It’s clear HR1 is not going to pass the Senate. So I put on my rose-colored centrist glasses the other day and got to wondering … what if it included a voter ID?
(Let’s leave aside for this conversation the fact that Senate Republicans are never ever ever ever going to vote for a bill Biden supports. He could propose a complete repeal of the income tax and they’d find a way to hate it. Let’s pretend the GOP is still evil but also sane.)
So I know why voter ID is a wicked idea, but would it be an acceptable compromise to lock in federally mandated access to polling places and absentee voting, along with guarantees that results can’t be overruled by state legislatures?
Here’s my thinking: Given a year’s notice, organizations could work with local communities to get voter ID cards to underrepresented voters – a huge lift, to be sure, but along the lines of the get-out-the-vote campaign that swung Georgia blue in 2020. But if states are allowed to pass laws that make access even harder and put votes in peril of being thrown out entirely, no amount of community activism will help.
TLDR: Voter ID sucks, but would we go along with it if it got HR1 passed?
A national requirement for voter ID would be acceptable if and only if the same law also created a national ID that would meet that requirement, mailed directly to every voter, free of charge.
The right to vote is not an issue that allows for compromise, because every other compromise in our political system is based on the assumption of free and open elections.
If the GOP is dedicated to opposing anything Biden proposes, why would they support this? All you have done is substitute one unpassable plan for another unpassable plan.
You seem to be under the impression that Republicans’ motivations in opposing HR 1 are driven by policy concerns over voting integrity. And so a compromise might be possible if those concerns were addressed in the legislation.
Excuse my ignorance, but what is the issue with requiring some sort of official ID for voting (i.e. driver’s license, US passport)? Doesn’t pretty much everyone need some sort of official form of identification simply to function in society?
This is why I said, let’s pretend the GOP is sane. I’m interested in what Dopers think about the idea, not how Republicans would react to it in real life.
You might think so, but various studies I’ve read have indicated that a significant number of Americans of voting age (around 10% or so) do not have a current, government-issued, photo ID. This number is substantially higher among older people, poorer people, and people of color. If you don’t drive, and don’t travel by plane or travel internationally, you don’t, in fact, always need a photo ID to function in society.
I think there is likely legislation that would strengthen voting rights that will get some Republican votes, namely Romney, Murkowski, Collins, Portman, but it’s hard for me to imagine any form of voting rights legislation hitting the supermajority threshold of 60. So for it to mean anything there would have to be a world in which adding 4-5 (R) names to the yea list was enough to get Manchin and Sinema to agree to bypass the filibuster for voting rights legislation. I am not sure that is what would happen.
I’d be fine with putting voter ID on the table (not that I think they’re dealing in good faith), but IMO the starting bid should be a voter ID requirement like in Ohio and some other states, where you can use many different documents, like utility bills, government mail, etc.
Also, my first priority for the bill would be a very strict anti-gerrymandering provision that prioritizes partisan fairness using something like the mean-median difference. (I personally don’t care how pretty the lines are or whether “communities of interest” are kept together, though there’s no reason why they couldn’t be secondary factors.) This alone would possibly be worth an actual photo ID law that goes farther than I’m personally comfortable with, even if none of the other Democratic wishlist items made it in.
My next priority would be stuff around the certification of elections at the state level, and reforming the Electoral Count Act to make it clear that Congress has no enumerated power to “refuse to certify” a presidential election.
After that…there’s not a lot that’s critically important IMO, unless we’re putting stuff like statehood in this pile (and that would move us from pigs flying to pigs launching themselves into orbit). Like, I support absentee voting and same-day registration and all that good stuff, but more along the lines of “good government means making citizens’ lives easier” than “this is critical to save our democracy from its imminent peril.” The whole HR1 process was pretty dispiriting from beginning to end because it was just a bunch of old talking points from the mid-2010s stapled together and treated as the panacea to the recent much-more-severe problems.
I don’t know what you mean by this. What they do might be labeled as unethical, but what they do seems to work for them. Would you like us to approach this as if the GOP was not interested in the preservation and growth of their political power?
Indeed. That is as much as 34 million people who live fine without a photo-ID, or at least without one of the sort that some of the states demand — some states disqualify things like college student ID, or native tribal ID that gives the address as “Clan X Lodge, Y Reservation” rather than an outsider-standard number/street.
Creation of one single universal standardized legal photo-ID is an absolute non-starter in the US — even after 9/11 the most that you could get was the half-cooked “Real ID” law for making those IDs that do exist meet a common standard, that 20 years later is still being postponed.
I guess what I mean is, instead of the GOP reflexively opposing anything Democrats propose, let’s pretend they’re willing to consider getting some of what they want in exchange for allowing some of what they don’t want. You know, how political compromise is actually supposed to work.
Voter ID is a non issue in states like OR, WA and CO where every voter gets a ballot in the mail. It’s interesting that I never hear anyone complain about voter fraud in these states.
Then we will have to pretend that they want something other than what they really want. Let me know what this imaginary GOP really wants and I will tell you what compromises might pass.
The national ID card idea would need a lot of clarification. What information is stored on it, who would have access to that information, could it be used for tracking by governmental agencies (from city police to the Federal Government), and which authorities under what circumstances can demand to see it.
^^^ This. The law should create a voter ID. Not “require one” that is the voter’s responsibility to conjure up, but issue one at the time of voter registration.