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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.
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.
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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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