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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!
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)
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 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.
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Even?
That legitimately sounds like a lot to me.
Like, how many would you think is a lot? 50%?
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