Now, getting to the DMV to apply for an ID card can be a hardship on people given the hours that the DMV operates and the fact that you usually need to set aside several hours to deal with waiting in line and such. If you hold 2 or 3 jobs, and missing part of a shift means getting fired, you probably don't have the time to go to get an ID. (Hell, you probably also don't have the time to actually go to the polls to vote, but that's another issue.)
And what if you're homeless? Getting an ID is probably very low on the list of things you can afford, even at $8. Also how do they mail it to you if you don't have an address?
At any rate, isn't this fixing a problem I don't think we don't have? Where is the evidence of rampant voter fraud that would recommend even an ID requirement?
If you look at the people affected it's clear that it is racial disenfranchisement under a different name.
Requiring IDs and then denying IDs to a particular race would be racial disenfranchisement. Simply requiring an ID isn't.
And in the end, I think it makes a lot of sense for an ID to be required in order to place a vote.
Because there are barriers, and expensive fees for many, intentional or not. The article above gives a couple stories of the issues people face trying to get ID for voting.
Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting, these are new versions of poll taxes.
And yet, no politician campaigns for that because it would actually resolve the issue.
A politician who campaigns for that will be beset upon by the right wing as it heaves into a fit over they're spying on us, they're trying to track us. Because in actually solving the nonexistent problem, they threaten the true reason for the problem being posed.
But you decided to take only the slice of the problem that fit your talking point, and that is the real problem.
My "talking point", such as it is, is that one political party is actively disinterested in democracy (while the other is more or less ambivalent), and that nobody in that actively-disinterested party is going to let the ambivalent party make this happen. Because it empowers them for it to not happen. It's not rocket science.
Yes. The argument is pretty straightforward: explicitly mentioning race would be blatantly illegal, so legislators are targeting a variable that correlates with race and using that as a proxy instead. Old-school disenfranchisement laws did much the same thing, using the voting eligibility of one's grandfather as the condition for exemption from poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on (whence we get the term "grandfather clause").
In person voter fraud is extremely rare[1], this is why requiring photo ID to vote has been struck down as voter supression in many states[2]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/03/he...
[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528457693...
IDs should be required but they should also be very easy to obtain. The government should go out of its way to make it as easy a possible. Being undocumented is not useful to any citizen, it creates an underclass. People should have IDs and we should care about voter fraud, whether its 1 vote or 1 million.
That the parties won't do this shows that both sides have something to gain by keeping things the way they are, they just want to win, regardless of the sanctity of the vote or the well-being of the people.
There's nothing inherently wrong with existing as a living being without declaring your existence (or, realistically, asking permission for your existence) to the government.
Nobody is complaining about animals roaming the world freely without documents. In fact birds routinely cross borders without being stopped or even noticed.
Why do people need to be monitored?
You don't have to mandate it for anything but voting. But if you do want one, they should be easy for anyone to obtain. If the poor can't prove who they are, they can't do a lot. They'll always be poor.
Do you have a source to support this claim?
As I previously pointed out, voter fraud is incredibly rare[1] practically non-existent.
Creating laws and administering laws both take time and resources. Can you support your claim identification is needed with any sort of rational, data based arguments or are you operating on emotion?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/03/he...
Of course it would take time and resources, but to make it easy for people to obtain IDs would be one of the cheaper things we can do as a nation.
You need an ID to get a lot of jobs, get funding for school, etc. If it's not easy for people to get IDs, we are limiting them anyway, so by argument we should be making them easy to obtain. That's my datapoint. It's a very natural way to empower people.
The source of the source you link to kind of backs up OP's point. It's not an unbiased source. So why do they think ID's should not be required?
I mean just thinking about, verifying who a person is before they vote seems like 101 common sense to me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/05/ho...
This stuff isn't accidental.
The other side would like to keep this same group (who can't be arsed to get IDs) from voting by whatever means necessary. Drug laws and felony disenfranchisement are likely part of this same scheme.
I'm not pleased with political shenanigans in general. And objectively I think if IDs are required they should be very easy to get and cost free even. That's the real problem.
But saying we don't need to verify who a person is before they vote is just f'n fishy as hell. Shenanigans. All cries about "disenfranchisement" aside. Washington Post (and friends) put this stuff out because they are clearly in first group.
Now, getting to the DMV to apply for an ID card can be a hardship on people given the hours that the DMV operates and the fact that you usually need to set aside several hours to deal with waiting in line and such. If you hold 2 or 3 jobs, and missing part of a shift means getting fired, you probably don't have the time to go to get an ID. (Hell, you probably also don't have the time to actually go to the polls to vote, but that's another issue.)
If this statement can be made in this same thread and upvoted as an argument for why IDs are too difficult to get for voting purposes, surely that's an unnecessary hardship irrespective of voting and should be fixed.
But it still would be a ridiculous argument.
ID's should be easier to get, yes, but the fact it's an inconvenience for some small minority of people shouldn't undermine the principals of one person one vote nor make it difficult to verify eligibility.
ID is required to vote—remember that we're talking about which kinds of ID are to be accepted.
So the argument should be, how much assurance do you need to allow a citizen to vote? No security is perfect, and increased security usually decreases usability.
https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-har...
If you started expanding something like social security numbers to be a real ID system with photo ID and digital 2FA, then maybe in 10-15 years you can make it a requirement.
That's how long time adopting of such systems takes in other countries... With much smaller populations
Establish a universal ID first and eliminate any access bias then we can talk about requiring it to vote. Given that there is no evidence of any real problem that it actually solves in voting, it's more important to avoid creating new problems than to rush into it as a solution for speculative potential future problems.
So I go into the DMV with my expired ID and expired passport and a stack of mail with my current address and a stack of debit and credit cards and my social security card. They will not do anything without my birth certificate. Crap.. Lost that when my basement flooded. I will head over to vital records.
Then the lady at the DMV told me that they closed down the vital records office in Eugene and my only option was to go to Portland. So right here I have to spend 60 bucks on a round trip to get to Portland two hours away.
So I get the bus the next day and go to vital records. Again more expense for the Max. So I get them to print out a birth certificate. I had to pay 40 bucks for them to do it. Then they want to see my ID. Wait it is expired. They will not accept it.
I am told my options are to have a parent or sibling come in to vouch for me. Difficulty.. Parents are dead and my sister at the time lived on the east coast.
So here I am stuck. I know, I will have my sister get on a plane to come out here. It will cost but it needs to be done. So she does. So now I need to pay for a last minute ticket for her. And shit, it will be a while so I need to get a hotel for the night. And I should probably cover my sisters lost wages for a few days.
In the end I got my birth certificate. Off to the DMV where I paid 40 bucks for a state issued ID.
This all was fantastically expensive.
And really.. They closed the vital records office in a city that has 200,000 people. The only option for the entire state is Portland. One office for 4 million people and Oregon is a physically large state.
So yes.. Getting a state issued ID can be incredibly hard and expensive. Even if everything was perfect and I was able to easily get the documents it would still be 80 bucks to just get a ID card.
I otherwise agree with your point, if it is that ID is too expensive to require for voting. It amounts to a poll tax.
Better to make it the job of a federal agency. Let's call it the Federal Elections Commission. ID is free, and they track you down to issue it, kinda like the census. Then I might be able to support requiring the ID for voting.
It's a chicken and egg problem. I understand and respect why they want to make it hard to get the birth certificate since we've made it the key to the kingdom. It used to be quite easy to get when I was younger, I for some reason have three copies of mine from over the years.
Not everybody is so lucky unfortunately.
https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-har...
I understand that it's important to protect our poor and all that, but requiring proof of citizenship to vote seems pretty important to me in our democracy, and is an incredibly low bar that nearly everyone is already capable of meeting.
https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Brennan_Center_for_Justice#Bias
edit: Why am I being downvoted for doing research on citations? It's kind of important to be critical of these kind of things.
"A portion of the population without a drivers license – whether valid or not – will have a photo ID, but without an analysis by race and location, it is not possible to estimate that population. "
The question here isn't whether or not they have valid drivers license, it's whether or not they have a valid photo ID good enough to vote with.
Thank you for providing that link, though. It's less biased than the others so far.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-drivers-licen...
There's a lot of people who live in the "fringes" of society who don't have an ID.
My uncle, for example. He lived with my grandma his whole life and didn't have a driver's license, car, or a job other than to run errands for my grandma.
I also have a friend who does not have an ID. Her husband takes care of everything and she doesn't drive.
It's unusual but not illegal to live like that.
http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/do...
I'm sorry you live in a bubble and can't see past it.
So we're at an impasse.
See, my deal is, you want to make this whole system more complicated at several steps, and for what benefit? To solve what problem?
I'd rather keep the system as simple as possible--cheaper, easier, less can go wrong that way, and more people get to vote and participate in governance.