Of course they should.
But as for the homeless, how do you determine which district, ward, or precinct they reside in, if they move around a lot? My state, IIRC, requires 30 days residency before election day to be an eligible voter.
If they sleep in Jonestown a few days here and there, and across the bridge in nearby Smithtown for a few days here and there, where are they eligible to vote?
I’d say the district that they spend the most time in, just as it is for people with homes. If you have two homes, and you spend a few days here and there in one, and you spend a few days here and there in the other, where are you eligible to vote?
What is the point of this question? Suppose that I answer that I don’t know how such folks get along in society. And obviously, you don’t know, either. But that doesn’t change anything. These people do exist, and in extremely large numbers. And that’s all that we need to know: Somehow, they exist.
Like I said, in order to vote in my jurisdiction, one must be a resident for 30 days in said jurisdiction prior to election day. You can’t live 20 days in one location, 5 in another, and another five in a third.
I happen to live at the intersection of three towns. I can literally walk one block west and be in “B”, and two blocks to be in “C”. Where can I vote? Wherever I woke up on election day? Can I vote in all three, since I live in all three A B and C?
BTW, why do we continue to have Tuesday as election day? Wouldn’t Saturday or Sunday be better (along with extended voting in the days and weeks prior, for those who can’t make it on the actual day of the election.
Just to correct this, not every province has photo ID as the medicare card. In New Brunswick it is just a card with my name and number on it. I believe, the last time I had occasion to check, Canada has about the same percentage of population without a photo ID (approx 10%).
You have to be a resident for 30 days. That’s not inconsistent with living 20 days there, and 5 days each in two other locations, and in fact, well-to-do people (i.e., the sort who have photo ID, and whose voting Republicans approve of) quite often do things of that nature. A person can, for instance, spend a great deal of time on business trips, and so end up sleeping in a hotel room more often than in his own residence, and nonetheless still be able to vote in the jurisdiction in which that residence that he rarely uses is located. So why shouldn’t a penniless drifter be afforded the same right? Establish residence in one place, by whatever means, and then vote in that place, even if one doesn’t spend all of one’s time in that place.
More than half of the studies in your link show a much lower percent than that.
Given that Democrats are, on average, more educated than Republicans, I doubt that they are less likely to have ID. Probably the opposite.
Also, Democrats can motivate supporters off of GOP efforts to make it hard to vote. So I suspect voter suppression is a GOP own goal. This isn’t to support making it hard to vote. I’m for making it easy to vote even if it means a few more low income men, white and Black, then vote for a Trumper.
If it were possible, I would trade hard-to-vote for non-partisan, compact and contiguous, redistricting and/or Puerto Rico statehood.
Of course, no such compromise is offered.
If you look up how to register to vote if you have no permanent address, there’s a ton of information explaining how a homeless person can vote. However, that’s not what this is about. This is about an ID.
You’re using the argument that voter ID isn’t a big deal since everyone should have an ID. It’s an old argument. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of people don’t have IDs for one reason or another and they’re often not allowed to vote.
In Arkansas—which does have no excuse absentee voting—they require you to include a copy of the ID with your absentee ballot.
Hopefully, they actually then check the number on it in some database and make sure it’s real. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the idea is just that it adds an extra barrier to have the time to get to a copy machine, negating some of the advantages of voting by mail, and so they don’t really check.
As for the OP? One thing would be for the ID to actually be free. Here in Arkansas, we can either get a driver’s license, or pay for an ID. You can also get a free sworn affidavit to use, but only if you can take time off work to get it at your country clerk’s office. And actually know that’s an option, since the generally just say you need a photo ID. (This is how I assume they get around the ID being a poll tax.)
Where you registered. Not sure why this is so complex for you.
Are you saying that if you go on a vacation and get back 15 days before election day, you can’t vote in your home district? If so you are wrong. If not, then your questions are irrelevant.
And in order to register, you have to have lived in said jurisdiction for 30 days prior to election day. What if you live sometimes in the first Ward, and sometimes in the second Ward, but not in either one of them for 30 days prior to election? How do you register?
I realize that very few homeless people register to vote. However, you earlier stated that people should be able to vote anywhere in the state, or at least the county. If I don’t like the politics of the town next to me, should I be able to vote in their elections? Of course not.
You are using fairly specific language here, I will note that not all states are the same. For instance, in Ohio, you only have to be a resident of the *state for 30 days prior to the election, not the district. Most other states are similar, with some talking about county.
Can you tell me what state’s law you are referring to here?
And in any case, it is where you declare your residency to be where you live, which should be where you spend most of your time, not where you slept the night before the election.
Most states even let you vote from outside the state even if you haven’t set foot in it for months before the election.
So, it’s pretty simple. They register in the district where they spend the most time. Can you explain why that is not correct, and if so, can you explain how snowbirds who live in two different states over the course of the year can be registered in either of them?
Conservatives are always talking about how inefficient bureaucracies are.
Now imagine they want to make a bureaucracy deliberately inefficient.
“Hi, I’d like to apply for my voter ID.”
“Of course, Sir, you just need to fill out the application.”
“Okay, can I have the application?”
“Of course. But you have to go to our Dallas office.”
“What? We’re in Houston! I have to go all the way to Dallas to get an ID.”
“No, Sir, you have to go to Dallas to pick up the application. But applications are submitted to the El Paso office. Then you have to come back here to the Houston office to pick up the ID.”
“At least I’ll finish up back here in Houston.”
“Temporarily. If you want your new ID to be valid, you’ll need to get it stamped at the Waco office.”
That’s the way we had it done here in Maricopa county. 70% of the ballots were mail-in and for the 30% who weren’t, they could go to any of a handful of “voting locations” before the election and a big bunch of them on election day. The voting locations were tied by some sort of wireless WAN to the registrar’s office – not going through the internet – and once you were identified, a ballot on demand would be printed for you with all the proper candidates for all of the various districts you were in.
The ballot would be inserted into a machine which would check for any overvotes and spit any such back out so you could correct it on a fresh ballot. Undervotes were not a trigger and the votes were not counted at the location but rather the ballot deposited in a sealed box that would wind up back at the registrars where it was machine counted.
Those are the ballots the Cyber Ninja dumdums have been ruining for a couple months now. The mail-in ballots could be dropped off, in a signed envelope, at any of the voting locations up to and including election day, a number of ballot drop-off boxes, or simply mailed in. The registrar recommended after the Wednesday before election day it be dropped off rather than mailed as the ballot had to be received by close of polls on election day, not just postmarked.
See, you made a mistake there. You shouldn’t have told them about the El Paso part. Tell them to pick up their application in Dallas and then tell them to drop it off in El Paso after they return to Houston with their compleated app. Bonus points if, due to a recent policy change, the Dallas or El Paso office requires a valid gov issued ID for entry into the building and they hadn’t realized the complications that would cause since a person would need to enter that building to get an ID.
On the face of it, a voter ID requirement is a small thing that appears eminently sensible.
In reality, it’s an outright assault on the voting rights of people who are more likely (there are exceptions, obviously) to vote Democratic.
If we allow states to impose ID requirements on the right to vote, I absolutely guarantee that we’ll see shit like this:
If I thought those pushing for a voter ID requirement were doing so in good faith, I really wouldn’t get that excited about it. I more or less agree with those who say that, all things considered, getting an ID document isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things, and really, every adult should do so.
But that’s not what’s happening. The push for voter ID laws is (a) a thinly disguised attempt to suppress the votes of minority groups and the poor, and (b) a PR thing to fire up the base and convince them that only the Republican/Trumpist party can save them from the hordes of Mexicans and Guatemalans being brought across the southern border by Kamala Harris to vote in US elections and ensure that the Democratic Party stays in power forever.
It’s real Great Replacement bullshit.
ETA: Oh, and also, yes, of course gerrymandering is even worse.
And they are only open on the fifth Wednesday of every other month.
I was curious, so I Googled. That situation with the Georgia DMV was settled with the state agreeing to stop mistreating people who moved from Puerto Rico.
I know. But it was an obvious attempt to deny Americans rights, including voting rights. It was also an attempt to deter Puerto Ricans from moving to Georgia – I’m sure that’s what the impounding of ID documents was about.