And thus the where voter ID has been upheld, proof of residence such as a utility bill suffices as ID.
You know very well that it’s a part of the US historical ethos, so beloved (albeit sometimes exaggerated) by all libertarians and most Republicans (and a some lefties as well), that we are unusually (globally speaking) hostile to the idea of mandatory, nationally uniform ID cards. Government interference in rugged individualism and all that.
(True, much of this hostility is more specifically about the idea that officials could force you to show said ID card at any time. But it’s still ironic that it’s a more or less conservative point of pride, from what I can tell, that the US is exceptional in not requiring a national registry. Some of these same folks still resent FDR for creating the Social Security registry system – which has come to fulfill many of the de facto roles national ID cards do in other countries.)
The reason we don’t have a national registry is because the states are sovereign and the federal government only possesses a limited set of powers that have been delegated to it by the states.
The states also reserve the authority to take away any, or all, of the federal government’s powers, should 3/4ths agree.
What? Huh? I don’t even…what? Da fuck? In the hell are you talking about?
Constitution 101, shouldn’t be hard to understand.
We have no national ID because the federal government has no authority to create a national ID. That is a state prerogative.
An ID. A card with your name, address, and maybe a picture. That’s the jackboots of Big Government come stomping into your life. Uh huh. Right.
You mean like the organ donor database? When you check the box on your drivers license to donate body parts if you take the dirt nap? Not even sure that’s a Fed program, but if it isn’t, that’s ok, but if it is, its tyranny?
You got some mighty strange notions percolating in your brainpan, podnuh.
Undoubtedly the most absurd sentence I have read this week. :rolleyes:
Are you referring to a Constitutional Convention?
I’m a liberal for a single, national ID as long as it’s free and easy to get. I already have a DL, passport, SS card, birth certificate and a host of other IDs and it would be so much easier if I just needed to carry one. When I move I could just go to a website and update my info and have it automatically register me to vote in the the new precinct. If I were a green card holder it wouldn’t let me register. If I committed a felony I would be removed from the roles. Pardoned?, put back on the roles.
As long as I need ID to do almost anything it might as well be accurate and convenient. We have the case now where people who share the same name as someone on a terrorist watch can end up on a no-fly list: even if they are different age, race, or sex. In Florida, people were mistakenly taken off the voting roles in some cases if they had similar names as a felon.
Could it be abused? Sure, but we already have abuse with our current system.
Many countries have a simple, nearly foolproof method of preventing in-person double voting – fingertip inking. I wouldn’t have a problem with that v
Unfortunately, that doesn’t prevent the brown people from voting, so it won’t satisfy the right wing extremists demanding arcane photo ID laws.
At first blush, neither would I, actually. Of course that doesn’t achieve the goal of making it more difficult for minorities to vote, so I don’t expect Republicans to accept it as a “solution”.
ETA: I see Fear Itself beat me to the same sentiment above. 
Well, one could use a particular pigment and then claim that anyone whose fingertip is that color has already voted and is therefore ineligible to cast further ballots… but that might be a bit obvious.
OK. This has been a bit of a personal windmill-to-be-tilted-against for me for quite a while.
So, I am going to put this in spoiler tags. (Because I don’t know how to do hide tags, I guess.)
As a summary:
[ul]
[li]Disenfranchisement undermines the entire voting process. The current furor over voter IDs is more about restricting the voter’s rights than it is to secure the validity of the composite of the tabulated votes.[/li][li]There are sane and relatively simple solutions to handle issues in the voting process.[/li][li]Voting should be a BIG DEAL with a national holiday associated with it. If we can do it for Labor Day, then by golly, how about Voting Day?[/li][li]Spirited (mean or otherwise) debate does not replace reasoned discourse, either here or in Congress.[/li][li]The folks in Congress are (for the most part) immoral or impotent and it seems that the folks who wield the greatest power court the influence of their least sane colleagues. And the worst thing about this sorry state of affairs is that all of it is OUR fault.[/li][/ul]
So here goes…
Disenfranchisement of any type, partisan directed or not, blocks a portion of the populace from directing their own individual and collective destinies through their elected representatives. We, the citizenry, are all supposed to be part of this process. There are noted exceptions: those who are below the age of majority, those who are not of sound mind as determined by a court of law, and those who have been convicted of a felony (again by a court of law). This may not be an exhaustive list and others are welcomed to correct me. But, by and large, you and I, the plumber down the street and her son serving overseas are all supposed to be able to vote. There are people who wish to make it more difficult for the folks who aren’t as wealthy as they are to vote. They worry that these not-as-wealthy folks will try to overwhelm them by their very numbers and vote in ‘bread and circuses’. And, they have the ability to manipulate things so that they do not need worry themselves of such things.
There are sane solutions to this problem. This isn’t hard to implement. As a young man voting in my first election, I rather nervously stood in line with the other people whose surnames started with H-L and when I reached the registrar’s table there was a nice lady about my grandmother’s age who asked me my name. I replied, “Gagundathar The Inexplicable” and she flipped to the page that started with “Ina…” and ended with “Ini…” I saw my name there! “Inexplicable, Gagundathar T.” along with my father’s “Inexplicable, Thorong A.” and my mother’s “Inexplicable, Transa T.” I felt a true thrill. There I was! On the voter’s roles. I was an adult!
Curiously though, as she gave me my ballot and crossed my name of the list, I almost asked her right then and there what would happen if someone else came in here to this polling place and said that they were, in fact, me. I imagined that she would have replied, “Well, if they came in first, then they would have gotten your vote.” As it turns out and as I found out later, that nice lady sang in the choir with my parents and knew who I was already, but that bothered me. I imagined what could be done to solve the problem. As a budding scientist, I assumed that there was a logical solution to this conundrum Yet, the logical solutions appear to be the very hardest to implement.
If you worry about votes being cast by deceased people or by a single person voting multiple times, then marking the thumb of a voter seems a very valid solution. If you are concerned with the validity of absentee ballots, then require something that can validate that ballot. We have used signatures to do so with other paper records in banking and commerce for quite a number of years. And, for logic’s sake, make the ballots easily imprinted by the voter and tabulated by the nice person who is doing this tedious task by hand in the backroom of a stuffy room in the courthouse.
As for electronic ballots, my personal opinion is that there is not a single system implemented in the USA without a paper audit trail that can be trusted as far as you can all throw it to the moon. The solution is, again, rather simple. The voter enters the booth and then enters her votes for her candidates and/or ballot initiatives and then is given a hardcopy of her votes. She reviews them and enters them into a reader that validates the ballot electronically. If there is a discrepancy, then she has a chance to cancel and revote once. Otherwise, she can call over one of the nice volunteers to help her. It is also paramount to require a random audit during every election to determine the validity of the system.
Voting should be something that we celebrate and make more a part of our civic life. One of the rites of ‘coming of age’ should be a young person’s first opportunity to vote in an election. We should have dances and parties to mark the occasion of our collective liberty. It should be a national holiday starting on a Friday and ending on Sunday. But, no. Instead, we vote on a Tuesday and those who care gather in taverns or around their hearthside widescreens to watch the results. The rest of us? Well, we go to bed early so as to rise once more to return to work or school the next morning. And we wonder what happened to us overnight.
The voting process should be a reminder to all of us that WE are supposed to be in charge. But, instead, it becomes yet another battleground. And that is what is essentially wrong with our current political climate. We have partisan participants in the panoply of politics who pretend that this is merely a game played between teams with nothing at stake but the conquest of The Other. I have seen it here on this wonderful forum and elsewhere.
Sane discussions devolve into mud-wrestling. And, in the end, it makes no difference. No person’s positions are changed in such a manner. We all pretend to be adults here, but quite a number of us react to opposition poorly. It is as if some of us are still adolescents living in angst in their parent’s homes. I find it distressingly uncommon for any of us caught up in such duels-o-posts remember that we chose to join this community to help fight ignorance (or at least, that is what drew me here.) I would remind each of us that there are no Internet Points awarded for swatting down another’s reasoned opinion by calling names, casting aspersions upon their perceived allies or employing the Chewbacca Defense.
In short, spirited debate is entertaining, but is does not substitute for reasoned discourse.
We wonder why the business of our Congress is filled with such vile contests between partisans who strive to undermine the plans of each other and never advance their own plans to counter them instead. It has been said that we deserve the kind of representatives that we elect, because in the end, they are reflections of the will of the populace. If this is true, then I truly worry about the sanity of our people. If this is not true, then we are already mastered by the servants we elected to serve in our collective stead.
Thank you reading my screed.
Only if you’re ignorant of our Constitution.
Cite? (And something more specific than “United States Constitution.”)
Cite the authority under which the US could create a national ID. The burden’s on you, not me.
Here’s what Congress actually does have the authority to do in that regard:
Of course, half the states have simply refused to participate, and you know what the federal government is doing about? Nothing. You know what the federal government can do about it? very little.
However, this article speculates that a national ID card that has a particular purpose furthering a compelling government interest: curbing illegal immigration in this case, would permit a national ID card limited to that purpose.
In this article, supposedly an early attempt at immigration reform during Obama’s Presidency involved a biometric ID card that workers would be required to present to get a job.
There’s also a neat little aside in the article about voter ID:
**A case with many parallels is 2008’s Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board. In that case, the state of Indiana enacted a law requiring citizens voting in person to present government-issued photo identification, such as a driver’s license, at the polls.
A federal judge said the evidence in the case did not support an attack on the law, and a U.S. appeals court ruled the “burden” placed on voters was offset by the prospect of reducing fraud.
The Supreme Court also ruled for the state 6-3, though the ruling came in two opinions. Each opinion was supported by three justices.
Liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, who retires at the end of the current term, announced the judgment in favor of the law and wrote one of the majority opinions. He was joined by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Stevens dismissed Democratic claims that the law was enacted by majority Republicans in the Legislature to keep poor voters, those least likely to have a driver’s license or a passport, from voting.
“If a non-discriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators,” Stevens wrote. “The state interests identified as justifications for (the law) are both neutral and sufficiently strong to require us to reject petitioners’ facial attack on the statute. The application of the statute to the vast majority of Indiana voters is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.’”**
Read more: U.S. Supreme Court: Justices might like national ID card - UPI.com
If, in order to stop a few hundred fraudulent votes, you are willing to suppress hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters, you cannot claim to be interested in a fair election. What you are seeking to do is disenfranchise the wrong kind of voters.
Same answer as to almost any con law question: Commerce clause. General welfare clause works, too.
But you know that.