I’m talking about clients I’ve had and others I’ve heard about.
One woman was a 68-year-old born and adopted in Puerto Rico. She had a PR birth certificate, but it was invalidated when PR invalidated all of their birth certificates in 2010. She could not obtain a replacement with the other ID she had unless she flew to PR. That’s true for a lot of Puerto Ricans.
Another was an elderly African American woman who had her purse stolen with her identity documents in it. The DMV couldn’t help her obtain the necessary replacement documents or direct her where to go. Without lawyers, she might not have been able to sort out the process, and even with them, the process was far beyond “reasonable effort.”
I’m not talking about who has ID, but who has the most difficulty getting it. It tends to be people whose names don’t match their birth certificate or who don’t have a birth certificate or other core identity document like a Social Security card. This disproportionately affects the elderly, African-Americans, and Puerto Ricans, for reasons both historical and recent.
It’s not free though, as mentioned. Most people have to take a day off work just to get the ID, even if they don’t have to pay a fee at the DMV. That’s after doing the same thing to get their social security cards, birthday certificates, etc, which aren’t free. And they have to pay for transportation to all these places. You’ll find that for poor or disabled people, that can run into the hundreds of dollars if not more.
And that’s if it’s even possible to get in the first place. I knew a guy who couldn’t get his birth certificate without ID, but couldn’t get his ID without a birth certificate. Eventually they let him use a signed affidavit from his doctor swearing he was him to get the birth certificate, but guess who often won’t have a doctor at all? Poor people.
To use your analogy, it would be as if the bank decided it wanted a new type of ID to be used for opening or accessing accounts. People who had used their previous form of identification for all of their lives will no longer be able to open or access accounts. The new ID isn’t hard to get, and for most people, it is below trivial. However, it is not to all people, and the people for whom it is hard to get are the exact people that the bank does not want as customers anymore.
Just as republicans keep saying that voter ID isn’t about disenfranchisement, but about “election integrity”, democrats keep pointing out that it is not Voter ID they have a problem with, but the manner in which it is implemented.
Anyone who brings up the democratic opposition to voter ID either does not, or is pretending not to, understand this distinction.
Only if people stay poorly informed on the issue, and think that the only reason to oppose the implementation of Voter ID is because you want illegal votes.
It is possible that people will stay misinformed on the issue, but I feel it is my duty to inform people about it, and not to disseminate false information, that makes people realize that their “reasonable” position lacked nuance, and on a second look will realize that the implementation of voter ID has been done for cynical and partisan reasons. Any reasonable and honest person, once informed on the issue would see that it is more nuanced than it appears on the surface, and would be happy with a voter ID system that did not make it harder for people to vote.
It does seem as thought the integrity of our elections is a bit problematic. The problem is, is that focussing on voter ID is much work with little gain.
Is there a reason, do you think, that other avenues of voter fraud, like absentee ballots, are not being addressed by republicans concerned about election integrity?
If someone doesn’t have an ID, how can their name not match their birth certificate? Can’t the ID just have the name on their birth certificate?
How do these elderly people receive Social Security benefits, or see a doctor, or pick up prescriptions without an ID? (serious question I’ve wondered about since the ID related threads. Whenever I go to the doctor, I have to show an ID. And I have to show an ID to pickup any medications from a pharmacy)
Oh, and this process? It took months. Months of wasted back and forth driving and phone calls for competing bureaucracies to finally agree on a workaround for their incredibly inflexible policies. Imagine if his ID had expired in October of an election year and he just found out he had lost his birth certificate? That’s a middle class white guy who is disenfranchised that year.
If it was that hard for him, imagine a poor, elderly woman with mobility issues on a fixed income. Or a single mom with two jobs?
And you also have to keep in mind that all of this work is not really getting the potential voter all that much.
On an individual level, voting is one of the least effective ways of giving your voice as to preferred social policy. Spending the time and money required to get a voter ID on nearly anything else will give your life more meaning and pleasure than spending the time and money so that you can stand in line for a few hours, and register your opinion at a polling place once every few years.
As a society, having a voting populace is important, so it is in society’s best interest to ensure as many people can and do vote as possible. As an individual, voting only makes sense if it is not too inconvenient.
Because “free” photo ID is never quite free. Even assuming that you can just turn up at the DMV with a birth certificate, you still have to get to the DMV. Where I used to live in the USA, this was something like 20-30 miles with no applicable public transit. In Texas, a voter ID law was struck down specifically because some people had to travel upwards of 120 miles each way to get to the nearest place they could get photo ID.
So you have to find a way to get there, plus this has to be during the hours the DMV is open - usually business hours, so if your transit is long, you’re going to have to take time off work. Then there’s getting your birth certificate, which can be a bit of an ordeal, and is also not free. If you were born in Puerto Rico, your birth certificate expired in 2010, and in order to get it renewed, you need a photo ID card, so you’re just shit outta luck.
Even ignoring the fringe cases where getting photo ID is just straight-up impossible (of which there are likely still more than actual documented cases of in-person voter impersonation fraud), what you’re left with is a whole lot of people (people who largely lean democrat) who have to jump through more annoying hoops, and for what? The kind of voter fraud that photo ID laws prevent almost doesn’t exist.
This is directly contrary to all available evidence; do you have a cite? Double voting and impersonation fraud don’t even remotely make sense. Like, you’d have to be a gigantic idiot to do it. You put in a ton of extra work for the sake of one extra vote - and that extra vote can net you years in prison. You’d have to be a complete moron to take those odds. What makes you think it’s common?
Okay, how many orders of magnitude are they off by? 1? 2? Even if there were one hundred times as many unsubstantiated cases that all turned out to be legit, the math still wouldn’t work.
You generally need multiple forms of ID (utility bill, student ID, whatever) in addition to the core document like a birth certificate. The mismatch emerges from those.
It’s a problem for them. In the case I know the most, she had been seeing the same primary physician for decades (who did not require her ID) but he died and his successor started asking for ID. That’s how she came onto our radar in the first place. She had a Social Security card and received Social Security checks, but that was not sufficient core ID to get a voter ID in the absence of a birth certificate.
Once you have a bank account, you can get an ATM card and do all the depositing/cashing you want with that card.
In general, I find the "You need the ID to do X, therefore you should have one to do Y to be inconclusive. It could be that the burdens of obtaining the ID for X and obtaining the ID for Y are quite different. To me, it carries no more weight than the equally silly “If you have to get drug tested to work why don’t you need to get tested for welfare?”
You don’t need an ID to get a protest permit. You don’t need ID to gamble, drink, smoke, etc. unless you look young. You don’t need ID to rent or buy a house or buy a cell phone.
Some of the ways you do these things require ID. Many do not, as evidenced by the thousands of people who survive OK without ID.
Well, for one thing, IDs expire. Meaning, they could have gotten through the vast majority of their life just fine, but now, at this time, this election season, they can’t.
Not to mention, “obtaining food and shelter” isn’t on the list, which is basically all you need to “get through life”. The rest is optional.
I’m sure every one of those people who are or will be disenfranchised by voter ID laws have a different story. I won’t try to generalize. Just use a little imagination, and the law of large numbers, and you’ll easily convince yourself that this is a significant problem with those laws.