This fell apart when those people with the grasp of reality pointed out that illegal immigrants can't vote.
Meh. Some yes, some no. Illegal immigrants can't legally vote. But that's impossible to enforce when identification and citizenship status aren't verified for voting.
Look, when I go to the local doctor's office, there's a sign prominently posted that says it is illegal to bring firearms, knives, or pepper spray into the office. But there's also no checking involved to see if anyone is complying with that law. The reality is that anyone could bring a concealed weapon into the office with them at any time. Nobody would know, because nobody is verifying at all.
So you think voter registration and verification is nothing more than a sign that says "please don't vote if you're an illegal?"
Depends on the state.
Many states allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses... and they require only a driver's license to register to vote. It would be reasonable and rational to expect cross-checking... but I've stopped assuming anything.
In CA, for example,
you have to provide your driver's license in order to register to vote. The
basic instructions for getting a driver's license say that you should be prepared to show your SSN card. But someone without a SSN can still get a DL - in fact, there's a
process for a person to get a DL if they're unable to provide proof of legal residency. One would hope that the voter registration excludes AB 60 DLs, but they look identical at a glance. Additionally,
Immigrant Legal Resource Center in CA has the following guidance in their AB 60 FAQs:
Just because they look identical
at a glance doesn't mean there is no difference in the records. Why do you persist in assuming the visible security is the whole of the security?! In the real world visible security is for deterrence purposes, most of the real security is hidden.
I completely agree with you here and I saw that, too, in reading Emily's post. It's like saying security on IIDB is terrible because they don't even track IP addresses. Of course, behind the scenes IP addresses are in fact tracked, but the casual user doesn't see it and staff isn't going to go about trying to disprove the claim by giving real life examples of people's IPs. Indeed, most security is hidden because this is how security works. You don't want the casual users to know the strategies being employed because then they can try to break through the security and there can be holes and you don't want people to figure those out.
Why do you think they wouldn't check? They don't just blindly accept information on voter registrations, it's checked against other databases.
I can attest that relevant databases exist. As someone who has done a lot of work in modern genealogy (which probably sounds odd to bring up), I have often had to connect the existence of a living person to other people generations beforehand based merely on a nickname, user name, initials, or full name if I am lucky. Not only can this be done, but starting from someone's full name and alleged residence would be way easier to do. There are residential databases among others that scrape the Internet or multiple databases including the residential ones, criminal databases, business and financial and piece together reports of everyone. One can access just one, many, or one of those conglomerate databases to investigate a person or confirm residence if needed.
To add--there are also social security databases, including those publicly available to genealogists but also those that are available to security or state actors which probably all have different levels of privacy and access. These are also integrated into reports available through services or if it is a state actor doing the query, it is probably a different level of privacy. For example, Loren, I can tell you where you got your SSN and the approximate year you got the SSN. Without going into too much detail because I do not want to reveal too much, you were 4 or 5 years old and it was not in Nevada. I know which state and when. This is a typical scenario for citizens whereas immigrants most often have SSNs issued much later in life. If, for example, someone has their SSN registered at year 15 or later the probability is going way up that they were not born in the US.
Let me give a concrete example. I am aware of a person born in Haiti in 1949. They came to the US in the 80s. Their SSN was registered in DC between 1981 and 1983. One can clearly see they were not 4 or 5 years old from the examination of databases.
One can certainly imagine that such records could be red-flagged for further searches OR all records regardless could also be checked against even more databases. Again, working in genealogy, I can say that we have access to OLDer records of citizenship and immigration, but a state actor would have different levels of access to records of people becoming citizens or registering with immigration. It is also a certainty that the SS database itself includes birth location, but that may not be available to common people such as me querying public reports. I do know it has a birth location available once a person is deceased so it is present in the record just protected from public view until later.
So the idea that an immigrant can get a SSN isn't a security hole at all. It is a way to look them up and link their info across databases and get even more info on them.
