#29
Post
by tvrec » Thu Nov 06, 2014 5:00 pm
I have worked at polling stations in California off and on for over ten years, and the initial scenario misses a lot of the checks and balances in play to ensure voters can cast their ballot without burden and that they are legitimately eligible to vote.
It starts with Registration, when your eligibility to vote is verified weeks before any election by your county registrars office; you cannot register and then immediately vote. You're vetted first. This requires that you submit information meant to prove your identity and eligibility (like a social security number and driver's license number, though there are other things that can be used at this stage).
After you are registered, you receive election materials at your residence, which will tell you precisely where you have to vote. These polling stations generally cover extremely small areas, and are not necessarily obvious. At least 40% of the people coming into the station I work at think they are arriving at their polling station because they live "like right over there," but they didn't read their materials and we have to look up on a map to re-direct them to their actual polling location. They are on the voting roster ONLY at the place to which they have been assigned. If they do want to vote at a different location, they can, but they must do so provisionally, meaning their vote is set aside until the registrar can verify the eligibility of the voter. This issue is particularly sensitive for localized politics, because polling stations only have access to the ballots for their precinct--local propositions, offices, even statewide assembly elections may be different a mile away and provisional voters won't be able to vote in the ones tied to their residence (in the cases that they are different) and even if they vote provisionally in the alternative location, their votes for those localized things will not be counted if their residence is not within the same precinct. Case in point, some guy told me he drove down to South Orange County (San Onofre) so that he could vote provisionally and cast a vote against Darrel Issa; I had to tell him that it was all in vein because his provisional vote would be cast out because he was not a resident of Issa's district. Only the larger state propositions and offices would count on his provisional ballot.
When you participate in your first election, you must provide proof of residence, which could be a driver's license, but also other official things, like a rental agreement or utility bill--something to verify your name a residence. As others have pointed out here, it's a very questionable proposition to require an ID that costs money (or to assume everyone has a driver's license or access to state IDs).
You sign and write your address in a voting log and your address is cross checked. That voting log contains a scannable barcode beside each signature. The registrar uses this signature and bar code combination to verify that the signature in the voter log is the same as the one on the registration. Granted, this comes after a vote is cast, but it does provide a cross check. Like banks cross checking signatures on checks, it could be be gamed by someone who has all your information, sure, but the likelihood is minimal and once that info is in the book, that "eligible" voter cannot vote again, so any scam here is limited to one vote-- statistically nothing.
Anytime I hear someone saying that we need to require voter IDs, I get worked up because it is a complete non-issue as it relates to the legitimacy of elections. There is absolutely no evidence that in-person voter fraud has any kind of statistical prevalence or relevance to the outcome of elections. It is merely a political argument, most often used to fomenting distrust of Others.