Absolutely. Any time something is centralized it becomes an irresistible target for unlimited numbers of bad actors and the bar to entry for remote anonymous access makes it a much easier target. Anonymous access to paper ballots means someone is going to be on at least a handful of cameras and has to bypass many security systems so if cheating happens it is because the people gathering the votes want it that way. Such cities or states should be excluded from the voting process.
We have a long and storied history of coming up with extremely disturbing capitol punishments performed in public, and yet those punishments coexisted with much higher rates of criminality then now.
Stealing from the church in history carried some pretty gruesome deaths, and yet plenty of people still stole from the church, etc.
People are chronically bad at transferring future risk to their current decision making. Any consequence that relies on people being able to model a future problem against their current desires/needs is always going to have a lot of transmission losses. You end up trying to make ever more horrible punishments to overcome the losses in transmission.
I think the goal should be the smallest possible functioning consequence, which is possible by being close to the 'crime'. The very best way is when community can do it immediately. Like if someone does something fucked up, but then their buddies go 'that was fucked up dude', I am very confident this will prevent then from doing it again much more efficiently then a distant jail sentence. (among all the other ways too, there's never one clean action to take to solve problems on a societal level)
I think the day I _must_ walk go a desk to vote is the day I'll give up. Voting by mail is one of the best things occuring here (in Switzerland). You get the voting stuff by mail, make your crosses, put it back into the postal box and it's delivered for free (as in beer) to the government.
Relying on the postal service here would make it much worse, honestly.
isn't that racist? i've heard it repeated but i'm not so sure
In the case where disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race then it can be seen as racist (as it affects the population of that race differently). If the reason that disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race is because of racism, then a policy that disenfranchised the poor would effectively extend economic discrimination into political discrimination.
Though I tend to think that even if we remove the economic effects of racism such that disenfranchising the poor couldn't be called racist, they would still be classist and should be avoided where possible.
how about the ones accepted by the police when they ask "show me your ID"?
if it's enough to ID you to cops it should be enough to ID you to enter the voting booth, no?
>and how hard it is to get one.
you can get one at the DMV
Proponents of voter ID claim it is needed to prevent fraud, while opponents point out that there's not enough fraud for it to be worth the cost.
Note that countries such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also didn't require voter ID. First-world countries that do require ID to vote have systems in place to ensure that getting that ID is easy even for poorer people - such as automatically sending the ID to the voter by mail if the government requires you to report your residence or filing out the necessary forms once, before turning 18.
there's no scientific link between race and the ability to go to a DMV once every 10 years
I have seen this constantly claimed, and never reasonably evidenced. It's also hard to believe the kind of American exceptionalism that supposedly causes these problems that everyone else can easily solve, despite an environment that is clearly heavily politically invested in solving it (because that also avoids the appearance of racism).
Meanwhile, American proponents of voter ID can readily find people including among the supposedly discriminated-against groups who will testify to the contrary.