Comment by monkeywork

I appreciate you called out the more fundamental disagreement here: "... the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness."

I think a lot of people miss this or pretend that the conservative position is just old-school racism (although it definitely is sometimes). But there are really hard philosophical, ethical, and political questions at the base of a lot our political problems. I think it helps keep people from arguing past each other if they can find out where the really "hard" part of their political disagreement actually is.

Progressive thinkers like Ibram X. Kendi believe every single policy issue must be evaluated on the basis of whether it happens to impact different races differently. Essentially turning the state into a gigantic social engineering project.

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-racial-crossroads/

One example would be a black neighborhood having 1 voting machine so that the line is so long there isn’t time for everyone to vote.

Meanwhile a white neighborhood has dozens of polling places, each with many machines.

The only reason gerrymandering works as a tactic in the first place is that neighborhoods DON’T have a statistically uniform distribution of the population. So “Steven and Sally live in the same neighborhood” is not a very good way to look at issues like these.

That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.

One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.

Yes, in aggregate -- the whole group, not cherry-picked individuals -- racial groups vote differently from each other. In 2024, if only Black people had voted, we'd have President Harris now. This is beyond dispute.

The nature of that ID is essential. If it used to authenticate someone for voting, which is a RIGHT, then every citizen must have a RIGHT to possess that ID. Not only that, but obtaining the ID must not pose any encumbrance beyond the effort to vote.

Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.

The only form of government "ID" that could presently meet the bar is social security cards, as every citizen has one by right. That is obviously a bad idea. There is no "move fast and break things" when it comes to democratic process. If something as important as this cannot be done right, then it should not be done. The right to vote is sacred and cannot be infringed upon, period.

As someone from one of those non-US democracies, the reason why we can mandate IDs for votes is because they're basically trivial to get, whereas from what I've heard of the American hodgepodge of state-level IDs and "this one counts while this one doesn't" shenanigans, that doesn't seem to apply to the US. Now, I know that over there, the several states are responsible for running the elections within their borders -- that being in the US Constitution -- but some states seem to try to (and succeed in) making it unnecessarily difficult, and that may or may not be on purpose. Civil Rights groups certainly seem to think that it is, and that it affects minority populations disproportionately, because of course it does.

For a point of comparison, here in Finland we require that a voter has a valid ID, that is an ID card, a driver's licence with a photo in it, or a passport. Now what if you _don't_ have one of those IDs? Easy, you go to the police station and get yourself a temporary ID, which is by law given free of charge. You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.

And of course there are other things outside of the ID issue which make the elections not rigged against minorities. Simple things like having the actual election day on a Sunday, the polling stations being usually in walking distance in cities -- people living in the countryside most likely have a car -- and that said polling stations tend to be in schools, shops, and other such places where people would be going anyway. Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.

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The US could totally start doing ID mandates, but the problem is that in the US, their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns, but out of voter disenfranchisement, which again, hits minority populations disproportionately hard.

The US could make IDs free and then make election day a national holiday, in which case the resistance to ID requirements probably wouldn't be as strong. Currently voter ID laws will suppress voting, whereas the goal in a democracy should surely be that everyone has ample opportunity to vote and have their voice heard.

Yeah other democracies don’t have the historical baggage of literacy tests and poll taxes and other tactics that were used to prevent blacks from voting for a century.

I’m not being obtuse here. Have you opened a fucking history book, or are you just purposefully acting dense for political convenience?