Just about the only times I have pulled my ID out of my wallet for normal day to day activities in the last decade is when I was at the DMV renewing my license, or when the poll workers asked for my ID to vote.
Are you from Arizona? ID’s expire frequently where I’m from. I hear they’re good for 50 years in AZ, which is a huge improvement, but you’ll notice, 50 years is still not an entire human lifetime.
Bank accounts, on the other hand, are good for as long as you have money. And by the way, I got my first bank account when I was 7 years old, long before I got my first ID.
Yes, due to the Patriot Act, which mandates a customer identification program for financial institutions.
Accounts opened before 2002 didn’t have this requirement.
Also, bear in mind that 7% of adult Americans don’t have a bank account. A lot of these folks depend on check-cashing places, pawn shops, money transmitters, casas de cambio, and so on to get by.
Fair enough, but I wouldn’t group people who let their IDs expire with “people who cannot easily get an ID”
Not entirely, ID is only required (as part of ATF Form 4473) to buy from an FFL (Federal Firearms License) holder. You can buy from a non-licensed person without going through this process, and it’s legal in most states, as long as both the buyer and seller are residents of the same state. This is also known as the “gun show loophole”.
Because some people are legally prohibiting from purchasing firearms, and the ID allows the FFL-holder to verify, via the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, that any given purchaser isn’t one of those prohibited persons.
Voting is a bit different, in that there’s a registration process that skims off those who are prohibited to vote. ID is intended to verify that the person trying to vote is the same person who registered, as opposed to being used to verify that the registered person is eligible to vote.
Why not? And, it’s not “let their IDs expire”. All IDs expire, whether you “let” them or not. You might not have to show as much documentation to renew them (if you didn’t move, and if you didn’t lose your ID, etc), but you still have to take off work, find three pieces of a specific type of mail to prove you still live at your address, travel to the DMV, etc. It’s still an expensive and time consuming procedure.
Maybe in between the last time you renewed your ID and now, you became unemployed and disabled? Or your house burned down? Things that are easy for some are decidedly not easy for others. And things that are easy for you now might not be easy for you later. Why is this such a difficult concept for some people to grasp?
Sorry, but I considered not renewing your ID before it expires “letting it expire” You can call it something else if you want.
I’m pretty sure I never said it was easy.
I don’t know. If I had to guess I would say that absentee ballots are simply too popular with the public to fight against.
But certainly that seems more subject to fraud than in-person voting.
I know one person who voted fraudulently (a close relative of mine, actually). He registered to vote when he was in his early-to-mid teens, and gave his age as being about 40. He was afraid to make his age too low because he didn’t want to get tangled up with Selective Service. His intention was to vote absentee, where his appearance wouldn’t give him away, but he ended up voting in person (I forgot why). He said as he walked away from the voter sign-in table, the elderly volunteer manning the table said to their equally elderly coworker “they’re getting younger and younger these days …” 
I feel like the true answer is really unknowable. But I would agree that it’s probably extremely low.
I could see fraudulent votes making a difference in a Coleman-Franken or Bush-Gore type election, but not much more than that.
I still remember that day …
I was buying some liquor and went over the clerk with my stuff. She was focused on the items and noticed the liquor and said “you need ID to buy that …”, but then looked up at me and said “nah, you don’t need any ID”. Ouch.
Renting an apartment isn’t obtaining shelter? When I rented my last apartment, 25 years ago, I definitely had to provide ID just to have the leasing agent show me the unit.
(IIRC, I had to physically surrender the driver’s license temporarily, but maybe she just made a Xerox. Either way, I had to have an ID. This was in a deep blue state, too.)
I’ve rented apartments in six states and was only asked to show ID once, and that time I’m reasonably confident that something less than currently-valid official state ID would have been fine.
But even assuming the absurd hypothetical that ID was required to obtain shelter, that would only prove that at least one member of a household needed ID.
I have to agree there. It’s not like in-person voter impersonation fraud actually makes any sense as a strategy. As pointed out above, it really is a stupid, stupid, stupid crime. In order to commit one count of voter impersonation fraud, you have to either send in a fake registration (which entails knowing who might be on the registrations but wouldn’t register) or impersonate someone else (which entails knowing someone who registered at that polling location but who isn’t going to the polls). Then, you have to stand in line at the polling place, cast your ballot, then go to a different polling place, and cast another ballot there. Even just this much is a lot of work and risk.
And congratulations - now you’ve cast one fraudulent vote that voter ID laws could prevent. In the process, you’ve broken at least one federal law, and if they catch you, you’re in for a few years in prison. And what’s the payoff? One vote. Enough to swing the election for Mayor of Southwest Harbor, ME, perhaps, but the amount of collusion you’d need to actually swing a real election would require the kind of work that just can’t be done on election day, or the kind of conspiracy that would almost certainly be found out.
That’s pretty variable, when I was apartment hunting, some took my ID, some didn’t. My understanding of this is that they take it so that if you decide to assault the person showing you apartments while you are in one, they know who you are, and you know they know who you are, making it less likely to assault them. This is just a policy that many, but not all apartment complexes use, not a law they have to, and the ones with the policy do not enforce it all the time.
In any case, I know many people who have attained shelter without using an ID by moving in with friends. I have often had several people living at my house, and I am pretty sure I have never asked any of them for ID.
If they can show up in person on election day, they can show up for a free photo.
Its that simple.
As for paying for transportation, I’m more than sure both sides could provide transportation if needed go get someone photo ID’d to vote.
I would even be okay with a $20.00 tax deduction for those who need transportation to vote.
How did you know it was really them??!! :eek::eek:
They provide me with mail that shows their current mailing address.
I have no overwhelming objection to requiring folks to show ID in order to vote.
The ID in question should be issued by the Board of Elections or by whatever organization registered the person as a voter. It should be provided automatically as part of the process of registering to vote.
Now, whatever proof of identity is required by THAT organization in order to register the voter in the first place (which is apparently not as much an item of current contention), that should include a wide variety of “sufficient proof” and, furthermore, coming up with it is something that a person has a much wider timeframe in which to comply.
The purpose of requiring Voter ID to cast a vote — at the risk of sounding like a broken record — appears to be voter intimidation of folks less likely to be toting the type of ID required.
No. It’s not. You’re oversimplifying a situation that you don’t seem to know very much about. Why not ask the various people who tried to vote but couldn’t as a result of these programs?
Sure. :rolleyes: A tax deduction. I mean, why though, when they could just as easily take an early withdrawal from their 401k? Or simply liquidate a few of their assets?
Let them eat cake, bro.
Most people I know vote before or after work. Are your hypothetical free photographers going to be available in those time slots?
They already do, don’t they? Its is a central dogma of tighty righty mythology that they are the majority, always have been. If nothing else, at least the majority of real Americans. So, it follows that the only way they can lose elections is treacherous skulduggery.
They were not shocked by Il Douche’s absurd claim that there were three to five million illegal votes for HRC…they already believed it! It wasn’t “WTF are you babbling about, peckerhead?” It was “Yeah, you tell 'em!”