I go in for my annual checkup, and my physician suggests that I start taking a prescription drug to protect me from the effects of a serious condition.
Like a clever boy, I decide to get a second opinion, this doctor points out three things:
The drug is an effective treatment for this grave condition, and is extremely cheap.
I’m very glad that he can confirm the validity of this treatment.
It is generally safe, but there are anecdotal reports that this drug has side effects
This is interesting, but not necessarily conclusive. Side effects are a burden that come with most all drugs.
I don’t actually HAVE the condition that this drug is intended for.
This is where the whole thing falls apart. Asking yourself if the side effects are reasonable is a smart thing to do, if you have the disease. If you don’t, the entire idea of taking a drug to treat it makes no sense.
We don’t have a voter impersonation problem. The burden of dealing with the solution to this problem shouldn’t even be discussed, because we don’t need any solution in the first place. If you demand an answer… Zero. Zero burden is reasonable, anything higher is unreasonable, given that the law is not actually fixing a problem.
Is obtaining all the documentation to obtain a state ID free (e.g. birth certificate)?
Is travel to the state location where you get the ID free? For instance almost a third of Texas counties (as an example) do not have driver’s license offices (the places for these IDs).
It is free to get an absentee/vote-by-mail ballot, and almost free, in your sense, to vote early. As for taking time off – good point! Weekend voting now!
Ten hours in line at a poll is too much, but ten hours at the DMV is fine? Perhaps your partisan zeal is showing.
Please explain to me how an intelligent person can justify making it much harder for tens of thousands of people to vote to negate ten or fewer fraudulent votes.
You want to cause huge impacts to elections to stop a microscopically tiny impact.
Sure. But even then, there’s time required, as well as the time and expense required to get the necessary ID to register to vote, and the time required to actually register to vote.
Man, this is really affecting my confidence as a voter. Someone should really put a stop to these voter ID laws in order to restore it. Who will pick up this torch? If only there were a crusader who was interested in preserving voter confidence…
No. It must be a combination of two factors: not being able to measure the extent of illegal voting, and not being aware of the possibility – remote but present – of a huge consequence on a national scale. Florida in 2000 changed that.
You could as well argue that hijackers in planes are not a threat, because of the years of commercial aviation that went by with only a few planes diverted to Cuba as a consequence of hijackers.
Well, of course. Short of some kind of universal mechanically-assisted telepathy where you vote via the cell-modem implant in your skull, there is no conceivable method of conducting elections that does not require some kind of effort on the part of the voter.
Of course.
WTF is your point?! That is absolutely and completely irrelevant to the obvious and indisputable democratic principle that the state should minimize the burden of voting in all ways possible and consistent with ballot-integrity.
So no, then. Well, at least I’ve learned to verify first before diving into the knothole.
The voter who chooses not to wait has made an unreasonable decision too. There are no unfair burdens, as long as the court and/or legislature does not deem them so.