Is getting evicted “unlucky”, too?
Wow.
I believe there is no way to answer that question.
A law gets proposed and passed by many votes. I’m absolutely certain that some of the legislators that voted for it had the intention of increasing voter confidence; and I am equally certain that other legislators wanted to decrease Democratic votes; and others wanted to decrease African-American votes; and others wanted one of those primarily but were happy with the other outcomes; and others wanted one of those primarily and were unhappy with the others but decided they could live with the tradeoff; and others did not care about any of it but voted for it because their legislative leadership told them to; and others did not care but voted because they were holding up their end of a vote trade (“Give me your vote on the Voter ID and I’ll vote for the road improvement contract that the contractor in your district wants to bid for.”)
So here is the method I believe should be used to analyze a passed law: if a law is not discriminatory on its face, and is justified by valid neutral rationale, that rationale cannot be disregarded simply because improper interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators.
I am saying that the “burden” placed on someone to go get a cost free state ID (that they will need for a million other purposes in life) is a de minimis one. I am not claiming that the effect of the law is de minimis. Without verification of ID at the polling place, nobody can ever tell if there is voter fraud taking place.
The claims that only a handful of people get prosecuted for voter fraud are unremarkable since there is no verification system to determine that the votes cast are actually done by those registered voters. It would be like if there were no law requiring stores to check ID for beer purchases and then noting that very few stores were prosecuted for selling to underaged kids. If you aren’t verifying, then we cannot reliably tell these things.
Plus there are a lot of people on the fringes of the right and left who will freak out at the idea of a database of everyone’s fingerprints. And there will be pressure from law enforcement to be able to use that database, which will cause even more people to freak out and lead to Fifth Amendment challenges and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby.
It’s not remotely racist but implementation will be challenging nonetheless.
You may be right, but doesn’t that switch the argument from “Is it racist?” to “Does the cost outweigh the benefit?”
Are you similarly against the policy that an ID is required to legally purchase a firearm? After all, requiring an ID for this exercise of 2nd Amendment rights must disproportionately negatively affect people of particular races who do not have an ID.
Me personally? I’m on the fence about requiring an ID to vote. I’m just against the automatic assumption that a person who thinks people should show an ID to vote is automatically a racist who wants to disenfranchise minority voters.
However, I agree with those who say that getting an ID is not too difficult and other than a few poorly written news articles, I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t have a photo ID because they couldn’t get one, as opposed to didn’t want to get one.
And lest you bring it up again, I have read all of the other thread and do not find anywhere in that thread where the possibility of copying other countries that do have an ID requirement was mentioned or discussed.
Sure, but that just means that you’re not socializing with the types of people for whom getting a photo ID is a burden. Those people do exist, and they exist in the millions. The fact that you don’t know any has no bearing.
Fine, let’s get everyone a government ID. After everyone has it, THEN we can implement photo ID laws, but not before.
For me, I’d say there are two significant differences.
The most important one is that you can buy a firearm any day. If you find out when you try to go buy one that you need an ID, then you can go get one and come back to buy the gun. Not so with voting. Show up to vote like you have for the last several decades, find out the rules have been changed, and you don’t get to vote. Can’t come back next week to cast your ballot.
For this reason, voter ID laws that allow people to cast provisional ballots regardless of their ID, then verify their identity later (in some cost-free way) are acceptable. Indiana’s, which Bricker offered as an example, lets you do this.
The second reason is that buying a firearm is already expensive, so the argument that someone can’t afford the procedures to get an ID is weaker. Not invalid, but not as strong.
I also would support official state identification being free. Sure, if you want a drivers license, you can pay for the administration of the testing and the whatever. But if you just want the state to officially acknowledge that you’re a specific person, and they require you to do so to obtain your other rights, that should be covered by general taxes.
One advantage of an election PIN over say a password or ATM PIN is that a fraudster only get one shot at it with no confirmation as to its success. Say I get my own 12 digit PIN. Is it my and my wife’s 6 digit birthdate? How about my two kids’ birthdates? 123456789012? 724680223000? Something else that I won’t forget and you can’t guess?
And if we make it alphanumeric that is even better.
The primary reason we think in-person voter fraud is rare is it’s incredibly difficult. Think about it; polling stations are set up by neighborhood, so when you vote you’ll know most of the people in line. There’s also a good chance you’ll know the poll workers–mine live on the same block as me. So if you go to the polling location claiming to be Wilhelm Gusentheit, you going to be talking to people who might actually know Wilhelm Gusentheit. And you’d better be sure Wilhelm Gusentheit hasn’t already voted, or you’re going to jail. And you’d better hope he’s registered. And if he shows up later to vote your vote will be disqualified anyway.
So to commit voter fraud you have to find someone who’s interested enough in the voting process to be registered, but not interested enough to actually vote. And you’re going to have to impersonate him in front of his neighbors, some of whom know him.
And if you get away with it, congratulations, but you’re not done yet. One vote isn’t going to change anything. You’re going to have to repeat this process thousands of times. Good luck. There’s a reason no one actually does it.
Our voting process has been working for literally hundreds of years. People only started caring about voter ID when it became clear minorities weren’t voting the way the authorities wanted them to, and voter ID was seen as a way to keep them from voting.
Haven’t you ever wondered “hmmmm…if they care so much about voter ID why don’t they provide free, convenient, accessible state IDs?” The answer is that if the voter ID process was too easy it wouldn’t prevent people from voting!
The benefit is basically zero.
Or maybe the benefit is “increased voter confidence,” which has suddenly become so valuable that it’s worth disenfranchising tens of thousands of people of their constitutional rights, but not valuable enough to justify the state spending any money at all to ensure they can get IDs.
Voter Confidence: priceless.
One more polling station in minority neighborhood: much too expensive.
Guns aren’t free. They have never been free. There is no constitutional amendment that was passed to guarantee free guns. No one expects free guns.
But voting has always been free, and when it wasn’t, they passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that it would always remain free. People expect to vote for free.
Charging people to vote is wrong. Charging people for guns is a perfectly acceptable business practice. Just like charging for ink and paper. But charging people money to vote is entirely separate and odious practice, hence why it was outlawed by constitutional amendment.
The rights to free speech and to bear arms are guarantees that you will be able to buy guns and pay to publish your ideas without government interference. But the right to vote is not the right to be allowed to pay to vote. The right to vote is guaranteed regardless of ability to pay. It’s a big difference and I’m surprised people are pretending they don’t recognize that difference.
Interestingly, none of that stopped someone from signing my name in the voter rolls one year and voting under my name.
So the previous vote was not disqualified?
But your valid vote overrode their invalid vote, and zero voter fraud actually occurred, correct? Or did you just throw up your hands and say “I guess I don’t get to vote this year”?
I’ve been thinking about this some more, and trying to see things from the POV of someone who’s pro-voter ID. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
The Voter ID laws affect two types of voting problems. One is that there may be some people who impersonate someone else in order to vote. This is the ostensible reason for the laws, to prevent this.
The other is that there are registered voters who don’t currently have a photo ID and would have to get one. Until they do, they won’t be able to vote.
People on my side of the issue see the huge numbers imbalance between the two effects, and come to the conclusion that the prevention of tens of thousands of valid voters from participating isn’t worth preventing the very very small number of fraudulent voters that get allowed in the current system.
But I think people on the other side think that prevention of those fraudulent votes, where one person impersonates another, in-person, as more important than simply making it more difficult to vote. That we should do almost everything in our power to prevent fraudulent votes, but getting the proper paperwork is up to the individual voter and it’s not the government’s problem to fix that.
I quite frankly find it difficult to believe that any legislator voting for the law thought its purpose was to increase voter confidence, but I guess legislators are subject to the same IQ distribution as the rest of us.
Let’s guess percentages. Here’s mine: 80% voted for the law knowing but not caring or that it targeted minorities. 19% voted for the law because they didn’t like the idea of “coloreds” voting in “their” election. And 1% voted for the law to increase voter confidence, while flies flew in and out of their open mouths.
Was that fraud, or did someone just accidentally sign on the wrong line? If the latter, how would ID have helped?