You dont know many poor people, or very young people.

I work a furry convention in the Southern US, about 3% of our attendees have some ID related malady - can't get a timely appointment at DMV, missing core documentation, unable to prove residency, etc - nevermind rural voters who may live hours from a DMV.. which they can't get to without a license (assuming they can afford a car) or a ride. No bus service to speak of either.

Its a huge issue, I'd 100% support voter ID if getting an ID was free and easy, without it I'm skeptical.

I'm with you

Yeah, see the article about "RealID" yesterday. The first step is to require an ID, and the next step is to make it harder to get. For example, a married woman without a perfect paper trail of name changes? No Id.

I unironically keep an original copy of those documents in my safety deposit box because of this. In theory I should be able to go to the courthouse and get another copy but if 40 years down the line they've lost them I'm screwed.

I feel bad for the people in states that don't require court orders for this because they apparently have the worst time trying to update accounts.

What state do you live in? I think this argument is very frustrating when people who live largely in blue states (like California) that don't up any hurdles to getting an ID, can't imagine the level of dysfunction that is intentionally executed in other states in order to prevent people from getting IDs.

Yeah, everyone you know has a valid ID because you don't live in a battleground state that is currently fighting electoral welfare. Republicans don't care to put up barriers to getting an ID in California, Texas or New York.

RealID documentation requirements are a PITA. I have a birth certificate and passport and valid DL and it still was a nuisance the accumulate the required point allocation. People without those golden documents can be very hard pressed to meet the bar.

> I know very few adult Americans

Do you think there's a chance there's a selection bias to your random sampling of the population?

It's easier if you just tell me what the bias is.

Incidentally, there are many less privileged people around me and, let me tell you, they're not going to work on foot.

Just read all the answers in this thread. Your PoV is far from reality, especially at a time where elections are decided by single digit margins.

Most people are friends with people like themselves?

The selection bias of extrapolating an entire country (not to mention one as large and diverse as usa) by using your friend group should be very obvious.

Yet I wasn't talking about my friends. I live in a large city and get to see many people I don't know every single day.

Incidentally, my friends are much more likely to not need to drive at all (tech or otherwise who WFH) than the average person around me.

Do you often ask people you don't know if they have a driver's license?

> live in a large city

Ah yes, large cities. Famous for their rural populations.

You're not arguing in good faith.

Wait, are you telling me that rural populations have less proclivity to drive?

I'm just pointing out obvious ways in which you have selection bias here.

FWIW googling, allegedly 1 in 10 people in rural america do not have a license. Or at least that is the claim floating around the internet. So yes, i think figuring out if this is a real issue should include both checking on rural and urban people, along with many other demographics. It is not obvious how this situation differs between urban/rural.

Do any of them take the bus to work?

> This makes no sense. You can literally register to vote at the DMV.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/feb/19/john-olive...

> driver's license

Republicans are trying to make it so that the vast majority of drivers' licenses do not work either. You may have to get a new one, with passport-level paperwork.

That politifact page literally states there are close by DMVs that are open every week. Not sure what point is trying to be made.

Around 9% of US citizens 18 or older do not have a non-expired driver's license. It's even more for various minorities [1][2].

[1] https://cdce.umd.edu/sites/cdce.umd.edu/files/pubs/Voter%20I...

[2] https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/06/07/who-lacks-id-in-ameri...

I only mentioned DMVs to point out that even if you didn't set out to get a voting document, you can still check the box and get it.

In other words, it's not "people need driver's licenses to vote".

Aren't poor and dumb usually republicans tho?

The poor disproportionately votes left. Somebody who is poor and lives without a valid ID that meets voting requirements is also not necessarily dumb.

Cities. It's cities.

Almost 10% of eligible voters do not have access to citizenship proof at ready[0].

Trump changed voting rules to require proof of citizenship[1].

Disenfranchising 21 million voters makes sense now, no?

[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/213-...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/25/politics/voting-proof-of-...

Name one person who can legally vote but was prevented from voting from this. These groups come up with these insane estimates like that 11% of people don't have a government ID.

I have never met a single person in my life that doesn't have a government ID. Have you? They never drove a car? Bought alcohol? Gotten on an airplane? Forget having a bank account, they've never cashed a check? Maybe they are so poor they have never had a check, but wait, collecting food stamps requires a government ID card. Having a job requires two forms of ID! If they are disabled they need an ID to collect disability checks. If they are old they need an ID to use medicare.

Everything requires an ID, I've never met anyone who didn't have an ID, and I've never met anyone who claimed to actually know someone personally that didn't have an ID.

It's completely ridiculous and stupid, but go ahead piva00, if 10% of people don't have an ID card you should be able to rattle off a name or a thousand. Where are they? What do they do all day?

Edit: this is getting downvoted, but nobody is even willing to claim to know a single person without an ID card

Edit: aredox: https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee42f4-9b4c-8006-aad9-ce3b275ec5...

There are literally dozens of links in these threads showing how wrong you are.

>Name one person who can legally vote but was prevented from voting from this.

Literally thousands of people were barred to vote by last-minute voting roll purges. Virginia, Georgia...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/eligib...

"Things that might work for other purposes" != "An ID your State government is guaranteed to accept with the new rules they want to impose."

Effectively everyone has an official, state issued ID. If you know someone who doesn't you should say so.

Read all the responses in these threads instead of relying on ChatGPT to "think" for you.

It's tiring to explain to people that they don't understand what they are responding to.

The group I stayed with in West Virginia (back to lander hippies basically) only had driver license, which to my understanding, is not a valid voting ID (it isn't a proof of citizenship), so they cannot vote (Lincoln county, WV). Some are a bit mad about it, most don't care.

I don't live in the USA to be able to name people, you have 350 million people, there's definitely enough to have gone through life without doing any of the stuff you mentioned, barring them from voting is antithetical to democratic values. It's very simple probabilities, there's a non-zero number of people that will be affected.

On top of that, making vote more difficult through technicalities (voter roll purges, increased friction to vote, increased uncertainty if one can vote and will be punished if not eligible due to a technicality, etc.) further tilts the scale of who votes or not, either being barred by technicalities or fear.

None of that has any place in a real democracy, if democratic values are to be uphold it should be as easy as possible for any eligible voter to exercise their vote if they so wish.

You want anecdotes to fight against statistics, I think you got stuff reversed there, mate...

Edit: ah, lol, I think I need to repeat your own words back to you:

> This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance and is also asking someone else to prove nonexistence of a situation.

No, I'm asking you to prove the existence of a situation. Sigh. For your sake I hope you are just pretending not to understand the difference.

Do you know anyone in your country who doesn't have a state issued ID card? It's simply not true that 10% of people lack a state ID, it's absolute fiction made up for political reasons. If you bother to look it up (of course you can't be bothered) you would find that it comes from a single phone poll which they then extrapolated using census data. It's beyond dubious.

> None of that has any place in a real democracy, if democratic values are to be uphold it should be as easy as possible for any eligible voter to exercise their vote if they so wish.

So Norway isn't a real democracy? Ireland? Germany? Sweden? Netherlands? Italy? India? Greece? Why aren't you on their forums calling them fake democracies?

It's very easy to go find made up statistics published by political groups. I could go find a 'statistic' that says 98% of people in the US have IDs. In fact, here: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2019/p...

The US highway administration says that 102% of driving age individuals in 3 US states have valid driver's licenses. 102%. That's a statistic published by the government. Don't try to explain to me that "you can't have more than 100%" because that's just an anecdote, mate. You have to just believe whatever the statistic says.

> Do you know anyone in your country who doesn't have a state issued ID card?

Where I live right now it's simply impossible because it's required to have an ID, we are also 10 million people so it's pretty easy to not fall into the cracks.

Back in my native country (Brazil), yes, I do know people who did not have any form of documentation up to when they died, like my great-grandfather, or a former's colleague grandmother.

> It's simply not true that 10% of people lack a state ID, it's absolute fiction made up for political reasons.

It's not about state IDs, read the fucking thing I posted, it's about "proof of citizenship" which 10% of the population does not have ready access for it, and rules have been changed for voters needing proof of citizenship, learn to read before spouting vitriol, please.

> So Norway isn't a real democracy? Ireland? Germany? Sweden? Netherlands? Italy? India? Greece? Why aren't you on their forums calling them fake democracies?

Here in Sweden is really easy to vote, nothing even close to what the US does to its voter rolls, or states deciding to purge them right before elections to tilt the scales, etc.

You simply are talking past through me, it's clear as day that people in the USA who want to vote many times cannot vote, you live there so probably have read more articles about this happening than I ever did. That is a problem, it's a fact, and it's used for political manipulation, 10% of the population will have increased friction to exercise their right to vote, that's simply anti-democratic, plain and simple :)

> Where I live right now it's simply impossible because it's required to have an ID, we are also 10 million people so it's pretty easy to not fall into the cracks.

The hypocrisy here is astonishing. You are fine with your country requiring an ID but not mine. I think it's really telling that everyone on this thread is concerned with letting people vote without an ID, but nobody is saying we should try to help get people IDs because without an ID your life must be a complete shambles and they have no access to many basic government benefits or just basic things in life.

A state ID is proof of citizenship. There is no federal ID card in the US. I'm sorry, you shouldn't express opinions on these things when you clearly don't have basic understanding of what is going on.

> You simply are talking past through me, it's clear as day that people in the USA who want to vote many times cannot vote

Right, that is what the media puts out there, but it never actually happens. That's why I said it must be easy to find at least one actual person who couldn't vote, because supposedly there are so many. I've never met one nor heard of one. In the worst case they give you a 'provisional' ballot and in the event the election is close enough they check each one to see if that person was qualified to vote before counting it, but they ALWAYS let you vote. I had to do a provisional ballot in Santa Cruz, California (one of the most liberal cities in the US) to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. It's not uncommon, but they NEVER turn anyone away from voting. I'm sorry, but you just have absolute ignorance here.