It was to do with the lack of usable mailing addresses. People who live on reservations have PO Boxes as their mailing address and you cannot get a mail in ballot sent to a PO Box.
This required a massive mobilization effort to get volunteers to the reservations to help the residents cast their votes, and it’s exactly this sort outreach that is being targeted in the many state voting laws that have been passed in recent months. We first make it harder for certain groups to vote, we then outlaw the sort of activities people have to do to help people in those communities overcome the obstacles we put in their way. And then have all this supported by the Supreme Court
The need for ID to vote is pretty much a right wing initiative… But the idea of free universal ID has been rejected by other right wingers who are scared of the government having their information.
Exactly.
In Australia where there is compulsory voting, no ID is required to vote. Enrolment is about 97% of the eligible population and election turnout is about 95% with about another 5% voting informally. The level of fraudulent voting is miniscule - as defined by investigated multiple marks on voting roll - with instances consistently less than 1 in 100,000 across elections. Electronic synced certified lists of those enrolled in each electorate are making this even rarer over the last couple of elections and into the future.
Federal enrolment (and most State enrolments) are done either automatically (via govt source data matching and a reply/confirmation period) or can be easily done online with ID or a witness declaration as verification. Voting itself can be done on ‘election day’ (a saturday) or in the weeks preceding election in designated pre-polling stations open across long working hours in many metropolitan areas or via postal voting. You can also vote if you are out of the electorate, interstate or overseas.
Well think about it this way: enfranchise everyone and get voting turnout of >90% of eligible population with historic* fraud levels of ~100 votes across ~16,700,000.
Alternatively disenfranchise 10-20% of the population with turnout around 50% leading to ‘lost votes’ of about 55-60% of the population - or more than 9,200,000 people across a similar sized eligible population.
Surely there is no comparison from a democracy perspective!
*these levels falling further with electronically linked and updated cert lists.
Absolutely. They should be sacked immediately. They are both clearly Republicans. Better to have open Republicans than Republicans pretending to be Democrats. It’s a farce.
Lots of people pulling their hair out criticising Rucker for waiting to put this in his book rather than reporting on it contemporaneously. Ordinarily I buy that, but there wsa plenty of reporting of exactly this at the time. The issue was all the talking heads telling everyone that any talk of an attempt to overturn the election was overblown.
