The problem is that the state and federal ID system is so fucked up that it disenfranchises voters. Until that system is fixed, you can't use it for voting.

This issue then becomes a partisan one because voter fraud is so rare that it doesn't seem to need any additions, so strong pushes for voter ID laws (which almost never address the issue of the ID systems) are targeting those who are less likely to have ID, which tends to be concentrated with voting for one party. If anyone actually cared about voter ID laws for non-partisan reasons, it would go hand in hand with a national ID system.

I'm in favor of requiring a photo id to vote but am well aware of the problems some have in obtaining such an id. That's the problem that needs to be corrected. It does need to be corrected first and we shouldn't just shrug our shoulders and go back to things the way they've been. Everyone should have easy access to a state endorsed identification card. It's an essential function of government and interaction with citizens. As such it should be funded by general taxation rather than a user fee.

A state issued identification card is used for so much more than just authorization for driving a vehicle. Why is it in the hands of the DMV/DDS in most if not every state? Even the non-driver identification cards issued to those who don't drive are usually still issued by DMV/DDS. It's an odd system that wouldn't be designed as it is now if we were designing from scratch but we're use to it because that's how it evolved over time.

The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate how congressional elections are held - Article 1, Section 4 - precisely because those elections are national in practice (in terms of how their outcome translates to policy). Congress already uses the power to, for example, set the date of the elections to be the same across the country, or to enforce a uniform electoral system (single-member districts). That same power could be similarly used to enact uniform voter ID requirements, and one could argue that it is the only way to ensure that states aren't abusing the system to benefit whatever party controls them. And once you go there, it makes sense to tie those requirements to a national ID.

States can use their own IDs for state elections. But I don't see why they should get away with arbitrary restrictions (or arbitrary lack of restrictions) for elections that directly apply outside of their borders. They're not sovereign countries, and federal elections are one of the issues on which federal-level regulation is clearly both reasonable and constitutional.

There tension between those two positions is of little practical importance. I'm not worried that they can link my name and address, I'm worried about a sudden outbreak of majority-vs-miniority where someone I really don't like gets in to power and links, I dunno, tax records-name-address, racial-history-name-address , travel-history-bank-account-photo or somesuch. I don't think it is practically feasible to target someone off the information in a voter role.

The real issue to me is that there isn't much organisation against governments laying the groundwork, and in practice opposing an ID card doesn't mean anything. In Australia we basically have all the infrastructure for a national ID card except the formalisation of a little piece of plastic.

Showing an ID to vote is utterly common sense.

Instead of all those voter registration campaigns that everyone spends money on ... they should be spending on 'just getting ID'. And then maybe there should be no need to even register in many cases, if you're ID w/address is good enough.

Two birds.

In the end, you have to register to vote, and in most states you do so with the same agencies that make Identifications. Requiring an ID card to get a voter ID, or having it as part of your driver's license or state id isn't a horrible idea.

There's no reason for it to be a "federally issued id".

States have been proven by experience to be willing to do both. AFAIK, all states that have implemented some form of voter ID to date collect fees for issuance of any eligible IDs. And there are numerous cases of states closing or moving DMVs and similar agencies, or mucking around with vote schedule, to deliberately suppress some voters (a recent example which is particularly glaring because the state explicitly admitted its motivation: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-carolina-voter-id/).

Thus, the only way to ensure that voter ID would not be discriminatory in practice, is to have feds run the whole thing, in a way that guarantees non-discrimination - which means it has to be free, and it has to be easy to get. If you truly believe that voter ID is necessary for election security, then this is the compromise deal that you'll have to accept for us liberals to be onboard with that (keep in mind that most of us don't believe that there's any real issue to be solved by having voter ID, so any such support would be mainly symbolic in nature - and you'll have show good faith in courting it).

Wow, this is mind-blowing to me. A fair election is the basis of western democracy, a sacred institution. In my mind this pretty much equates to treason.

I don't know how these people can sleep at night.

I really think this is a giant myth. You're expecting me to believe that these minorities are living such horrid, opressed lives that they slave away every single day, and can't find a friend with a ride, or band together to make a group trip to get registered one day out of the year?

Yeah, I've heard it, registration centers are closing in minority neighborhoods; but that doesn't mean that these people don't have places to register/get an ID within an hour or two by bus.

The problem is ignorance and apathy, not voter suppression. Frankly, if someone is so uninterested/unwilling to participate in society that they can't be fucked to spend even 1 day out of the year to get a license, then they don't have any business making any decisions regarding out collective government.

Maybe you don’t even have bus fare. Maybe your car can’t make it 90 miles to the nearest DMV.

Also you’re really dismissing the fact that some people literally work all the hours the DMV is open. And when those people have their one or two days off, there’s other crap they have to get done.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have voter ID... I’m just saying you’re being disingenuous by saying it doesn’t disenfranchise any voters.

>Also you’re really dismissing the fact that some people literally work all the hours the DMV is open. And when those people have their one or two days off, there’s other crap they have to get done.

For an entire year? You can't scrape together $20 and find a free afternoon once or twice in a decade? What percentage of the non homeless population actually lives this way and actually lives too far from a DMV?

Also, I'm not saying it doesn't disenfranchise voters, but the numbers are so incredibly small that it's statistically insignificant.

I understand that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but I think we shouldn't let the good be the enemy of the perfect either. The symbolic act in being able to cast your vote and at least have the feeling that you have control over various governments that have such powerful sway over your life is powerful and maybe even cathartic.

The documents you present for ID shouldn't be any more than you should present to vote... it's just a shortcut. Voter fraud is a significant issue... in many districts significantly more than the number of people who would be unable to vote because of complications.

1) There is a way for all Americans (including the poor, minorities, indigenous tribes, the homeless, and people without a physical address) to obtain this ID without any prejudice, opportunity cost, or privacy implications 2) There is significant political will to rolling out 1)

Then I'm with you. If not as it currently is the case, then voter ID is a means of disenfranchising the vulnerable groups I mentioned in 1) and I'm opposed.

Update: You might argue that I'm contradicting myself in that voter ID law would be good and ensuring that the groups I mentioned were protected in 1) would be asking for perfection. My rebuttal would be that any scheme that allows for legal disenfranchisement of otherwise legal voters is not good at all.

No one, including partisan commissions established for no other purpose than validating this claim, has been able to provide evidence supporting this.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

  most of which are practically prohibited by law to obtain a valid ID

An example: https://www.dmv.org/ny-new-york/id-cards.php

To apply for a photo ID card, you must:

* Be a citizen or a legal resident of the U.S.

* Be a resident of New York State.

* Have your original birth certificate.

* Have your Social Security card.

* Be able to provide enough documents to verify your identity.

This is not a myth, and affects magnitudes more people than there are cases of voter fraud.

Renewing or replacing an existing ID requires none of those other documents, generally. (I haven't even seen my SSID card in three decades)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...

Where I'm from everybody is required by law to have one from the age of 14 and gets it for free for the first time. You just can't have anything done without id and tax identification code, so voting is just another place to show it. It's not even about technologies - my is handwritten with photo being glued on it.

The ID law has been shown to be slanted to disfavor the working poor who vote for one party over another. It's not done as a legitimate concern over fraud; its a political maneuver to favor one party over the other and disenfranchise the poor. That's the argument

Sure, it isn't easy, but they get ID because they need it for damn near everything. For example, you mentioned "work hours". If they are legally working, they have ID. If they get any sort of welfare, they have ID. If they smoke or drink, they have ID.

“Lower-income individuals are less likely to have photo ID. Twelve percent of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income.”

From http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...

It is assumed that the people claiming to be Americans without ID are in fact Americans without ID. It's kind of hard to verify this without ID, eh? The given percentages are in the ballpark for estimates of illegal aliens, meaning that these might be people who aren't supposed to have an American ID and in fact aren't supposed to vote.

It wasn't a problem for voting because the poll workers knew most of the nursing home residents socially. This was a small town and some of the poll workers even attended primary school over half a century ago with the nursing home residents. As our communities become looser and looser knit, this kind of informal identification system loses its integrity. Our identification card issuing system hasn't kept up with this change in society. Fix that problem and the rest fixes itself.

So the remaining opposition is more symbolical than anything - accepting a national ID would be acquiescing to this state of affairs, while rejecting it allows to maintain the pretense that all the massive data-gathering operations (from IRS and Social Security, to DHS and NSA) are somehow fundamentally different.

In practice, this just means extreme inefficiency whenever you have to deal with the government. I would dare say that citizens actually suffer a lot more from it than the government does (the government can always hire more bureaucrats to maintain and synchronize more databases).

Stopping identity theft would reduce the cost of banking, including all kinds of credit, bringing consumer interest rates closer to non-consumer ones. Stopping identity theft would quickly cause the arrest of most fugitives, both immigration-related and otherwise. Stopping identity theft would reduce medical errors; today your treatment can be affected by an identity thief. (the doctors think you have drug-seeking behavior, a genetic condition, a disease, or issues with violence toward hospital staff... and this changes how they treat you)

I have never been able to file my taxes electronically because I cannot pass their electronic verification process.

They have to verify birth date, which they think is something else other than my actual birth date.

I have spent hours and hours being shuffled around between different governmental offices, explaining my case, and it got to a point where you have to give up. Have you ever seen the movie Brazil? You might know what I'm talking about.

Imagine having to be reduced to calling around your city, trying to find the nearest fax machine because some governmental office will only take faxes so that you can continue your quest towards the distant sanity...

Now imagine doing that when you work an hourly service job instead of a salaried engineering job.

So at least in those states, it isn't an issue. You have every day off from work.

  In some states, you'd have committed a crime already

1) you don't need any drivers license to be employed in anything but driving

2) all states recognize other states' licenses ("full faith and credit") until a grace period after you take up actual residency or employment.

2) Sure, you can drive there. You can work there even. You can't combine them: working while having an out-of-state license is a crime.

If you try to move to a federal ID, you de facto need to replace a bunch of state run offices with federal offices. This would not be an easy transition at all. It would be easier to create federal regulations and require states to alter their state ID to comply by X date, but states tend to resist that kind of interference from the federal government.

The US is a little bit like a country of countries. It would be a little bit like requiring an EU ID and European countries objecting.

For half a century social security cards had "not for identification" written on them because they are really bad for ID. Didn't stop everyone from using them as ID because there was no other option. The Social Security administration was the only government agency actually tasked with tracking citizens for their entire lives so they did that. Poorly.

If you want to understand why requiring any state ID is voter disenfranchisement in the US just consider what it takes to get a state ID as a fresh adult. Two recognized proofs of ID. Basically birth certificate, student ID, social security card, or other state ID. If you don't get a student ID, didn't go to high school, or your ID from there simply expired it can't count. So its basically requiring birth certificate and social security card.

Now thats where you might not recognize how weird the US is. Nobody is required to have those. Hospitals do the paperwork to get them issued when you are born there but for every child not born under the supervision of a doctor (way too many to this day in the US) your parents do need to actually apply for those. Of course that only matters if you are filing taxes to begin with. Which is disproportionately whites. A ridiculous number of people exist outside the tax system because... the government doesn't know who its citizens are. It doesn't keep track of anyone in a central way. If you IRS never started getting pay stubs from your employers they might not even know you exist.

This is in addition to having the means to get to a DMV, pay the fee to get an ID card (I think it was $25 when I got one to fly to Texas when I was 17?) and be able to go there during some obscenely limited hours of operation (some of the worst offenders I've seen are only open 10-2 on three weekdays). Then you also need a permanent address to get it shipped to.

For way too many people they are missing something in that chain, and if you find yourself without two qualified forms of ID getting a birth certificate or social security card where you never had one before can take months at least.

What might sound really bizarre to you is that there is nothing to really "catch" kids that fell through the system. School enrollment is completely decoupled from all the previously mentioned systems of tracking people - you don't need any major documents to enroll your kid in a public school, often not even proof of legitimate residency in the country. Schools want those but the laws are state specific and often simply "try to figure out who they are or just drop them in class somewhere I guess". So you can easily graduate high school with no government institution knowing you exist whatsoever, go to get a job, and find out your employer won't hire you without this backlog of paperwork nobody made sure you had.

This whole mess, as others say, disproportionately affects minorities and the poor. They are less likely to have parents who can afford hospitalization for the birth so they don't get the paperwork done for them. They don't pay taxes or work under the table and thus don't itemize their children or apply to get their documents to get tax rebates. They get them enrolled in school without having any documentation of their own. They go their entire childhood using health clinics and whatever their mom thinks is best to get through because they don't have health insurance and never show up in that system. Nobody in their family can afford a car so getting into the drivers registry isn't even on the radar for any of them.

There are millions of legitimate born US citizens to American parents without a paper trail because they live in poverty. Its the 1 in 4 food insecure kids growing up today. Their towns and cities are practically blighted with mistreatment by every institution that has any influence on their success. I live in central PA and see this all the time - neighborhoods can be 10 miles apart where on one side they don't have regularly working electricity and water while on the other end you have mcmansions and three newly built shopping centers composed of Whole Foods and Old Navy. One of those groups is going to have their learners permit at 16 and be preregistered to vote without even knowing it, the other would have to spend years of time fighting to form the paper trail to register to vote.

And its a legitimate fight. My parents lost my social security card at some point in my early childhood and it took 2 years and 3 visits to the DMV to get a replacement. Good thing that happened when I was 12 and not 18 or I would have missed upwards of two elections like that. And I was on the lucky side of the ID disparity - born in a hospital, records of doctors all the way through, proper paper trail in the public school system, and it still takes several hours of your life to get through the beuracracy to have a drivers license or state ID by the time you are eligible to vote. Way too many people don't have the paperwork or the time to try to use it as a barrier to voting.

In the US, one of the founding principles, different from all (almost all?) others at the time, was the people create the government to govern for them. Government was not suppose to be a system where the government (ie. the monarchy) rules and owns the people. I don't think it is such a bad idea that people are resistant to a national ID. "Show me your papers" and all that comes with it is something to avoid if possible.

Its hard to get your first ID specifically because of the desire to limit immigration fraud.

My major issue with the thought process that gets you to "having a national is a violation of my freedom" is that you only want to be invisible if the government is an actively hostile entity to you that you want to avoid. It is also the principal justification to the right to bear arms - you arm the citizens against a tyrannical government.

The problem is that in both cases - if you have a government that you want to hide from anonymously or a government you need to arm yourself against - you have a government you need to overthrow. You don't just exist in this state of armament or anonymity without taking action to depose the king and reclaim your liberty.

In both cases there are real, persistent, continuous costs of not having a centralized record of citizenry with secure id (because social security cards are not even close to secure) as there with keeping recreational firearms ownership so permissive. The former means people fall through the cracks and need to exert tremendous effort to prove they exist while the later costs life and limb all the time.

If US history has taught me anything (in regards to the history of most nations) its that when trying to preserve liberty its a fine line between disdainful paranoia and reasonable ambivalence. And American culture definitely falls towards the extreme on that spectrum in a, in my opinion, really unhealthy way. It just breeds controversy and arguments about ideology without anyone actually doing anything to improve the world they live in for either outcome... which is a generally common thread in US politics, to be fair.

  My parents lost my social security card at some point in my early childhood and it took 2 years and 3 visits to the DMV to get a replacement

And they would have to give a valid name of a registered voter who had not showed up yet, or the pollworkers would realize that the same person was trying to vote twice.

Or you could only impersonate voters who voted by mail (thereby voting twice in the same name).

Sure, you can come up with examples where a very small number of votes determined an election outcome. But for the vast majority of important contests -- and especially for state and federal level -- it does not seem feasible to round up enough thousands of people to cast enough fraudulent ballots to affect the election outcome.

An Australian polling booth has a copy of the electoral roll, with names and addresses (homeless people can enroll with name only). This roll is marked when you vote, and then the roll is analysed afterwards. Attempting to stuff the ballot box by impersonating someone will show up as duplicate marks on the roll. You won't get far with impersonating random people as voting is compulsory in most elections so duplicates will quickly happen. You could vote twice if guaranteed in advance that someone wasn't going to vote, but at best you will get only a small number of extra votes that way.

The aim with an election isn't necessarily to outright prevent cheating, but to prevent undetected cheating. Hence why ID isn't so crucial (at least in Australia).

To vote you simply have to bring that letter with you, and then you usually don't need to show any ID. The election officers can still ask you for it if there is any doubt about your identity. Just before you enter your ballot your name is checked against the voter registry and crossed out from it.

Of course that still leaves a bit of fraud potential, but not really on any scale that would affect the election. You'd still need to forge the letter and know the personal details of a voter that won't vote themselves.

The complaint is the fairness of the burden to obtain acceptable ID, for voting. In Alabama, over a dozen driver's license office closures mean people in overwhelmingly black counties had a vastly high burden to obtain ID than people living in predominately white counties. There are all kinds of examples and variations on this theme. It's hardly any different than poll taxes, and literacy tests. They're just as blatantly racist as how photo ID rules are employed.

Using your logic of Puerto Rico, since the vast majority of the U.S. went without photo ID's for voting for over 200 years with no statistically meaningful voter fraud problems, we don't need such laws today either. Meanwhile a recent case in Texas, a non-citizen with stolen photo ID had been illegally voting in elections, which means photo ID's do not assure there's no fraud.

Anyway, people have a right to vote. It is not a privilege. And therefore the state cannot apply unreasonable burdens on people, which only serve to disenfranchise them from their right to vote.

Actually, in US, it is a privilege. Look up the Constitution - the original one doesn't define any right to vote at all (which was a necessary component of the 3/5th Compromise); all it says is that the states must have a "republican form of government". And all subsequent amendments specify what can't be used as a basis to deny the right to vote. Aside from the ones that did so explicitly, there's also the catch-all Equal Protection Clause - but even that does not amount to a full-on acknowledgement that voting is a basic right of any American citizen.

This is why the states can e.g. deny the right to vote to felons - some doing so for the rest of their lives, and without any ability to reinstate it. And why all challenges to voter suppression have to be coached in anti-discrimination language (i.e. that they deny the right to vote to some protected minority specifically, as opposed to a generic right to vote).

It's a very unfortunate state of affairs, and we desperately need a constitutional amendment that instates the right to vote as one of the fundamental rights of a citizen.

The only bit in the 14th that explicitly addresses voting doesn't establish a right to vote. It says that if the states deny the right to vote to some male citizens above a certain age, then their representation in Congress is proportionally reduced. Note that this mechanism implies that the states can, nevertheless, opt into such an arrangement. So, if anything, it establishes that there's no right to vote.

If you're referring to the Equal Protection Clause. It does not explicitly establish a right to vote, either. It has some effects on voting rights - in particular, it was used to restrict poll taxes in state elections (since the 24th only applied to federal elections). However, the relevant court decisions explained that it was not because it infringed on some inherent right to vote that all citizens possess, but rather because it was unduly discriminatory (on the basis of "the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee").

> and fifteenth amendments

That one says you can't deny the right to vote based on race. Similarly, 19th amendment does the same wrt gender, and 26th does the same wrt age for those 18+.

However, none of these establish a right to vote, per se. For example, if a state denies the right to vote on the grounds that are not related to race, they are not in violation of the 15th.

> and the voting rights act of 1965

That one is more of an implementation of the above, although it goes further wrt placing the burden of proof on the states in many cases.

But, in any case, it's just a law, and as such it cannot establish a fundamental right (since Congress can overturn it at any time).

> those have all been significantly weakened by the judiciary

Given that Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections was one of the massive expansions of the right to vote, I don't think that's a reasonable assertion. Courts have given, and courts have taken away. If Constitution were explicit on this subject, we wouldn't have this back-and-forth.

> allow permanent disenfranchisement of convicted felons, which seems explicitly against the text of the fifteenth amendment.

Convicted felons are not a race. Yes, there is a racial disparity when it comes to such laws in practice; but the amendment doesn't prohibit any restrictions that result in a racial disparity - only those that are specifically using race as a basis.

Voting Rights Act, as amended in 1982, is the law that prohibits restrictions on the basis of their results, rather than their intent. But even with VRA, a mere disproportionality is not sufficient to declare a restriction unlawful. And, of course, it's still just a law, and therefore cannot provide any fundamental guarantees like the Constitution does.

So, in practice, there's no universal constitutional right to vote for citizens in the United States on the federal level. There's a patchwork of protections, but even when taken in combination, it does not amount to such a right.

Which explicitly labels it a right, as well as restricting the conditions under which that right may be restricted. PPP

So, it is explicitly a right.

And it has repeatedly been found to be a fundamental right (and thus subject to strict scrutiny.)

I’d be interested to know why though. Is it a problem in the US? In the UK at least, no ID is required and there is virtually no voter fraud. Is it really the case that the cost (disenfranchising groups with lower rates of access to photographic ID) is worth it to solve an issue that might not even exist?

And if you think about it, it’s pretty clear that in-person voter fraud is already difficult and risky enough in the US that it’s really not a scalable election manipulation strategy.

I've been thinking alot about Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) and how to do an instant runoff with paper ballots at scale, notably for something like President. I suppose it's unlikely to occur, but in the instance of a national popular vote for president that results in a runoff, it is worth the extra time to go back through and count. After all, TV entertainment aside, there is no need to have results in same-day.

It works that way in New South Wales. Apparently in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Malta, too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_preferential_voting

And besides, it’s really not fair to assume that voting systems are simple to understand. Just have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...

I agree there are other methods that are better by the book than the IRV method, but are exercises in statistics and graph theory.

Based on first-hand experience, Al Gore disagrees.