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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
It's 2026, it's okay to expect that government could process this stuff quickly.
I can order a burrito to a ridiculous % of the world's addresses, they can figure it out
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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.
20% does seem reasonable. I guess this is just difference of intuitions. If I had to justify mine, I could point to driver’s license numbers or something, but I have to admit I’m going off vibes.
I would support a free, mandatory ID too. We accrued all these goofy workarounds for something that shouldn’t actually be difficult.
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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.
I think that is a bit uncharitable. Do Republicans mean no one should vote, ever?
Voter ID is one of the many, many issues where the parties usually take incremental positions. Democrats are the party of fewer restrictions and verifications. They have been since the Southern Strategy realignment. Their current planks are such radical statements as “expand the VRA”. I think most Democrat voters would endorse bringing all states up to the basic ID requirement. Maybe even a national ID, if it was free.
But that’s not what Trump is offering. He’s throwing shit at the wall in hopes that it benefits his team.
It's not a perfect parallel of absurdism. You can't remove voters from rolls. You can't require ID. You can't oppose ballot harvesting. You can't be skeptical of hundreds of homeless people voting from an NGO office. Et cetera and so forth.
I'm originally from a state with a notoriously corrupt election history, so maybe I'm a little more primed than average to take concern here.
I am comfortable being a bit uncharitable when believing my lying eyes. Likewise, I'll acknowledge that the DHS twitter account is proof enough that for at least some in the administration, the cruelty is the point. Less than maximal charity does not require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Do we really think elections would be improved by making the Catch-22 navigating between the CRA and VRA even worse?
Maybe we should just disenfranchise white people altogether. Taps head Can't gerrymander the minority when there's no majority! For some reason I doubt the Dems would be satisfied then, either. I wonder how all these laws blow up in 2060 or if history just keeps the charade going.
Not a relevant category. What voters want and what politicians do is poorly correlated, and prior to the Iran brouhaha I would've said it was especially poorly correlated on the left.
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