“Illegal Voting Gets Texas Woman 8 Years in Prison, and Certain Deportation” (nytimes) came out just before I went to the airport and got on a United Airlines flight (thanks to the flight attendant who offered me cough drops when I asked for hot water and lemon due to a sore throat).
When I showed up at the airport, United was able to look at my ID and figure out whether or not I was a customer.
The unfortunate subject of the above-referenced article was given the task of self-certifying her eligibility to vote (“be a customer” of the government?). It turns out that this is not straightforward due to the fact that in some jurisdictions non-citizens are able to vote in at least state or local elections (Wikipedia). The only ways to become a citizen are by being in the U.S., in which case the government is supposed to issue a birth certificate, or by being naturalized, a process controlled by the government. Wouldn’t it make sense for the government to operate more like United Airlines? Find out who the person is and then offer him or her the appropriate level of voting?
[Separately, though my heart was saddened by the story of a basically harmless person going to prison for 8 years (many of the Germans who attended the Wannsee Conference were given shorter sentences), my brain was drawn to the fact that “she has a sixth-grade education.” How is the U.S. economy supposed to grow, on a per capita basis, when our population growth comes from people with sixth-grade educations? (Ms. Ortega, age 37, had a higher-than-average fertility: “Her four children, ages 13 to 16..”; she also had a 27-year-old fiancé, according to the article, so a few more kids might have been forthcoming.)]
Readers: What do you think? Instead of fighting about “voter fraud” why not use a system where the only way to commit “voter fraud” would be by assuming someone else’s identity?
Alternative formulation: If United Airlines doesn’t rely on self-certification (“I am pretty sure that I paid for a ticket!”) before taking you to Chicago, why does it make sense for the government to rely on self-certification when it is time to determine who will run the government?
Related:
- Texas family law (shows the potential child support profits available to the single parent of four kids; they would be more than twice as lucrative if from four different fathers, assuming all had the same income, though capped at a maximum of about $82,000 per year (tax-free))
Isn’t this a consequence of the federal nature of the US? Birth certificates are issued by cities, which are organs of State, not the Federal government, and thus the left hand does not know what the right hand does, unlike more centralized nations like France who are also sticklers for the integrity of government records.
Interestingly Maryland passed a law declaring La Fayette and all his male descendants natural born citizens.
Pretty sure that is why Trump got elected. Of course the government should figure out who is a citizen and who isn’t. And the criminals who are in this country illegally should be locked up and deported. This is not controversial to most people except for the few people who were offended by the “grab em by the pussy” comments.
The woman who was sentenced was either exceptionally dumb or very determined to vote (or both). She sent in her registration marked “permanent resident” and when it was rejected she sent it in a 2nd time marked “citizen” – this raised red flags and is why they caught her. You would think that she would have quit after the 1st rejection.
The commandant of my father’s concentration camp got 20 years hard labor but the French let him out after only 10. I found his obituary – he had been a musician before the war and went back to being the leader of a small town brass band (I think these are common in Germany). They didn’t mention the crimes against humanity that he committed or his decade in a French prison but they did note that when he led the band he was a stickler for proper uniforms.
The states send the birth certificates’ data to the feds.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/births.htm
@Jack D
An obituary is generally going to leave out the negatives
It depends who wrote the obituary and in what paper. The obituary for a major league war criminal published in the NY Times is not going to leave out a conviction for crimes against humanity, but obituaries in small town newspapers, often written or dictated by the family, are not usually going to mention the negatives directly. It’s possible that the members of the band didn’t even know of their leader’s past. In postwar Germany, “what did you do in the war?” was something that most people knew better than to ask.
But sometimes the reporter will work in a hint, either consciously or unintentionally. The thing about being a stickler for proper uniforms was such a hint and I thought it was amusing in a bitterly ironic way.
They also said he was a “former military man” .
Fazal is right. It’s a matter of decentralized elections there’s no Government that governs election process. There are approximately 200,000 precinct level “elections”. So the difficulty comes from the fact that there are different rules for different states or localities, and of course people can move so all those rolls have to change (unlike if we had a single US tracking system).
As usual, streamlining the process would be more efficient presumably – Federal Government dictates rules of elections that everyone must follow (including whatever ID they want) but then they also have to enforce ease of elections – make sure everyone can easily get an ID if they are entitled to one, and has an easy way to vote (nearby polling place, mail-in, internet, etc)
Self-certification is a reasonable choice. Misrepresenting your status is fraud, and obviously there is an audit process that catches violators, as in this case.
But ultimately, there’s just no justification for spinning up a whole new government apparatus to combat a non-existent problem.
There is no evidence suggesting voter fraud in the United States, on any level above uncoordinated, isolated incidents like this one and the woman in (red state) who voted for DJT twice because she totally knowed that her votes wouldn’t be counted because HRC is a half-breed muslin lover who should be in jail!
http://cis.org/The-Cost-of-a-Border-Wall-vs-the-Cost-of-Illegal-Immigration
“Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes, excluding any costs for their U.S.-born children. If a border wall stopped between 160,000 and 200,000 illegal crossers — 9 to 12 percent of those expected to successfully cross in the next decade — the fiscal savings would equal the $12 to $15 billion cost of the wall.”
“If a wall stopped half of those expected to successfully enter illegally without going through a port of entry at the southern border over the next 10 years, it would save taxpayers nearly $64 billion — several times the wall’s cost.”
“Important Caveats and Observations About These Estimates
In addition to crossing the border surreptitiously, aliens join the illegal population primarily by overstaying a temporary visa. A southern border wall would not address this part of the illegal flow.
A large share of the net fiscal cost of illegal immigrants is at the state and local level, not the federal level. The costs of building the wall will be borne by the federal government.
To create its long-term fiscal estimates for immigrants by education level, the NAS uses the concept of “net present value” (NPV). This concept, which is commonly used by economists, has the effect of reducing the size of the net fiscal drain that unskilled immigrants will create in the future. The NAS does this because costs or benefits years from now are valued less in economics relative to more immediate costs. But this means the actual net lifetime fiscal cost of illegal border-crossers, given their education levels, is possibly $140,000 to $150,000 each in their lifetimes if the NPV concept is not used.”