Voter ID laws are all over the place. Very wide deviations from one state to the next, and every state has different ideas about what counts as an acceptable form of identification (they don't always have to be government issued photo identification cards). Of the states that require ID for voting, the following also provide a method to get a free ID to use for voting (although it's possible I missed one or two):
Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
That would be the 'logical' solution, but the party that wants voter ID is not trying to do something logical.
It wants to prevent people who don't currently have it from voting. So they demand ID, without making it possible/easier to get. (And when they do make it possible/easier to get, its only in their political strongholds - or they explicitly disqualify particular kinds of state-issued ID from being used to vote.)
Selective disenfranchisement is the whole point of the policy, not an unfortunate, unforeseen, unpredictable side effect. If you'd like to learn more about the history of this, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow are a good primer on the motivations behind it. Those motivations haven't gone anywhere, because the cultural struggle in question has never actually been resolved.
Great, have congress legislate laws to make it easier/free to obtain passports. Instead of requiring folks to travel to DMV/Post office/etc., why not have federal public servants visit them door-to-door and assist in issuing it? We do it for census, so what's preventing them from doing it for passports?
How much are we willing to spend on non-issues?
This is not my opinion however, as I think the US could do with a guaranteed, everyone has it, national ID card. Republicans however definitely don't want that, as it could be evidence that a government can actually do something right, and that's anathema to them, and also because a not-small group of evangelicals think that a government issued ID is a sign of the devil or something.
If the opposing party wanted to be logical, they would just make IDs free and easy. Especially while they are running the government.
2. Once in a blue moon, they do. But anything they build to enable this requires constant funding and maintenance. Their opponents either dismantle it when they take power, or retroactively disqualify existing IDs from being eligible for voting.
It's not, and has never been about IDs. It's about disenfranchisement.
However, voter ID itself is a completely reasonable thing. This issue will never go away. The most logical thing for Democrats to do is to enact voter ID the right way so as to remove this as a tool from the Republicans' arsenal.
"Republicans may implement voter ID improperly, so we must never ever verify that the people casting votes are doing so legally" is an insane position, honestly.
An obvious first step would be to make getting a passport easier and free, though I am not sure if the federal government can compel states to accept a passport as identification.
We already verify this, we just don't do it with the particular methods that they demand (and why they reject state-issued IDs that aren't used by their preferred demographics.)
Which is, of course, a game of goal-post shifting, that is impossible to win.
Wouldn't this be the responsibility of the government in power, and not require any participation from the opposition?
The DoD has had ID card production figured out for years. All it takes is a work station (for checking your entry in a database and confirming the data that goes onto the card), a specialized printer, and a few other peripherals (camera, fingerprint scanner, keypad). I can walk into a DoD ID card center and walk out with a new card in 15 minutes. You could easily stuff several of these workstations into the back of a van, and then drive around to neighborhoods, bringing ID services to the disadvantaged. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card
This way, you can strike down the arguments about the entire Democracy hinging on fake voting and "lost the election" BS. Give Republicans what they want. I don't see any issue with it.
Also Democrats need to calm down and realize that it is not that unreasonable to ask people for IDs to avoid duplicate voting. It is not anti-democratic and definitely not doing anything helpful by calling people that want IDs fascists. Election integrity should be so good that it shouldn't have gaping holes like not having a fricking ID.
One of the 2 parties is more incentivized to discourage voting, and that's worthy of discussion.
I am strongly anti-partisan but am compelled to vote in alignment with what I consider to be the least-worst option.
It's beyond frustrating to try to discuss these issues without it becoming a tribal war, even here on HN where one would hope for a higher level of discourse.
While this is from 2015, this does not appear to be true.
Those who do have a free ID, require a time consuming waiver process.
Free needs to mean free, "not fill out this stack of paperwork and we'll send it off to the state capitol and see if it'll get approved"
Means testing is expensive and time consuming.
Until the voter ID proposals address these issues, they aren't "securing our elections", they are putting arbitrary barriers in place of American's inalienable right to vote. Many of us will never support disenfranchising anyone.