The Trump Thread

[Torillian]

Jimbo1337 said:

Torillian said:

It's about the scale of the threat and the side effects of the fix. 26 foreign nationals working on influencing an election can have a much larger impact than 400 non-citizens voting. 

But beyond that my main concern is with the solutions being proposed. I would not want to make things more difficult for actual voters just to avoid a mistake that didn't even impact any elections. So you bring me a solution that won't negatively impact actual voters and I'll just agree that they should do that. 

Using airport-style identity checks actually perfectly addresses your concern about side effects, because it proves we can have high security without making life harder for the average person.

Think about how the TSA operates today: you walk up, insert your ID into a scanner, a green light flashes, and you walk through. It takes five seconds. The advanced technology does the heavy lifting on the back end, while the experience for the traveler remains seamless and simple.

Bringing that same logic to voting doesn't mean adding long lines or complex paperwork for citizens. It means updating local polling places with modern, automated ID scanners that instantly verify eligibility against state records. High security doesn't have to mean high burden; it just means using smart, fast technology to protect the system automatically.

And if we send such an ID to everyone for free that's a reasonable path, but if you charge people to get an ID and they have to miss out on work to go for the ID then some appreciable number of voters will be disenfranchised and doing that to try to avoid 400 mistaken voters is not worth it. 

Airport-style identity checks are by definition more cumbersome than if you didn't have to have them. We do that because we've determined that it's worth the inconvenience to avoid the unlikely but disastrous outcome of something like 9/11 happening again and because 9/11 showed that our previous security was not sufficient to avoid it. 400 mistaken voters in PA is not of a comparable severity and so I do not think we should have to put up with the same inconvenience to avoid it, and the current security in place has avoided anything of comparable severity so I'd rather just stick with what we have. Honestly I'd love to go back to being able to get a ballot in the mail and dropping it in a box but sadly I don't know that we'll ever get the convenience of the 2020 election again. 

TLDR: I disagree with your premise, Airport security does make life harder, we just deemed it worth it.