All through my voting life, I’ve found it odd that I can walk into a polling place and cast a vote without actually demonstrating that I am the person I claim to be. It occurred to me early on, that if i felt strongly about a candidate or ballot measure, I could go from polling place to polling place, and, if I knew the name of someone who opposed my position, I could give his name, (I doubt I could get away with giving a woman’s name!) and cast a vote for MY candidate, blocking him from voting for HIS candidate. In theory, I could do this several times over the course of the day.
A number of Conservatives are proposing Voter ID legislation, by which I would have to show my Driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID in order to cast MY vote, and I would thus be unable to engage in the voter fraud described above.
This seems reasonable to me, but many Liberals oppose it, on the grounds that the result would be voter suppression, particularly in the African-American community. Many of those same liberals then accuse the Conservatives of racist motives. Given that legitimate state-issued non-driver identification can be obtained from the state Motor Vehicle Administration in much the same way as a Driver’s license, but without the driving tests, etc., AND that such identification is required to prove identity when starting a new job, how is it possible that a lwa such as this could serve to suppress the African-American vote?
I am not taking a position on this issue: I am genuinely trying to find a legitimate argument against such laws, because I have yet to see any real potential harm. I look forward to respectful discussion and debate on this issue, and welcome opinions from all points on the spectrum.
As you said, the necessary photo ID can be obtained for free from the state’s DMV or licensing department. In Texas, driver’s licenses are issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).
So, here is how you limit minority voting using Voter ID laws: close the DPS offices in minority areas. Claim (maybe even reasonably) that people in those areas don’t have cars, so they’re not coming in for driver’s licenses often enough to warrant keeping the office open. Also, set the remaining office’s hours such that ordinary working folks can’t get in to use them.
Then, there is the matter of getting the “free” ID. To get one in Texas, you need a birth certificate. In Texas, this costs $24. That is quite noticeably “not free”. I live in a county with fewer than 10,000 residents. There is no DPS license office in my county. (It is not a minority area. However, the people with mobility issues ARE minorities. We white guys have cars.) The nearest office is 30 minutes away, or one hour round-trip. So, that is about $8 in gas, plus an $7.25 in minimum wage time. Once you get to the office, you’ve got a line to deal with. Say, that’s another hour. So far, that “free” ID has cost our intrepid voter $47. Of course, all of that is assuming that he/she brought the required documents to the DPS office on the first trip. What are the odds of that?
That is how you use Voter ID laws to suppress minority voters.
If everyone could gets the cards mailed to them for free and use at the polling station was a simple swiping of the card taking a second or two, no problem.
The theory, though, is that it’s fairly easy to introduce barriers to selectively make voting more difficult. If the goal is to get fewer poor people to vote or fewer people in a particular district to vote (as might be desirable to a particular party who sees these voters as likely opponents), just slow down the process of getting the ID card. Cut budgets to government offices in those neighborhoods so there are fewer workers who can issue cards. On election day, have card scrutiny be more strict in certain places, making voter lines longer, causing more voters to give up or not get a chance to vote before polls close.
None of this is overtly disenfranchising, but potential abuses are obvious enough (and the added expense shouldn’t be ignored), and all to correct a problem (voter fraud) which either doesn’t exist or barely exists.
Let’s take it farther- why is ID enough? Why shouldn’t you have to be able to prove basic competence to cast a vote?
You walk into the booth, and there are three questions, multiple choice, taken from this year’s citizenship test.
Correctly answer two of the three questions and cast your vote. Fail and your vote is rejected.
Heck, why not have voters sign a loyalty oath and sing the national anthem before being allowed to vote? What’s wrong with showing patriotism?! What are you, some kind of traitor? Surely none of you wants Jones back!
That’s a complete non sequitur. It’s not requiring better or more ID, it’s requiring a certain level of knowledge to vote, which is not only a completely different idea, it’s already been ruled unconstitutional in the US.
Or just - oops - put some applications on the wrong desk and not “notice” the mistake for a couple of weeks. A couple of hundred voters in a town get their id card processing delayed for a couple of weeks and aren’t registered in time to vote. Or a couple hundred forms get sent back and people are told they didn’t fill them out correctly.
Conservatives have long told us that government bureaucracies are corrupt and inefficient - and now they want these bureaucracies to be in a position to interfere with voting.
Well, if voter fraud was a rampant problem, maybe a solution like this would make sense.
So how many known voter fraud cases have their been in the last decade? Given the energy behind the voter-ID movement, I’m guessing it has to be a lot, a few hundred thousand at least.
And yet many (most?) developed country in the world has some form of voter ID law. This is not rocket science, and such laws can easily be crafted so that an ID is easy to get.
Would you consider the program a failure if the number of people known to be prevented from voting exceeds the number of people known to have cast fraudulent votes?
Point is the courts strike down barriers to voting because they unfairly disenfranchise select groups of people.
This unnecessary law (can someone show evidence of widespread fraud?) does nothing to help anybody and will be struck down as being harmful to the citizenry at large.
Plus, what in the world makes conservatives suddenly want national ID cards?
They used to* hate* that crap- what has changed? Only the party of the President.
This measure is a sour-grapes initiative aimed at cutting Democrat votes.
Only if the people trying to pass them want to, which in America they don’t. If the courts force them to change the law so it doesn’t suppress minority/Democratic votes, then the people pushing the law lose interest in it. That is the only purpose for which they are proposed here.
Which specific law are you talking about, and would you like to bet?
Who is talking about a national ID card? This would be a state ID card. States run elections in the US.
I’m not an advocate for such laws-- i just don’t see why they are inherently bad. But it’s much easier to measure the number of people prevented from voting than it is to measure the number of fraudulent votes, so no, I wouldn’t consider them a failure under your scenario.
When I vote, I show up at my assigned voting location, identify myself, and then sign a “ticket”. My signature is compared to the signature on file, and all is cool.
If I attempted to vote anywhere else, the judges would find no record of me.
If someone tried to vote using my name, at the correct location, the judges would say: “It looks like you already voted, come back next election.”
The Voter Fraud As Described Above wouldn’t be possible.
All else is republicans attempting to supress the vote of the people that they have been screwing. It ain’t complicated.
Voter fraud, by the way, is an almost nonexistent “problem”.
The “solutions” to the “problem” complicate the process, and serve no useful purpose, other than preventing those among us who have been fucked over from voting.
It’s just as simple as it sounds. That’s why only one side thinks it’s a good idea, and the other side recognizes it for the crock of shit that it is.
As a minor note, although government-issued ID is technically necessary to vote in Canada, I can’t recall ever being asked to show it because I don’t think anyone has ever made an effort to screw me out of my vote.
Of course, registration is a breeze since I check the little box on my tax return authorizing Revenue Canada to pass my info on to Elections Canada. I gather there’s no equivalent federal agency in the U.S.
What if the number of people who lose their chance to vote is ten times that of the number of people known to have voted fraudulently, just to account for relative difficult of measurement?
Thing is, the laws aren’t inherently bad - on paper. Other countries have such laws - on paper. It’s in the application, and the U.S. (well, parts of it) is already known for electoral shenanigans, though in recent years it’s mostly been gerrymandering. Suspicion that this opens new avenues for abuse is not unreasonable.
But they are not crafted that way because they are not trying to solve a problem we have but simply prevent democratic votes with something that sounds reasonable. It’s not really voter id that is a problem, like you say that could easily be crafted in such a way that it did not disenfranchised voters. It is republican attempts to disenfranchise voters through voter id laws that are the problem.