USA 2020 Elections: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Wed Jun 2 22:57:39 PDT 2021


Though ID represents unnecessary forces of power and
control databasing etc over you, and you voting represents
you immorally forcing yourself on top of other people...
the supposedly secure US leaving itself open to exploit
of "voter fraud", that many analysts say did in fact occur
during 2020... is quite hilarious... same as its gasoline
pipelines, and its sheeple, leaving their systems and
minds open for exploit... then the Left tries lambast US
Republicans for trying to properly secure "voting" against
exploit.


https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/01/the_us_is_a_voter_photo_id_outlier_theyre_the_rule_in_europe_and_elsewhere_778714.html
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3849068.

America The Outlier: Voter Photo IDs Are The Rule In Europe And Elsewhere

Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the
extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during
the 2020 elections – warning anew of racist voter “suppression”
otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different
story – of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard
lessons learned.

A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention
Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures
are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries
after they've experienced fraud under looser voting regimes.

Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe -- a place where, on other matters,
American progressives often look to with envy -- all but one country
requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The exception is
the U.K., and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland
for all elections and in parts of England for local elections.
Moreover, Boris Johnson’s government recently introduced legislation
to have the rest of the country follow suit.

Criticisms of the British leader’s voter ID push are similar to those
heard in the U.S. The Scottish National Party claims his voter ID push
targets “lower income, ethnic minority and younger people” who are
less likely to vote for Johnson’s conservatives and therefore
represents “Trump-like voter suppression.”

Yet despite such pushback, Britain looks set to follow countries in
Europe and elsewhere with stricter voting regimes, few of which
temporarily relaxed any of their voting rules during the pandemic.

In the map here, the blue isn't for America's Democratic Party.
Rather, it's for European countries that require voter photo IDs,
which Democrats oppose in the U.S. The exception is Britain (green),
which plans to require IDs for all elections, while Denmark (light
blue) requires them on request.

Seventy-four percent of European countries entirely ban absentee
voting for citizens who reside domestically.

Another 6% limit it to those hospitalized or in the military, and they
require third-party verification and a photo voter ID. Another 15%
require a photo ID for absentee voting.

Similarly, government-issued photo IDs are required to vote by 33
nations in the 37-member Organistion for Economic Co-operation and
Development (which has considerable European overlap). Only the UK,
Japan, New Zealand, and Australia currently do not require IDs. Of
those outliers:

    Japan provides each voter with tickets that bear unique bar codes.
If the voter loses the ticket or accidentally brings the ticket for
another family member, polling staff verifies the voter’s name and
address using a computer with access to the city’s database. The voter
may have to present government-issued photo identification.

    New Zealand technically requires an ID with a unique code, but
while it will take longer to look up identifying information, it is
still possible to vote without the ID.

    Australia has by far the loosest rules, and while a photo ID is
required to register to vote, once at a polling station, voters need
simply report their names, addresses, and whether they have voted in a
previous election.

There were a few exceptions to developed countries’ general avoidance
of emergency voting measures during the pandemic. Poland allowed
mail-in ballots for everyone last year as a one-time measure, as did
two cities in Russia, but Poland’s rushed plan played out so poorly it
dissuaded other countries from following suit. France made more
limited exceptions, temporarily allowing sick or at-risk individuals
to vote absentee.

In some countries, even driver’s licenses aren’t considered
authoritative enough forms of voter identity verification.

The Czech Republic and Russia require passports or military-issued IDs
and others use national identity cards. Others go even further:
Colombia and Mexico each require a biometric ID to cast a ballot.

Many countries in Europe and beyond have learned the hard way that
fraud can result from looser voting regimes -- and they have
instituted stricter voting measures in direct response to it.

In Northern Ireland, where a bitter sectarian conflict extends to
hardball electoral machinations, voter fraud has been described as
“widespread and systemic” on all sides. Both Conservative and Labour
governments instituted reforms to quell it. In 1985, the U.K. started
requiring identification before ballots could be issued. This proved
insufficient. A 1998 Select Committee on Northern Ireland report found
that medical cards used as IDs after the 1985 law could be “easily
forged or applied for fraudulently,” thus allowing non-existent people
to vote. By 2002, the Labour government made voter identification
cards much more difficult to forge, and used the more secure ID and
other rules to prevent people from registering to vote multiple times.
These anti-fraud provisions led to an immediate 11% reduction in total
registrations -- a suggestion to Labour of the extent of earlier
fraud.

One study of vote fraud in Northern Ireland before the 2002 reforms
interviewed Brendan Hughes, the former IRA Belfast commander. Hughes
explained that he had a fleet of taxis to ferry fraudulent voters from
one polling station to another and that they “dressed up volunteers
with wigs, clothes, and glasses, and said this practice continued for
decades.” Young women were usually “used for voter impersonation
because they were more likely to be let off if there was any doubt.”

A 2002 survey of Northern Ireland by the U.K. Electoral Commission,
conducted after the rules passed but before they went into effect,
found that by a 64% to 10% margin, voters thought that vote “fraud in
some areas is enough to change the election results.”

Elsewhere in Britain, there have been notable fraud cases involving
absentee ballots. In 2004, before recent photo ID requirements, six
Labour Party councilors in Birmingham won office in what a judge later
described as a “massive, systematic and organized” postal voting fraud
campaign. The fraud was apparently carried out with the full knowledge
and cooperation of the local Labour party, and involved “widespread
theft” of absentee ballots (possibly around 40,000) in areas with
large Muslim populations. The fraud reflected some Labour members’
worries that the areas’ Muslims could no longer be trusted to vote for
the party because of unhappiness over the Iraq War.

On the mainland, France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of
massive fraud in the island region of Corsica, where postal ballots
were stolen or bought and others were cast in the names of dead
people.

In Hungary, which has the most lenient mail-in voting regulations in
Europe, including no ID requirement, the government of Prime Minister
Viktor Orbán, criticized for authoritarian tendencies, won 96% of the
mail votes in the 2018 election, thus giving itself a supermajority in
parliament by a very slim margin. Concerns are that fraud is possible
because “there is little scope for verification of identities, or to
check that people are still alive.”

When there are no tamper-resistant photo IDs, fraud is difficult to
prove. If hundreds or thousands of people vote at a polling place, how
do you verify if someone voted by pretending to be someone else?
Criminal convictions tend to occur only when people try voting in the
same polling station multiple times instead of visiting multiple
stations. But, with poll workers often working different shifts, even
the same polling station can be compromised.

Take a case from the U.K. in 2016. As the Electoral Commission
describes it: “Later in the day the same voter attended again and
sought to vote again, this time in his own name. Due to certain
physical characteristics of the voter (he was very tall and wore
distinctive clothing) and the vigilance of the presiding officer he
was suspected of having already voted earlier and formally
challenged.”

In another case in the U.K. from 2017, police caught a person voting
multiple times only because he openly bragged about it on Twitter. By
far the most common consequence for those caught voting multiple times
is a “caution” notice from the police.

American progressives might take heed of a Mexican election stolen
from voters on the left in part due to lax voting requirements
facilitating fraud. The 1988 loss of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the leading
leftist presidential candidate, to Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the
long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party has long been
considered a result of electoral fraud, later even acknowledged by the
then-incumbent president, Miguel de la Madrid.

And as a result of that fraud, Mexico in 1991 mandated voter photo IDs
with biometric information, banned absentee ballots, and required
in-person voter registration. Despite making registration much more
difficult and banning absentee ballots, voter participation rates rose
after Mexico implemented the new rules. In the three presidential
elections following the 1991 reforms, an average of 68% of the
eligible citizens voted, compared with only 59% in the three elections
prior to the rule changes. Seemingly, as people gained faith in the
electoral process, they became more likely to vote. Ultimately, in
2006 Mexico would revert to permitting absentee voting, but limited it
to those living abroad who requested a ballot at least six months in
advance. Claims of voting irregularities have occasionally arisen in
later years, but they focus on vote buying, not impersonating others,
or having non-existent people voting.

Despite the record of Europe and the vast majority of the rest of the
developed world, congressional Democrats are pushing to remove
identification requirements for voting. The House recently passed the
For the People Act of 2021, which replaces state voter ID rules with a
signed statement from the voter, and makes permanent the pandemic’s
mail-in ballot voting. The mailing out of blank absentee ballots en
masse would become a fixture of American elections. The Senate
Committee on Rules and Administration marked up the bill, but failed
to pass it with a 9-to-9 pure party-line tie vote. However, Democrats
have recently changed Senate rules, so they can still bring the bill
to the Senate floor for a vote.

Meanwhile, efforts in Republican states to require voter IDs for
in-person voting and absentee ballots have triggered boycotts from
Major League Baseball and other corporations. Georgia’s new absentee
provisions raised a ruckus despite being much less restrictive than
much of the rest of the world. Anyone who wants an absentee ballot can
obtain one. A reason need not be given, such as being out of town, but
one must have an ID to get an absentee ballot. The pattern is similar
for developed countries around the world.

The case of Mexico undermines the idea that stricter voting rules lead
to vote suppression, and so does some of the evidence from America. A
number of states have in recent years instituted photo and non-photo
ID measures, and found no statistically significant change in voter
participation rates. Other evidence suggests that black and minority
voter registration rates increased faster than whites after states
implemented voter ID requirements for registration.

RCI contacted both the Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU, two
organizations that have been at the forefront of the ballot
access/voting integrity debate, to ask them what they made of the more
restrictive voting rules implemented elsewhere. The ACLU did not
respond, and a Brennan Center spokesman said: “As a rule, we don’t
comment on other countries’ voting systems because that’s not our area
of expertise.”


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