Let’s start with this, and then move on to more substantive issues.
How nice for you. Life isn’t always as easy for everyone. This assumes first of all that you have a record of birth at all and know exactly what it is, which many blacks do not, as a legacy of the Jim Crow era where they may have been born at home and not in a hospital or their records otherwise not clear.
And there are many other requirements in many jurisdictions which may be onerous for many, including affidavits and certifications and such complexities in the application process as are a real part of life for such individuals as the one you’re trying to convince it’s not a problem, even though it is for them. Birth certificates are the fundamental basis of identity, potentially instruments of identity theft, and, no, I doubt that even in your state they’re given out indiscriminately to anyone with ten bucks to spend.
OK, enough of that.
There was a question about the number of driver’s license holders among blacks in Alabama. I don’t have those numbers but it seems evident that it’s a significantly lower number than among whites. Among youth across the US, for instance …
54% of respondents were licensed before age 18. Blacks (37% …) and Hispanics (29% …) were less likely than non-Hispanic whites (67%) to be licensed before age 18. Lower household income was independently associated with delayed licensure (P < .001). The most common self-reported reasons for not becoming licensed sooner were not having a car, being able to get around without driving, and costs associated with driving.
And this, which corroborates both things I just said:
… there are somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people around Alabama who don’t have photo identification, according to the state’s own numbers. African Americans are more likely to not have licenses or state-issued ID—in no small part because a lot of folks in the elderly black population don’t have birth certificates. (Many black women in the South weren’t served by hospitals during the Jim Crow era, so they gave birth at home or at non-medical facilities, their children born off the books.)
http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/10/workers-not-voters-are-most-at-risk-due-to-alabamas-dmv-closings/409957/
And now this gem:
Once again, how nice! The insidious thing about “anyone can get it, and it’s FREE!!” is that not anyone get it, and “free” isn’t free if it’s an enormous hassle and/or involves being subjected to intimidating onerous processes. At some point the person just goes, “why bother?”. Which sort of sums up the whole objective of voter ID. Septimus said “As for the free voter ID, one complaint is that the registration process is made intimidating. Petitioner must swear, risking Class C Felony Perjury, that he/she has no other ID, according to the NAACP.” And the following appears to be quantitatively factual:
These problems undoubtedly contribute to the fact that only 5,070 voter ID cards were issued by the Secretary of State and county registrars ahead of the November 2014 elections—utterly failing to bridge the gap for the hundreds of thousands of voters who lack driver’s licenses or non-driver ID cards and falling far short of the Secretary of State’s own modest goal of issuing 12,000 cards.
The source is the same as the prior link. Note that this equates to a grand total average of about 75 of these marvelous free voter ID cards being issued in each county. 75!! I read somewhere that one county issued a grand total of five. Not exactly flying off the shelves. Sounds like another convenient misdirection by the vote suppressors.