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The Daily Northwestern reports
The Illinois Senate voted 38-18 on [November 16] to override Gov. Bruce Rauner's veto of an automatic voter registration bill.
The bill [...] would automatically register voters who are seeking a new or updated license, or who are seeking other services from state departments such as Human Services or Healthcare and Family Services.
[...]The only two things a citizen should need to vote is being 18 years old and a citizen.
[...]The bill received bipartisan support when it passed through the House by a vote of 86-30 and the Senate with a vote of 42-16.
[...]To fully override Rauner's veto, the Illinois House will also have to vote to override, but it will not back in session until Nov. 29.
More information on Automatic Voter Registration can be found here.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 20 2016, @05:50PM
Here's a short list of voter registration problems
1) In theory we don't require ID cards to vote, only to register. Yes jump thru ten hoops and you can register without a free state ID card. Of course free state ID cards require sometimes expensive registered birth certificates. The point is registration is a "stealth" voter-ID required law, you just don't show it at the polls. So people can LARP that the same system simultaneously requires and doesn't require voter ID.
2) See above if you let lazy people register at the polls you have 95+ year old volunteers making all kinds of judgment calls about adequate identification papers but if you register then my local municipal clerk takes her time crossing all the t and dotting all the i to make sure I'm properly registered in the state system exactly one time, in the 10 overlaid gerrymandered districts at all levels of government. There's a nice paper trail, you can involve the judiciary when necessary, she's theoretically a bonded well paid professional, etc. Much less likely to be F'd up than having rando 95+ year old election day volunteers attempting and failing to handle it.
3) See above part of having 10 or whatever layers of government is I believe this feeds into the gerrymandering machine along with decade-level census figures to try and organize districts. I think federal congress is gerrymandered only with once a decade census records, but my municipal aldermanic district is I believe they try to allocate 2000 people per municipal alderman and it changes on a shorter term (like annually?) I suppose it depends how fast your city is growing (or for democrat controlled areas, shrinking)
4) See #2 above if every casual thing I do, spams the local municipal clerk, I'm going to be quite a nuisance and there are likely to be registered voters at my house named ULM, VLN, VlM, VIM, who knows how many. Yes theres only one VLM drivers licensed 123456789 but see #1) above what do you do about Jose the illegal alien and his bro Jose and kid Jose and dad Jose all living in the same illegal micro-favela, sure illegals can't vote for federal elections but the more corrupt or anti-american or anti-white cities do allow foreigners to rule over the locals via voting, they've been cucked. Aside from debating that issue, it exists as a thing and spamming the muni-clerk office as punishment is inadvisable because its just going to mess up the records. Even worse, if I submit a form that's almost correct, I'm now open for felony voter fraud, "jon" vs "jonathon" "ben" vs "benjamin", here's proof he's trying to register two people, when in reality he's just trying to get a fishing license. Also spamming the clerk means more chance for her to F up, so now I'm no longer registered in "hometown" but I've been moved to "nowheresville" and I'm unable to vote. And of course the registered voter list is where muni court jury lists come from, so having ten records of which nine are false and I never use just bumped my odds of jury duty up by ten.
5) My state heavily disenfranchises voters for crazy-ish reasons "having resided at the above residential address for at least Z consecutive days immediately preceding this election, with no present intent to move. I am not currently serving a sentence including incarceration, parole, probation, or extended supervision for a felony conviction, and not otherwise disqualified from voting." Now the problem with registering everyone with a drivers license is I move here and rent an apartment month-to-month till I find my permanent place and immediately get a new drivers license because where-ever I end up it'll be around here, they give me a stack of shit to sign and suddenly I'm a felon having only resided here 3 days and I'm planning on moving in two weeks to my official house/apartment. You could technically imprison students or "migrant farm workers" on a regular basis with this as a means to discourage voting for democrats. Or I get out of prison on parole and immediately get a valid drivers license to get my stuff together so I can drive to my job and they give me a pile of shit to sign and whoops I'm back in prison for trying to register to vote as a parole violation. Generally speaking "crossing the streams" when you don't have to is just a dumb idea. "Lets involuntarily register everyone to vote who buys property" sounds oh so progressive and forward thinking until every out of state landlord is now a felon. Ditto registering everyone buying a car or getting a fishing license or a marriage license or all kinds of ideas that sound so nice but are actually pretty dumb and are going to create a lot of legal drama and trouble for people who never deserved it.
6) Lets say I want to stop black people from voting, because supposedly the only reason anything is regulated beyond a complete free for all is because "racists". Once voting registration is linked to irrelevant forms, all I need to do is crack open a phone book, old fashioned "white" pages (bet that term offends special snowflakes today) and pick any ethnic sounding name or segregated neighborhood address, and buy a fishing license under the name Tabi-beth-sheeba Washington at an address two counties away. Now she can't vote in the next election (well, unless she figures out where she's been "moved" because someone bought her a hunting license and she actually drives there...). So now you have to "federalize" really dumb stuff that should never be trusted around voting records, for example applying for a credit card, merely applying for a drivers license change of address, merely applying for a boat registration, all kinds of ways to really mess with people and abuse the system.
7) The federal census has to be filled out and one data source is, I'm told, voter registrations, so now VM and VLM have to fill out a census form and now I get more congressional representation. This doesn't matter for me as an individual but once its accepted the records will be F'd up then it'll become a political football to decide which areas should and should not be cleaned up.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Sunday November 20 2016, @08:13PM
Are you saying that people in Texas are dumber than people elsewhere? In Minnesota, you have to be registered to vote, but you can register at the polls. The election worker who registers you (we call them "election judges" and they are trained and paid) has a handbook that spells out precisely what ID is ok. In the OP's case, CT DL even if expired would serve to prove their identity (so would a passport or a specified variety of other governmental or semi-official documents), but they would still need proof of where they lived (utility or phone bill or bank statement with their name and address). Or they'd need another already-registered voter to swear to their identity and address. If the poll worker can't figure it out, they call for help from the head judge. I've been working elections for a decade, and yet to see a 95+ year old election worker, it's a grueling day, though maybe that's a Texas thing too. Though if we let them gut social security and medicare, I suppose there will be some who need that $100 to buy something to eat more upscale than dog food.
BS. Name one such city that you've got a reliable cite for (that is, a cite from somebody more reliable than Rash Scumbaugh). It's true we've got a few corrupt cities (and states like NJ), but that's mostly about stealing money. Illegal aliens want to stay off the government radar so they won't get deported, they're not stupid enough to walk into the jaws of government and be documented committing a felony in front of multiple witnesses.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 20 2016, @10:51PM
I don't think my arguments are an "Oceans Eleven" blueprint for precisely how to commit fraud or even observations of specific events, but more along the lines of given a blank sheet to design, here are some often proposed ideas that lead to scenarios that are just dumb and can be trivially designed out of the system.
For example, yes I'm sure your average "law enforcement officer" has the skills and training to administer field tests of the ability to drive. So we could scrap the DMV, tell people to just drive around, and once they run into a cop the cop can test them for ability to legally drive and then the cop can issue them a same day license. That sounds completely ridiculous, because it is. Its infinitely more efficient to have DMV centrally issue licenses according to a small number of testers who specialize and standardize and are very closely supervised and monitored. Thus it just seems to make sense to have one municipal clerk specialize in registering voters. If she does it right she'll be faster and cheaper than any other method and if she screws up the full weight of the judiciary lands right on her. It actually works very well for people who are more interested in politics than some sort of "well, it was the McDonalds drive thru or voting, and I guess its voting this time, now I want a supersized candidate number 1 with extra zingy sauce" or whatever. Are we missing anything important by disenfranchising people who by their very actions prove they don't think voting is very important? I mean there's a traditional straw dog of people who want to participate but can't, but I don't think they actually exist.
I think that's cool that you volunteer for elections, no sarcasm or nuthin. We need people who are not 95+ yrs old doing important work like that. Or if you are 95+ yrs then you get a free pass for being with it enough to respond. Cool either way. None the less, the design of the system you're stuck in sounds... badly designed, like what were they thinking... Yes in a rich country we can afford to implement badly designed systems and they'll "work". However, mere working most of the time does not imply a well designed system. So why not have a system that doesn't suck?
Its telling that the voter registration system is like nothing else the government does. Why can't we have volunteers collect real estate tax money? Or replace the IRS? Why not license dentists doctors and lawyers by volunteer office? Building codes should be enforced by industry volunteers exactly once a year? Once a year volunteer air traffic control and FAA pilot licensing. DoT can have volunteers fix the roads, some kind of libertarian paradise LOL.
The best counterexample to my making fun of this is volunteer fire departments. I donno if a fire department is a good analogy to elections. Oh and volunteer park rangers the "friends of the park" fundraising groups, again, they don't actually scale and don't seem a close analogy to an election.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Monday November 21 2016, @02:56AM
No, you missed something. We don't "volunteer", in Minnesota we're paid. $13.30/hr in my city (registration specialists and the head judges for each precinct get a little more; pay isn't uniform in the state and we're probably toward the high end, some places might be as low as minimum wage, but rural areas are more likely to pay mileage too). There is a place on the timesheet to check if you don't want the money, but I've never seen anyone check it. We have training classes (also paid). We swear an oath. Ok, nobody makes a living at it, not with one and a half day's work a year, but we are paid. I do understand that some states are too cheap to pay workers, which sounds crazy to me. Then you're more at risk of staffing with people who have other reasons to work for free, like an ax to grind or they're getting "reimbursed" by a candidate or party (the 95 year olds aren't so much the problem, it's too grueling for them anyhow.. unless you're one 'o them young whippersnappers who thinks everybody with grey hair is 95).
I'd agree that voter registration should probably be a paid job, especially if, as here, you can vote two minutes after registering. At the polling place I work, that's me. About 10% of our voters register on election day, though a lot of those are people who skipped voting in the last couple of elections, or moved (even to a different apartment in the same building), and need to re-register. About 2% of those trying to register were not registered because they didn't qualify.
The judges do tend to skew toward retired people, since those are the ones who don't have day jobs (or be taking care of children), at least until we can make election day a national holiday.
Volunteer fire departments might be a good analogy. Or church rummage sales. Staffing for events that happen rarely, where a full-time paid staff doesn't make sense.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @01:23PM
Huh, thats pretty cool. Interesting way to run an election. I imagine operations are quite different when its a trained job vs all volunteer.
Likely a part of the reason we only have volunteers is we have the expensive (for their time, decades ago) optical scan readers. When its plugged in do the lights turn on, now does it eat ballots, if not call support, now you're fully trained on the mechanical aspects of the job. They spend a lot more time memorizing streets so they can instantly tell you your district and find you in the registration binder, and of course ballot handling processes are probably very formal and complicated. Do you all have fancy electronic voting machines? I would imagine every $ spent on fancy machines is a $ not spent on election workers. The extreme of that would be people voting at home over the internet.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:49AM
We've got both. The machines (there is one per voting place), stuff your ballot in and it reads and counts it. If it notices a screwup (e.g. an overvote, where you checked too many boxes) it tells you and offers to give the ballot back so you can get another and do it right. (If you decline, it voids that particular election, but counts the rest, some voters don't want to deal with redoing it.) It's got some kind of (proprietary, boo) computer and optical scanner, and can figure out which side is up. For a precinct where there were about 1500 voters in the recent election, there were about 15 workers, all paid. Most of the jobs aren't rocket science, and don't take much training (everybody gets a 2 hour class and a handbook to study). Registration specialist gets an extra hour of class, and I think the head judges get extra. Being supervisor types, they have some work before the election as well. They try to return workers to the same precinct in successive elections (I've been doing that one for the last 6) so there's a core of workers with experience who know each other.
For streets, we've got binders that index all the streets in the precinct, and tell what range of house numbers. To vote, people who say they're already registered need to know their name (signin judge looks it up) and address (ditto). If they get those both right and are in the book, then they sign in (attesting that they're of age, live at the address, not incompetent, etc.) and get a ballot.
I don't know what it all costs, the numbers seem buried in various budgets. In 2012 they reported the election cost about $7500 per polling place (about 1800 registered voters), covering rent, machines, staffing, materials, etc. So, a little over $4 per registered voter, maybe $6 per vote (turnout varies year to year, and primary to general).
Like I said, in other towns or rural areas the details may be different, and the pay scale definitely varies. But state law requires paying at least the minimum wage.