Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by hef19898 on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @04:51PM (#31673921)

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.

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Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by hamburglar on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @05:21PM (#31674392)

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.

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Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by hef19898 on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @05:26PM (#31674466)

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.

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Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by mulmen on Thursday June 09, 2022 @03:29AM (#31678501)

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.

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Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by rootusrootus on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @07:51PM (#31675979)

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.

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Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by hamburglar on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @06:02PM (#31674923)

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.

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