Would voter ID laws be okay if the government provided an ID to every voter age citizen? Of course the right would probably consider that a socialist idea.
I have a question about the 25% of blacks (and large percentages of other minorities as shown in the article) who don’t have photo ID. How do they do anything in life, drive a car, buy a drink, get credit etc?
And there is a huge difference between the requirements to get a concealed gun permit and a school photo ID. California has “legal” illegals attending its schools. I am sure other states do as well.
So what is this all about. Protecting democratic voters or is it a racist right wing plot?
What would you require be done before you would agree to a voter ID?
Every state that I know of allows people to get a state ID. It essentially provides the same function as a driver’s license without being an actual driver’s license.
I think it’s obvious that the voter ID laws are to strengthen the “old white guys” voting block. But I also feel the democrats have a pretty strong way to combat it. In the same way they do voter registration drives, they can do voter ID drives. Rent some buses, drive everyone down the the DMV and walk them through the process to get an ID.
Immigration reform, including amnesty and a path to citizenship, to start with. Secondly, a conclusive demonstration (i.e., peer reviewed scientific studies) that vote fraud is a significant problem that’s worth a heavyweight solution like this.
That is, every study I’ve ever seen on the topic says vote fraud is a non issue. So the question becomes, if vote fraud isn’t a significant problem, why is the Republican party pushing for voter ID so hard? What motivates it? The best answer I’ve seen is that voter ID laws disproportionately affect Democratically leaning constituencies, mostly minorities, and the result is significantly lower voter turnout amongst legal, registered voters. I don’t see any reason to ascribe overt racism to the polices; that’s “just” a side-effect. It’s about redefining the rules of the game (voting) in a way that benefits one side more than the other. Thus, for me to support a voter ID law, policies will need to be in place such that the effects are not partisan.
in the uk you have to be registered to vote (each year you recieve, fill out, and post a census form naming who lives in your house of voting age etc). Then you simply turn up at the voting station, and your name is checked on the list and you do your vote.
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Is this terrible? (i guess it could be)
What motivates the republicans is the folks who can’t get the ID easily are poor and black, and poor and black people vote Democratic, because Republicans make things worse for them.
If the folks having trouble were Republicans, they’d be suing to prevent this from happening (and probably encouraging voting early and often)
Honestly, even if you go with the big traditional voting blocks of inner city blacks and such like that… it’s not hard to get an ID. In those cases, they can pretty trivially get to a location where they can receive a free ID.
IIRC, Michigan has a photo ID requirement and not a specific voter ID card. If there’s a law that it’s required and you’ve never had to present your DL, that sounds like a case of selective enforcement.
That is the standard in America as far as I know, minus the yearly census stuff. Here you register, and as long as you vote (once in a blue moon at least) you stay on the rolls.
The vast, vast majority of the cited 25% live in the inner city. Most of them don’t have a driver’s license because they use public transportation for the majority of their travel and either don’t need or cannot afford a car. I suspect that very few are ever carded to buy drinks. You don’t need a photo ID to apply for a credit card, but I doubt that is something that many of this particular 25% worry about.
Being poor shouldn’t deprive you of your right to vote. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a true democracy is the opposite case.
It is transparently an effort to disenfranchise voters who would almost certainly vote Democratic.
The “protect against fraud” angle is itself a fraud. The Bush (II) Justice Department did a five-year investigation of voter fraud and ended up convicting a whopping 86 people… most of which were cases of individuals who should not have been able to cast a ballot, not instances of box-stuffing. A GOP-funded lawyer’s group created a report intended to bolster the case for voter IDs and they were unable to find more than a hundred cases of fraud per election over the last decade… even using their rather loose definition of “fraud” that included new immigrants who didn’t realize they were no eligible showing up and trying to cast a ballot.
There is not enough voter fraud present in US elections to justify even the incidental disenfranchisement of a statistically-significant number of voters. 1-in-5 eligible Philadelphia voters is so far above the “significant” line that it doesn’t even deserve to be talked about.
Some type of genetic scan, maybe. Something that could be done automatically without treating a voter as a potential criminal instead of as a citizen. Even that I’d probably be against since the dangers of losing my right to cast a secret ballot would overshadow whatever dubious anti-fraud benefit it might engender.
Four instances of voting fraud in Texas clearly justify effectively disenfranchising a few hundred thousand voters (especially if they tend to vote for the other guys), apparently. Unbelievable. Didn’t Alberto Gonzales have to resign because his Justice Dept. fired a bunch of career prosecutors who looked into voter fraud and found it was an almost non-existent problem?
