I have NewsHour on. Lot of snit about voting rights/voting fraud in the US.
You know the stereotypes, Democrats want to pack ballot boxes, while Republicans want to exclude undesirables from voting at all.
10% of country doesn’t have photo ID’s? If true, that has some potential for impact.
Aside: Both Gwen Ifill and guest Keesha Gaskins are having trouble with the other guest’s name–a Hans von Spakovsky. This made me laugh.
If you haven’t moved from state to state lately you don’t know how hard it is to establish residency . I have lived from Il to NY to Ca to Wi to Il to Mo in the past 55 years. All you used to have to do was turn in your old drivers license and get a new one and maybe a piece of mail and you’re ok to register to vote. Not so anymore. We just changed states again and had to provide certified birth certificates, passports, dl’s from previous state and a tiny little social security card that has printed on the bottom “For Social Security Purposes-Not for Identification” Hahahahaha my old dad is rolling in his grave about that one.
Indiana requires you to show a photo I.D. when you vote, and has some rather strict rules on which I.D.s will work. I’m a pollworker, and it’s not a real big problem where I work. We’re in a small town, not a large turnout, etc. But there are those few that come in and cannot produce an I.D. That’s fine, we’re supposed to give them a provisional ballot and they have ten days to produce the I.D. at the courthouse so their vote will be counted.
I can understand why someone may not have their I.D. and they want to vote provisionally. The license branch is open on election day so people can get replacements or new I.D.s, but sometimes a person loses a license and they don’t want to pay for a replacement, so they try to take the ten days to find the lost one. Or they don’t have their documents together yet. It doesn’t matter to me, I let them vote provisionally and let the courthouse sort it out if and when they follow up with them.
But every year, there are Republican workers that want to turn the potential voters away instead of letting them cast provisionals and leaving it to the full-time voter registration workers downtown. We have Democratic and Republican poll workers in this state, and I can see it every election day. The Republicans thinks anyone without a license or I.D. is undesirable and surely will vote Democratic, so they try to make them disappear, and the Democrats are willing to give everyone the chance to vote and let them find out if their ballot gets thrown out at the courthouse instead of trying to decide if they have the right to vote then and there.
I thought it was that in order to exclude undesirables from voting, Republicans were using the lie that Democrats were stuffing ballot boxes on a large scale.
Of course there has been ballot-stuffing in the past (not sure it’s restricted to Democrats), but I believe it’s been amply demonstrated that statistically significant impacts require methods that have nothing to do with voter ID. (Can’t find the analysis right now, but it’s shown up in more than one place–factors include the number of votes necessary to have an impact, the number of people involved, the time necessary to vote multiple times, the research needed to find person(s) to impersonate, etc.)
ISTM, one complicating elements in establishing voter ID, earlier also affecting the “enhanced” Driver’s License under “REAL-ID”, is the American aversion, nay, revulsion, towards the idea of a universal citizen/legal resident ID document. So instead we make people jump through hoops to prove residency and get a “compliant” ID (such as the Enhanced DL) or go to the other extreme and take pople’s word on their say-so and use documents that don’t really and never were meant to establish ID (the SS number).
(And BTW why the heck does Indiana of all places think that they’re being flooded with people rushing in to vote illegally? It seems it’s always Indiana…)