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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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Trump appears to be embracing his role as the late Republic's Gracchus.

I missed this announcement the first time around buried as it was under all the talk about Iran but it looks like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act may be moving to a vote and Trump has "tweeted" that he will refuse to sign other bills until it pases. The SAVE act is a measure that would require individuals to furnish proof of citizen when registering to vote, and significantly curtail the circumstances under which absentee and mail-in voting are allowed. Strictly speaking these rules would only be binding for federal elections but as the majority of precincts bundle their, federal, state, and municipal ballots together for cost reasons it's going to effect all elections except those in states that spend the extra time and resources to run federal and local in parallel rather than together. Naturally the GOP has framed this in terms of election integrity, while the Democrats frame it as an attempt to disenfranchise the under privileged, and (a bit ironically) usurp state authority.

This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out. This is the same Fulton County that was the subject of a "conspiracy theory" alleging that after a broken water main had supposedly forced counting to be suspended for the night only for the poll workers to resume counting after the candidates' representatives had left. It's probably just a coincidence but it feels noteworthy that Biden won the State of Georgia by a little under 12k, IE just over half the number of allegedly dubious ballots.

For those who didn't recognize the historical allusion in the opening line, in latter part of the second century BCE the Roman republic was wracked with civil and economic unrest prompted in part by the importation of cheap foreign (slave) labor undercutting local wages and the ability of smaller family-owned farms to compete with large commercially owned estates. Tiberius Gracchus was a scion of wealth and privilege, the grandson of Scipio Africanus, he ran for the position of Tribune of the Plebes on a platform of Land Reform. The Senate used every procedural trick in the book the could to thwart him only for Gracchus to retaliate by famously(infamously?) using his veto powers to gridlock the senate until they acquiesced.

"Having to show ID/proof of citizenship to vote" is one of those things that even when I was quite left-wing I didn't think was at all unreasonable.

That’s the motte. It’s quite reasonable, at least after a few decades of civil rights reform, which is why 36 states already have it.

The bailey is that most of those states aren’t doing enough. Even the ones with strict photo ID. They won’t be doing enough unless they massively expand their verification processes, retain extra documents, and also let Homeland Security look through their voter lists to find names which look too Hispanic similar to someone who got deported. Also, they have to do this NOW.

Seriously. Only five states offer an ID that also shows citizenship. The rest have to photocopy and store your extra documents. Only one state has a strict enough photo requirement. If this is so urgent, so important, why have all these legislatures not done something about it already? I live in Texas, which has been tying itself in knots to polish Trump’s ego. Apparently we’ve been slacking.

I support a universal, free citizen ID. I wouldn’t mind bringing all states up to the policy of those 36. I can’t support an attempt to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. As usual, it’s shameless.

I am quite left wing you might say, and I am against it for now; given who is asking for it and how they are asking. Mister ""find 11,780 votes" wants to put his spoon in? I wonder why.

That said, the instant we pick an ID (SSN or TIN, medicare, Drivers License, Passport card, there are so fucking many) and make it mandatory, free, and universally accepted, I will instantly flip. I'm tired of having that thang on me (my stack of government proof I exist) every time I do anything sufficiently financial, shuffling through a binder of documents like I'm trading pokemon cards.

Usually the full fat passport is enough, but sometimes ... Do you want my SSN card? Not that SSN card, huh? You don't like this one? It doesn't elicit joy? How bout some bank statements? Phone company bill! Bitch, it isn't 1985 anymore!

I’m not really that convinced by the argument that these kinds of IDs are hard enough for legal Americans to get that we should somehow be aghast at the idea that someone would have to produce proof of citizenship and identity for voting.

For one thing, just going about modern life requires this sort of thing all the time. You can’t open a bank account, drive a car, get a job, or get on an airplane without proving that you are who you say you are. I can’t even walk into a casino without proving my identity and age. Which brings up the question of exactly how people can go around and survive in 21st century America without having a valid ID in some form. The biggest change here is that the ID would also have to prove citizenship. This isn’t a big deal for the 99% of Americans with jobs and cars and bank accounts. Most of them will have ID and while you might need some proof of citizenship, it’s not particularly difficult to do so. And really I think a single passport card would actually eliminate the Pokémon problem simply because it’s one universally accepted card that any entity would accept as proof of identity and citizenship and so on.

I hate both the parties for not cramming the compromise of "voter ID requirements + support for poor individuals to get IDs" down the other party's throat.

Fuck the dems for not caring about the quality of life of someone without an ID. And fuck the repubs for not being willing to fork out some money to secure our elections.

I am quite left wing you might say, and I am against it for now; given who is asking for it and how they are asking. Mister ""find 11,780 votes" wants to put his spoon in? I wonder why.

More or less summarizes my view on this. Voter ID proposals are facially reasonable, but the details inevitably end up being extremely questionable. The motte is "of course we should have voter ID, are you crazy?" and the bailey is a parade of capricious provisions aimed at making it harder to vote.

A perennial problem in US politics is that a lot of people simultaneously want the population to be less legible so the government has a harder time doing stuff they don't like but also want to do things that require making the population more legible.

So fix those problems. It’s like saying “well lines at the DMV are long, so we can’t require people to get a driver’s license before driving a car.” That doesn’t follow. What should happen is you hire people for the DMV offices, automate as much as possible so people can get licensed to drive. Not being able to stop all murder is a terrible reason to legalize murder.

I was more for voter ID until I've seen the complete fiasco that the NC DMV has been under for over a year. Look for yourself with the appointment scheduler, it's basically impossible to get one in many areas. And they cut the hours even more now and thinned down how far out you can book so you have to constantly be checking even more

I managed to snag a spot at my local DMV after checking for about a week in October for my disabled uncle to get a state ID when he moved here and it was all the way till January. And no, you can't do walk-ins anymore cause they're all busy with the appointments (that you still have to wait there for because of course). I would have gotten a real ID for flying a bit ago, but just went with using my passport from a few years back domestically because it's such a fiasco now.

I live in Coastal Comi-fornia, so every time I go east a bit past Vegas and before I hit the WASPy zone to the North, I'm shocked by how third world the rest of the US is.

I hear all this shit about "crumbling infrastructure" and I'm like, A: what infrastructure and B: What crumbling, forgetting I'm in the all roads no bridges no brakes and also everything gets repaved and rebuilt on a 10 year cycle permanent construction state, and most of the rest of the country is in the "We cut taxes so much on the 10 rich car dealership owners/ 1800's style Local Bosses that there's no money, simply fill the pothole with your bodies.

I was more for voter ID until I've seen the complete fiasco that the NC DMV has been under for over a year.

I lost mine recently and I'm considering opting for a non-RealID and just carrying my passport those rare times I fly.

That, or drive to Nags Head I guess. LOL.

Some kind of proper ID would be great because it's inconvenient both for the person applying and the person processing the application to have to deal with "okay we need this physical piece of paper with your address on it, no that physical piece of paper won't do" (there was a case of someone applying for social housing who tried using 'address envelope from magazine subscription' as proof of address and got very het-up when we wouldn't accept it. The reason, in part, why it wasn't accepted was local knowledge; the applicant was trying to claim they were living in a shed on family property and had no other accommodation, while we knew the family house was large enough that they could live inside and probably were living inside and were not in technical need).

Irish government tried this with the Public Services Card as a universal ID card but the Usual Suspects put the kibosh on it as an identity card for the usual reasons. So now there's the ironic situation where a state-issued photo ID card can't be used as proof of identity, but if you have a photo ID card from an employer or a passport, sure that's fine!

I know part of the objection is that people could lie about the details on the official ID card, but if they're gonna lie, they'll lie anyway about driver's licence or passport or the likes.

I'm tired of having that thang on me (my stack of government proof I exist) every time I do anything sufficiently financial, shuffling through a binder of documents like I'm trading pokemon cards.

Huh. I had to do that to get my non-real-ID New Jersey license -- was actually pretty funny as I was forewarned that they were extremely picky so I brought a shitload of documentation, I'd put something down, they'd say "no", and I'd move on to something else. But most of my financial stuff has been done with no ID at all, just giving over my totally-not-for-identification-purposes-LOL SSN.

I think a passport card would work under the new law -- it's a Real ID which shows citizenship. I have one because it was easier to get that from the Feds (by mail) than to get a real-ID NJ license (which requires an appointment in person at one of a few centers)

Why am I not surprised that NJ has a completely dysfunctional setup?

I had a several year stint in NJ years ago, I tried to change my license like a good citizen, showed up with as much paperwork I could gather - after waiting months and driving an hour to the only DMV with appointments. They told me I didn't have the right stuff, despite me researching heavily beforehand.

I kept my old DL for the rest of that Jersey stay.

Hah! I'm intimately involved with that licensing absurdity. Through my various duties I get to overhear the woes of state licensing supplicants; I am also a passport acceptance agent. From this I've come to learn that for most of my fellow citizens they'd have an easier time getting a passport card for the sake of RealID than bothering with the state's licensing apparatus.

To bring it back to the topic of discussion, I concur with @asdasdasdasd: my qualm with voter ID is the Kafkaesque (it's trite because it's true) task of getting ID in the first place. It's incongruous that I help issue RealID documents that provide more travel opportunities and have fewer and better-defined documentation requirements than state-issued RealID licenses do.

Almost everyone in the US has jumped through the hoops to get a government photo ID, you can’t survive without it.

Even this leftwing think tank admits that only 9% of voting age American citizens don't have proof of citizenship "readily available". Note the weasel wording with readily available. This is also assuming that the self-reporting of citizenship in the survey was accurate and not a bunch of illegals lying:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/millions-americans-dont-have-documents-proving-their-citizenship-readily

I mean why would illegals lie about citizenship on a survey? They’ll just not take it. Ain’t nothing suspicious in not having time for a survey.

I agree that "readily available" is weesel wording, but 9% is a lot! Even 1% could swing an election. I went through this myself once when I let my driver's license expire while moving. I had to go through an annoying 3 step process: first buy something online with my new address, then use that to get a cell phone bill at my new address, then use that to get a new Drivers license. All of which involves hassle and waiting.

I've gone through that same process, repeatedly. In fact I moved last year, and was unable to vote in my local primaries because I didn't get my paperwork taken care of fast enough, I didn't feel like my rights were being infringed on as a result though.

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Even?

That legitimately sounds like a lot to me.

Like, how many would you think is a lot? 50%?

Like 20% or so? With a number as low as 9%, that sounds to me like the overwhelming majority of people that want proof of citizenship are able to get it without issue, and as a result it seems likely to me that that 9% could get it with relative ease if it became required for voting and they actually wanted to vote.

Though I would also have zero issue adding a law requiring ids to be completely free (i.e. taxpayer funded) if we made them mandatory for voting.

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At least 25%.

But really, it's more of a fundamental belief about the value of voting and what citizenship even means.

I don't think it's too uncharitable to say Dems are the Party of Vote Maximization- that anyone in the country should be able to vote with no verification whatsoever. 500 hobos voting from one building in Philly or whatever it was is apparently the pinnacle of democracy. Cynically, this has historically benefited Dems, and they drank their koolaid long enough to believe it.

I, on the other hand, think "competent enough to obtain a birth certificate or similar documentation at least once in their lifetime at or after age 18 and have an address that isn't an NGO office" is not so much friction as to be concerning for the foundations of democracy.

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The resistance to Voter ID on the left is one of the best, maybe the best, example of how signaling became weaponized and how to build a Motte-And-Bailey into the very DNA of a party / movement.

No reasonable person (sorry mods, but let me finish) could really have a strong stance against valid and secure forms of identification as a requirement for voting. Maybe there's some sort of argument along the lines of "secure IDs are too expensive and too difficult to get for people who, while citizens and non-felons, don't have their shit together." But it's a stretch.

Instead, the left does nice little sleight of hand card trick. It's not about the object of voter ID, it's about the real goal of those pesky rightists; disenfranchising qualified voters. This is why references to poll taxes and other Jim Crow era voting shenanigans are ubiquitous in the discourse. It's a way to hijack the object of discussion itself and redirect it into "THE RACISMS" pile.

A fun thing to do - something I've been doing more of of late - is to find your local leftist cat lady (who you've befriended, right?) and pretend to be retarded. Bring up the issue the way a retard would - "Hey, so what's like the deal with voter ids and whatever? I was just hearing about that on reddit." The immediate response is some version of "THE RACISMS" because that neurological pathway has been so well developed - anything to do with identification / documentation (oh, that's a fun word, isn't it) / registration is all "THE RACISMS" (unless we're talking about gun ownership).

To extract myself from any "boo outgroup" reporting, I'll finish by saying that this is a universal comms strategy used by all sorts of organizations, not just the political. People aren't good at holding multiple things in our heads at once and certainly not if there is complexity to them. We respond better to clean and clear associations. This is the whole psychology behind literal slogans. McDonald's' "I'm loving it" is literally the equivalent of zapping "MCDONALDS GOOD - ME LIKE MCDONALDS" to your brain. Politicians know that emotionally resonant issues are the power issues, so they want to re-route even minor ones to them whenever possible.

But the cost, aside from the real cost downstream (voting fraud), is that political communications are some of the most low signal, high noise forms of discourse. Sorting happens mostly at the tribal level (which is a close to Gospel as we have here on The Motte), and any sort of second and third order effect of a specific policy is never, ever really given consideration (again, with the exception of us internet mole people).

Wait wait wait.

It's not about the object of voter ID, it's about the real goal of those pesky rightists; disenfranchising qualified voters.

How is this “sleight of hand”? It’s the crux of the argument. Opponents really believe that the laws will hurt many more qualified voters than fraudulent ones. If true, maybe the stated object isn’t the “real” object.

I don’t personally think Trump is doing this out of racism. I think he’d gloat about disenfranchising people of any race or creed if they criticized him. But I can see why someone who already thought he was racist would conclude it was the real object.

secure IDs are too expensive and too difficult to get for people who, while citizens and non-felons, don't have their shit together.

This is exactly how the signature Jim Crow policies worked. Setting voting requirements that were easier for your guys and harder for their guys. People are citing THE RACISMS because THE RACISMS are kind of the most obvious comparison.

How is this “sleight of hand”? It’s the crux of the argument. Opponents really believe that the laws will hurt many more qualified voters than fraudulent ones. If true, maybe the stated object isn’t the “real” object.

They should be able to make the argument about the object of voter ID, then, without having to question the motives of it's proponents.

This is exactly how the signature Jim Crow policies worked. Setting voting requirements that were easier for your guys and harder for their guys. People are citing THE RACISMS because THE RACISMS are kind of the most obvious comparison.

This is also how literally the entire rest of the world works: if it's too hard for you to get an ID, maybe voting just isn't for you. Acting like race enters into the equation at all is basically agreeing that the racists are right.

They should be able to make the argument about the object of voter ID, then, without having to question the motives of it's proponents.

As an aside, I'd note that to some people on the forum, the motive is a perfectly reasonable reason to dismiss. See "arguments as soldiers" and "atheist quotes the bible to Christian" discussions.

But I don't think that's the central point anyway. We do regularly argue the object of voter ID.

  1. We do in fact look for voter fraud and that's how we've find out that a small number of people have tried to commit it and gotten caught.

  2. The amount we've found is so infinitesimal that the upside to implementing voter ID is nil, not even counting whether voter ID would have changed anything. Even if "the real number may be higher," the reason people don't care is that unless you had post-hoc knowledge of swing districts, the real number would have to be tens or hundreds of thousands of times higher than estimated (and towards the same candidate) to actually change the outcome of any major election.

  3. That implementing it to make people "feel" that the election is more secure is pointless, because the real root is usually sour grapes that their candidate didn't win. They'll just move the goalposts to claiming mail-in ballot fraud or such. Security theater is stupid.

  4. That voter fraud is already a low salience crime, because there's no personal benefit and you'd have to do it at a massive scale to accomplish anything. Even if you think "no one checks," don't you think that if you try to cast 100+ fake votes that the odds of getting caught would go way up just because someone recognizes you or for some other trivial reason?

  5. That the motive of its proponents does matter at an object level if they say they are going to do A and turn around and do B. Which I argue they have done and will likely do again.

The amount we've found is so infinitesimal that the upside to implementing voter ID is nil

Mechanically, how would you even know that, if you don't bother verifying thr voter's identity?

That implementing it to make people "feel" that the election is more secure is pointless

Why does literally every other country do it, then?

That voter fraud is already a low salience crime, because there's no personal benefit and you'd have to do it at a massive scale to accomplish anything.

Politics is notorious for being motivated by collective belonging. Limiting the analysis to direct personal benefit seems like intentionally blinding yourself.

Mechanically, how would you even know that, if you don't bother verifying thr voter's identity?

A combination of factors:

  1. In order to impersonate someone else, you'd need a bit of their information (which you could get, but would take time and this is a low salience crime). You'd need to spend time picking out people who don't vote and you can impersonate.

  2. Most states do check for some proof of who you are. The real trick the Republicans pull is suggesting that the fraudsters are also out here printing fake student IDs or something, so we can't have that. Gee, I wonder who someone who uses a student ID to vote might vote for. Or that the fraudster might get a hold of someone's expired photo ID.

  3. That Republicans have been beating this drum for decades now, and can't even come out with verifiable stories of people showing up to vote and being told they already voted.

  4. Mechanically, how do these fraudsters operate? Do they vote, go to their car and pick up a hat and fake student ID, and go right back in? Wouldn't you think if this were happening at scale a pollster would notice seeing the same guy but with a different hat? Or do they drive around to different polling sites?

  5. I once did some napkin math and suggested that on election day, if you were to use different polling stations to hide your crime, you could probably cast maybe 40 votes on election day. When most elections are decided by thousands of votes, you accomplished jack shit. Whoop-de-do. If there's only one or two people per election willing to even attempt this, it is literally better to let them get away with it and not turn away the greater number of people who might be turned away by Republican attempts to limit voting.

My strongest argument here is number 2. This fight is really over being able to decide which forms of ID are acceptable to vote rather than some ID vs no ID.

Why does literally every other country do it, then?

Lots of other first world countries limit free speech or gun ownership too. I always get a chuckle about selective calls to copy other countries.

Politics is notorious for being motivated by collective belonging. Limiting the analysis to direct personal benefit seems like intentionally blinding yourself.

You're overstating a nugget of truth. I didn't say there was 0 reason. There's just a tiny reason, a risk of jail, a low positive impact of a single vote, and a lot of time needed to pull it off.

Mechanically, how do these fraudsters operate?

No, the question was "Mechanically, how would you even know that, if you don't bother verifying the voter's identity?" You even quoted it!

From what you said it looks like you're assuming there's little fraud because it requires some prep, brings little individual gains, and carries some risk of punishment, but once it's actually done I see nothing about how you would prove it happened after the fact.

Gee, I wonder who someone who uses a student ID to vote might vote for. Or that the fraudster might get a hold of someone's expired photo ID.

The problem with portraying this as an evil Republican plot to exclude students from voting, is that students can just go an get the type of ID that enables them to vote. You know, just like they do in every other country.

Lots of other first world countries limit free speech or gun ownership too. I always get a chuckle about selective calls to copy other countries.

Same, I find it very humorous that American progressive portray Europe as some far-left utopia that every right-thinking person should emulate, that they routinely claim Democrats would be see as right-of-center here, but the moment you bring up basic election integrity they spontaneously erupt into a cascade of fireworks, hamburgers, and bald eagles.

Anyway, you have again not answered my question. Does this mean you think that the same European governments who are routinely repressing right-wing speech, are somehow requiring voter-ID in order to repress left-wing student voters?

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How exactly are you supposed to argue the object of a policy without questioning motives?

literally the entire rest of the world

No, it’s not. It’s really not. Lots of places allow a driver’s license, which wouldn’t be good enough for this bill. They also tend to integrate their existing database of citizens, which America stubbornly refuses to do, so they have a ready-made option. I daresay most of the other democracies are smaller and more centralized, too; everyone loves to hate on European paternalism.

How exactly are you supposed to argue the object of a policy without questioning motives?

What do you mean? I've seen plenty of discussions of say, the minimum wage, that don't assume the pro- side is explicitly aiming to drive low-wage workers out of jobs.

Lots of places allow a driver’s license

Not anywhere in Europe that I know of. It's the government ID card, or a passport, nothing else. I suppose I can't guarantee no one else does it, but driver's license-as-ID is a distinctly American thing to me, that,if anything, sounds more exclusive not less (what if I never owned a car, so never bothered getting one? Don't driving lessons + exam cost way more than getting an ID?).

They also tend to integrate their existing database of citizens.

The EU has no centralized database of citizens, but every EU citizen can vote in the local and European elections in the country they live in.

which America stubbornly refuses to do

That's something that can be debated, or added as a condition for supporting the policy. No need to go "muh racism".

I daresay most of the other democracies are smaller and more centralized

Individual countries are smaller, but not by that much. Germany has a population of 80 million. Russia spans a larger area and has 140 million. The EU is more decentralized, spans a comparable area to the US, and has 400 million people.

None of this strikes me as particularly relevant in the era of the digital panopticon anyway.

driver's license-as-ID is a distinctly American thing to me

You can vote with a driver license in The Netherlands.

every EU citizen can vote in the local and European elections in the country they live in.

EU elections are extremely weird in that you vote for a national party, that then has to join a European party to have any actual influence. So very few people actually have a clue which European party they are actually voting for, or even which European parties exist or what they actually vote for or against. In my country, the media have mostly given up on reporting on it, so the politicians can pretty much do what they want without the populace noticing.

No reasonable person (sorry mods, but let me finish) could really have a strong stance against valid and secure forms of identification as a requirement for voting.

Sure there is. If you want to make a process more burdensome, then there should be a benefit to outweigh the burden. The proclaimed benefit is reducing fraud. If in reality it does not reduce fraud - because the amount of fraud committed that it could stop is effectively zero - then it's just a burden. If it stops 1 fraudulent vote and 10 citizens, it's still pointless. The right pivots the conversation that the burden is very tiny and easy to circumvent, but it doesn't change that their preferred policy didn't actually do anything.

Would you buy and carry around with you a tiger repelling charm, even if said charm did repel tigers?

Instead, the left does nice little sleight of hand card trick. It's not about the object of voter ID, it's about the real goal of those pesky rightists; disenfranchising qualified voters. This is why references to poll taxes and other Jim Crow era voting shenanigans are ubiquitous in the discourse. It's a way to hijack the object of discussion itself and redirect it into "THE RACISMS" pile.

It's "not about the object of voter ID" because the object of voter ID is stopping something from happening that isn't happening. If you kept trying to further criminalize cannibalism I'd look at you like you were stupid or playing some game with me.

You're doing that thing where you take a reasonable argument but try to discredit it by making it about the emotional salience of the word racism. Yes, disenfranchising qualified voters is bad and I'm tired of pretending it's not. It's even bad if we ignored any discussion of race.

"The real goal" is a perfectly valid talking point when dealing with someone who categorically does things different from what they say they will. In 2013, a day after provisions of the Voting Rights Act got gutted by the Supreme Court, Republicans got to work making an election security law. Note that when making this law, they had already completed a survey of how people register and vote, broken down by race. They changed:

  • ID requirements - they already required some forms of ID, but accepted even expired photo IDs. They restricted the kind of IDs that would work, but kept some alternate IDs that whites use. Because apparently the vote fraudsters could also somehow get a hold of a bunch of expired IDs?

  • Same day registration - Notably not photo ID, which is the part always focused on. Sounds more like a way to stop people voting than increasing security. "The district court found that legislators similarly requested data as to the racial makeup of same-day registrants."

  • Out of precinct voting - Notably not photo ID, and not discussed. "Legislators additionally requested a racial breakdown of provisional voting, including out-of-precinct voting." If you vote provisionally, they check whether you've already voted before counting it.

  • Preregistration permitted 16- and 17-year-olds, when obtaining driver’s licenses or attending mandatory high school registration drives, to identify themselves and indicate their intent to vote. - You guessed it, done without ever suggesting we needed to do this. What does this have to do with security?

  • Reduction in early voting - also not photo ID, and also known that it was used primarily by black people.

  • Mail-in voting - This is commonly cited as a weak point in election security. But white people use this more than black people, so this wasn't touched at all!

Just such a strange response. I make an admittedly slightly uncharitable "boo outgroup" argument that literally gets a nasty gram comment from the mods (appropriate, however).

And then you swoop in and become a living breathing caricature of my outgroup.

I don't really know what to do here except sincerely thank you for your contribution.

I don't really know what to do here

Perhaps recalibrate what counts as a caricature?

Your post above was not actually arguing any point. It was just saying "Why would anyone oppose common sense gun control voter ID?" And follow a similar tactic where one simply sidesteps any discussion about the fact that mass shooters are incredibly rare to begin with and a smaller mag size doesn't really stop them by making the conversation about the supposed unreasonableness of opposing it. The correct response to this tactic is to ask, "You tell me - why then are you so insistent on this if it doesn't actually do anything?"

I don't actually care about 'THE RACISMS" except for the fact that if black people reliably voted Republican then the GOP would be all over expanding the vote.

You play this game of "Dems only oppose it because it's a tribal signifier." I'm saying that yes, "disenfranchising qualified voters" fucking is the real goal of those pesky rightists. And we know this because we've literally seen them do it, in ways that cannot be written off as election security, in recent memory.

To extract myself from any "boo outgroup" reporting,

My friend, if you notice yourself in a hole, don’t start trying to make it a tunnel.

The problem is that you’re beating up a strawman. Expanding that strawman from “cat lady” to “all sorts of organizations” does not make it a better argument. It’s still optimized for scoring points.

I’m not banning you for a colorful bit of sneering. But when you get that feeling of impending reports, maybe…listen to it?

My friend, if you notice yourself in a hole, don’t start trying to make it a tunnel.

The first rule of holes. If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, stop digging.

The words of a man who will never get to China.

No reasonable person (sorry mods, but let me finish) could really have a strong stance against valid and secure forms of identification as a requirement for voting.

Just see "leftist" Europe. Requiring an ID to vote is ubiquituous and it's a complete non-issue. Of course there is no separate voter ID as such but simply a requirement to present some valid ID (passport, national ID, drivers license or any other form accepted by the jurisdiction). Eg. the Finnish law merely states that the voter must identify themselves but does not specify any particular method for that. You can even get a temporary ID card for free from the local police station if you have no currently valid ID (ie. your passport / ID has expired and you have no drivers license).

Lets say it was a bit unreasonable.

Instilling faith in the 'sanctity' of the vote tallies is critical to the successful functioning of any democratic system, at any scale.

It seems objectively worth whatever burden it adds to the average citizen to make it significantly harder to cheat even a small quantity of votes. And its a very visible measure too. People should be more willing to believe and accept the outcome, absent other anomalies in the count.

And as long as there's a well-established and trusted method for obtaining ID, then its not even something 'arbitrary' like a poll tax or poll test, it really can't be abused to restrict who has the ability to vote.

Anyway, Democrat opposition to voter ID without any coherent argument for it has noticeably raised my suspicion/belief that they rely on some level of cheating to win. Adding on my experiences with Florida elections once they were made more secure.

I know, I know, my German statism is showing, but what ever was the counterargument in the first place?

Here there are campaigns to let resident foreigners vote, but even then they need to provide documentation.

The steelman, I guess, is that American elections are sufficiently Molochian that if the possibility (that you can stop someone from voting for your enemy party by making them fail an ID requirement) is put out there, someone will find a way to exploit it against people who constitutionally should be allowed to vote. The toolkit exists: you can charge money for valid forms of ID, or require a postal address, or make the process involve forms that are beyond the ability of the illiterate and low-executive-function to fill in and submit. If America wants to limit the franchise to those with $100 to spare, fixed housing, the literate and organised, then perhaps it may do so, but this seems like a change that should be performed explicitly through a constitutional amendment, rather than through the backdoor by people who will rub their hands and do the this-isn't-happening-and-it's-good-that-it-is denial dance.

You can moreover argue that even if we weigh disenfranchised Americans against wrongly enfranchised non-Americans who slip in under an ID-less voting procedure, the former should individually be given far greater weight as wrongs to avoid, by reasoning somewhat mirroring the "better n guilty men to go free than 1 innocent man to be punished" precept: one inappropriately counted vote only wrongs Americans by 1/(10s of millions) of an election outcome, but one American denied the franchise is one American wronged greatly by being excluded from the great civic ritual that tells them they are an equal member of their country (+1/(10s of millions) of an election outcome damage to everyone). This is a big deal under the Omelas-style non-additive ethics many subscribe to.

I also was under the impression (and very much [citation needed]) that historically, Anglo opposition to mandatory ID actually had a nontrivial undercurrent of Christian "this pattern-matches to the Mark of the Beast" thinking.

How do Americans even prevent people from voting several times in the same election?

Each state has its own rules so there is no one answer. But generally:

  1. You register your name and address, and your eligibility is compared to a database. Some states allow same-day registration.

  2. You are told where to vote. Some states allow provisional ballots where you can vote somewhere besides where are supposed to, but provisional ballots are recorded and checked separately to check for double voting or for recounts.

  3. Most states require some form of ID. Note that "voter ID" isn't just about whether any ID is required, it's about what forms of ID are acceptable. Some allow you to sign and attest that you are eligible to vote.

  4. Mail-in ballots have bipartisan signature reviews.

  5. States do track who voted

Source 1. Source 2

- Something something, there's no evidence anyone voted multiple times.

- Did you check?

- Lol, no.

An election process so very sacred, the mere idea of fraud is inconceivable. Thus, it is perfectly secure.

I yeschad to your first paragraph, but with regard to the last point - that may be a current among weird Kansas evangelicals, but the typical Anglo-civil-libertarian opposition to mandatory ID is more along the lines of "it's not a question of what the government pinky promises to do with it now, but what it can do with it in the future - plus, we can expect it to end up disenfranchising innocent people in a much worse way than something like slapping voter ID onto the existing system." This is very much a live political issue in the UK, where several governments have tried to introduce national ID and failed (voting in the UK also requires a government-issued photo ID, or a certificate from your local voting authority including a photo and the UK-equivalent of an SSN).

At least the version I heard in school:

In the American past, there was a group of people (Freed descendants of African slaves) who had a legal right to vote but the people running the voting booths did not want them voting. They created lots of ways to prevent this group of people from voting:

  • Some created tests with a mix of hard and easy questions, and required someone had to answer five random questions correctly. Naturally the people running the voting booth would make sure the easy questions were given to people they liked, and the hard questions to people they didn't like.

  • Others skipped the test and made a "Poll tax" which was set in a way that most African Americans could not pay.

This was frowned upon by the rest of America and some severe and broad laws were passed to make it impossible to require someone to pay money or to take a test in order to vote.

Democrats complain that most Government Forms of ID require paying a small amount of money to discourage people from losing theirs and to help offset the costs of printing the card and maintaining the ID system. Voter ID is then associated with a Poll Tax, which we all learned in school is Racist and Bad.

We should bring back the poll tax. Those are some of the oldest genealogical records of my family. It's also downright republican.

All else being equal, I would support a system where the only people who got to vote were "net taxpayers." People who pay into the system more than they get out of it. And some kind of adjustment for kids, like if you get child tax credit and that is why you aren't a next taxpayer it can be adjusted somewhat.

However, not all is equal and this would disenfranchise not only the stupid, lazy, and shortsighted disproportionately, but also disenfranchise specific racial groups disproportionately. Which to some extent is fine, in the sense that it only does so because stupid, lazy, and shortsighted people are disproportionately in certain racial groups. But I am also uncomfortable with removing these groups from having much of a say at all in how they are treated and recognize the moral hazard there.

But I am also uncomfortable with removing these groups from having much of a say at all in how they are treated and recognize the moral hazard there.

Your discomfort is why we can't stop voting to redistribute other people's money, it's why there's no voting our way out of this. The foreign hordes will continue to pour in, and they will continue to be allowed to vote and they and their anchor baby children will vote for more handouts like literally every single other race of people who have ever come to this country.

I don't want my country to turn into Zimbabwe, thank you, and that means keeping it Rhodesia.

On some level, we (the ancestors of our nation) brought in these people on purpose to exploit them, and now they can't return. It's like raising a tiger as a pet. Even when it's no fun anymore, you can't turn the tiger back into the wild because it doesn't have any of the skills it needs to live. You either make a tiger sanctuary, kill the tiger, or get eaten. We are somewhat choosing to make a tiger sanctuary, made imperfect by our unwillingness to see the question this way.

I don't know why you think there would be political will to remove the franchise from large swaths of the country but not political will to close the border. Closing the border would be much easier than shrinking the franchise.

The political will comes when people recognize the truth, and it comes in steps.

Of course, it must be noted that black voter turnout has not declined after voter ID requirements became stricter.

Black people do in fact usually have IDs. The people most likely to be loose in the world without one are professional white women who think their phone is a scifi universal gadget.

The people most likely to be loose in the world without one are professional white women who think their phone is a scifi universal gadget.

They would have IDs, even if they don’t always carry them. I would think the only people who really don’t have a government ID today are going to be dysfunctional hobos/junkies, and extremely “off the grid” types. But yeah, the idea that there’s this massive number of black people (even more so, black people who vote) who don’t have IDs is a nonsensical caricature. Something something DR3.

As an aside, I made friends with a few international students in college. When I voted in an election they asked what it was like, and were somewhere between shocked and baffled when I said that you basically just walk in and say your name (and registered address) to a volunteer clerk. “You really don’t show them… anything??” We really are deeply out of step with the rest of the democratic world on this one.

I would prefer, idealistically, that if we require an ID to vote we should also make getting it free, but one way or another it’s long past time for us to do so. The alarm bells of voter confidence in elections being a live issue have been blaring since at least 2000 and it’s only getting worse.

They would have IDs, even if they don’t always carry them. I would think the only people who really don’t have a government ID today are going to be dysfunctional hobos/junkies, and extremely “off the grid” types

One of my more favorite stories from being a new lawyer is how many female states attorneys (who always start in misdemeanors and traffic) admitted they had expired DLs or out of state DLs (despite living in and working in the state, which is against the law). Its like, your job is to prosecute yourself. Get with it!

professional white women who think their phone is a scifi universal gadget

Electronic licenses are getting more common! My state DMV was supposed to offer them last summer but it's been crickets since.

most Government Forms of ID require paying a small amount of money to discourage people from losing theirs and to help offset the costs of printing the card and maintaining the ID system

IIRC states with existing voter ID requirements have been required to provide no-cost IDs. Those free IDs may say "not valid except for elections", though.

To steelman, there's genuine problems with paperwork and compliance overhead, especially in more marginal cases. The United States doesn't really keep centralized databases for a surprising amount of important details. If you need a replacement birth certificate, for example, at best you have to dial into your birth state (and more often birth county's) offices. In rare cases, they just don't have it; either it wasn't filed correctly, or was filed and lost. It's usually not absolutely insurmountable - though it might escalate to a point where you have to get an administrative or court finding that you were born - but it can range from obnoxious to expensive. That's doubly true for people already on the margins: if you're couch-surfing it's a lot easier to lose an envelope of vital records, and a lot harder to give a mailing address for a certified form that can take a month to get there.

Ostensibly, you need these records to do a lot of other stuff: most employers have to get a photo ID and social security card, which generally rounds to the same set of problems. If you're outside of the normal business world, though, there's a lot of people that don't.

The primary argument by opponents to such a policy is that everyone who has the legal right to vote ought to have the option to have their vote counted, and this policy would place a burden on those who have the right but lack a government-issued ID for whatever reason. There are many other arguments surrounding this, but this is the core point that all their arguments come down to.

Yes, but if you can't prove you have the right to vote, then there's no reason to believe you have that right, and therefore there is no burden, since someone who is ineligible to vote is not being burdened in any way.

And if you can't prove that you have the right to vote, why should anyone believe you?

This is just weak apologia for lax voting, which favors the party importing millions of foreigners and putting them on welfare while signing them up to vote automatically when they give out IDs and driver's licenses.

the steelman would be something along the lines of "they CAN prove it (because they are a natural born citizen) but not necessarily within the required timeframe due to scheduling issues or other paperwork hangups"

I think the adoption rate of real ID is a decent stand in for approximating how many people have their birth certificate, original SSN card, and a tax return available at the ready.

And if you can't prove that you have the right to vote, why should anyone believe you?

when only 20% of the population in some states meets the bar for the new voting regulations, i think the onus falls back on the side that wants to disenfranchise over half of the census answering people.

I think the adoption rate of real ID is a decent stand in for approximating how many people have their birth certificate, original SSN card, and a tax return available at the ready.

Nah. Its people who have those things + 5 hours to waste at the DMV.

As of last week, New Jersey had the lowest compliance rate in the nation — just 17% of its state-issued IDs are Real IDs.

I assure you that Newark Airport is neither empty, devoid of New Jersey residents, nor full of people paying the TSA no-real-ID fee. This is just because New Jersey's process for getting a Real ID sucks so much and New Jersey residents who travel by air likely have a Federal Real ID (a passport, a Global Entry card or a passport card works).

i think the onus falls back on the side that wants to disenfranchise over half of the census answering people.

You're deliberately conflating "census answering people" with "eligible voters" or even "citizens" when you're on the side that fought and won to keep that question off the last census.

What percentage of census answering people deserve to be disenfranchised? It's sure more than zero.

The big obstacle with Real ID is getting an appointment in the first place. Every time I hear about it, the waitlist is months long.

My state offers walk-ins, did it first thing at opening a few months ago. Was waiting for six hours.

Wow, that’s… insane. I thought my red state ran the DMV poorly but here you can walk in to an office and get a temporary ID document same-day, and a card in the mail within a month. You might have to wait an hour for everything, but you’ll get it done. Appointments for the DMV aren’t even a concept, lol.

And the only difference between a standard state ID and a real ID is you need ONE MORE piece of mail sent to your address. When I realized that was the difference I laughed at how much of a political fight it was for and against it.

If that’s the reality for a lot of the country, then no wonder voter id is controversial. Y’all need to fix the DMV before anyone talks about voter ID.

Y’all need to fix the DMV before anyone talks about voter ID.

I believe this is known as the Moldbug Speedrun.

Blue state blues. On the plus side, I've been renewing my old-style license online and having it mailed to me since the Obama administration.

Wait till you see North Carolina, where you can't even get on a wait-list or an appointment to begin with in most areas. It's been like this since at least late 2024/early 2025, I had to check the site early morning every day just to get an appointment four months out in an awful early morning time slot.

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