It’s required over here (Ireland). You can use any official document with a photo, and any poor person almost 100% definitely has a public services card (which is free), since you need it to collect all your benefits. (Over here, unlike in the US, benefits are very widespread - unemployment benefit/assistance is almost automatic if you don’t have a job, child benefit is paid to anyone of any income level who has a kid…) And anyone over 65 or so will have the card because of their pension. You can also use a birth cert or marriage cert, along with something to prove that you live in the constituency.
Since ID is so widespread, I really doubt that a lot of people are being excluded by the requirement for it.
I’m all in favour of voter ID in those circumstances - if it’s a given that ID is easily and cheaply accessible to everyone. I do see the need for it. I mean, if there’s no ID needed, and I know my neighbour is planning to vote for the candidate I hate most, what’s to stop me getting to the polling station early and voting for my candidate in his name? But if ID isn’t universally easily accessible, then requiring it is dodgy as hell.
The laws are not only targeted at blacks and the poor. The NC law did not include student IDs, ostensibly to prevent students from voting absentee in their home states, while also voting locally in NC.
However, the law did include military ID as valid, which would also allow voting absentee in your home state while voting locally in NC.
Military and college students… I wonder what the difference could be between those populations.
And I’m getting pretty tired of the “you have to show ID to do X” canard. I can go right up the street and cash a check without showing ID. I can go right next door to that, buy beer, cigarettes and a lottery ticket, and put it all on my credit card without showing ID. And that would be 100% legal.
That depends entirely on what kinds are common in the targeted location. Which kind is common is what will be excluded, and getting new ID will be made as difficult as possible by shutting down local DMVs or the like.
Who said anything about staying home? You wouldn’t have any ID to show.
I was referring to the 2000 elections. Anyone listening to the non stop coverage during the Florida recount will recall a lot of talk that Gore would go to court in other states where he narrowly lost. Spiralling one court case after another. Something nobody ever wants.
That’s why it’s so vital that we have confidence in who’s voting.
If you can’t buy a beer without getting carded then why can you vote without it? It’s crazy something so trivial as buying a beer is more important than the integrity of a vote.
I am for voter ID laws. Yeah, lets keep them minimal and affordable and as easy as reasonably possible.
But at some point IMO you need to actually get off your ass to exercise your right to vote. If you can’t be bothered to do even that, I have little faith that you’ve invested much effort even bothering to think for a moment about the issues or the candidates.
So, I tend to think of voter ID laws more as non thinking voter filters.
And that’s been ruled an unconstitutional bar to the right to vote. Such laws should not be used to prevent any person with a right to vote from voting. Want to pass a law against having stupid or lazy or poor or libertarian people from voting? Get a law passed. See if it passes constitutional muster as well.
As has been well noted already in this thread, voter ID laws generally succeed very well in disenfranchising certain people who do have the right to vote in far, far greater numbers than they prevent ineligible people from voting. There’s really no good evidence cited to show voter fraud is a significant problem, or that it’s influenced election outcomes. There’s much more evidence cited showing that barring eligible voters from participating via voter ID laws has changed outcomes.
So for me, it’s a non-starter. For me to go along with such a law, I’d need to see that the problem is such that it merits passing a new law, with all its associated costs. Then I’d need assurance first that said law would NOT be a burden on any particular class of legitimate voter. Then maybe I’d get on board. Maybe.
Here is an idea- set up picture ID machines where ever people register to vote. Give them the ID for free if they can provide the ID formerly needed to vote,
My question is this- the people who want to change the ID laws were all elected under the old ID laws. They were good enough to get them elected once- why the change? (I’m looking at you, Wisconsin.) :dubious:
Only if the deceased you’re impersonating lives in the same voting district.
I don’t take government-issued ID when I go to vote. I’ve found that if I run or bike to my voting place I come in across the field instead of thru the parking lot which allows me to avoid the party apparatchiks who attempt to hand me their trash.
I think the “vote for this party” option should be made illegal. If you’re going to vote for someone solely because their D or R (or G or L) then you should fail the intelligence test required to vote.
Speaking as a Wisconsonian, our current elected leadership wants to make sure the electorate keeps picking them, as the state tends to seesaw back and forth between Democratic and Republican control. With a little helpful tinkering, they hope to make it more likely to stay in Republican hands for the foreseeable future.
I am against voter ID requirements when designed to hinder and minimize participation in the election and make it a pain in the you-know-what to register and vote.
I favor registering and issuing ID made EASY for everyone regardless of station in life or location of residence. If ID is to be needed to vote then it should involve no out of pocket charge to the citizen, it should be available at a convenient location easily accessible in both space and time, and the supporting documentation should not be unnecessarily restricted.
In a score earlier threads there has already been rehashed that no, there’s NOT a significant problem of voter-identity-fraud in US elections that is to be fixed by making everybody show a “secure” ID document.
(I also believe in minimizing disenfranchisement. I say if you’re fit to be released to the street even on parole, you’re fit to vote.)
I’ve mentioned it before in such threads – there are a couple of easy solutions:
One:
One Universal Official ID, issued to every citizen, free of all charge, that may be used when obtaining ANY public service thus stopping the requirement to whip up two or three different forms of ID with every transaction.
Millions of citizens in what are commonly considered free countries pack one of those. But for some reason Americans’ hair catches fire over such a concept.
Number Two:
A single-purpose Voter ID Card that is issued to you free of all charge when you register, that is to be used exclusively for voting.
This is the system we use here. When you first ever register you go to the local elections board and provide evidence of residence and identity. Said offices are no more than 30 minutes away from any citizen, are open full time, and on weekends in the months leading to the election, and there is a broad spectrum of acceptable evidence, up to and including two registered voter sworn witnesses. The you are issued a photo-ID on the spot, no need to go elsewhere.
Main disadvantage is that it does not fit well with same-day registration and mail-in registration as has been established by a number of states.
In 2000, the concern was not in-person voter fraud. It was the idea that ballots would be discarded or miscounted.
Here’s the thing—in-person voter fraud doesn’t happen. It’s about as common as alien abduction.
You have to balance the risk of in-person voter fraud with the risk of disenfranchisement, and the laws that Republican legislatures and governors have passed largely have accepted massive disenfranchisement in exchange for stopping almost no voter fraud.
I have to ask you—did you read the appeals court’s ruling? It’s very clear. It starts off by saying that the evidence in the record clearly shows that the law was passed with discriminatory intent and that it indeed has a discriminatory impact.
Voter ID was only one of the five components of the law. And the legislature’s justification for passing the law was “meager,” the court said. In other words, hey don’t actually do anything to solve the problems that the legislature claimed to be concerned about.
Regardless of anything you think about voter ID, this particular case is in a larger sense not really about voter ID. It’s about a legislature that passed a law to make it hard for black people to vote, and did it with surgical precision, and the justification they gave for needing the law was mere pretense.
The state’s motivation was to prevent black people from voting and that’s exactly what the law did, and that’s pretty much all it did.
But referring specifically to the voter ID issue, the court said:
In other words, the legislature sought out data on what kind of ID black voters were likely to have and not to have, and then passed the law specifically to make sure that they wouldn’t have the right kind of ID to vote, and that this specific voter ID law wouldn’t actual prevent any fraud:
What else were black voters likely to use that was eliminated or restricted? —
— Early voting, changed from 17 to 10 days
— Eliminated a Sunday voting day on which churches assisted people in getting to the polls
— Same-day registration
— In-person re-registration assistance
— Out-of-precinct voting (because, for example, black voters were more likely to have moved since the last election, resulting in erroneous registration information)
— Pre-registration
Interesting reference to The Daily Show in Footnote 7:
I’ve always wondered about that. I have one, but it’s a crumbling piece of paper that really only identifies me because I’m holding it. Anyone could hold it and claim to be me and they would be believed. It’s not proof of anything.
Perhaps we should move to microchips. You get microchipped at birth, scanned at the voting line, and thus no one can pretend to be you. No need to renew it. I think the advantages might out-weigh the paranoid thoughts about disadvantages.
I never get carded when buying alcohol. They pretty much take me at face value, and have since I was around 35.
One of the many things we’re concerned about here is unequal enforcement, as was famous in the Jim Crow era. A white guy shows up, doesn’t have his ID, and the poll worker says, “Oh, that’s Jack. Hell, I’ve known him since grade school. Of course he can vote.” A black man shows up with valid ID, and the poll worker says, “I don’t know. This photo doesn’t really look like you. Get out of here.”
(I once participated in a civil rights “sting,” applying to rent at an apartment. Since I was white, I was told, “Sure, you can move right in.” The second half of the sting was a black man, with identical references, who was told, “Oh, that’s a shame, we don’t have any vacancies.”)
I don’t want to give any additional weapons to that class of villain.
And the whole offensive “too stupid to vote” meme—which is really no different from a century of Jim Crow—here are the real reasons African-Americans, other minorities, poor people, or people with certain kinds of jobs might disproportionately find it difficult to navigate a complex ID system:
— They move more often, making it necessary for them to fix their registrations more often, and having to learn the bureaucratic maze in a new jurisdiction
— They are less educated, making it harder for them to get information and understand how to run the bureaucratic maze
— They have less access to transportation
— They are more likely to be in poor health
— They are less likely to have time off from work or immediate family obligations available to get these bureaucratic chores done
Why do we need ID to vote? How many people actually attempt to vote as someone other than themselves? (Answer to rhetorical question: 31 times out of the last 1,000,000,000 votes cast.) If you’re trying to rig an election, any idiot can see you should attack the vote counting, not the vote casting. The latter does not give enough opportunity for moving the totals in your favor.
Think like a conspirator, not a conspiracy theorist.
I don’t know how it relates to voting, but I can tell you how it relates to getting a job. When you get a job and you fill out an I-9, you can use your birth certificate. Your birth certificate proves that you were born in the United States, which means you’re a citizen, which means you’re authorized to work in the US (forgive me if I have some minor details incorrect, but that’s the basic idea). However, if you give me a birth certificate to prove that you’re authorized to work here, you’ll also need to present me with some form of identification (usually with a photo).
Basically, one thing proves you’re legal, the other thing proves the first thing belongs to you.
As for using it for other purposes, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot you can do with ONLY your birth certificate, most things that require that, also require some other form of ID.
Anyways, when it comes to Voter ID, on the one hand, I like the idea, but then I read about all the ways it’s been very specifically used to make sure certain groups of people can’t/don’t/won’t vote and think it’s a bad idea. Then you have to wonder how each group is spinning the facts in their own direction.
Something else I’ve always wondered about is following India’s(?) lead and dipping voter’s fingers in ink. Seems that would be the easiest. The only thing I don’t like about it is that some people don’t vote (on purpose) and it’ll be obvious. They might not want, literally everyone over the next week or so, knowing they didn’t vote. I like the idea, but maybe it could be tweaked. Black Light reflective ink maybe?
I always hear those numbers, but really, how do they know? If my super righty neighbor isn’t going to vote this year and I go and vote (liberal) in his name, no one is going to catch it, it’s not going to get reported and it’s not going to make it into any statistics. I’m not suggesting that voter fraud is huge, I’m just always curious at how they know that it’s that small. It’s like a store owner saying ‘we only get one or two shoplifters a year’ when they really mean ‘we only catch one or two shoplifters a year’, they might have people stealing everyday, they just don’t know about those ones.
