Comment by dijonman2
4 years ago
I can’t help but see this as some sort of propaganda. Where’s the evidence this is a concerted effort against poor people?
You can’t do much in life without ID.
4 years ago
I can’t help but see this as some sort of propaganda. Where’s the evidence this is a concerted effort against poor people?
You can’t do much in life without ID.
"You can’t do much in life without ID."
This is a common belief that, to me, displays a serious lack of knowledge of the breadth of human experience. It should not be hard to imagine how people who are some combination of very sick, old, lonely, disabled or poor can have their ID expire and then not get a new one for year after year. Yet people seem to constantly proclaim this as unthinkable or nonsensical, as if only their version of a lived life is believable.
Some countries make it work. The key is to make the mandatory IDs free and easy to obtain. It’s not that difficult. When I need to renew my ID here in <random European country> I need a 20 minutes appointment, any document can be printed there so there is no issue with pdf and no need to fake a mail. Nothing to pay as well.
For the driver’s licence it was even easier, I just had to upload a photo and a pdf bill as a proof of address on a government web server, and I had it in the mail 3 weeks later.
Voting is a fundamental right. If you are going to require IDs for it, it follows that IDs are a fundamental right, and making them arbitrarily difficult to obtain is capricious, discriminatory and should be considered unconstitutional in a sane democracy.
It's not just requiring ID, it's closing polling places, discarding mail-in ballots, and a whole host of techniques designed to "ensure the quality of voters". And these techniques disproportionately affect voters of color and the poor.
Also when I was a kid (20 years ago) no ID was required to vote. Actual voter fraud is incredibly, vanishingly rare. But the lie that it is common is used to drum up support for these regressive measures.
https://americanindependent.com/arizona-republican-john-kava...
Not to mention having biased election volunteers look at your ID and deem it fake or a "different signature." You can take them to court, but by then the election is over, so it doesn't matter. There's so many ways for the Republicans to corrupt the vote and they've had great success in doing so thus far, so why not go deeper down that path? Who is going to stop them? Democrats who even with a majority can't get a caucus going due to there always being conservative democrats who are pretty much republicans and loyal to republican causes.
I'm astonished that anyone would advocate for voting without some sort of Id. If you cant drink, drive or get a library card without an ID you shouldn't be able to vote. The Id laws that states do have on the books are incredibly liberal in what type of Id is acceptable to vote . Texas, a state lots of people are quick to assert has suppressive voter ID laws, doesn't even require a picture ID or original documents. In fact even a copy of a utility bill is acceptable: https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/poster-8.5x14...
I'm not really advocating for it, but I am pointing out that for whatever reason this was apparently the way things were done in the USA for voting for a long time. So as astonishing as it may seem on the face of it, there is some historical precedent that it is actually a very normal idea.
But as I said, this is not just about IDs. There are a whole host of laws being introduced, typically by republicans, that do definitely have the effect of disenfranchising poor people and people of color, who tend to be the political opponents of the people introducing the laws.
Closing poll places for example. They will suggest closing down polling places in poor neighborhoods, using some extremely thin disguise over their motives. It seems obvious to any person who believes in one person, one vote, that the color of your skin or the amount of money in your bank account is no reason to degrade someone's ability to vote. But we see long lines at polling places, where some people have to stand in line for many hours to vote! An obvious failure of democracy.
And they strike voters off of voter roles, going after people with hispanic names for example, finding a "Rosalind Sanchez" and a "Rosa Sanchez" in some city and deciding, based on that information alone, that this is a "duplicate voter" and disqualifying one voter's vote from being counted.
There is a transparent effort to block people from voting, and voting with ID is used as a talking point to steer the conversation away from the more egregious side of their efforts.
It gets weird as an expat. I can’t get a realID because I don’t have an address in my “resident” state (the one I file a tax return in every year). When I visit and use my old drivers license people tell me it’s fake. So I go and come back with my passport. They’ve never seen one of those before, so they start to get cagey. I ask if my sharing my old military id that is expired might help them believe I am who I say I am and that I was born on X date. Sure, they say. But it’s expired so they don’t care. We return 20 minutes later with a friend who can buy the alcohol.
Voting is looking like it’s getting even more convoluted for the next election. In all, I feel less and less like my home country even wants me to come back eventually.
And yet, gun permits (photo-less) are valid voting ID, and university IDs (with photo) are not.