Wrong again, unless by “irresponsible” you mean “grossly and maliciously fraudulent.” Didn’t bother to click the link, is it?
Does such excessive mis-purging help the GOP? Probably, for multiple reasons. They may have tilted the algorithm deliberately, as was done in Florida several years ago. And obstacles to reinstate mispurged voters favor certain socio-economic groups. For one thing, a mis-purged voter can’t respond to a postcard if he’s moved without forwarding.
Finally – and this probably affects many forms of GOP voter suppression – the appeals process will depend on response from specific officials. Does anyone doubt that Eric Kennie would have received a better reception from the bureaucracy if he were an affluent white?
(Am I wrong about this last point? I strongly suspect that differing response by officials is a major reason why suppression efforts affect minority voters more than the norm; but is there clear evidence for that?)
But prior to the existence of the voter ID law this condition didn’t prevent him from voting. He was able to exercise his right for decades without it being an issue. Now, a law passed to resolve an issue that exists on an infinitesimal level has created barriers to voting for hundreds of thousands of people. Most of them are poor people who are now expected to pay to keep the right to vote. How this isn’t a poll tax is beyond me. And just because SCOTUS refuses to see it that way doesn’t change it one bit as far as I am concerned.
So it’s time for all the people who support these laws to quite spewing bullshit about integrity of the vote and just admit it - you hate the poor because they won’t vote the way you want so screw’em, make it as close to impossible for them to exercise their constitutional right to vote as possible.
The guy in question doesn’t have any “Primary Identification”, and a birth certificate is only “Secondary Identification”. He’s also got to provide some “Supporting Identification”, and from the article it sounds like the only document that has his birth name on it is the birth certificate. He can’t go in with just the birth certificate and get an ID, and every other piece of information he’s got conflicts with the birth certificate and isn’t good enough without it. So before he can get any form of ID in the state, he’ll need to get an official name change order from a court, which combined with his birth certificate would be good enough.
This issue has come up with some of my grandmother’s friends in the assisted living community where she lives. Many of these women are in their 80s and 90s and let their drivers licenses expire ages ago, and they can’t find their marriage licenses and birth certificates at this point to get new ones. There were also a fair number of home births on farms and informal marriages at the time, so not everything is even documented at all. But since they’re over 65 they have the option to request absentee ballots without having to show ID, which they have done with more or less grumbling. (This apparent lack of concern for absentee voter fraud among a constituency which leans heavily Republican is in my opinion extremely suspicious, and I’m not the only one.)
I don’t really have any problem in the abstract with being required to show ID to vote, or even mandatory ID requirements. I do have a problem with the “shit flows downhill” approach used by my state. If they want everyone to have an ID, they ought to have the onus of getting one to everybody, and not stick people in catch-22 document retrieval situations.
Come on if his Birth certificate says Tuttle then that’s his name. I mean really, Buttle, Tuttle, what’s the difference. The government doesn’t make mistakes about these things, and even if they did, what’s the worst that could happen.
That’s not a practice or a situation that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable, and supporting it shows just how loony your side is. You are seriously arguing that that guy should be issued an ID in a name that isn’t his legal name and doesn’t appear on his birth certificate.
All I will say is: nope. No one except the loony left supports such an absurd bending-over-backwards. The guy has to either get an ID in his legal name or change his legal name.
I would agree with that statement. I would also say a system that allows a person to get a state ID card under an incorrect name needs to be fixed too. Mr. Kennie previously had a Texas State I.D card under the incorrect name and it wasn’t an issue.
These laws were supposedly enacted to prevent voter fraud. In this case, even though Kennie was using an incorrect name, I don’t see how this could be fraud because he had no idea he was doing so. Who cares if he was voting under his legal name or what he had been led to believe was his legal name? It appears he was conducting all of his business, his entire life, under what he thought was his legal name. I don’t believe for one second this individual was attempting to perpetrate any type of fraud, voter or otherwise.
Of course it was an issue. The mere fact that it happened does not remove it from being an issue.
Strawman. As I have mentioned here approximately seventy-four billion times, the laws were enacted to ensure that only eligble voters cast ballots, NOT merely to stop fraud.
The answer to “Who cares?” is: me, and the voters of Texas, who have every right to demand that voters vote under their legal name.
You don’t care about that, so when you get a state of your own, you go ahead and permit whatever rules (or lack thereof) you like. Texas doesn’t agree with your idea that it’s perfectly fine to let someone obtain ID and vote using a pseudonym.
Do you mean “eligible” in the commonly accepted term or in the new improved version you have released for beta testing?
They are? Demanding, are they? Heavens! I would have thought they would mostly just shrug and feel sorry for some poor dumb shmuck who got caught up in the sticky absurdities of a law. Mostly, they would think somebody somewhere should issue some sort of writ or affidavit that says he should be allowed to vote. Because he is who he says he is, and he’s not trying to pull any shit.
But they’re “demanding”, are they? Well, OK. then, tough shit for him. Nonetheless, I am impressed by the depth of your understanding of Texans, and how they think. Born and raised there, and not at all sure how they think. Or even if they do, half the time.
I very much doubt that is **Kolak’**s plan. I doubt even more that you actually believe that it is.
I happen to agree with the idea that these laws ought to make it pretty easy to get an ID. I don’t agree with all the lamentations over the “People will have to take off work! And walk a hundred miles up hill!” stuff. That seems overblown, meaning perhaps there are individual cases where the simple act of obtaining ID is an insurmountable obstacle from a reasonable man’s perspective, but they feel like outliers–no law impacts everyone the same. The same reasonable man could conclude the law is serviceable if such things are rare.
But the other requirements, while not draconian, do seem to me to be more than trivial for some people. If it were me, if I were the King of Texas, I would make obtaining birth certificates free, for example. I do think there are some people that can’t find 'em, and I tend to think the poor have the worst of this. Or maybe install a board that reviews individual cases and issues IDs supported by alternate evidence if a specific circumstance warrants it. Maybe such applicants have to provide a fingerprint for the state records, in case someone is trying some shenanigans.
But that’s my opinion, and I think a reasonable person could disagree.
Perhaps this is elitist of me, but I also think this guy’s specific situation is more typical of a poor guy’s. We were middle class, at first maybe lower in that range, but middle class nonetheless. And my parents kept the records in order. I could still get my hands on my birth certificate (or my baptism certificate, and probably my vaccination records when I was 7 and probably the pamphlet with my name in it from the 4th grade semi-finals for the area spelling bee). Poor people have other things to worry about. I can recall that we had to dig out the birth certificate a number of times. To get working papers, to apply for a particular program, that kind of thing. It came up for the sort of things we middle class people dealt with, and the name on the certificate was never a surprise. I would be shocked to find out anyone in my circles suddenly discovering they had a different legal name than the name they’d been carrying around for 45 years.
But, as Bricker points out, Texas disagrees with me, and I don’t think the measures they’ve installed are clearly over a line or unconstitutional, and they certainly weren’t for the guy in question. My point was that if someone wants to present an example of someone who will not be able to vote because of the voter ID law, they probably want to use someone who, well, will not be able to vote because of the voter ID law. And, even more powerful, demonstrate that this would not be an outlier. This guy already spent the $23. It is completely up to him whether he can vote or not. This example is a fail.
18 months ago I had to get my birth certificate from my state of birth. I’m 54 and it’s the first time I’ve needed it. It took weeks and several long distance phone calls and 50 bucks or so to a time zone 3 hours away and when they finally got it to me, the birth date had a typo, invalidating the document.
I crossed my fingers and the organization requiring it didn’t note the typo. (I confirmed the typo and the state acknowledged it but rather than sending the corrected certificate, they required that I go through the entire process again. The clerk admitted that they were short handed and it could take weeks to process even with the clerk flagging the file for special followup.)
Now I’m middle class and have worked in bureaucracies before and know a few tricks for navigating the system. For “poor folk” - forget it.
I find it grotesquely dishonest on the part of ID advocates that when challenged on the difficulty of getting the underlying paperwork required that they shrug and imply that anyone that can’t navigate the process doesn’t deserve to vote. I find it immoral that while they’ll support spending taxpayer money to make themselves feel better about the process they won’t offer a solution that makes that ID process easier, claiming that they’ll have to provide concierge ID service. There is no reason why voter registration even requiring ID can’t happen at polling places alongside the voting process.
I just recently found out that although in the analog old fashioned birth certificate for my son, my name is spelled correctly.
HOWEVER in the digital birth certificate record my name is misspelled, even though I have the paper copy issued after his birth in the digital government records my son’s father is grube. :smack:
And it is proving a hell of a problem to get this shit fixed.
Thanks for all the stories about how difficult it is to fight bureaucracy, even for something as simple as obtaining ID. I have my own stories, though the most amusing involve Thai government bureaucracy rather than U.S. Those claiming getting ID is always easy are either
ignorant,
stupid,
lying, or
a combination of the above.
Paradoxically, right-wingers are more prone than rational thinkers to condemn bureaucratic nuisances, often inappropriately. On more than one occasion that a right-winger denounced difficulties with a U.S. official, I was able to walk them through it, and get them to concede that the official acted appropriately, and that any shortcut would have been a dereliction of duty that the same right-winger would have been happy to denounce.
And, as I stated earlier with no rebuttal, bureaucrats often can and do make exceptions: That’s a big reason why GOP voter suppression is effective: Likely Democratic voters (i.e. minorities) will be deliberately presented with more obstacles.
Is that directed at me? I already said it should be as easy as reasonably possible, and for Texas in particular, I think they should make obtaining a certificate free. But if we were to dispense with any requirements hampered by government inefficiency, we might as well shit-can them all. I don’t know if your experience is the norm, but if it is, that sucks. But it doesn’t change the fact that voter ID serves a valid purpose, IMO so long as the process is reasonably easy to obtain one. It appears that we are now shifting the focus to obtaining the underlying evidence for obtaining the voter ID. I think that’s a valid discussion.
But I dismiss out of hand the notion that we among most western nations can’t figure out a way to administer a practical voter ID process. You can’t buy a six-pack of beer in my state without a government-issued photo ID (e.g., a driver’s license). You can’t get a driver’s license without a birth certificate or a passport, plus evidence of residency and Social Security card. That’s the nature of confirming your eligibility for certain things. I believe voting belongs in that category. (And frankly, I don’t know how most adults can get through life in the U.S. without a form of photo ID without a multitude of things being impossible or extremely difficult–e.g., getting on a plane, buying a bottle of wine, checking into some hotels, etc. Yeah, yeah, I know, poor people never, ever do such things.)