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Re:All the Ways Georgia Could Make It Harder to Vote by throwaway0a5e on Thursday February 25, 2021 @11:13AM (#26264408)
If we can justify expecting an impoverished single mother with a million other things demanding her time to jump through those same hoops to own a Glock in Massachusetts then we can expect her counterpart to do it to vote in Georgia. (Don't get me started on the judicial process series of amendments, they're ignored by the state(s) to an even worse extent.)

Frankly I think that level of restriction if bullcrap when applied to what is a plainly written right but this level of restriction is applied piecemeal to various rights by various states both at present and in the recent past. Legislatures does not see things as plainly as you or I do. They deal in these kinds of mental gymnastics as a routine part of their business. Just because something's obviously incompatible with the constitution doesn't mean it can't be the law of the land (especially at a state level) for a generation or three.

As an aside, an ID is typically required for all sorts of things that poor people do a hell of a lot more than rich people (change jobs, use a check cashing service, sell scrap metal, sign a lease on a new apartment, register a car, apply for .gov assistance, interact with the government in general, etc.) so they do tend to treat acquiring/renewing IDs with more urgency than the HN crowd because not doing so will cause them problems in shorter order.

Re:All the Ways Georgia Could Make It Harder to Vote by beisner on Thursday February 25, 2021 @11:27AM (#26264594)
I hear what you're saying, but I would push back a bit that the gun purchase vs. voting analogy needs a bit more nuance. There's ALSO a long tradition that individual rights enumerated in the Constitution+Amendments are not absolute, but are limited insofar as they infringe on others' individual rights and public safety.

The threshold where "public safety" is considered with respect to limiting individual rights is certainly up for debate in various cases - including gun ownership. That said, I think there are pretty clear differences between the public safety risk surface of "voting" and "owning a firearm", so I think it's not reasonable to assume that they should require the same standard of restriction (i.e. in the form of tracking/ID requirement).