Shoot, 9 years seems excessive. Is the idea that it will take some people 9 years to find the time to go get an ID? Or are you just waiting for some percentage of old people who don’t have proper documentation to die?
I’ll say this. If Republicans, or anyone I suppose, had come out in 2009 and said, “Hey America, we think you should need an ID to vote. We acknowledge that in-person voter fraud is not a major issue. Heck it might not even be a minor issue. We just feel that the current election process is a little sloppy, and requiring an ID in the future will help button it up. We’re sensitive to the fact that some people don’t have IDs, and so we’re going to start an outreach program to help those people get them. We’re going to make IDs free for those who can’t pay, or free for everyone. If people still can’t get IDs, we’re going to adopt some sort of Canadian style “This person is really old so someone just needs to vouch for them” system, which we may or may not phase out 30 years in the future. To prevent this new regulation from tarnishing the current election process, we’re going to enact this law in 6 years, for the 2015 election. That will give you one major election and 2 midterms to realize what the law is and get everything straightened out. Thanks America. Love, Republicans.”
If Republicans had said that, I wouldn’t have given 2 shits about it. Sure, sounds good, needing an ID and all. I use my ID everywhere to prove my identity, it makes perfect sense to me. Go ahead. But they didn’t. IMO, the drive for voter ID was purely political, and all arguments about it deceitful. It will forever be tarnished in my mind. Even if they came out and said the above now, and added 3 years to make it the 9 of the OP, I wouldn’t trust them.
If they had 9 years, it still wouldn’t be enough for many to find the time and money to gather up their birth certificate and truck themselves over to their state agency to get their ID.
That it is. Home to many without cars, many who don’t have a copy of their birth certificates and live far away from their birth state. Home to many who aren’t allowed or can’t afford to take time off work to get that “free” ID. Home to many who live out of reach of public transportation and are far from government offices.
Home to many without access to telephones. A birth certificate can be ordered from the county of your birth online (online access provided freely by public libraries).
If we wanted to, we could ask all counties to make birth certificates available for free to anyone born before 1940. We have the technology to set up a single national website to facilitate this. Ancestry . com would probably do it for the free advertising. If we wanted to, we could use the vouching system as elsewhere for those rare people who fall through the cracks.
But for some reason, voter ID cannot be discussed rationally, for the reasons steronz so eloquently stated. The objection that some people can’t get ID is a bullshit objection. I’d like to see a citation for the number of people who genuinely have no identification and for whom it would be a genuine hardship to acquire it. I suspect it’s about the same as the number of people actually committing voter fraud, that is, statistically insignificant.
(That doesn’t mean I think it’s right to disenfranchise them, even if there’s only three, just that I think the objection fails on the grounds of logic.)
Say you’re a 70 year old widow living in the projects of Chicago. You don’t have an ID because you’ve never needed one. You think it’s no big deal to find a library with internet, get there. learn to use the internet, figure out where the website might be in say Mississippi to get your birth certificate, figure out a way to send money to some out of state agency without credit card or checking account, then wait for the birth certificate and find someone to truck you to your state agency? Multiply that by tens of thousands and these are who voter ID disenfranchises and who it intends to disenfranchise.
Have you also analyzed the purported reason for the law? What do you conclude?
Velocity, yelling won’t make the bedridden paraplegic able to vote in person in any amount of time, nor will it let a birth certificate suddenly appear in the files in any amount of time. But if it feels good to get it off your chest, go right ahead.
And the darkest person of African heritage could probably find a way to bleach himself to South’ren-acceptable-pink, too.
It’s not about your judgment of whether this law would be “reasonable” for everyone it affects.
It’s about the fact of excluding a segment of voters who don’t measure up to largely white, affluent suburban concepts. Voter - citizens - people.
It’s about ANY need for the law, given the extreme rarity of identity-based voter fraud, and the extreme federal penalties for doing so.
Address the real issues, not your/the GOP’s/squawk radio/Faux News’ invented ones. Establish there is any remotely significant voter fraud to be dealt with, then we can discuss what might be done about it. (crickets)
In nine years, a Republican legislature could establish an ID issuing agency and then, as a measure to reduce government waste, shut down “unnecessary” local offices. They’d even be able to come up with some standard that, on paper, is unbiased but which just coincidentally happens to shut down offices in areas with Democratic voting majorities.
Look at Texas’ recent new legislation on medical regulation - which “coincidentally” closed down thirty-eight of the forty-four clinics that performed abortions in the state.
The Texas legislature couldn’t outright make it illegal to get an abortion - but they could make it extremely difficult. And the same would happen with getting a voter ID if you weren’t in the right party - it won’t be impossible but you’ll find various regulations have made it extremely difficult for you to get the ID you need.
Seriously, you can’t imagine that some people don’t know how to do legwork on the internet and are never going to learn, or that can’t get to all the places that one needs to get to in order to secure that ID?
If the OP is asking whether the liberals on this board would oppose a voter ID requirement that imposed no burden on low income and minority voters. If it was carefully crafted, I think the answer is no. However the likelihood that that such a program would be put forward by Republicans is exactly zero, since the entire point of the such legislation is to restrict the vote. A system that was fair and equal would just involve the expansion of the governmental bureaucracy and so would be opposed by small government conservatives, unless unfair partisan gains came along with the package.
Incidentally, how long would the drivers license be good for? If it has to be renewed every 2 years, than it really isn’t 9 years that we are talking about.
Thank you. I am wrong, then, and I appreciate the cite.
I think the lack of access to ID is a problem separate from voting, and one we ought to solve. This is a HUGE number of people for whom the lack of ID is probably also a barrier to employment and travel. That’s a scandal.
And if you’ll read my posts, you’ll see that I’m in agreement that the current calls for voter ID are to disenfranchise the poor, but that I don’t think this is the sole possible purpose for voter ID. It works in Canada and Mexico, after all. It’s just that America clearly has other problems that ought to be taking priority over reforming the voting system.
If the law would also fund legions of social workers to assist people who need help acquiring that ID and if it would also accommodate those who can’t get to the agency office or can’t do so during their normal hours, I would not oppose. But there is no denying that the sole purpose of the laws as currently constructed is to steal elections for Republicans.
For those of you who claim that it’s too much of a bother to get the appropriate documentation to get a voter ID: how did they get it in order to register in the first place? (Seriously, if you want to stop voter fraud, make absolutely sure that someone who registers to vote is eligible. Of course, this still has the “if you can’t get your birth certificate, then you can’t vote” problem, but you have to draw the line somewhere - you can’t just say, “I’m eligible to vote, and you just have to take my word for it.” Why not? One word - Rajneeshpuram.)
On the other hand, (a) unless voter IDs are free, this can be construed as a tax in violation of the 24th amendment (remember, the “I don’t have insurance” “penalty” is considered a tax, so pretty much anything can be), and (b) there really needs to be some sort of “voter ID photo van service” to get to people who otherwise can’t get to the voter ID locations, which is just asking for fraud (“What do you mean, this ID is fake? I got it from the Kim & Khloe Kardashian Charity African-American Voting Drive van!” “Ma’am, you might want to check those first three initials a little more closely.” “K, K,…ohhhhhh.”).) Besides, as already noted, a Voter ID law would just drive up absentee voting - assuming, of course, there aren’t “rogue gangs of Republicans” who would go around stealing ballots from mailboxes on the day they are delivered.
I think it’s worth pointing out that during the debate over voter ID a few years ago, liberals would generally quote these big numbers of people who didn’t have government IDs – 10, 15, sometimes 20 percent. I know not all of those people were registered voters, or even the sorts of people who were likely to vote, but I can’t be the only one who was surprised when the actual decrease in voter turnout in 2012 in states with voter ID laws was “only” about 2%. I use scare quotes there because 2% is a lot, really, and inexcusably shameful, but it’s also not the 5-10% I was expecting based on the rhetoric from the left.
I don’t think anyone really knew what the effect would be, but considering that these laws were pretty much passed with intention of reducing voter turnout, with no emphasis on giving potential voters ample time to comply or to making the ID process easier or cheaper, 2% seems… anti-climactic. If the laws had in fact been more compassionate, giving people 4-6 years and making IDs free and easy to obtain, would we have seen even a 2% drop? I don’t think so. I think the notion that we can never pass a voter ID law because some meaningful percentage of the voting population will be unable to get an ID in any period of time is absurd. Surely it could be done. But alas, the people who wanted to do it had no intention of doing it right, and thus the well is forever poisoned.
The well was poisoned long ago, by our long history of efforts of various kinds, official and unofficial, to limit or outright prevent participation in elections by people of darker hue. The modern voter ID laws fit right in a progression from grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, closed primaries, and sometimes simple terrorism. More recently, we’ve had the suppression of voter registration drives by ACORN and others like it.
There have been the occasional inadvertent admissions by the laws’ proponents of the real (and obvious) goals, such as Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”