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Every single state has policies allowing the homeless to vote, many dictated by court decisions or the state's Attorney General. At least a dozen of them actually have laws on the books to that effect. And since this is a state-level issue, each state (and sometimes each county) may have differences in their policies. It would therefore be impossible to answer your hypothetical, as it's handled differently throughout the country.
The bottom line, however, is that the homeless are allowed to vote, so long as they are citizens and have registered. And once they are registered and on the voter rolls at the polling place, no one should be allowed to call their right to vote into question. Period.
ah but you are confusing homeless and transient
if they are allowed to register, then there is a documented RESIDENCE, even for the 'homeless', their RESIDENCE might be a city shelter
but the FACT is that if you can not prove or provide what your residence is, how can you vote in any DISCTRICT
would you want someone from ventura beach, voting in a redondo beach race????
would you want a transient person from the other side of the country voting for a california senator, just because they are there at the time of election???
It should not be a problem, but remember that these laws are passed under all sorts of political influence. There is a lot of room for abuse by tailoring the requirements in such a way that certain classes of people won't be as able to meet them - people that would otherwise be legally entitled to vote.
Damn right there should be a national standard, at least for national elections, but good luck getting conservatives to go along with THAT.
uhm the conservative were pushing for a national id or a national standard,,,its the liberals that were fighting against it a few years ago...and the opposite just this past year with the obamacare national id....so go figure
Voter ID when voting is a faux problem. You can't vote unless you're registered. Voter ID wouldn't address any of the real problems of fraudulent voting. The real problems are with the voter registration systems that do not keep up with address changes, that are not updated when people die, that allow the same individual to be registered in multiple locations, even when that individual doesn't have any fraudulent intent.
Many, many places do currently require voters to present photo identification, and have back-up procedures when photo identification is not available. But requiring identification does present problems for a small minority of people, and that minority should have their right to vote protected. I don't think Democrats are opposed to voter ID laws, they are opposed to voter ID laws that don't take into consideration that small minority.
And anyone determined to commit voter fraud could easily get around voter ID requirements at polling locations by using the absentee ballot system. There are very few actual prosecutions of voter fraud, and both Republicans and Democrats assign party members to polling locations to make sure that the rules are being observed.
The best way to prevent voter fraud is not for more stringent ID requirements at the time of voting, but for voter registration rolls to be more carefully maintained and to be cross-referenced against registration rolls nationwide.
Having seen a couple of answers that are nothing but lies, are you interested in an honest answer from a Democrat?
First, voter fraud is a myth. This doesn't mean that it has never happened, but it does mean that there is no evidence to believe that it happens to any significant extent, or that it is prevalent enough to come close to influencing elections.
Second, every proposed law has costs. For instance, we could adopt legislation that would create safety systems to reduce the number of workers killed in construction accidents to zero. Why don't we do it? Because we know that the cost would be prohibitive and it would probably put such a burden on the construction industry that building would stall and a lot of desirable economic activity would come to a halt. Or, to put it in starker terms, as a society we have decided that we prefer a system that allows some building activity, even at the cost of killing some workers, to a system that doesn't kill workers in construction accidents.
We could probably design a voting system that prevents all conceivable voter fraud. Since we know that it is possible to forge government documents, if we really thought that preventing voter fraud is the most important goal in running elections we could do that, but it would probably involve creating biometric systems, such as fingerprinting everyone at the time they register to vote and then again at the time they attempt to vote, or other expensive and unwieldy mechanisms. Even people who claim to be concerned about voter fraud aren't arguing for this kind of absolutely foolproof system, so we can say that they obviously prefer to allow some voter fraud to take place than to put in the most effective possible mechanisms to prevent it.
Third, voter ID requirements do not hit all segments of society equally. We do not have a system of mandatory national identification documents. Many people on both the right and the left would oppose such a system. As a consequence, not everyone who is legally entitled to vote has some identification document that would satisfy a voter ID requirement. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who don't have birth certificates, driver's licenses, passports, military ID cards, or anything else that would be required under a voter ID system. It can also be harder than you might think to obtain these documents.
Not surprisingly, the people who don't have ID tend to be the poor; the young; racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities; the very old (there are still a lot of people around the country who were born at home without a doctor present); and people with limited education. If a voter ID system were implemented, it would tend to disproportionately prevent these groups from voting. This would, in turn, mean that the voting strength of these groups would be diminished relative to the white, the affluent, the well-educated, and people who live in places with easy access to well-functioning government services.
Not only are Democrats more concerned than Republicans about the groups that would be disadvantaged by voter ID requirements, those groups tend to be more likely to vote Democratic. Thus, voter ID requirements, even if you assume they are motivated purely by the desire to prevent voter fraud, have the natural effect of favoring Republicans and disfavoring Democrats.
Fourth, the historical record does no support the idea that when Republicans argue for voter ID requirements they are acting out of pure motives. For instance, in 2000 it is clear that the Republican Secretary of State in Florida adopted a system to identify voters who were barred from voting because of a felony conviction in a way that grossly overcounted the ineligible voters and prevented many eligible voters from voting; Florida has since implemented its system of restoring voting rights to convicted felons in a way that presents unnecessary delays and continued disenfranchisement of convicted felons.
We have also seen that when Republicans have pursued aggressive voter ID campaigns they have been primarily targeted to minority areas. This makes sense from their perspective because those areas are more likely to vote Democratic, but it still demonstrates that their motivation is not to ensure the purity of elections but to prevent likely Democratic voters from voting.
As another example, when Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court he indicated, or it came out in his writings, that he opposed the Supreme Court decision outlawing the poll tax, which was one of the mechanisms that Southern states used to prevent blacks from voting.
Finally, the very system of felony disenfranchisement falls disproportionately on blacks and other minorities. Felony disenfranchisement of some kind is found in most states, however the most stringent forms, imposing a lifetime disenfranchisement for all or some convicted felons, is most prevalent in the deep South and a few extremely conservative western states. Many of these laws were adopted right after the Civil War, and served then and now as a mechanism to prevent blacks to vote. Although in the century after the Civil War the Southern Democratic parties were largely the home of white racism, it is beyond question that the Republican Party has supplanted the Democratic Party in this dishonorable status.
In short, from the perspective of this Democrat, stringent voter ID programs impose needless costs on the election system, have the intent and effect of disenfranchising the poor, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups, and have the intent and effect of tilting the scales in favor of the Republican Party. That is the reason that I oppose these proposals, and I believe the same is true of the Democratic Party in general.
--voter fraid---------------it only took a couple hundred votes to decide the US Senate race in Minnesota. Not many felons could swing that election
--costs----- what a joke !
The country Trillions of dollars in debt, bail out bills galore, and you ( a Democrat) crying about a small cost to ensure our election process is honest?
We have to have a more stringent policy on issueing state ID's in the first place.
KSTP TV did an investigative report on state ID's.
They discovered a small city in Minnesota where there are a lot of Hispanics working in a poultry processing plant.
The state had issued ID's to 20 different people . All of them had the same first name, same last name, and same date of birth. The only thing different on each was the address.
The reporter went to those 20 different addresses and could find no one by that name. The people living there said they never heard of that guy.
Yet Democrats say those wortless state ID's should be all that is required for getting a job,voting, or getting welfare.
Voter ID when voting is a faux problem. You can't vote unless you're registered. Voter ID wouldn't address any of the real problems of fraudulent voting. The real problems are with the voter registration systems that do not keep up with address changes, that are not updated when people die, that allow the same individual to be registered in multiple locations, even when that individual doesn't have any fraudulent intent.
Many, many places do currently require voters to present photo identification, and have back-up procedures when photo identification is not available. But requiring identification does present problems for a small minority of people, and that minority should have their right to vote protected. I don't think Democrats are opposed to voter ID laws, they are opposed to voter ID laws that don't take into consideration that small minority.
And anyone determined to commit voter fraud could easily get around voter ID requirements at polling locations by using the absentee ballot system. There are very few actual prosecutions of voter fraud, and both Republicans and Democrats assign party members to polling locations to make sure that the rules are being observed.
The best way to prevent voter fraud is not for more stringent ID requirements at the time of voting, but for voter registration rolls to be more carefully maintained and to be cross-referenced against registration rolls nationwide.
Anybody can get a photo ID if they are a legal resident. That is a non issue. Voter registration fraud and not checking ID's at the polls leads to actual voting fraud. If you can't see that, you're not being very honest.
You entire post was blown up with the fact that you have to have ID to register.
No you do not. At least not the kind of ID you're referring to. And if one cannot provide certain information when registering, they are still allowed to cast a provisional ballot. You need to stop repeating this false information.
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