# How do voter ID laws suppress minority votes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 11, 2013, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968 "2013-08-11T22:09:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2013, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/201 "2013-08-26T20:56:39Z")
When this nasty bit of business got started, “disenfranchise” had nothing to do with it, the original plan was cooked up by very smart and cynical people. The goal wasn’t to prevent voting, nothing so obvious that would create a furor. It only had the goal of making it just more difficult, to discourage the probable Dem voter, the Dem voter who would vote if it wasn’t too much trouble, but stay home if it were a pain in the butt. Cut the Dem vote by just enough to win the close ones. Maybe it the fact that the inmates have taken over the Republican Party asylum. Or maybe one or two points isn’t enough any more. But they’ve gone over to the full court press, nothing is too blatant or repulsive. And ask them about cutting the number of polling places for students and the poor, ask them about cutting down on early voting, ask them about brazenly stacking the deck…and every time they will change the subject back to voter id, and how you gotta have it to buy heroin and booze and cigarettes, so why not to vote? Because voter id wouldn’t be a bad idea at all, if it were done right. An outreach program, an effort to make it easy and convenient to get. Any of us could come up with ways to make that easy. They don’t want more people to vote, their people already have voter id and already live where its easy to vote. Last thing they want is a huge increase in voter registration, because they’ve already got pretty much all they are gonna get. How many elections has it been, now, with national news reports about people in Florida and others waiting for eight fucking hours to vote? They couldn’t fix that? Really? Anybody fucking stupid enough to believe that? They don’t _want_ to fix that, they will do whatever they have to to _stop_ you from fixing that! And they are bound to get away with it, at least some of it. So figure they are going to have about a two to five percent advantage that we have to overcome. Gonna be tough, gonna have to get our people fired up. But if we can, we can stuff this so far down their throats in bursts out through their rectum. Think of it as a colonic cleansing with extreme prejudice. ---
**Author:** ![Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e47c2d/32.png) [@Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hershele_Ostropoler)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2013, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/202 "2013-08-30T19:03:52Z")
> [@Saint\_Cad](#): > > To be honest I’m tired of telling this story because everytime I do, the Lefties on the board minimize what happened by saying the illegal voting/disenfranchizing of a citizen via voter fraud isn’t really all that important in this isolated case because it only happened once. HOWEVER, if I said I was a poor old black woman living in the Bayou that didn’t have a picture ID (note I didn’t say I couldn’t get it) and how the White Republican Devil Slave-Masters ™ wouldn’t let me vote, you can bet the Lefties would be all up in that saying “See Bricker! We told you that Voter ID laws disenfranchise people.” Are you asserting that someone who isn’t you signed your name in your space and voted while pretending to be you? And are you asserting that it was part of a systematic effort to disenfranchise your demographic? Because otherwise the analogy there is … tangerines and oranges at best. > [@elucidator](#): > > Because voter id wouldn’t be a bad idea at all, if it were done right. An outreach program, an effort to make it easy and convenient to get. Any of us could come up with ways to make that easy. I suppose I could live with it if it were opt-out rather than opt-in. If every citizen over 18 were on the rolls (except convicted felons, perhaps; the justice of that exclusion is outside the scope of this thread), I’d be ok with a system in which every citizen over 18 were issued ID automatically and had to display it to vote. I still wouldn’t prefer that to no ID requirement, but it would answer most of my specific objections. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2013, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/203 "2013-08-30T20:24:20Z")
It would have no purpose but to answer that one obnoxious talking point, about how people need to show id to what they ought not (drink and smoke), so it stands to reason they should be required to present it in order to do their civic duty. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2013, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/204 "2013-08-30T20:43:56Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I think that if a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of certain individual legislators. > [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Well, shoot, they had to pass a law to get rid of poll taxes and literacy tests so the question is whether that law covers this bullshit too. The answer is “No.” As the Supreme Court has already told you. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2013, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/205 "2013-09-04T15:20:53Z")
> [@Bridget\_Burke](#): > > Here’s Bricker’s dream–the results of the 2012 election if[only White Men](http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2012/11/if_only_white_men_could_vote/) had the vote. (He’ll be in his bunk.) Nothing posted in this thread requires you to make personal attacks on other posters–particularly outlandish attacks and veiled obscene ones. > [@elucidator](#): > > . . . leaving the perfectly reasonable suspicion that he was trying to pull a slow one. Nor is there a need to try to sneak accusations of dishonesty past the rules. Knock it off. [/Moderating] ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2013, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/206 "2013-09-04T15:33:26Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I think that if a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of certain individual legislators. In what sense are you using the term “valid” here? Objectively correct? Or just not constitutionally infirm? ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2013, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/207 "2013-09-04T15:37:04Z")
The words nondiscriminatory, valid, neutral, and justification are \*all \*inapplicable in that sentence. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2013, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/208 "2013-09-04T15:47:38Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > In what sense are you using the term “valid” here? Objectively correct? Or just not constitutionally infirm? I’m quoting, verbatim, Crawford. ---
**Author:** ![Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hentor_the_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2013, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968/209 "2013-09-04T15:56:04Z")
> [@Hershele\_Ostropoler](#): > > Are you asserting that someone who isn’t you signed your name in your space and voted while pretending to be you? Since he says that they signed “their signature” next to his name, it appears that **Saint Cad’s** example of in person voter fraud involves someone else representing him- or herself accurately and signing Saint Cad’s voting rights away. Diabolical! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-voter-id-laws-suppress-minority-votes/665968.md?page=10)