Perhaps ‘cushy’ was the wrong word. I used it because most of the jobs throughout my life were ones where I was tied to the clock. I consider the fact that I am able to arrange my schedule to accommodate the little hassles of my life as adding some ‘cushy-ness’ to my job.
Nope, not a burden if ID is easily available and free of charge. By “easily available” I mean that one should not have to lose wages or queue up for hours to get the required document, and that those who are unable to drive should not be disadvantaged, as I don’t believe that ability to drive is a requirement for a US citizen who wishes to vote.
In Texas, the issuing office is in Austin, so most applications are made by mail. Of course, if you were born out-of-state, you’ll have to deal with some other state’s bureaucracy.
Naturally, Texas doesn’t let you off without a dose of Catch-22 weirdness: On the one hand, the state website states that two supporting documents are sufficient to prove identity, provided at least one bears your signature. On the other, the application form states, in red letters, “APPLICATIONS WITHOUT PHOTO ID WILL NOT BE PROCESSED.”
Unless you have a military ID or passport, a birth certificate is pretty much required to obtain a state ID (see http://texasdriverslicenses.org/id_cards.html). Moreover, I suspect that a lot of people have original birth certificates that are no longer considered acceptable. All in all, kind of a PITA, and certainly more difficult than when I got my driver’s license thirty years ago.
OP certainly knows how to rock the abbreviations.
Are you really unable to imagine that there are people in our society who live their lives quite differently from the way you do?
No, because as far as I know, being able to prove you’re a citizen of the United States IS a requirement for many, many reasons and for many, many benefits. Voting should be one of them. If its not, then we may as well erase all borders and just start singing Kumbayah together. Wouldn’t that be nice?
If you can’t be bothered to have proof of citizenship to vote, then you shouldn’t vote. If its not important enough to you to provide proof, then it’s not important enough for you to vote. Period. Paragraph.
How exactly would three-quarters of American citizens (those without passports) prove their citizenship?
Don’t be obtuse. How do 3/4 of American citizens get driver’s licenses - OR passport for that matter? OR Social Security cards. OR register for the draft? Etc etc.
Chief Inspector: “How does an idiot become a policeman? Answer me that!”
Insp. Clouseau: “Eet is sehm-pul. He applahys, lahk ayverone else.”
The problem is that the majority of us have grown up with the necessary documentation and have inherited it from our parents. Others have accumulated the appropriate documentation by convenience and luck, in the good old days before 9/11 and the Patriot Act.
It used to be that it took very little to get a license; even al Qeda visitors could get them in whatever name they chose. (hence resulting in the present catch-22 mess). The whole plot of the Day of the Jackal is based around that at the time (early 1960’s) it was trivial to get a passport based on a birth certificate anyone could apply for, probably in the name of a deceased baby with the right range of birth date.
You hda a copy of your birth certificate, got a student ID because nobody really questioned your assertion who you were for that, you could show a copy of your student ID or an electricity bill and get a driver’s license, a letter from a minister or doctor or lawyer (who probably never asked you for ID) plus birth certificate, was sufficient to vouch for your passport (at least, in Canada). Military ID, additional documentation like pilot’s license, hinting license, old passport, ID badge from work, health insurance card, credit cards, maybe even a criminal record… You accumulate a crust of supporting documentation that makes it easy to replace any piece that goes missing. I’m still running off a small birth certificate my father obtained and laminated in the late 1950’s.
Now imagine you’ve been on skid row, or worked minimum wage jobs for the last 20 years, you have had no car or passport or credit cards - probably how a significant part of the country lives… Where do you start? As far as the system is concerned, unless they arrested and fingerprinted you, the system does not believe you exist. Heck, even if the did, AFAIK DMV does not take “look me up on the police database” as proof for a license.
Or imagine like another significant chunk of the population, you have had one or some or all of these documents at one time, but lost them - fire, had to leave your place suddenly, no home so your stuff got tossed…
Try this as a simple exercise. You know who you are. You live across the country from any family, if you have even seen them in 20 years. How would you go about beginning the catch-22 situation of starting your documentation if you had zero ID for some reason? Can’t get a license without a birth certificate. Can’t get a birth certificate without… ID? Can’t get a birth certificate in person unless you travel halfway across the country. Google the mess with Puerto Rico birth certificates, most of the ones before 2000 were invalidated and need to be re-issued.
You’re assuming everyone has a mess of credit cards, travels with an accumulating pile of family albums, old documents, copies of back tax returns, a few years of utility bills… Many people start fresh with not much more than a suitcase of clothes. Others live a few miles from where they were born and have never had to have documentation because everyone knows them and they’ve never had the money to do anything that need ID.
(My suggestion is simple - if you are so worried about fraud, anyone who wants to vote, does not have ID - (a) take a thumbprint and (b) dip their finger in purple dye like a third world voting system. Heck, with modern digital technology, take their picture too.)
In this state, DMV requires you give a fingerprint to get ID.
But you CANNOT use your fingerprint to get a replacement ID.
It’s insane.
As an additional complication Texas requires you prove state residence via things like multiple utility bills in your name at your address to get even a state ID card or DL. I see now that at least on the website it says if you cannot produce proof of residence they will let you swear out an affidavit, this was not offered as an option to me many years ago by the DMV.
You say you agree and then go on to completely disagree. I said if you are a citizen, you can vote. You say if you can prove you are a citizen, you can vote. Being a citizen and proving you are a citizen are entirely different things.
That’s an absolutely facile and absurd idea of how to communicate. By stating that an act violates a certain law but failing to disclose that the law in question was itself nullified by court decision, you present what amounts to a tremendously deceptive claim. In a discussion of, say, Obama firing Hagel, I cannot imagine anyone announcing that Obama’s action would violate the Tenure In Office Act, getting called on it, and then offering this defense.
That section of the Voting Rights Act is no longer law.
In GD, I suppose you might be able to wriggle around on this point. But in GQ, the focus is on a factual answer. Your answer did not accurately reflect the current state of the Voting Rights Act, as it stands following the Court’s decision in Shelby County.
That’s simply your opinion, and not a matter of law.
I agree with the sentiment, but offer the same objection as I did above: how is this a factual answer to the factual question? This is your opinion.
Again, there are many people who are just cannot provide 100% of the paperwork required to get a state issued ID. The government records system is far from perfect. Records get lost, misfiled, never existed in the first place, etc.
Note that this is not the same as establishing identity and hence establishing citizenship. These requirements typically go much farther than the basics. E.g., documenting every name change due to marriage/divorce or adoption, etc. The more such records are required, the more likely someone is going to encounter something wrong.
In addition, you have to prove to the states holding these records that you are you in order to get copies. This can quickly turn into a Catch-22 nightmare.
Or it can be absurd the other way. Mrs. FtG in last renewing her drivers license needed to get a lot of docs from another state. To do that, they required a photocopy of her current drivers license! So we copied that, sent in the forms, got the copies back, sent those in and got a new drivers license. A completely absurd situation.
Thankfully she had an existing license. If she didn’t, it would have been a mess.
If the state has been recognizing you as you for decades, then they should continue to accept that. It should be up do to the state to put in the effort to dispute such a long standing matter. This is why we have statute of limitations laws. After decades, trying to prove some old fact is no longer reliable in all cases.
And all to prevent a tiny number of unqualified voters! The notion that there are millions of non-citizens trying to vote has no basis in reality. It’s not even in the thousands. Don’t be fooled by scare tactics.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but getting all of docs required for these idiotic new laws can be extremely difficult to impossible. I have no idea how many times people have to be told this.
The OP apparently knows that Texas is, in fact, somehow violating the VRA, and also knows that they’re getting away with it. Combining these, one deduces that the OP is already aware of the much-publicized fact that a recent court decision struck down the VRA, and that Texas had waited until such decision to implement its current requirements. I saw no need to repeat information that the OP already knew.
The US government seems to be pretty keen on intelligence and making sure that they track everyone’s movements. How hard would it be to have a “processing center” where people without ID could go and where government officials would take fingerprints, DNA samples, copies of documents the person does have, and then correlate that with the massive storehouse of data they have to put two and to together and come up with a comprehensive background check that confirms the person’s identity and gets them an ID? Since we already spend lots of money transporting prisoners around here and there, it would seem that we could spend a few dollars to provide a complimentary “pickup” for wannabe-ID holders to be transported to their closest Citizen Identity Discernment center. Disadvantage, of course, is that if your background check turns up as you being a foreigner without a valid visa, they already have you in their grasp and please step on this plane to be deported, sir.
“I see that you don’t have ID. Don’t worry, please step into this room here for fingerprinting. Now that we have your fingerprints, we’re going to run them through the big computer here and let’s see, what documents did you bring? Oh, an elementary school transcript with the name of Clara P. Jones and parent’s name of Miles K. Jones from Cleveland, let’s put that in too. Ding! Computer says your fingerprints match a Clara Jones who was arrested for vandalism at age 18, and we matched the names against a marriage certificate issued in Atlanta for a Clara Paula Jones, daughter of Miles Kevin Jones, to marry a John Percival Smith, son of Hugh Robert Smith. You seem to be a US Citizen, we found a birth certificate from Michigan for a Clara Paula Jones, child of Miles John Jones and Amanda Ann Robinson. The father’s middle name doesn’t match but we found a college yearbook article mentioning that Miles Jones, class of ‘23, changed his middle name, and we verified your father’s college enrollment address as listed in his registration with his parents’ house in Newark, New Jersey, and that same address turns up in an essay you wrote in 4th grade called “All about grandpa”. You must be Mrs. Clara Jones Smith, right? The computer is always right! Here’s your ID, ma’am!”
How hard would that be?
Politically speaking? Absolutely impossible.
Here is the OP:
Nothing in the OP remotely supports the assertion that the OP “knows” Texas is somehow violating the VRA. That’s an absolutely false statement.
One of the things that annoys me is when people say that so-and-so doesn’t get any paid vacation time and therefore they can’t take any time off because zomg you know they don’t get paid leave, they’re gonna like starve!11!one. It’s as if the concept of taking a small amount of unpaid leave to get something important done can’t possibly be worth it because getting your full paycheck every single month is worth sacrificing everything else for. Can’t see the doctor, don’t get paid leave. I’d rather get sick and die than have my paycheck docked. Yeah.