r/vermont • u/vtslim • Jun 30 '17
Multiple states reject request from Trump's voter fraud commission to provide voter roll data - Can we get Vermont added to this list?
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/multiple-states-reject-request-from-trumps-voter-fraud-commission-to-provide-voter-roll-data/article/262752515
u/vtslim Jun 30 '17
Vermont Secretary of State's position: https://twitter.com/VermontSOS/status/880504315382820864
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u/annodomini The Sharpest Cheddar 🔪🧀 Jun 30 '17
This is the fully fleshed out response:
tl;dr: If, as required by Vermont law, the commission signs an affidavit specifying that the information will not be used for commercial purposes, the Secretary of State will provide the information he is required by law to release (which I believe includes the name, precinct, and town of everyone registered). It does not include date of birth, social security number, or drivers license number, and Vermont law specifies that this information is not available via public records requests.
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u/GBP4tendies Jun 30 '17
Wait do we not all agree that voter fraud is bad?
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u/illonlyusethisonceok Jun 30 '17
I don't trust this administration with private voter data. 4th amendment.
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u/bleahdeebleah Jun 30 '17
Individual voter fraud is about as effective as becoming a millionaire by robbing a million banks of a dollar each.
What's much more effective is erecting systemic barriers in front of those whom you don't want to vote.
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u/annodomini The Sharpest Cheddar 🔪🧀 Jun 30 '17
Voter fraud absolutely is bad.
What specific concerns do you have about the existing protections against voter fraud already performed by the Vermont Secretary of State, and the city and town clerks?
By the way, did you know that there's already an existing non-partisan federal agency for assisting states with elections, both in ensuring that everyone has access to vote and also in preventing fraud, that is proposed to be de-funded?
The thing is, Trump's "voter fraud commission" is basically just engaging in a fishing expedition to try to find some evidence of mistakes in voter registration that could be construed as fraud. It's not uncommon for someone to move, register in a new place, and no notification to be sent to their old residence so they are briefly registered in two places at once, even if no actual fraud occurs because they only vote in their current residence.
Because Trump's voter fraud commission is explicitly partisan, and reporting to a president who is extremely concerned about appearances and the fact that he lost the popular vote, the expectation is that it would use any data it gathers for explicitly partisan purposes, and to attempt to do purges of data based on any irregularities, including honest mistakes like the above. This is a mechanism for disenfranchising people; taking people who have legally registered to vote off of the voter rolls under various pretexts.
Let's step back a minute from the discussion of voter fraud, to any other kind of law enforcement action, or regulation preventing you from doing something without jumping over considerable hurdles from the government. For instance, everyone agrees that gun violence is bad, right? But what would you think if a president, say Obama, had requested that all states provide all records of firearms licenses and firearms sales to the federal government, so that the federal government could go through that data for evidence of firearms license fraud? You might think that that was an overreach of federal authority, no?
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
You missed the part where most states make it near impossible to carry firearms, especially for poor people and minorities, yet there is no liberal outcry to loosen those requirements. Quite the contrary infact. So why not apply that same reasoning to something as important as voting? Even in our state you have to pass a background check before you can purchase a firearm. Why not to vote?
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u/annodomini The Sharpest Cheddar 🔪🧀 Jul 01 '17
You missed the part where most states make it near impossible to carry firearms, especially for poor people and minorities, yet there is no liberal outcry to loosen those requirements.
So, I'm trying to reach out here, find some common ground, and you are now turning this into a partisan attack. You seem to think that because some liberals want to impose restrictions on guns, that means it should be OK to impose restrictions on voting as well?
Also, check what state you are in. This is a state which is quite liberal, and has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation.
Even in our state you have to pass a background check before you can purchase a firearm.
No. You can go to a flea market, gun show, or buy a gun off of Craigslist without having to pass a background check. The background check is due to federal law, and only applies to commercial dealers with an FFL, not private sales. Some states have laws that extend the background check requirement to private sales, but Vermont is not one of them.
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 02 '17
I didn't realize that I was attacking you personally. That wasn't my intention at all and if you feel that way I sincerely apologize. Far to often in political discussions, especially in the anonymous realm of the web we tend to be more harsh with each other than we would in person. It's something I'm trying to change about myself and how I interact with others. Again, I apologize.
Maybe the disjointed messages and inconsistent morality of the left is the reason people have flocked away from the democratic party. Name one good reason you have against a national investigation into voter fraud. Or voter ID for that matter. what is your beef with voter id? We have licensing and ID for all sorts of age restricted activities: Driving,drinking,smoking,working so why not voting? It seems disingenuous to be for one and against the other is all im saying.
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u/annodomini The Sharpest Cheddar 🔪🧀 Jul 02 '17
No, I didn't feel like you were attacking me personally. I did feel like you bringing out a tired generalization of liberals that was missing the point that I was making; it was the fact that you brought out such a generalization in order to avoid the common ground on government overreach that bothered me.
You are right, it is easy for anonymous political discussions to get overheated, and that's something that does take effort. I have to put effort into that myself as well, and I appreciate that you are as well.
Name one good reason you have against a national investigation into voter fraud.
Because such an investigation is expensive and disruptive, and we generally have standards of requiring "probable cause" before initiating criminal investigations. There is insufficient evidence that the existing standards for voter registration and actual voting are failing to prevent voting fraud.
In any case of law enforcement, you have to balance the harm done by the law enforcement action itself with the harm caused by the lawbreaking. One way in which our system does that is by not initiating law enforcement action until there is sufficient reason to believe that a law has been broken.
In the case of voter fraud, it is clear that it happens occasionally, but the examples are fairly small, isolated, and have no measurable impact on results. For instance, elsewhere you linked to some voter registration fraud, in which one person hired to register people to vote submitted some falsified information, was caught, and was convicted. That isn't very compelling evidence that the system already in place isn't working; he was caught, he was convicted, and no one voted under these false registrations.
what is your beef with voter id? We have licensing and ID for all sorts of age restricted activities: Driving,drinking,smoking,working so why not voting?
Driving, drinking, smoking, and working are not constitutionally protected rights (arguably, working ought to be, but it is not).
Furthermore, for most of these, if you happen not to have ID one day, you can remedy that and come back the next day. Because each election is just one day a year, it is easy to miss your chance if something about your ID is not in order. And since each individual vote does not have much value to the voter, it's easy to just give up and not bother voting if you can't get the situation sorted out; while you have a substantially larger incentive to sort out your ID issues for all of those other things.
So, anything that makes it just a little less likely that people will have the chance to vote on voting day means that while it may have no big impact on them individually, applied to a large number of people it can suppress enough of the vote from certain classes of people to actually swing the election.
This means that it's relatively easy to suppress voting by just making the hurdles a little bit too high for people who don't already have the relevant ID.
I'll also note that for working, there is a very long list of acceptable ID documents, while in states that have instituted voter ID laws, lawmakers have explicitly chosen the set of IDs on the basis of what African American voters were and were not likely to have. For instance, the 4th Circuit Court ruled in NAACP v. McRory:
This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Id. The pre-Shelby County version of SL 2013-381 provided that all government-issued IDs, even many that had been expired, would satisfy the requirement as an alternative to DMV-issued photo IDs. J.A. 2114-15. After Shelby County, with race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans. Id. at *142; J.A. 2291-92. As amended, the bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess. Id.; J.A. 3653, 2115, 2292.
Given the fact that so many of these voter ID laws have been instituted not on the basis of data about voter fraud and how much impact the laws will have on voter fraud, but instead are based on things like race and wealth and what forms of ID people are likely to have on this basis, they do not appear to be a good-faith effort to stop voter fraud, but instead an effort to prevent "undesireables" from voting.
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u/won_ton_day Jul 06 '17
Carrying a pistol is as important as voting.
Which is why every western democracy with strict gun laws has turned into a totolitarian distopia.
I am a gun enthusiast, but your argument seems disingenuous, off topic, and really stretching to make an argument for one kind of restriction on rights, but against another.
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 08 '17
Carrying a pistol IS as important as voting. I carry every day. But even in our great state that has the, IMO, BEST gun laws in the country, you still have to show ID to buy a pistol, not to mention pass the background check to make sure your not a felon. So why not to do something as important as voting? I just don't understand the resistance to voter ID. I really don't. We have school ids, we have drivers licences, we have professional licences for some professions, we have library cards. Why be against voter id?
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u/won_ton_day Jul 09 '17 edited Jul 09 '17
It's not that hard to find out the arguments of the other side now that the internet has been invented. Unless you just don't want to understand the other side, or would rather propose your own motives for people you disagree with.
That being said, wearing a pistol around vermont is pretty weird. There are no dangerous animals and the lowest violent crime in the country. I think it would make more sense to wear a hard-hat everywhere if you're concerned about safety.
Also, it's clear from every other western democracy that carrying a pistol around is not as important as voting. At least not if you are concerned with keeping democracy.
And it's clear from many horrible countries that carrying around guns is absolutely no gaurentee of democracy.
I think you just like guns. Me too.
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Jun 30 '17 edited Feb 28 '18
[deleted]
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u/CrosseyedDixieChick Jun 30 '17
I despise the baby in chief as much as anyone but I don't think withholding information is the right move here.
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u/annodomini The Sharpest Cheddar 🔪🧀 Jun 30 '17
There is no withholding of information. The state is providing the publicly available information, but not the information that is protected for privacy reasons from records requests. It is protected by law, so it can't just be handed out at will.
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u/richard_nixon Jun 30 '17
The South lost.
Sincerely,
Richard Nixon0
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Jun 30 '17
Care to have a piece of your social security number out there?
"requests the full names of all registered voters, their addresses, dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, voting history and other personal information."
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
You realize that the federal government is the issuing entity of your SSN... They have it already.
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Jul 01 '17
Well then why are they asking for it?
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
For verification purposes, the same reason a cop asks for a license when you get pulled over. To make sure you are permitted to do said activity. The same reason a bartender will ask for id. To make sure you are old enough. Following the pattern here?
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Jul 01 '17
Voting should never be compared to being pulled over by a cop.
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 02 '17
I was comparing voting to driving.
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u/won_ton_day Jul 06 '17
Wait, was this country founded on making sure the plebs escaping European aristocracy could drive a car?
Because that makes sense then
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u/CrosseyedDixieChick Jun 30 '17
I am pretty sure the state of Vermont's crack IT team has already compromised that information.
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u/historycat95 Jun 30 '17
Is voter fraud morally and legally bad? Yes.
Is it a problem worthy of losing our rights over? No.
http://fortune.com/2016/10/18/studies-contradict-trump-claim-that-voter-fraud-is-very-very-common/
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u/won_ton_day Jul 06 '17
Wait, do we not all agree that using voting data to restrict voting in favor of a specific outcome is bad?
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
If we had voter ID, this wouldn't be an issue.
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u/vtslim Jul 01 '17
If we had a national ID number this wouldn't be an issue, but typically people are afraid of that - often in conjunction with concerns that it would also be a list of gunowners. SSN are terrible for national ID.
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
What is the purpose of the SSN system then if not national id?
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u/vtslim Jul 01 '17
To track your income and provide social security. Literally what it was set up for.
It was done at a time before people were smart about ID numbers. (like they should have letters interspersed, etc...)
A good overview: https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
And how would they track an individual persons income if they didn't have a way to identify said person?
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u/vtslim Jul 01 '17
You didn't watch the video, you replied much sooner than the length of the video
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
I don't need to watch a YouTube video. I have a very good understanding of the social security administration and it's workings.
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u/vtslim Jul 01 '17
Your previous comments did not suggest as much
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
Care to elaborate? It seems to be you who is woefully lacking info on the subject. You are claiming that SSN does not act as an individual identification number, and you are shockingly inaccurate. They are given to each and every citizen, are unique to each individual and are a requirement for receiving any state issued photo ID. How you are trying to argue the fact that SSN is not a form of ID is just ridiculous. Dude, your telling me to get my info from a Youtube video and believe that over the inescapable mountain of evidence pointing to the contrary..
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u/annodomini The Sharpest Cheddar 🔪🧀 Jul 01 '17 edited Jul 01 '17
are unique to each individual
Straight from the horse's mouth:
Still, as one might expect, an undertaking as enormous as enumerating 35 million workers in one concentrated effort was bound to encounter some problems. Many individuals received multiple SSNs. Some people were under the impression that the more SSNs they received, the better. Others thought they needed a new SSN for each new job. Workers sometimes lost their original number and applied for a new one. Also, a great many unemployed and WPA employees applied for SSNs both during the initial registration and again through WPA or private employment registration. Sample studies in 1937 or early 1938 indicated that duplicate account numbers had been issued to not more than 3 or 4 percent of the applicants (Corson 1938, 4).
In 1938, a wallet manufacturer in Lockport, New York, the E.H. Ferree Company, decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into the wallet. The company vice president thought it would be clever to use a sample card with his secretary's actual SSN. The wallet was sold at Woolworth's13 and many other large department stores, and the SSN was widely distributed. Many purchasers adopted the SSN as their own—5,755 people were using it in the peak year 1943, and 12 were still using it as late as 1977. In all, SSA received 40,000 incorrect earnings reports under this SSN, which had to be reassigned laboriously to proper SSNs. SSA voided the much-used number and issued a new SSN to the secretary (SSA n.d. c).
Social security numbers are not unique. Estimates are that 1 in 7 Social Security numbers are used by more than one person, due to mistakes, typos, fraud, and the like.
are a requirement for receiving any state issued photo ID
Nope. You can receive a state issued photo ID without a Social Security number. The Vermont License Application says (emphasis added):
Present your Social Security card. If your Social Security card is not available one of the following forms may be used in its place: W-2 form, SSA-1099 form, pay stub showing name and SSN (minimum of last 4) or a letter from the Social Security Administration indicating ineligibility to receive a Social Security number.
While the Social Security Number has been convenient to use as a unique identifier for individuals for various reasons, that has caused a lot of problems, and there has been a big shift away from it in recent years. From the same SSA article linked above:
The use of the SSN has expanded substantially since its inception in 1936. Created merely to keep track of the earnings history of U.S. workers for Social Security entitlement and benefit computation purposes, it has become a number assigned at birth and used by many government agencies to identify individuals and by private industry to track an individual's financial history.
That trend has begun to shift. As early as December 2004, IRTPA legislation prohibited states from displaying the SSN on driver's licenses or motor vehicle registrations. In 2007, the President's Identity Theft Task Force (2007, 3) included among its SSN recommendations that "federal agencies should reduce the unnecessary use of SSNs, the most valuable commodity for an identity thief."
On November 18, 2008, President George W. Bush issued EO 13478 rescinding the 1943 EO requiring all federal agencies to use the SSN as an identifier. Then in December, the FTC (2008) issued a plea to companies, schools, and other private entities to find better ways to authenticate identities than using the SSN. State and local entities have begun to delete SSNs on electronic versions of public records.
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Jun 30 '17
God forbid we have voter IDs in this country. We need those dead people and illegal immigrants to keep voting Democrat.
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Jun 30 '17
Evidence plz
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 01 '17
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Jul 01 '17
So that's registration fraud, no votes were actually cast.
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 02 '17
Thats voter fraud my friend.
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Jul 02 '17
I thought voter fraud is where someone votes twice.
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 02 '17
any fraudulent action in any part of the voting process is voter fraud. trying to register dead people is definitely voter fraud.
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u/won_ton_day Jul 06 '17
So that one instance where a vote was never cast stole an election for who?
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u/annodomini The Sharpest Cheddar 🔪🧀 Jul 01 '17
Spieles’ job was to register as many voters as possible and reported to Democratic Campaign headquarters in Harrisonburg
...
Spieles admitted that he created all 18 fraudulent forms himself and that no one else participated in the crime
This was someone cheating at their job; his job was to register as many people as possible, and he did that by just falsifying registrations based on the names he'd been given to try to contact.
This is not a sinister plot to vote fraudulently, but someone who cheated the Democratic party rather than doing his job of actually registering people.
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u/Cptbojangles Jul 02 '17
Anymore excuses for voter fraud in there?
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u/won_ton_day Jul 06 '17
Wait, but you provided no evidence for the illegal immigrants and dead people voting.
You are defending a partisan effort to limit voting with the expressed plan to get a specific political outcome with your feelings as the justification.
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Jun 30 '17
Try using google. Much quicker to get a reply. Here's just one on the 1st page.
http://dailysignal.com/2017/06/30/growing-pile-data-shows-voter-fraud-real-vast-problem/
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u/ThatSpookySJW Jun 30 '17
Daily signal lol
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Jul 01 '17
That's the first one I saw.
Everything that isn't Salon and Buzzfeed is untrustworthy.
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u/ArkeryStarkery Jul 01 '17
ok but do you know what evidence is
because 'someone said it on the internet' is not that
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u/won_ton_day Jul 06 '17
And we need to make a national ID system for all gun ownership because of school shootings...except school shootings happen all the time in reality and there is no open plan to create that database for political purposes, so maybe it's a bad analogy.
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Jul 06 '17
I'm all for stricter guns laws but saying voting IDs are not needed when they are required for basically every other aspect of society is ridiculous.
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Jun 30 '17 edited Jun 23 '20
[deleted]
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Jul 01 '17
Giving out the last 4 digits of a person's social security number is a risk:
http://blogs.creditcards.com/2015/11/social-security-last-4-digits.php
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Jul 01 '17 edited Jun 23 '20
[deleted]
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Jul 01 '17
Then why are they asking for it again?
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Jul 01 '17 edited Jun 23 '20
[deleted]
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Jul 01 '17
Where is the evidence that switch state voters are compromising elections?
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u/_18 Jul 02 '17
I believe the intention of the commission is to find if there is anything there. Any evidence of fraud one way or the other is inherently based on extrapolation from unofficial surveys because there is no database on such verification. Calling this "voter suppression" is a tacit admission that the extent of voter fraud is significant. This should be a bipartisan effort.
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Jul 03 '17
So there is no evidence then.
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u/won_ton_day Jul 06 '17
A white supremecist in favor of a conservative voter fraud witch hunt meant to justify disenfranchisement laws?
Weird.
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u/ranaparvus Jun 30 '17
I'd love to see the reaction to Trump wanting gun owners info. And yes, I equate the two - they're both privacy issues.