That's irrelevant. They did have slaves, doesn't mean slavery was a good system.

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.

Being undocumented only creates an underclass if you require people to be documented!

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?

So they can be taxed?

If you have documentation requirements of any kind (dejure or defacto), without documentation you are at a disadvantage. There's a lot of processes that require single if not multiple forms of ID, today.

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.

>IDs should be required

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...

Considering the vote is the centerpiece of democracy, to ignore fraud of any kind or to not safeguard your democracy is on its face illogical or at least questionable.

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.

Is there a reason an ID shouldn't be required to vote?

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.

As stated several times, instituting ID requirements disenfranchises people at an extremely high rate compared to the number of 'fraudulent' votes that are stopped. There's a reason that Voter IDs are the centerpiece of several anti-democratic voter suppression efforts:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/05/ho...

This stuff isn't accidental.

One political side (the bent of the source you site) would like to be able to load a bunch of folks who can't be arsed to get IDs (a part of adult modern life) into buses, fill them full of rhetoric and drive them to the polls in an emotional fervor without impediments.

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.

It's too bad you are getting downvoted, you aren't wrong, it's just not fun to hear.

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.

If the demographic for whom getting an ID is an undue burden suddenly became supporters of the other side I have little doubt the argument would get flipped around.

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.

Reason: the difficulty of obtaining accepted forms of ID can disenfranchise more voters than any thwarted voter fraud does.

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.

The founders made a system which required landed property to vote. "They didn't require photo IDs" is ridiculous.