My understanding is that the right to vote is constitutionally protected, so all these laws don’t really have teeth, or a federal law would require an amendment to the constitution to pass.
You can’t “regulate voting” in that sense. That’s like regulating the military, or the USGS. They’re programs where the gov’t is inherently involved.
Banning black people from voting is a regulation. So is allowing black people to vote. There isn’t a “small gov’t” form of voting in the same way there isn’t a “small gov’t” form of aircraft carrier.
I don’t see Voter ID laws as inherently discriminatory. They can be set up to be inclusive. It’s just that the ones the GOP has been passing are deliberately not so. But ignoring that, in my view the answer is a resounding “yes”. The law has been properly passed and should be enforced. Government should not attempt to overrule the will of the people. Obviously voting discrimination is wrong but the recourse should be to convince people of this rather than seeking to subvert democracy.
As Simplicio points out, the government has to regulate vote counting in any case so it becomes neither stronger nor weaker with discrimination. The only factor making the government stronger or weaker in you scenario is the decision of whether it can ignore the will of the people. Those who answer “no, the government should not enforce discriminatory Voter ID” are answering in favor of stronger government. Those agreeing with me (which I expect will be a distinct minority) are standing for weaker government in this instance.
A government strong enough to function is strong enough to suppress voter’s rights. This libertarian idea that you can prevent tyranny by making the government weak doesn’t work; a government too weak to be a tyrant is too weak to be said to exist at all in any meaningful fashion. A government too weak to be a tyrant is a government weaker than an individual person, which is too weak to do anything at all.
A brief hijack to say I’ll agree with this statement by itself (while not presenting an opinion on Voter ID per se).
Political power, rulership, whatever you want to call it, abhors a vacuum even more than the proverbial “nature” itself. A government too weak to be a tyrant is too weak to resist a tyrant. Even if it is not directly overthrown, its power will be replaced by some other entity in effect.
Our government was specifically designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority. Most modern democracies have followed our example.
If the government’s strength comes from the legitimacy it gets from the support of its people, then people would have to vote for that tyranny. We do not have a majority of voters that would accept tyranny even if it meant they could get everything else they wanted politically.
Conservatives would vote for FDR and Liberals would vote for Ronald Reagan to avoid real tyranny.
If a government isn’t strong enough to be a tyranny, it isn’t strong enough to do anything; including keep the peace. It takes a strong government to protect minorities. A weak government doesn’t mean freedom, it means the law of the jungle.
As far as possible, everyone.
The desires of the people, including the people in the government, to not be a tyranny. The same thing that prevents the military from overthrowing the present government and setting up a dictatorship.
First, there are other rights that are constitutionally protected where ID can be required to exercise them. Secondly, registration is a burden on voting rights. Why is requiring registration constitutional but ID not, according to those opposed to ID?
I don’t think people want weak government, so much as limited government. Government should have great power to exercise its enumerated powers. It should have no power at all to exercise powers it is not granted.
Besides, the less a government has to do, the better it can be at doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Right now we have a government that no one man can possibly be responsible for, yet our Constitution elects one guy to do the job. So by supporting big government, we’ve given up democratic accountability. It’s never anyone’s fault when things go wrong unless the head of government was personally involved. Which is a great incentive to not get personally involved in anything that might be unpopular.