When I’ve registered to vote I’ve never had to prove my citizenship beyond swearing to it. I suppose I could – because I’ve got a copy of my birth certificate in a file at home. Do you?
I guess the IDs weren’t doing a good enough job disenfranchising minority Democratic voters.
Illegal immigrants in general are petrified about getting caught and returned. There is a real problem getting them signed up even for stuff they are allowed to get since they are so scared of the government. Thinking that there is going to be a problem with them marching up and showing id to vote is absurd.
Now, all the poor people who jet off to France for the summer won’t have a problem with this law, but I suspect that there are a few US citizens who just haven’t had time for that vacation and who might have misplaced their birth certificate in ten moves or so. I’m sure lots and lots of them will be thrilled to file for a new copy just to be able to vote.
I can’t imagine why Republicans would want to keep the people who have benefited so greatly over the last seven years from the trickle down from the Bush tax cuts from voting, though, so all hail this grand effort at protecting our polling places, no matter how many poor voters it will cost.
A birth certificate can show that so-and-so was born on US soil, and is thus a US citizen, a drivers license shows that the person standing in front of you is the same person on the birth certificate. IIRC this is also sufficient to get a US passport, which I has always assumed was proof citizenship.
No, a birth certificate proves that you were born a US citizen, not that you still are one. Some countries require you to give up your previous citizenship in order to be naturalised, so a small number of people born US citizens are no longer US citizens. (There are a few other ways that yoiu can lose US citizenship, but that would be the commonest reason).
Having a US passport is better proof, but, of course, a lot of US citizens don’t have passports.
I would loooooove to see this go to court and have the law thrown out because there really isn’t a reliable way to demonstrate citizenship. I have no clue where my birth certificate is, and as has been stated, it only shows that I was born in the US lo those decades ago.
Maybe I should rely on my paperwork showing the security clearance I hold? That’s probably my best proof of citizenship, since it is more recent than my passport, and very few would know what to make of it.
If the people of Arizona and perhaps Missouri are so concerned about tracking citizenship, perhaps they should support a national ID card. But seeing as how there seems to be a lot of overlap between the “get the immigrants out” camp and the “national IDs are the first step towards dictatorship” folks, I bet that wouldn’t be too popular of a suggestion.
(Note: I think a national ID card is a dumb, purposeless idea.)
Yes, of course not everyone has a passport, I was only trying to give a counterexample to the statement that ‘nothing’ proves citizenship. Can I ask why you say ‘better’? When would a holder of a passport not be a citizen? I would assume that renouncing citizenship also requires turning in your passport.
What I should have said is this: we have a system in place to verify citizenship in order to issue passports, can’t we apply the same system to voter registration? Don’t get me wrong, I agree that doing so would be expensive and would deter voters in a way that favors one party in particular. But this is different than saying that citizenship can not be verified at all.
Well, no system is foolproof. A former US citizen could just lie on the passport application, and not tell the nearest US consulate/embassy that they have lost their citizenship, and there’s be a good chance that they could get away with it. But we’re talking about a very small number of people here. Most of the countries that US citizens are likely to emigrate to and become citizens of do allow dual citizenship (e.g., Canada, Australia, the U.K.).
Nothing proves global warming, but the evidence is strong enough that it makes sense to take it reasonably seriously. Equally so, it doesn’t make sense to shut down every coal- and oil-fired electrical generation station in the country tomorrow based on the evidence we have now.
It’s even so with citizenship. Nothing proves it to 100% certainty, true – but different sets of evidence will provide different degrees of certainty. We can ask the prospective voter. We can require him to swear to it. We can examine documents that show citizenship. We can conduct a Top Secret-type background investigation on every voter.
All of these steps will produce evidence of varying certitude. What’s the right level of certainty for this question?