Yes, but you are in the minority. Most people believe that asking for photo ID as a condition to voting is quite reasonable. So as far as increasing faith and confidence goes, it’s a valid step. Why should your minority view be the one to win out over such a strong majority view?
And the majority holds this view because…?
And how will this measure prevent other close races from happening? Are you implying that voter ID fraud had anything to do with the close races in Florida and Washington State, because that’s what it looks like to me.
It won’t prevent such results from happening.
But when they rarely but inevitably do happen, we won’t have, hanging over the final razor-thin result, the spectre that perhaps that result was tainted by a few illegal votes that would have otherwise been cast.
Because of what happened in Florida in 2000. The entire country saw the presidency of the United States depend on the difference between hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads.
And demanding photo IDs would fix dimpled chads how?
And how did the entire country decide that Voter ID cards would solve that problem? Can you think of any group that might have been pushing that as a “solution”?
Not about voter ID. About using voter ID as an excuse to trim Dem voter rolls. Which, by now, you have been told maybe a thousand times.
Voter ID could be issued and required in a way that not only refrains from infringing upon legal and valid voters, but add significantly to the voter rolls. The Republicans are not interested in those options, citing a condition of extreme emergency which simply does not exist.
But they’ve moved on from this, and even the sparse pretense of legitimacy, and are now nakedly and baldly trying to bugger the voting rolls in their favor. It is a repulsive spectacle, and I would be assured if Republican were at least ashamed of it.
When you keep switching the subject from voter ID fraud to close elections and back again without warning, can you see how some might think that you are trying make people think that one is causing the other, even though you won’t say it directly?
Do those who oppose mandatory voter ID believe people ought to be able to buy liquor or cigarettes or cash checks or get on trains or airplanes without ID as well? Just curious.
The standard answer being that requiring an ID for those does not entail a burden on a right.
And to add(if I may) that adding such a burden should require evidence of such a need, and not just fleeting popular opinion engineered by one group or the other.
I have lived all over, have known lots of people, but never knew anyone without either a driver’s licence or a state ID (for non-drivers), or if I did I was unaware of it. It’s an odd way to live in the 21st century, akin to living without indoor plumbing or electricity. And like those things, we should help people get it rather than insisting on their right not to (this hints at why I hated that movie Beasts of the Southern Wild).
I also wonder how many of these people vote as it is; and aren’t they all really old? Hard to imagine this will all matter in a few years.
More from Hasen’s book:
Later in the same chapter, discussing the 2008 case of Republican Party of Ohio v. Brunner (Brunner refused to share with local election officials a file of “mismatch information,” about mismatches between data in individual voters’ records in the database of the voter registration system and their records in the database of the motor vehicle authority, because, in Hasen’s words, “she trusted neither the information nor the officials,” for pretty good reasons which he sets out; the Ohio GOP sued to make her; the HAVA required her to collect the mismatch information but was ambiguous as to what she was required to do with it, and also ambiguous as to whether any private party had the right to sue over the dispute):
That’s an interesting observation. I agree with the judges who felt there was no private cause of action. I thought the SCOTUS in Alexander v. Sandoval settled the issue of whether we could expansively read private causes of action into laws that don’t define them. (Hint: no).
The Brunner case went up to the SCOTUS, which agreed with you in a rare unanimous opinion, reversing the 6th Circuit and ruling that there was no private right of action here.
My opinion so far on this issue is based on my perception of the balance between the “avoiding voter fraud” camp and “not disfranchising eligible voters” camp. If my understanding is wrong, I’d like to know about it, but I think lots of people here would have similar preferences for what to do, if we can at least reach some agreement about how much of each problem actually exists.
So far from what I’ve read, the number of voters who vote fraudulently is outnumbered by the eligible voters with no photo ID by something like 1000:1. That’s off the top of my head, but from that, I had formed the opinion that the voter ID laws are a scam.
On top of that, my opinion of the voter-ID thing was that it was a hysteria, created by lawmakers who are trying to whip up emotions on a non-issue, while serious issues go unaddressed in every state. I don’t think this is just my partisan bias, because I always tended to have more of a Republican party view of governance, at least before that party got shanghaied by the social conservatives.
So can we address the relative sizes of the problems before we decide the proper way to fix them and if we need to fix them at all?
I just think ID should be required whether you want to vote or not.
"Are hyour paperz in order, mein Herr?" 
I know, I know…but if someone is a suspect in a crime and has never had any kind of ID, what do the police do with that?