I followed this discussion in the US quite close actually. Simply because we need to have government ID. It is racist to require it if access to those IDs is, in praxis, limited for the demographics that should have limited access to voting. It is not if you are required to have government ID, and it is very easy to get one. getting a provisional passport for travel, with a validity of 6 months, takes all of one hour tops over here in Germany.

Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement.

And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.

Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.

Too much power in too few hands.

Compare the US to the EU.

The US is over 4.5x the population of Germany, the largest EU member. The entire EU is only about 25% more people than the US. California alone is larger than all but four of the EU member nations.

The US Federal Government is more like the EU itself rather than any member country. The states are more analogous to the countries in the EU.

So a US National ID is kind of like a EU Citizen ID.

What we have instead is an agreement between states and the federal government on ID guidelines. From that perspective it’s not so different.

It's fundamental to the country. We are a federal republic of states, and as such the real power lies with the states. The feds get the nukes, sure, but culturally we are reluctant to hand more power to the central government of a nation of 330 million people.

Yeah, I don’t completely get this one either, but the way we are raised is that national ID is somehow a slippery slope towards federal agents wandering the street demanding “papers, please.”

Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.

> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US.

This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist.

The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed racist by political opponents because the people implementing them know this to be true and do it anyway, because they prefer the outcome that minorities are disenfranchised.

Republicans have been found in court to play these tricks with “surgical precision”, to make sure the rules they come up with impact minorities more than whites.

Another example is closing polling places so that it takes 8 hours to vote in black precincts whereas it takes 8 minutes to vote in white precincts. Yes, the act of closing a polling place is not an overtly racist thing to do. But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.

> The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities.

Democrats have never negotiated in good faith over the requirement to make IDs available though whenever the debate is brought up. States like Wisconsin require voter ID and will make an ID for voting available for free, through the mail, and yet there is still opposition that always relies on handwavy arguments about how utterly baffling and difficult it is to obtain a photo ID, even in Wisconsin. Arguments which are ultimately disingenuous and yet still persist in light of accommodations by states that require voter ID.

It's a pretty standard tribal division, much like abortion and everything else. Each side refuses reasonable compromises because they perceive that it would be a slippery slope allowing the other side to ultimately prevail.

Like I said, unfortunately Republicans have been found in court to have used similar tactics intentionally to disenfranchise minority voters. When they have full control of states they show their hand by passing voter ID laws without commensurate GOTV funding. So we know they are acting in bad faith before it even starts.

If Republicans were serious about non-racist voter ID laws they could have demonstrated that in Georgia when they overhauled election laws there. They didn’t and we know why: more “surgical precision”.

In Wisconsin? With that legislature? Want to guess how easy it will be for them, over time, to make certain cuts to the program that makes it so easy for everyone to get a free ID?

> But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.

Which is racist.