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