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Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination, report finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
231 points (94.9% liked)
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I don't understand what the problem is. A lot of countries require an ID to vote, that's normal practice. Why is British public such snowflakes about it?
The fact that "Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination".
Maybe read the article?
He doesn't consider that to be a problem.
Is it hard to get an ID/passport in the UK or are their disabled people just even more disabled than in the rest of the world? Maybe the problem here is infrastructure (or lack thereof). You could be the most disabled person in Sweden and your caretaker would still take you to the tax agency or police to get identification of some sort. Not having any way to identify yourself is pretty much unheard of here except for the severely mentally ill who refuse help.
Passports are expensive & disabled people are poor. And no, there's not much help for disabled people in Tory Britain. Also it's a bit of a Catch-22, it's hard to get ID that proves who you are without ID that proves who you are. Currently having that problem with a disabled family member and haven't found a solution yet.
What discrimination? Every citizen should have a passport. That's how it works in every developed country!
If passports were given out for free then sure, but they're really fucking expensive. Mine expired years ago, but since I can't afford to travel anyway I'm hardly going to scrape together the £80+ for a new one.
Yeah, Britain is very weird. How do you even live without a passport? No wonder Britain has plenty of identity theft going on...
It's explained in the article. So I will say it again: "Maybe read the article?"
Not every citizen has a passport. And they usually aren't free either.
Yeah, why? How's this even possible? Or legal?
Read the article you walnut.
I don't give a shit about the article. Why is it possible to live in a country without a passport? That doesn't make any fucking sense!
Because you don't need a passport? It's not something everyone needs or has.
And that has to change.
Why?
I explained below.
Okay. So make passports free to apply for and renew, and make the application process possible from every Post Office, including on Saturdays. And maybe then that will be a fair way to require voter ID.
That I can agree with for sure.
Why would you need a passport if you aren't leaving the country?
It's a piece of paper you buy every ten years if you want to travel across national borders, it's not like some intrinsic part of your being.
At the point that the new voter ID legislation was introduced, about 8% of the electorate - ~3.5m people - did not have a passport or a driving licence.
You need a passport to protect yourself from identity theft. Britain is quite a unique country, where this shit happens regularly. Back in my home country no large financial transaction can go without solicitor approval and you being in person with your valid passport. But here you can see a post about wife/husband secretly opening credit cards in the name of their partner on Reddit every bloody month! All you need to know is their name and residency address for the last three years.
It's unnecessary
Name + DOB + address
How is that secure though? I could easily figure out that information for people of my gender and in my age range...
So what do you do? Do you turn up and give the details for Double_A, vote, then turn around and pretend that you're now me, for example?
Or do you spend the day travelling around to different polling booths hoping that the person you've chosen from that area hasn't voted yet, or that they nobody will make a fuss when it turns out they're trying to vote twice?
You get a bus full of old people, tour them around the city and tell them ID data to cast votes. Works like a charm for Putin. Voting without a passport is absurd.
It works for Putin because anyone who disobeys him mysteriously falls out of a window.
Again, in this scenario, what happens when the actual voter turns up? You conveniently ignored that part of my post.
Most people don't vote, that's not a very realistic scenario.
About 70% of the electorate vote nowadays, it has varied higher or lower but never been as low as 50% of eligible voters to even say "half of eligible people don't vote" let alone "most"
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8060/CBP-8060.pdf
So assuming you have say 20 old people on your fictional bus, even assuming that all of your voter info is correct and everyone is on the register, the chances of all of them being able to cast a second vote without any of them being caught are billions to one.
The idea that millions of people will risk a significant chance of a lengthy prison sentence for their individually tiny extra votes is absurd when any actual attack on election integrity would not happen at the point of "turning up at the polling station and hoping for the best."
Even if one in a million voters did try and get away with this - which again is a hugely inflated number from anything we get an indication of - if to do so you stop tens of thousands of people from being able to vote at all that still makes the election less democratic overall.
And yet it happens across the world.
But you think buses full of old people voting in multiple polling stations is?
I mean it happens all the time across the world.
Yes that, but very early so the chance is high that I vote before the real guy.
When they prove they are the real guy you get busted for voter fraud. Congratulations.
So in your scenario, what happens if the person has already voted, or cast a postal vote? Or what happens when they turn up later? Do you think that they're just dismissed, or do you think that someone's going to investigate the fraud?
You clearly haven't thought this through.
And then you commit voter fraud and get the appropriate punishment.
Oh, and what about your own vote? Gonna vote twice? Might not want to do that...
And yet, nobody was doing that and the system was working.
It isn't, but that actually isn't really a problem. The information required to pose and steal a single voter's vote is pretty easy to come by. But it's an absolutely terrible way to steal an election, simply because it doesn't scale well.
While it is relatively simple and probably a low enough risk to steal a single vote, realistically to flip enough votes to guarantee a desired result you would need to do this several hundred or possibly even thousands of times. There are only so many disguises you can use or polling stations you can go to within an election constituency before you get caught. Also, there's the time constraint involved. You need to do all this in the span of 12-18 hours on a single day. An individual cannot manage this by themselves.
So now you need to scale up your operation, so you enlist a whole bunch of people to split the vote stealing with. Now you have a conspiracy which is a huge risk to discovery, and also likely carries a more harsh punishment should you be discovered. Nobody is going to steal an election this way.
It is much easier to steal an election by targeting a later step of the process, either by compromising the integrity of the ballot boxes via corrupting election officials, or in areas where electronic voting takes place (not the UK) manipulating the tabulation of the votes somehow. In countries where democracy is valued, these steps of the process are hardened quite significantly, with multiple safeguards to prevent tampering.
@Double_A @PunnyName Firstly, we don't do that.
Secondly we vote where our neighbours are.
Thirdly a double vote has a high chance of being noticed.
Fourthly, there are few polls where ond vote would make a difference. The ones where it would/have get even more interest in advance and afterward.
I've had voter ID for as long as I know, and I've been with my parents to vote very often (good educating on their part).
It's never been an issue, you bring your ID, your voter ticket (which gets sent to you by the govt) and cast a vote. No racism issues there.
It seems the UK has somehow fucked it up.
That would be the tories for you, yes
And yet, it would be even less of "never been an issue" to have it in the first place. Shocking!
I think the biggest issue is simply that there was no need to change the system if there was no problem to begin with. Any changes to the system would lead to some people losing their ability to vote for no good reason.
If they stick with the law for a few decades no one will care anymore because everyone is used to it. But this year 14,000 people lost the ability to vote and they prevented about 0.4 people from commiting voter fraud. That's not very proportional.
Why would anyone lose their vote? Everyone should have a passport.
Why?
It’s because the political party who get the most votes from old people made it so that an OAP bus pass was an acceptable form of identification, whereas student, IDs and other young people, IDs were not accepted
Why not just have a passport like all normal people?
Not everyone has a passport or the money to buy one simply to vote.
Not a problem anywhere else.
It even exists in Northern Ireland and has never been an issue. You can get photographic ID here for free for voting (but is also usable for proof of age) so it's very useful
Exactly! It's not a problem anywhere in the world but England!