I don’t have any mail my parents got when I was an infant. How is that a reasonable expectation of people, to safeguard mail they got before they could read or write or use the bathroom or walk?
Furthermore, it’s easy to renew your DL if you’ve never moved, or as you mentioned, never lost important documents. Renewing my license in IL is easy, presuming I didn’t lose it in the mean time. But when I moved to Kansas, I needed all those documents again. Documents from various bureaucracies scattered across the country. Luckily I was in the Army at the time, so I had ready access to all those documents. And I needed them again when I got out of the Army and moved back to Illinois.
The issue of Voter ID is divided between people who rightly say “How hard is it? Everyone I know has an ID and uses it every weekend at the bar!” and people who also rightly say “yeah that’s great for everyone with the privilege of leisure time, money, family support and transportation and good health, but we’re not worried about them. We’re worried about those who work two jobs to live and can’t afford to take time off to collect various documents from across the country, pay $30 bucks and spend another several hours at the DMV. People who are disabled and can’t leave their home, people who are old and their birth certificates no longer exist.” These people aren’t the majority, but democracy isn’t about giving most people the vote. It’s about giving everyone the vote. And Voter ID laws dangerously limit the kinds of people who can actually vote, even if the number of disenfranchised is small.
There isn’t a problem with voter ID laws if they have equal impact on everyone across social/economic/racial class.
But if they have disproportionate impact on an identifiable socio-economic group or racial class, and if members of the groups disproportionately affected tend to vote for a particular party and if voter ID laws are being pushed by the party that they’re not likely to vote for, then you have a problem.
The impact doesn’t just depend on socio-economic class, it also depends on gender, because women are far more likely to change their name (due to marriage). If the full name on your birth certificate doesn’t match the name you go by, you need to come up with additional documents to prove your identity.
It was more a matter of them not being assholes and expecting me to pay for something they already had, and that they didn’t have any use for anymore.
Same thing with the SS card; they mail them shortly after birth. I got that at the same time. Pretty much once I was on my own, they handed all that stuff over to me, as I might, you know, need it. They certainly didn’t.
I plan to do the same thing with my children- once they’re on their own, I’m going to unload all those documents on them- verifying their identity is their problem after that point.
Ultimately though, the requirement to have an ID is a marginal hurdle to exercise one’s franchise. If you can’t manage to get your shit together enough to have a freaking photo ID in the 21st century, you have NO business whatsoever voting. Managing to put enough effort in to register to vote and get a photo ID is trivial, and if you can’t or won’t prioritize that enough so that you can vote, we’re better off without you.
Thailand does require it. I mean, it is a democracy from time to time. But even when it is, it’s mainly just nominal, as the military has always been in control, quietly in the background, ever since the 1932 revolution.
Voter tests were outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I’d say a procedure designed to evaluate whether you “have your shit together” certainly qualifies as a test under the VRA.
Same in Pakistan, well there is a charge of about USD 15 as a process fees but that’s about it.
As it is; they do require ID, but they have a voter list (do they not have them in the US?) with your name, address and picture.
The ID makes it extremely easy, you just send an SMS to a toll-free number and get a reply which tells you where you are registered, which polling station and the serial number on the voting list you are on.
At the station you just tell them your serial no.
I really cannot understand why its an issue frankly, it seems to me to be a case of opposition for the sake of opposition; rather than on merits which is something becoming distressingly common in U.S (and World) politics.
Yes, every US jurisdiction has a voter list with name and address. The voter registration requirements vary widely from one place to another, however; there are a few places where you can register on the day of the election, and others where you need to be registered 30 days in advance. (Technically, North Dakota doesn’t have voter registration, but they maintain lists of who has voted in a precinct previously, and in practice it works pretty much like same-day registration.)
However, I’m not aware of any place where the voter list contains photos, nor would it be easy or even practical that it could. No one agency maintains photos of every citizen, and differing forms of identification are possible. For example, in my state an ID issued by a tribal government is acceptable, as is a student ID from a high school (but only if it’s a public high school). In most cases, an ID issued by the federal government or any other state is acceptable, too. In countries with a more centralized government, there’s one agency that issues ID; in the US, there are many thousands.
Elections are largely the responsibility of the individual states, and so is issuance of photo ID. That means there are dozens of different sets of rules on who gets to vote, how they obtain appropriate ID, and even what constitutes appropriate ID. How easy or difficult it is for any given person to obtain voter ID depends on factors ranging from their socioeconomic status to what state they live in now and where they were born. That extreme variation is the reason it is an issue.
This does not seem to be that much of an issue. No one agency contains all pertinent information about a citizen here either. Although in the U.S maybe NSA?
This seems to be an excuse rather than a reason. Here the Federal, provincial and territorial Election Commissions have a statutory responsibility to ensure that the data is accurate (and you get about 7000 texts before an election begging you to verify) and lists are up-to-date. And they ask multiple agencies in different jurisdictions, from the Federal Registration Authority, to the Tax bodies, to the District land and traffic records. When I voted in 2013, the picture on the rolls was not the one on my then National ID Card (taken when I was a teenager) but from my driver’s license; taken the previous year.
I feel like if you’ve made it to 18 and haven’t learned basic human empathy and that other people’s situation might not mirror yours you have no business whatsoever voting…so who wins this mexican standoff?
It’s an issue because the U.S. has a unique and ugly history of suppressing the vote up until very modern times (and as demonstrated in this very thread!)
One point to remember is that election officials are, in most of the United States, chosen on a partisan basis. For example, the chief election official in my state is a Republican and a former chair of the state Republican Party; during the 2012 election, he endorsed Mitt Romney at the same time he was supervising the election in which Romney was a candidate. This is not unusual.
This partisan nature means that many decisions taken by elections offices are, or at least have the appearance of being, made mostly to benefit one particular party. Voter ID laws have been implemented mostly in states where the elections offices are controlled by Republicans. Oddly enough, most of the people most likely to lack ready access to photo IDs are in demographic groups more likely to vote for Democrats.
Election officials typically do NOT have the statutory duty to seek information from other agencies, and they don’t usually have the legal power to compel others to give them information. Heck, they don’t always even cooperate with each other. If you move from one county or state to another, it’s not their responsibility to ensure the lists are up-to-date; it’s yours.
In Kansas, we had a problem for some time with cross-agency cooperation. It was possible to register to vote at the same time you got your driver’s license, and both voter registration and the license required that you show your birth certificate. The driver’s license office made a copy of your birth certificate for their records, but they didn’t send a copy of the BC to the elections office when they sent the voter registration, and for many months they didn’t tell you that they weren’t going to do so. The elections office received your voter registration application and put it “in suspense”; you were just supposed to know (by osmosis?) that you needed to visit another office, sometimes in another town, to complete your voter registration. Getting the information transmitted seamlessly from one agency to another was not viewed as a priority by either agency.
See, to the rest of the world this just looks bizarre. Why in God’s name would anybody think that appointing partisan officials to run elections was a good way to do things? The potential for failure and abuse is obvious. And, given that feature of the system, I struggle to think that faffing about with voter ID requirements is going to make any serious contribution to the robust integrity of the process.
Of courses, the US is where it is, and it got there through the not-always-rational unfolding of history. And despite the fact that this feature of their electoral system looks almost designed to foster corruption, the US is a functioning democracy and a pretty successful one. So, although this system shouldn’t work, it evidently does.
Still, yeah, you do have to be a bit cynical about people who want to improve the system with voter ID requirements that put all the onus on voters to get it right, but who don’t think that the greater need might be for the system to be run by officials of demonstrated competence and impartiality.
I can verify this. I served as an election official one election year in Hawaii, and the head of each polling station had to be a Democrat since the Democrats were in control of the state. We had two or three rounds of voting, what with various city and state initiatives, leading up to the presidential election itself. The head of the polling station I was at was a really nice older guy. He liked my work so much that he promised to try to get me my own polling station until I pointed out to him I was a registered Independent and thus not eligible.
People are partisan. There is no such thing as a non-partisan person. Even if they’re not officially registered with a party, they’ll lean one way or the other.
Indeed, but if they are appointed to run a service impartially as a professional obligation, with defined and measurable indicators of what is agreed to be fair, that’s a rather better standard to be working to (and to justify sacking someone if they don’t meet it) than just making sure they’ve got the right political friends. Surely there’s a concept of a professional civil service at some level?
I do… I’m already registered to vote, and have been for 25 years. I’ve had a photo ID for 26 years.
Seriously though, who can’t manage, on a continual basis, year-in, and year-out, to get a photo ID eventually? I can see missing one single election because you couldn’t line things up in a timely fashion, but past that, it’s a matter of personal priorities, and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for someone who doesn’t prioritize being able to vote.
Prioritize over what, though? Being able to eat, or have a roof over your head, or keep a job?
Consider somebody who has not had photo ID in Kansas before. We don’t care if you used to have photo ID in Missouri or Nebraska or Florida, or if you used to be registered to vote in one of those places; if you’re living in Kansas now and need current ID, you start over at the very beginning, with a copy of your birth certificate and any other documents (adoption decree, marriage license, etc.) documenting change of name.
Depending on your personal circumstances, those documents might be anywhere from free to several hundred dollars (or even more–e.g., if you need the photo ID even to obtain the birth certificate, but you need the birth certificate to get the photo ID, you may well have to shell out some serious change to work around that catch-22). If you’re living on a fixed income, or working a low-wage job, where’s that money supposed to come from? If you have to take time off from work, maybe even several times if you need to visit several offices, you’ll have even less money to keep the bill collectors at bay.
If ten minutes of time and $15 once every four years was sufficient, your argument would make sense. If somebody got a nice healthy savings account and paid vacation leave, even $200 is nothing. What if they don’t, though? If they’re not safely middle-class, but just barely clinging to a lower rung of the ladder, do they deserve to vote?
Why is there the notion that voting is somehow exempt from any identification requirements, when just about everything else worthwhile requires the exact same identification?
If anything, voting is important enough to require MORE than say… driving or writing a check.
But you drive, write cheques, etc, for your own convenience, profit or pleasure.
Voting, by contrast, is a civic responsiblity, the discharge of an obligation to the republic. The republic wants you to vote, and should do everything to facilitate that, and not to impede it. So if voter ID is required to assure the integrity of the system, then the voter should be able to obtain it for free, and without having to take time off work, travel to inconvenient locations or spend hours in queues.
Other democracies manage this; it can be done. If a requirement for voter ID is preventing eligible citizens from voting then something is broken, and the proper response is not to castigate the disenfranchised voters but to protest against the inept officials responsible for this train wreck, whose incompetence is undermining the republic.
