I'm unsure why you think I'm addressing someone with the opposing position when I merely stated a rhetorical question:

> The real question is why voter license proponents are against the idea of giving a free voter ID to every eligible voter on their 18th birthday

Why is it that voter license proponents are against the idea of giving a free voter ID to every eligible voter on their 18th birthday?

It's frequently brought up in response to voter license legislation, but it is never incorporated into their proposed legislation. Why is that?

First, no one is for voter licensing, a person is 'licensed' by being a citizen. The two (honest) sides of the argument are: ID is required to keep elections honest and requiring ID's keeps people from voting by being too onerous to acquire. The ugly truth is democrats know that sloppy voting tends to fall their way and republicans know that voter id laws tend to fall their way.

A good compromise would be free ID's for everyone, but neither side wants this and would rather keep fighting the id battle, because like most battles, its only purpose is to keep the people divided and easy to manipulate.

> First, no one is for voter licensing, a person is 'licensed' by being a citizen

With voting license legislation enacted, in order for a citizen to vote, they must have a government-issued license. It can't be just any government-issued license, either, it needs to be one of the specially designated licenses that you need to jump through hoops to get beyond being just a citizen.

For many people, obtaining such a license is both a monetary and time expense that is only necessary to participate in elections. A citizen living in a city might have little reason to have a driver's license, but they'll need one if they want to vote, and they'll need to renew it every few years at their own expense.

A solution to this problem is making sure every citizen receives a voting ID on their 18th birthday. For whatever reason, voting license proponents never seem to want to implement such a program.

> The ugly truth is democrats know that sloppy voting tends to fall their way and republicans know that voter id laws tend to fall their way.

And yet voting fraud is nearly non-existent, and there are numerous examples of courts finding that voting license legislation disenfranchises voters.

You can't know if voting fraud is nearly non-existent because we have very little in the way of enforcement and auditing systems to even know if there was fraud. And yet people are still arrested all the time for voter fraud.

Please stop portraying your political opinions as fact. Independent and government research has been done[1][2][3], and courts[1] have found that voting fraud is nearly non-existent in the US.

If you want to take issue with the methodologies used to determine that, you're free too, but right now what your post amounts to is denial of scientific evidence.

[1] Here are dozens of independent and government studies, and court rulings on voter fraud: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/02/low-rates-o...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/minuscule-number-of-...

First it is ridiculous to point at studies that say we don't have fraud when we can't know if we have fraud because most votes have no way to audit them.

And none of those speak to my point, and the point of many others who study this in detail, is there were over a thousand recorded criminals cases of voter fraud over in recent elections. When you couple that with many elections having no way to audit a vote, then we have a huge problem, because without auditing tools, only the most stupid and egregious incidents of fraud will be caught.

If you agree that a fraudulent election would be catastrophic for our democracy, and that we currently have no tools to audit the integrity of our votes (which we can't without voter ID), then voter ID, free or whatever, is an obvious solution.

I'm betting Belarus wishes they had a way to audit their elections about now.

> First it is ridiculous to point at studies that say we don't have fraud when we can't know if we have fraud because most votes have no way to audit them.

Again, you insist that the methodology to audit isn't there, yet there are dozens of studies, audits and case law examples that disagree with your opinion.

Again, if you want to disagree with the methodology, you are free to, but please be specific about what you disagree with.