Name one thing the state government does for normal people who actually finance the largess. Are you really surprised billions go unaccounted in a place where train robberies are a thing? But don't you worry, a photo ID won't be required in the next election though.
In my case, because the USA does not have a national ID, and this disenfranchises anyone who is unwilling to pay to get said state ID, or does not have the means to get to an office.
I have yet to meet anyone advocating for ID to vote who actually wants to address these by both making said ID free for all Americans and paying for the programs necessary to ensure that every American has easy access to get one. This means everything from busing programs to opening new offices in areas that don't have one to putting people on the street to collect the necessary forms and make sure the homeless get them. Then also making sure you find a way to ensure that the disabled, elderly, or just people who can't kill two hours standing in line have an easy way to vote.
Most instead seem to treat that disenfranchisement as acceptable even desired. Truly address the issue of not everyone having an ID and universal access to easy voting (I'm not aware of any lawmakers proposing Voter ID laws attempting to do so) and my objections go away.
Then you'll only have to deal with the folks who are against requiring everyone have ID because they worry about turning us into a "Papers Please" kind of society.
You can make it free, but you can't make it compulsory. While the constitution allows for a national ID scheme in the sense of making a card and issuing it, actually using it for anything would be near impossible.
There is the Bank ID formula to work around that, at least for the nation state checks: "The Identity Card belongs to the Union, and each Citizen of the Union is obligated to use it as specified in this section of the Code, as enforced by the President of the Union."
> Solution: Make the USA passport card free and compulsory.
Great! All that's left is addressing all the challenges I brought up around making obtaining one simple for everyone (no, drive 40 minutes to your nearest post-office doesn't count), and making voting universally easily accessible to everyone and you have my support!
Given that as far as I know not a single lawmaker who has been pushing Voter ID has backed your suggestion, much less put any effort into addressing my other concerns, I don't think I'll be supporting Voter ID anytime soon.
> Solution: Make the USA passport card free and compulsory.
That would be the ultimate solution, and, as it was mentioned, something that has been proven effective in a very large chunk of the developed world.
But having spent the last five years in the US, I think this will trigger the opposition of most conservative pundits, politicians, and attorneys across the country. Ironically, these are the same people who advocate for stringent voter ID laws.
Voting ID's are free in all states they are required.
> or does not have the means to get to an office.
This could be said for anything...it is funny that the liberal American solution to lack of access to ID offices is to get rid of ID's...not, you know, improve access to said offices (subsidized Ubers that link into an ID appointment, maybe only available every year/whenever you need to renew).
> it is funny that the liberal American solution to lack of access to ID offices is to get rid of ID's...not, you know, improve access to said offices
It's funny that the conservative American solution to lack of access to ID offices is just deny them a vote... not, you know, improve access to said offices.
Seriously, what do you think the conservative reaction to giving a tech darling like Uber taxpayer money to cart the poor around? I can hardly imagine the backlash.
Also why assume I'm a liberal? Not requiring an ID has long big a conservative principal. It's only recently that requiring one has become a republican one. Turns out the world isn't as simple as conservatives vs liberals.
>I have yet to meet anyone advocating for ID to vote who actually wants to address these by both making said ID free for all Americans
I've seen the opposite, not a single person who wants voter ID is against making it freely available to those who can't afford it. In fact, voter ID is already required in a number of states, and not only are there free options available in those states (because it would be a poll tax otherwise), but voter ID's in those states have not shown to decrease minority turnout in elections.
> I've seen the opposite, not a single person who wants voter ID is against making it freely available
I have. I've met plenty of people who say if you aren't willing to spend $25 on your ID you don't deserve to vote. But that's really besides the point given that it only addresses one cherry picked issue out of a number I brought up. Doesn't matter if the ID is free if you have to spend 3 hours bussing to and from, waiting in line, and bussing back from getting it. Or if there is no public transit available. Doesn't matter if the ID is free if there is an hour long line because there aren't enough polling places in your area and we've banned mail-in and drop off ballots. Or if you are simply too infirm to make it to said polling place. Or aren't willing to wait in a large crowd of a hundred of your closest strangers I'm the middle of a pandemic.
How many of those pushing for voter ID are prepared to spend tax dollars on those issues? Texas certainly isn't.
> but voter ID's in those states have not shown to decrease minority turnout in elections.
You can see Voter ID laws by state - https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state and look at voter turnout. There is no correlation between those laws and turnout, which makes you wonder why people pretend there is...
Well the problem with having no laws requiring voter ID is that you literally can't catch fraud...since you don't check for ID to see if the person should be voting.
But as serious as people take elections, it's absurd to think people wouldn't do things they shouldn't when their favorite (or least favorite) candidate is on the ballot. You think everyone just plays by the rules?
Of course not! Whoever claimed this? I don't think anyone has claimed that there are no instances of fraud, to do so would be asinine, we have caught confirmed cases of fraud.
> Well the problem with having no laws requiring voter ID is that you literally can't catch fraud
The reason there is so little voter fraud is the reward is so little and the risk is so great. I cast my grandmas ballot and risk 5 years in a federal prison for what? That vote has a lower chance of swaying the election that I'd have of winning the lottery with a lottery ticket. To perform fraud on the scale required to sway an election you need to coordinate a large group of people (for a Presidential election across multiple states) and all it takes is one defector to bring it all down. Frankly, if your going to attempt this scale, your not doing to attack the system anywhere that Voter ID helps. If I send people to cast ballots that's hundreds of events where I risk getting caught, no you'd want to inject ballots after they've been collected. Or some other scheme that avoids having to cast hundreds or thousands of illegal ballots individually.
In fact the reason that this is important and that people take this seriously is exactly why one should be suspicious of any politician looking to change the rules, especially when there is zero evidence to support said rule change. Who has more incentive to sway the election than the politicians in office? And there is absolutely zero legal risk in proposing a law that just so happens to help you get re-elected, unlike the individual commit voter fraud. SO politicians have all the incentive and none of the risk.
And we know they aren't afraid to use it. While specific instances are debated, no one denies gerrymandering exists. So yes, when I look at Voter ID, I don't just look at it by itself, I look at what's included in these "election security" bills that include stricter Voter ID. It's never opening more polling placing, allowing voting on multiple days, or any other measure designed to make it easier to vote. Instead it's always closing drive up voting, mail in voting, disallowing votes not cast on election days, and limiting the number of polling places in high population areas.
Then when I oppose this bill I must be "pro voter fraud" because otherwise why would I be against Voter ID? Nevermind those other measures in the bill.
Awesome! I suspect if we had started by making a point to make sure everyone has IDs instead of starting with "let's require IDs knowing full well that some people don't have them" this would've been a minor issue and we could be done already.
Yeah, the challenge there is that there are loud partisans on both sides of the aisle against national-id based on freedom from government/mark-of-the-beast concerns.
The integrity of our vote is much greater than any of the issues you brought up. Every issue you have against a national ID can be solved easily.
As many have mentioned the USPS could serve as the backbone with ID cards being printed in kiosks on the spot. The USPS already provides the means for obtaining your passport.
It's not clear to me why anyone falls for the rhetoric of ID's suppressing or disenfranchising voters, it's a lot of partisan nonsense. "Someone think of the homeless and disabled elderly, how will they vote" when we all know the reality is they don't.
> The integrity of our vote is much greater than any of the issues you brought up.
The integrity of our vote includes ensuring every eligible voter is able to do so without obstacles. As far as I can tell this is currently the primary threat to the integrity of the vote we are facing.
> Every issue you have against a national ID can be solved easily.
Great let's solve it then! As mentioned actually solve those issues instead of hand waving them away and I'll be pro-voter ID. But as far as I can tell no one is trying to solve them, especially not the people currently pushing voter ID.
> As many have mentioned the USPS could serve as the backbone
Not everyone has a USPS nearby. Not everyone has a car to drive there. I don't accept denying these people the vote.
> "Someone think of the homeless and disabled elderly, how will they vote" when we all know the reality is they don't.
Your reality is news to me, and I don't accept that it's okay to make it hard for anyone to vote just because you don't think they want to.
As long as we also address the other concerns in my post. You know ensuring that everyone has easy access to getting that ID (just being free isn't enough it needs to be accessible, as does voting).
Now you just have to convince everyone else pushing for voter ID to actually put in the work (and spend the money) to get that done, and we can get this thing rolling!
> Why are people honestly against ID requirements for voting?
It's mostly a fake issue to cast the administration as pro-democracy and the opposition as anti-democracy. There's no doubt that poor people sometimes find it very tough to obtain ID, and that voter ID laws benefit Republicans by a few percentage points, but Republican positions on voter ID are less to get those points than to paint themselves as the guardians of democracy against an imaginary secret cabal who are secretly manipulating elections with armies of minorities and illegal immigrants.
They're both playing the same game to different voter bases.
If Democrats seriously cared, they could simply create facilities with the stroke of a pen that would reach out to every voter and help them to obtain ID. Instead they're loudly pushing bills they don't have the votes to pass as a campaign tactic.
It's astounding that under the same administration that is fighting for the right to vote without ID, facial recognition is going to be required to file your taxes. Taxes you only have to file because of Intuit lobbyists.
What else would you expect from a government that ran on being covid rationalists but has taken a year to figure out that they should be sending people masks and tests if they want people to be wearing masks and taking tests?
> Has anybody provided even a single example of a US Citizen who was trying to figure out how to obtain some ID and couldn't figure out the process?
Not an US citizen, but a Texas resident.
It's not only that the process is painfully complex. For instance, homeless people who don't legally own a gun or can drive a car, are effectively excluded. Same goes for students whose bills are still attached to their families, would have a hard time proving their residence status.
If one can go pass this step, providing proof of identity is equally complicated [1]. It's amusing that some of the accepted documents are even harder and way more expensive to obtain, like a passport.
Not having a social security number makes the whole process almost impossible to complete.
Point is, this shouldn't be this complicated and time consuming. Someone with low income and working two or more jobs, would have a hard time going through the process.
I appreciate that insight, but with respect, that didn't answer the question that was asked. I'm not asking for a theoretical explanation of the difficulties involved with procuring an ID, I'm asking for a real world example of just one person who couldn't manage to get one.
Certainly with such interest in this topic, there's been a journalistic expose that went into the unfortunate story of even one US citizen who was wrongly prevented from getting some kind of ID? If I had even 1 name of somebody who was wrongly deprived of an ID, it would be a lot easier to understand that there's a real issue here.
> I'm asking for a real world example of just one person who couldn't manage to get one.
Same could be said about "widespread voter ID fraud". Given that there are no such examples of this, why would anyone want to push for more stringent voter ID laws?
> Same could be said about "widespread voter ID fraud". Given that there are no such examples of this,
I could make many comments here about the actual election system and how recounts are designed to be worthless, but my biggest argument that I think is completely unassailable is simple: credibility. Do you want to have a credible government or not?
Here's a poll from early in 2020 that says that about 59% of Americans distrust the election system. I'm sure you could find many other polls from before and after that show that a non-trivial percentage of Americans have doubts about the election system's honesty.
Why wouldn't we want to take the concerns of a non-trivial group seriously and work to address them? The mere fact that there's such establishment resistance to enhancing the security of and ability to audit the election system only adds fuel to the fire that there's something that they want to hide.
> why would anyone want to push for more stringent voter ID laws?
As long as we're not preventing any valid voters from voting (a legitimate concern of course), what's the argument against making the election process even more credible and secure? Please help me understand that.
Let me start out by saying that this article did not meet my stated criteria of asking for a specific name of somebody who was unable to get an ID. I was very specific in asking for a name because even just one real verifiable example of a person can illustrate the issue.
Anyway, I agree that the article does highlight some theoretical issues with applying unnecessary hoops to people. I sincerely hope that all people in uncommon living situations (such as those with nonexistent addresses on an Indian Reservation or living out in the sticks somewhere) have the legal ability to vote.
To play Devil's Advocate and be a bit contrarian however, I have to point out this article was a one-sided polemic. The best anecdote from the article about the grandma showed that she was able to vote the same day once she got a little assistance. And the article made a big deal about the distances that poor folks had to travel in order to vote, but the phrase "absentee ballot" doesn't even appear in the article. The article does mention the difficulties with rural mail being slow, but doesn't give even one example where this prevented somebody from voting. I'm certainly going to keep an open mind about the struggles involved in getting ID and voting and I fully agree that any election system that exists should be easily accessible to all valid voters, but I'm not convinced from this article that there's 1 legal citizen out there who can't figure out how to ultimately acquire identification.
> Do you want to have a credible government or not?
That's not at stake, again, unless you can prove that widespread election fraud is a thing. Which, so far, isn't.
> Here's a poll from early in 2020 that says that about 59% of Americans distrust the election system.
Out of curiosity, I went to check out the actual Gallup article and poll results [1]. What it actually says is that the drop is likely driven by allegations of foreign interference and cybersecurity issues, neither had anything to do with voter ID.
A more recent poll [2] increases confidence in the electoral process to 59%. Drop in confidence is driven by republican voters. Interestingly, the issue of eligible voters not being able to cast their vote ranks higher than non eligible people casting votes. So, voter suppression is perceived as more important than voter fraud.
Let me reiterate, there is no proof of widespread voter fraud.
The issue here is that voter IDs are, sometimes, quite difficult to obtain. If republicans were serious about this issue, they would make it universal, free, and compulsory. If every single person born in the US could have an ID card issued in a matter of minutes, which is something pretty common in most developed countries, this "problem" would automatically be solved.
But this is not what Republicans want. They don't want to make it easier or cheaper to obtain a voter ID, they want to keep the current model and make it harder to vote.
> Let me start out by saying that this article did not meet my stated criteria of asking for a specific name of somebody who was unable to get an ID.
Well, this is unfortunate.
Frankly, I find it a bit dishonest to peddle the narrative that people want harsher voter ID laws, since, as stated, they care more about suppression than they do about fraud. It's also not great that your argument revolves around that voter ID laws would make elections more "secure", when there is no proof that they weren't in the first place.
A poll is not proof of anything.
Public sentiment is just that, a sentiment.
The fact that most republican voters believe that voter fraud is widespread, does not mean that they would change their minds if what they ask for is granted. And I don't need to go back too far to prove my point, because the fraud narrative has been moving goalposts since the very beginning, as they went from illegal absentee votes, to votes arriving too late to be counted, to dead people voting, to foreign votes (?) being counted, to voting machines being hacked, and so on and so forth. None of these claims could be verified, yet here we are.
The UK government has proposed making photo ID mandatory for voting (currently it's only needed in Northern Ireland), and it's been controversial for similar reasons to the USA. The legislation is currently progressing through parliament.
The Government's research shows that 2% of the UK population doesn't have any form of photo ID, and up to 9% of the population don't have a valid photo ID (i.e. one that would be recognised for voting purposes and has not expired). [0]
The idea that 9% of the population would need to go through additional processes and costs to retain the right to vote is concerning to many.
There's no ID card scheme in the UK, so people typically rely on a driving licence or passport in day to day life. These both have requirements people may not be able to meet (e.g. health conditions may prohibit a driving licence being obtained), and can be expensive.
Fortunately, the UK government has announced plans for a free voter ID card to be made available to anyone without another form of ID.
It then comes down to a cost/risk analysis. The UK government estimates it could cost something like £18 million per year to implement the photo ID requirement.
If the types of fraud that would be prevented by asking for ID are miniscule (33 allegations of voter impersonation were made in 2019 out of 50 million votes cast) and so many people don't have ID - is it worth that cost?
In the U.S. context, Black people were deliberately deprived of the right to vote for most of the country's history via seemingly-neutral requirements that were designed to stop their participation. Voter ID as proposed is an attempt to re-introduce one of these requirements.
> seemingly-neutral requirements that were designed to stop their participation
This is notably the origin of the term "grandfather clause", although its current meaning is subtly different from the original sense.
The 15th Amendment made it illegal for states to deny the right to vote directly on the basis of race, so instead they imposed new poll taxes and "literacy tests" (which were not designed as true tests, but rather as instruments to allow poll workers to arbitrarily "pass" and "fail" would-be voters), while exempting those whose grandfathers were eligible to vote before a specific date.
Literally everything is a partisan issue including the voting ID. The general argument against it is that proposed valid IDs are not free to obtain, and this would equate to a voting tax which is forbidden in the constitution.
Voter ID laws are all over the place. Very wide deviations from one state to the next, and every state has different ideas about what counts as an acceptable form of identification (they don't always have to be government issued photo identification cards). Of the states that require ID for voting, the following also provide a method to get a free ID to use for voting (although it's possible I missed one or two):
Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
That would be the 'logical' solution, but the party that wants voter ID is not trying to do something logical.
It wants to prevent people who don't currently have it from voting. So they demand ID, without making it possible/easier to get. (And when they do make it possible/easier to get, its only in their political strongholds - or they explicitly disqualify particular kinds of state-issued ID from being used to vote.)
Selective disenfranchisement is the whole point of the policy, not an unfortunate, unforeseen, unpredictable side effect. If you'd like to learn more about the history of this, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow are a good primer on the motivations behind it. Those motivations haven't gone anywhere, because the cultural struggle in question has never actually been resolved.
> So they demand ID, without making it possible/easier to get.
Great, have congress legislate laws to make it easier/free to obtain passports. Instead of requiring folks to travel to DMV/Post office/etc., why not have federal public servants visit them door-to-door and assist in issuing it? We do it for census, so what's preventing them from doing it for passports?
Charitably, the democrats don't care to take any action because there's never been evidence that voter fraud is an actual issue. It happens, in minuscule amounts, in most elections and is statistically meaningless. Most cases of voting fraud in the US are mistakes, because sometimes people don't realize when they've lost the right to vote, or didn't know they were taken off the voter rolls due to inactivity, or being incorrectly listed as dead or similar.
How much are we willing to spend on non-issues?
This is not my opinion however, as I think the US could do with a guaranteed, everyone has it, national ID card. Republicans however definitely don't want that, as it could be evidence that a government can actually do something right, and that's anathema to them, and also because a not-small group of evangelicals think that a government issued ID is a sign of the devil or something.
Note that voter ID laws are being passed at the _state_ level. Doing what you say above is fine, but getting states to recognize those IDs is not. This is not some trivial problem in America (like it may be in other countries).
1. They don't really get to run the government in the states where this is an issue.
2. Once in a blue moon, they do. But anything they build to enable this requires constant funding and maintenance. Their opponents either dismantle it when they take power, or retroactively disqualify existing IDs from being eligible for voting.
It's not, and has never been about IDs. It's about disenfranchisement.
I agree that the current Republican approach is about disenfranchisement.
However, voter ID itself is a completely reasonable thing. This issue will never go away. The most logical thing for Democrats to do is to enact voter ID the right way so as to remove this as a tool from the Republicans' arsenal.
"Republicans may implement voter ID improperly, so we must never ever verify that the people casting votes are doing so legally" is an insane position, honestly.
An obvious first step would be to make getting a passport easier and free, though I am not sure if the federal government can compel states to accept a passport as identification.
>
"Republicans may implement voter ID improperly, so we must never ever verify that the people casting votes are doing so legally" is an insane position, honestly.
We already verify this, we just don't do it with the particular methods that they demand (and why they reject state-issued IDs that aren't used by their preferred demographics.)
Which is, of course, a game of goal-post shifting, that is impossible to win.
A nationally required ID is constitutionally questionable, meaning this would need handled at the State level. It would require involvement from all parties.
The Federal government should set standards for features that need to be present on a State/Territory ID card "in order to facilitate interstate commerce". Then offer to subsidize production/distribution programs run by the States, for any State with a compliant ID program. Even better if we fused all of this with FICAM somehow. (https://www.idmanagement.gov/ )
The DoD has had ID card production figured out for years. All it takes is a work station (for checking your entry in a database and confirming the data that goes onto the card), a specialized printer, and a few other peripherals (camera, fingerprint scanner, keypad). I can walk into a DoD ID card center and walk out with a new card in 15 minutes. You could easily stuff several of these workstations into the back of a van, and then drive around to neighborhoods, bringing ID services to the disadvantaged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card
Definitely a partisan issue, but if we look through the fog - why not find the root cause of this argument and make IDs free? It can be done by the states. We can send COVID tests to every American. I am sure issueing IDs (in control of States) would be possible.
This way, you can strike down the arguments about the entire Democracy hinging on fake voting and "lost the election" BS. Give Republicans what they want. I don't see any issue with it.
Also Democrats need to calm down and realize that it is not that unreasonable to ask people for IDs to avoid duplicate voting. It is not anti-democratic and definitely not doing anything helpful by calling people that want IDs fascists. Election integrity should be so good that it shouldn't have gaping holes like not having a fricking ID.
One of the 2 parties is more incentivized to discourage voting, and that's worthy of discussion.
I am strongly anti-partisan but am compelled to vote in alignment with what I consider to be the least-worst option.
It's beyond frustrating to try to discuss these issues without it becoming a tribal war, even here on HN where one would hope for a higher level of discourse.
Rational arguments get lost in the partisan noise. For what its worth, the federal government could make passports (or passport cards) free for every citizen, which would solve the ID requirement. It's something that can be done by presidential fiat even, no laws required, that doesnt solve the issue that the underlying document needed to get any ID cost money, but its a start.
They are either completely or almost completely free to get in states already. The usual argument then swaps to how much of a pain in the ass it is to source ID documents and show up in person at the DMV or similar.
I moved to a new state last year and to get an ID/DL the first available appointment was 90 days away. The amount of documentation required for the said ID was also less than whats needed for a US passport. Even after an appointment for a specific time, I waited 1.5 hours in the line for my turn. The fee was nominal (for me, $25.) But I can totally see how it can be hard for some people to go through the whole process.
I don't know that the US is especially worse than other countries when it comes to time and paperwork needed to receive govt services. I have waited in long lines all over the world.
This isn't for government services, this is for voting. The kind of people that are prime targets for disenfranchisement are exactly the same people who can least afford to spend a long time in line to vote. And they won't, because the relative value of that vote to them is pretty low, but in aggregate pretty high to the folks who'd like to disenfranchise them to win elections.
I don't believe that they are free in most states. $25 is a lot for some people. Three hours to take the bus to the DMV, wait in line, and take the bus home is both a reality and time they don't have for some people.
Until the voter ID proposals address these issues, they aren't "securing our elections", they are putting arbitrary barriers in place of American's inalienable right to vote. Many of us will never support disenfranchising anyone.
This reminds me of how my stances on almost anything are circumstantial to the government they apply to.
I remember when Mitt Romney got blasted for being against Federal involvement in healthcare while having signed state level legislation for the same thing when he was Governor of Massachusetts. I saw that it was seen as controversial politician hypocrisy but I noticed that it matches my ability to compartmentalize topics. (note: I don't have an opinion on the actual issue of that event and don't care, only noticed I could just as easily look at the circumstances for one jurisdiction and like an outcome, while being against the same outcome in another jurisdiction)
That ability was tested when one time I was stopped by border police on a train into Germany or Austria. They just did a check scan of my passport. Some residents on the train thought it was embarrassing for their country that it could be "so unwelcoming" to foreigners, but myself and some other foreigners from different places were pretty enamored.
This doesn't translate to my stance on US checks based on appearance, or ID requirements in the US or political affiliation or anything.
Only reason I write it is because I wonder if there are other people like me, because I can't tell.
There are a great many things that I’m in favor of local or state governments having the power/standing to do and opposed to the federal government having the same power/involvement. It’s the entire reason for the Tenth Amendment, which for my taste should be interpreted much more strictly rather than treating it with the same level of function as your appendix.
> Why are people honestly against ID requirements for voting?
Whether this idea is accurate or not is up for the reader to judge, but there's a perception in America that one of the major parties (not naming names) needs to have as many mechanisms in place to be able to cheat as possible in order to win elections.
Personally, all I'd like to know at this time is if there's any legal citizens out there who who cannot find out how to procure identification.
I always figure the parties hire consultants that tell them how changes to election laws will affect turnout. If it works in their favor, they'll push for it. You're not going to support something that hurts your side, even if the change may be a good idea in and of itself.
It’s a little disingenuous to paint this as “both parties are only motivated by what would help them get more votes” if one of those parties advocates policies to increase voter participation and the other advocates policies to decrease it.
That argument could be made, of course, but (like all arguments) only by presenting evidence and reasons to believe that one side’s proposals result in (or would result in) election fraud.
Why would only one side be forced to provide such evidence? The fact that almost every modern country on earth is requiring it makes me think that the burden of proof would be stronger on the side of people who think ID requirement is racist.
The hope would be that there is a strong institutional desire for peaceful transitions of power after open elections, and institutional opposition to anyone advocating otherwise.
Historically some governments have had such institutions to various extents.
It’s kinda the same answer to the question “why wouldn’t each side use unrestrained organized violence to attempt to hold and increase their power?”
because the IDs themselves are only issued by states and are intentionally withheld from demographic groups that the states would like to prevent from voting in large numbers.
No one really is, it has majority support from both sides of politics.
Because it would be a change in the system it's used as a wedge by politicians. Additionally they know that it's harder to get out of the vote among left leaning voters, so any extra requirement would be risky in swing states. Democrat strongholds (ie Delaware) already have voter ID.
> Why are people honestly against ID requirements for voting?
I think a better question is why folks are against ID requirements but are for vaccine passports and photo ids to buy cigarettes, booze, get into rated R movies, drive, or fly.
they're not higher. the federal government doesn't even care how old you are, let alone where you live or whether you are who you say you are. those standards are all locally mandated and locally enforced.
Sort of... The federal government passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act[1], showing they did care. Although they don't directly enforce drinking age mins, the carrot and the stick approach was used.
I think this is a frame of reference issue. The I buy beer at whole foods, someone checks my ID and won't sell it to me if I don't have one. If I vote via mail in ballot, I sign my name on a sheet of paper that arrives to an unsecured mailbox. Whatever the law that applies, as an end user, beer seems to be a more restricted product.
I mean, I'm opposed to ID's to buy some of those things too. But thats my libertarianism speaking. Generally we have no strict ID requirements for those items, its up to the seller to verify age, which that can do by obvious appearance, or by carding the person. It's why you dont get carded all the time.
Driving requires a specific credential and is not relevant for this discussion.
Flying is another case, you do not need an ID to fly, there are provisions to fly without photo ID if you do not have one, they're just more time consuming and meant to be somewhat punitive.
My point is that it's incongruent. The reasons brought forth supporting an id-free voting system are absent when any policy that requires more government papers and over sight are put in place.
Generally, if you saw conservatives proposing policies that made ID available to everyone for no cost (like a free copy of their birth certificate and free passport card for every citizen), their opposition would look silly on this.
Instead, conservatives focus on the ID mandate, ahead of fixing the inherent supply issues. Indeed, while I still have objections after this issue is fixed, they're largely irrelevant to the political mainstream.
Generally I'm opposed to anything that smacks of 'papers place', and the government has a higher bar to need to confirm and record identity than John Q. Public (also I'd note, the examples you cited, generally do not record anything, they just verify age of purchaser).
It all boils down to some form of absurd partisanship.
> Generally, if you saw conservatives proposing policies that made ID available to everyone for no cost (like a free copy of their birth certificate and free passport card for every citizen), their opposition would look silly on this.
Any group raising their money from small dollar donations has an incentive to do nothing. As soon as they accomplish something, their funding dries up.
Both are raising their money from large dollar donations. They also both accomplish plenty - bipartisan votes pass things in wealthy donors' interests.
The things that they do nothing on are "wedge" issues. The filibuster guarantees that those are the only things that can't get passed if Congress stays vaguely equally divided. Passing material improvements to average lives is no benefit to either side.
Because there is no mandated form of ID in the USA (and it was fought against for decades by conservatives claiming it represented unwarranted overreach by the state).
As a result, actually obtaining some form of ID that might be acceptable (the forms vary mostly depending on the political party that writes the rules) can present a significant challenge to some voters, and for some of us, that is an anathema (the right to vote being sacred, certainly compared with the right to drive for example).
Introduced a national ID that the government is OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE for every person, and many of the arguments against it would go away. Currently, no state in the US, nor the federal government, has such a form of ID.
Voting is a state concern. It doesn't matter that there is no Federal standard. Every state that has Voter ID will have some form of acceptable ID card that you can get, even if you don't drive.
I said "government" and mentioned both state and federal. The point is that there is no ID required in any state. Voter ID cards are not the obligation of the government to provide - voters much take the steps to procure them. The right to vote precedes and predates such a requirement - if the state wants to impose it, that's fine but it should come with the obligation upon the state government to provide the ID, not a requirement to procure it.
And getting that will cost money, often requires traveling non-trivial distances (note the demographics of the areas where state offices are opened or closed, and viability of public transit), and requires proof of residency / identity which can be hard for some people to satisfy (there are plenty of people who’ve hit issues about things like maiden names, being able to prove continuous proof of residence when they e.g. weren’t on a lease or other legal document, etc.).
I still think ID is good but it really needs to be paired with a robust improvement in making the system of getting ID work better. If we’re requiring it, the government should be required to provide it for free and meet a legal standard of proof for denial.
Elections are local not national, so why would you need a national ID? You can use a State ID for a local election, and each election can have their own requirements about it, matching whatever the local ID in use there is.
There is no mandated form of ID in any state. How can you require people to have something to vote that is not required for any other purpose, at least if the government is not required to provide it?
Isn't that effectively the same argument though? In practice states provide ID's to everyone who can prove residency. Forcing states to grant ID's to everyone who asks for it is the same as forcing them to allow anyone to vote without ID's, just with an extra step.
You don't "force states to grant IDs to everyone who asks for it". You force states to issue IDs to all legal voters. States do not "provide IDs" to anyone - you are required to fill out paperwork, potentially travel and more.
In nations that do in fact have a national ID, everyone gets one, with little or no effort (certainly no need to travel), and if you wanted to mark the card "non-voting" that wouldn't be a big step.
Your right to vote is established by the US Constitution. A state can't burden that right. If a state wants to add an ID requirement, that's fine, but getting the ID must present no burden to any voter.
In reality, the conundrum here is entirely of conservatives' own making. On the one hand, they (non-exclusively) are adamantly against automatically issued national or even state IDs. On the other, they want to require ID for voting (ascribe whatever reason to this you want). You can't fulfill both these desires without violating the constitutional right to vote.
If you live without a vehicle in a rural corner of your state, compelling you to travel to somewhere else in order to get a state-sanctioned ID is, IMO, an undue burden.
If you are required to have documents and paperwork for a voter ID that you are not otherwise required to have, that is, IMO, an undue burden.
I have no problem with the state saying "you must have this document in order to vote" (it even makes a limited amount of sense, despite being a solution in search of a problem). I do have a problem with the state doing anything other than ensuring that every resident who should that document gets it with minimal effort (preferably zero).
Because we make getting an ID cost money, and make it difficult for poor people.
If you live in a rural place, or are poor, getting an ID is hard, it costs money to get the underlying proof of identity, then costs time (which is money) to get the ID itself, because you often must travel vast distances to the office that issues photo ID's.
If we solved the issuance problem, so everyone could get a free copy birth certificate and made passports free (which can be obtained via an appointment at most post offices), then this problem would be easily solved, and my objections to voter ID would pretty much instantly fall away.
That said, as a former polling place worker, the amount of voter fraud is.. vastly overstated, its a basically non-existent problem, and is mostly an issue of people making good faith mistakes.
However, if it makes folks feel better, its a societal good to get everyone some form of free and easy photo ID, so for me its a two birds with one stone policy, I'll give on this issue, to get the other one solved.
The issue is conservatives seem hell bent on passing voter ID laws without doing enough (or sometimes anything) to solve the (ID) supply side of the equation.
Make IDs free. These are all weasle arguments for not attempting to improve and gives ammunition to Republicans to question election integrity (even though it didn't stand up in the courts).
In many cases the ID is free, and available to anybody who can spend multiple hours during the workday standing in a line in the county seat an hour away from home.
This is how it is used to disenfranchise people. Add a small clause to the rule that says "every county has 1 location" and it is zero burden for rural voters while urban voters are locked out of the process because no single government office can handle 10 million people. Then the legislators will blame the people in the urban counties for being "lazy" and not voting. We saw in 2020 that the voting rate discrepancies are almost entirely the effect of longstanding voter restrictions that just happened to not work that year, which is why so many state governments have worked overtime to double down on voting restrictions to avoid making the same mistake of allowing people to vote.
I'm 100% with you man, I think its a net social good to give everyone a free ID, while I think voter ID not needed as a policy, once everyone has an ID it causes little if any harm.
I'm generally opposed to anything that smacks of 'papers please', thats my personal root of opposition, but its very weak, and if someone promised a policy that gave everyone a free passport but mandated voter ID requirements, I would gladly show up and vote for them.
If that were true surely Republican's would be proposing making IDs free themselves no? If the purpose is to protect the integrity of our elections and not to disenfranchise voters, surely that would be step 1 right?
That number is a bit misleading. For example Idaho is counted in that 32, and here we are required to show ID OR sign an affidavit. Also are those IDs free? Otherwise I'm not sure what that changes about my point.
An address determines which district you are eligible to vote in. The citizen still has a right to vote but where is a legitimate question because it determines which ballot they receive.
Excuse me, can I see your vaccine card so you can enter this store/restaurant/theater/polling place/etc.?
Minorities, Blacks in particular, have lower vaccination rates than whites. Ever heard of the Tuskegee experiment? Who can blame them? Given vaccine rates by demographic, it seems like many places are hell bent on introducing racist vaccine passport policies. I thought we weren't supposed to do stuff like that anymore.
I dont agree with vaccine passports at all. But, if vaccine passports are required, minorities having a lower vaccination rate by choice does not make vaccine passports racist. Enough with the disparate impact BS when the policy is the same for all people across the board.
The only thing that vaccine passport requirements are discriminating against are unvaccinated people. Skin color has nothing to do with it.
There is no purpose to delineating government revenues since money is fungible.
Even though legislators might label or apportion some source of tax to some specific expense, in reality, they can always move it elsewhere (since they are the legislators). Therefore, it is always a question of which expense has political priority.
I thought the problem with CA was that the state budget isn't fungible - 90%+ of the money is allocated via ballot measures or the state constitution and can't be touched by the legislature.
New Hampshire also has no income tax or sales tax, and has infinitely better roads than nearby states like Massachusetts.
Roads are not particularly hard or costly to build. If they are a priority, they can be built and maintained without taxing a population to death. If you think its reasonable to lose a third or more of your income to pay for roads, you are a tremendous sucker.
Back to the first pdf - 52% of the total funding for the road is from the state, 26% is from federal and the other sources are use turnpike (15%), local (3%), and bonds (4%).
I'd rather tax users than have a slush fund that has no accountability because state lawmakers can allocate more money to it whenever they want without regard for the results achieved for the money invested so far. Then if you want more money you have to go to the voters and convince them more taxes on gas are a good idea.
Somehow Florida still manages to have, as of writing, $1.50 cheaper gas per gallon than California, so I think they're doing fine with their taxation scheme.
There's a bit of market forces at play there that shouldn't be ignored. Florida is much closer to the refineries and oilfields in the south east than California is and also doesn't have any smog constraints which also means more expensive gas. Then you get into the "some cities in California have other constraints which gets to micro lots of gas and that ruins economies of scale".
From a state level tax perspective, Florida is $0.4226/g and California is $0.6698/g.
> California has the third greatest refining capacity in the U.S. at 1,892,471 barrels per day.
> The California Reformulated Gasoline Program requires the entire state to use gasoline with minimal oxygen content that burns cleaner than conventional fuel. A number of other states are either required or opt to use reformulated gasoline in an effort to reduce smog-forming and toxic pollutants. 30 percent of U.S. gasoline is reformulated, however California’s Reformulated Gasoline Program uses a proprietary blend that differs from the federal reformulated standard. While PADD I features ample production capacity for federal reformulated gasoline, the only refineries outside of California capable of producing the blend required by state law are located in Washington and the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast refineries haven’t produced reformulated gasoline since 2011 leaving Washington as California’s only out-of-state gasoline source.
---
This isn't an issue of pushing out manufacturing and energy production. It's that there is a very limited set of refineries that make it and those refineries aren't near the oil fields of the gulf states.
The geography of the area (mountains) make it more challenging and less economical to get a pipeline from somewhere else (Canada?) to the refineries in California.
> Oxygenate blending adds oxygen-bearing compounds such as MTBE, ETBE, TAME, TAEE, ethanol, and biobutanol. The presence of these oxygenates reduces the amount of carbon monoxide and unburned fuel in the exhaust. In many areas throughout the U.S., oxygenate blending is mandated by EPA regulations to reduce smog and other airborne pollutants. For example, in Southern California fuel must contain 2% oxygen by weight, resulting in a mixture of 5.6% ethanol in gasoline. The resulting fuel is often known as reformulated gasoline (RFG) or oxygenated gasoline, or in the case of California, California reformulated gasoline. The federal requirement that RFG contain oxygen was dropped on 6 May 2006 because the industry had developed VOC-controlled RFG that did not need additional oxygen.
they have no personal state income tax. there is still a corporate income tax, and they still get all their revenue from taxes. most if it is from much more regressive kinds of taxation like sales tax.
Name one thing the state government does for normal people who actually finance the largess. Are you really surprised billions go unaccounted in a place where train robberies are a thing? But don't you worry, a photo ID won't be required in the next election though.