worker is challenging a voter, and you believe the challenge is unlawful. What do you do?
Answer #3: If you are not able to dissuade the poll worker into allowing the voter to vote normally, then you have them vote provisionally. The most important thing is to get the voter through the process, and their provisional envelope into the box. Once that is done, you reach out to the polling place helpdesk, letting them know who did what.
Indeed, quoting from the article you linked, "After the [polling place] manager intervened, Burrell-Aldana was allowed to vote." The article does not say, but I expect the polling place manager was already planning on how to communicate the incident back to headquarters, and was keeping an eye on that poll worker.
If you had volunteered for this election, and you happened to be in the situation from this article, then you would have known what to do. :-)
My point was that despite all the training, some whack job was still allowed to work and question voters’ rights. How many did he successfully turn away? Hopefully none, but we don’t know.
Except non-citizens have voted. And the Democrats found Virgina over removing confirmed non-citizens from the voter rolls. Why would anyone support keeping illegible voters on the rolls? We all know why.
Nobody is going to argue that non-citizens should be on the voter rolls. They are going to be upset if your method for taking them out is too coarse and removes legitimate voters, though.
Non-citizen voting is illegal already. We don’t need new laws re-banning it.
The numbers of non-citizens voting is small so any effort to purge them is as likely to disenfranchise legitimate voters as remove illegal voters. That’s a net negative.
I’d say this was a fluke if the GOP hadn’t spent the last umpteen months pushing all this non-citizen voting nonsense.
https://wapo.st/3AsIvnf