• Aux@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • darq@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I don’t understand what the problem is.

      The fact that “Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination”.

      Maybe read the article?

        • BakedGoods@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • onymousol@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What discrimination? Every citizen should have a passport. That’s how it works in every developed country!

        • darq@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • onymousol@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Aux@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, Britain is very weird. How do you even live without a passport? No wonder Britain has plenty of identity theft going on…

      • Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        How is that secure though? I could easily figure out that information for people of my gender and in my age range…

        • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          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?

            • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              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.

            • PunnyName@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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…

          • Aux@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              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.

                • james1@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Most people don’t vote

                  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.

        • scootinfroody
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • MidgePhoto@photog.social
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          1 year ago

          @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.

      • SirQuackTheDuck@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Hillock@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • senoro@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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

    • Flax
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Exactly! It’s not a problem anywhere in the world but England!