And it often costs money, and it's often a lot of hassle, and sometimes the employees charged with making it available give false information on what's required to get it.

Some stats on Wisconsin, which is supposed to provide a free voter ID: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html

Why does it take that long? I had to get a PSC, Ireland’s not-a-national-id-we-promise, to apply for a driving theory test a while back (days afterwards, the requirement to have one for a driving theory test was dropped after public backlash). It took about 20 minutes, and that was only because the civil servant’s computer was being uncooperative.

It's slightly insane that we make people go to a physical location and derp around waiting for a piece of ID.

You should be able to handle this like you do getting a passport. Fill out the forms, get a proper picture taken, slap it in the mail, get your shiny new documents back in two weeks.

Counterpoint:

I filled out the forms to renew my passport and took them to my local post office. The only person staffing the passport desk refused to take my forms because I hadn't filled in the name of my employer. I pointed out that the website explicitly states that that field is optional, and that the website will not even allow you to print a form that doesn't pass its validation. She hallucinated that the field is optional only in the case that you have no employer.

So, I had to travel to a passport office. The desk there really wanted me to fill in the name of my employer, but at least they didn't refuse to take my perfectly valid form based on their own personal delusions.

You already have to have an ID to get a job. Who can't do this once in their life?

and what happens when the id expires or you change your address or you change your name or the id gets lost or destroyed?

This is a crisis created by local governments. The private sector could easily solve this problem, but that would require bureaucrats losing their power.

I'm sure their friendly neighborhood community organizer will charter a bus for them to get their ID cards. If they're citizens, there will be somebody who wants their vote badly enough to walk them through that process and even buy them a sandwich for their trouble.

Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens. Community organizers have proven to be extremely effective at getting voters to the polls. If a preliminary step is for them to get them their card, I'm sure they won't flinch from that duty.

Transportation to a DMV office isn't the main limitation. Having the freedom to miss a day or two of work to spend waiting in line is a bigger problem, especially when those offices don't necessarily process non-driver ID cards on all ordinary business days.

> Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens.

The proper time to verify citizenship is during the registration process, when there's time to be thorough. You can't do a reasonable job of validating ID or checking that a person is only registered to vote in one place at the polling place.

I will support any system that insures that all voters have verified citizenship.

At what cost? Are you interested in ensuring that additional voting restrictions actually prevent more illegal votes than they prevent legitimate votes? What makes you think the base rate of non-citizen voting is even high enough to be a problem that can be addressed without invariably causing more harm than good?

Integrity of our system is important. It doesn’t need to be a partisan issue.

Sure, but how is any of that relevant to voter ID? If you really care about integrity of the voting system, then you should also care about prioritizing the problems that are real, easily exploited, and have the greatest potential for harm. Voter ID is largely a solution looking for a problem, with undeniable side effects of voter suppression. It's being made into a partisan issue not by its opponents but by the proponents who are unjustifiably elevating the issue above more important systemic election vulnerabilities.

Nonsense. We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that? You talk about conspiracy theories. This notion that there is this huge population of legal, eligible voters who are functioning in our society without ID is ludicrous.

But if you want to implement paper ballots across the board at the same time, or even 1st, than let's make that happen. As you say, any progress is better than none. Since you are obstructing voter id and not obstructing paper ballots (I assume), than by all means, let's do that first.

> We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that?

Ignoring for the moment how improper it is for you to take such a personally accusative tone: The voter ID opposition has been thoroughly justified by the lack of evidence that the problems it solves are real enough to need solving, and by the fact that even the slightest awareness of the context surrounding these voter ID proposals makes it clear that they are not good-faith attempts to make our elections more fair.

In short: nobody's falling for the lies. They're too transparent.

> nobody's falling for the lies. They're too transparent.

I would be pleased if you did not personally insult those who you are speaking to.

The lack of evidence is a farce, since any attempts to collect such evidence are met with stonewalling and refusal by democratically controlled local and state government.

In 2014, a study released by a team of professors from Old Dominion University and George Mason University estimated that approximately 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted In the 2008 presidential election. (Versus 56% of legal citizens voting)

As immigration reform becomes more and more of an issue, there is incentive for that 6.4 percent number to further increase, and indeed it may have in 2016, but that data is proving hard to pry loose. Since there are 11 million illegals in the US by the lowest estimate (high estimates are 20 million) this is not a non-problem.

As for the disenfranchisement canard. Even Nate Silver acknowledges it's non-validity. Silver has noted, this argument doesn’t make sense because the vast majority of adults in America hold some form of photo identification and states with voter ID laws offer qualifying documentation at minimal or no cost.

Turning ten people who have the right to vote away, to catch one cheater is a ten times worse violation of integrity then the converse.

Not letting a citizen vote is just as much voter fraud as a non-citizen voting. Except its worse, because it is performed by the state.

If you continue to post uncivilly and/or to use HN for political battle, we're going to have to ban you. Please review the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them regardless of what topic you're commenting on.

It's in the realm of tinfoil hat and freakishly paranoid conspiracy theories that there's any meaningful amount of non-citizens voting. Feel free to design a system that meets the John Rawl's "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, such that the burden of obtaining such ID is equal among all. What would that really look like? If Joe Bob has to take 2 hours off work, without pay, to get ID, how do you get a Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos to go without pay for two hours? Charge them $3 million for their ID card? And if you do, is their burden really the same when they still take home $30 million that day, while Joe Bob lost $30 out of his $600 weekly pay, plus the $30 cost of the license or 10% of his weekly take home? And even if you charge ~$17 million for Warren's driver's license, his weekly take home is still $160+ million. So is that the same burden?

By the way, the single prosecuted case of voter fraud from 2016 I'm aware of, is a man in Colorado, who voted for his wife after she'd moved out of state. They're both citizens.

Obtaining an ID card can be as easy or as painful as our local governments decide it to be. Amazing, it’s the most painful I have ever experience here in California where the DMV borders on insanity. I would think such a progressive state would care more about the burden it places on its citizens than on maintaining tight control over the process but such is California.

I was able to schedule my DMV appointment in California and was in and out.

Congratulations. Did you wave goodbye to the huge crowds of visibly frustrated people who have been waiting for hours on your way out?