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votes
Why are voter ID laws controversial in America?
In France, we all need two identity documents to vote, a voter's card and a national identity card (or passport). It is not at all controversial, even at the far left of the political spectrum. In America, people say it's voter suppression.
Three reasons:
Access to getting the required ID. For example, in Alabama, back in 2015, the DMV decided to close a lot of its offices in areas that served a lot of black residents, while keeping offices that served white residents even when they made little sense. It was blatant enough that the federal government opened a probe into whether it was done with racist intent, and while the Alabama state government backed down and partially fixed the problem, it left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
Type of acceptable ID. For example, in Texas, you're allowed to vote using a gun registration card, but you're not allowed to vote using a student ID card. You can guess which of these groups regularly votes Republican...
Lack of reason. For example, in Alabama, a probe conducted by the attorney general during Trump's whole voter fraud scare concluded there were 34 cases of likely in person voting fraud between 2000 and 2014, or two cases per year. My own state, New Hampshire, did a similar probe, and found only a few dozen such cases; almost all of the cases were by accident, of people voting illegally when they genuinely thought they could do so legally, and adding voter ID wouldn't help at all.
Lastly, another reason why it bothers so many people is because the Republican party doesn't care at all about the possibility about foreign interference; they've repeatedly dismissed and refused to consider the idea despite evidence that Russian state hackers managed to gain access to several state's voting databases, and yet they care much more about false votes from its own citizens, despite proof that that isn't a major concern.
Now of course, is there a magical solution that could solve this? Yes, there is actually. Universal ID, that everyone is required to have, would end this once and for all. Conservatives would be happy since only people with a legal presence could acquire one, liberals would be happy since it would ensure every eligible citizen would have the ID to vote, everyone would be happy, right?
The Republican has historically opposed a universal ID program... On the grounds it would allow mass surveillance... *sigh*
Sorry for getting salty btw, I tried to stay clear. This is a really frustrating topic to think about... it has such an easy solution, and social security almost functions like one anyway...
I'm pretty left, but having Universal ID leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It would become way too easy for the police to begin doing random ID checks. This is already happening in the south near the Mexican border where just based people looking brown they have to produce proof of citizenship.
I agree with you but to play devils advocate, we already kind of have a universal ID: social security numbers. And they are the least secure and wosrst possible way to go about it. That's because they weren't really meant to be an ID, it just kind of ended up that way.
We have that, but most people don't have their SSN memorized and, if I recall correctly, the card says not to carry it around with you. SSN's aren't something that you could realistically be required to carry around with you everywhere, while having a Universal ID card could be. That's not something I would be okay with in the slightest.
"The result, based on a statistical analysis by Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post, is that there is now no correlation between DMV availability and race. Instead, there appears to be a correlation only between a county’s total population, black or white, and DMV availability."
One is handed out by the government with citizen verification and the other is printed out by a college without any regulation? I am open to accepting this as long they are regulated and forced to include address, photo, etc. like Wisconsin requires.
If you aren't fighting against voter fraud then isn't it possible that people are just successfully committing voter fraud? This is kind of ridiculous thinking and I can't see it ever applied to any other subject. That's like saying an electronics store should stop trying to catch thieves because only two people a year are caught stealing, and that the best way to prevent theft is to just not try and prevent it at all.
Why can't both be a concern? Im not really sure I understand your point here. I'm a Republican who is both for Voter ID laws and securing our voter data and voting systems against foreign interference. There are plenty of Republican politicians who also care about it but aren't participating in the "Russia won the election for Trump" conspiracy.
https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards
I would hardly call this a magic solution.
Also the "Minorities can't get ID's" logic is completely flawed. There are so many services which require a government issued ID in the US, including the social services that those in poverty most often use.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/15/14909764/study-voter-id-racism
"But a follow-up study suggests the findings in the original were bunk. According to researchers at Stanford, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, the original study was based on surveys of voters that are extremely unreliable — skewing the results. On top of that, several calculation errors led to even more problems. When the errors are corrected, the follow-up researchers found, there’s no evidence in the analyzed data that voter ID laws have a statistically significant impact on voter turnout."
And just for fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk ;)
Your own vox source says the laws are racially motivated and seek to give Republicans an edge, the fact that it may not be working doesn't make it OK.
Secondly, Fox News is not a reliable source and even if it was "on the street videos" are notorious for being heavily cherry-picked and edited. It's disingenuous to include it, even if you claim it's "just for fun".
Because of the long racist history of using voterID laws, among other things, to stop black people voting.
This, and how embarrassingly difficult it is to get the ID you need to actually vote.
There wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't so intentionally difficult to get ID.
The problem is that you generally need a government issued ID, and when the government issues an ID, it is actually a legal process.
When I tried to get my ID when I was 18 - not a driver's license, just an ID, I had to provide an original birth certificate and Social Security Card. Copies were not allowed. Thank god I had the birth certificate, because if I didn't it would have been a whole different ordeal. Unfortunately, I didn't have the Social Security Card. To get that, I had to go down to the social security office, and that quite literally took the entire day just waiting in a queue. With all the documentation I had to procure and all the processing time, it took about 3 months to get the actual card.
I see people saying things like that all the time, that law x affects certain people more than others and such, but should you even consider things like that when you are trying to make laws? Because a good law should be a good law in a vaccuum, regardless of current reality - that's what I think separates good laws from bad laws - it's really unthinkable for me how a nation, especially a nation as big as the US could have no voter id laws. That's an outsider perspective of course, but what stops people from commiting all kinds of voter fraud if you can just show up and take a vote?
It sounds incredibly reckless to just disregard the current state of things when imposing new laws. If you want to make sure the law has the intended effect you need research into how it would affect different social groups for instance.
In reality, the laws that are put in place are *not put in place in a vacuum chamber.
Pragmaticly, laws have to take into account who is affected. Laws don't and cannot exist in a vacuum. I am not even sure if they would in an ideal case. For one, creating a new law is driven by something and someone. Of course that isn't to say we shouldn't remove barriers that prevent a law from being applied fairly.
I can see your pragmatic point, but i disagree. You should have a model of the society that you want to create, and the laws should reflect that desired goal. I think cases like that hould have a tick-tock kind of approach to it - you should make a law that will stand the test of time first, and then after it is enacted you work out any current problems with temporary orders to relief all the hiccups.
My two-cents is that we're passed the model law making parting and now pretty much any law we're creating now is dealing with the hiccups.
except voter fraud is a pretty large problem here too