First things first, I don’t doubt it is a bad thing, considering who supports it and who doesn’t.
But my question is what exactly is the issue and what is the current and proposed voting process when it comes to IDs?
Here in my EU country, you have to show some version of a government ID, be it an ID card, drivers license or passport. And we don’t have to pre-register to vote.
I can tell you the issue, but it won’t be what everyone else is telling you the issue is.
The real issue is that there are votes at all. You cannot be born into a system of consent, so you cannot be born into a system where by default, some huge organization can steal your income and use it to produce things you never asked for, probably mostly don’t use, and even blatantly don’t want.
You shouldn’t need an ID to do anything that isn’t something you’ve not already consented to, and the only people you would ever need to consent to would be those who own property you wish to utilize.
There’s a reason why nobody else is saying that.
Before you can vote, you have to “register” to vote. When you do this, you need to prove you’re a U.S. citizen. Usually providing a birth certificate, or passport, military id, idk everything.
My understanding was that the name you were registering to vote with had to match the document you were using. But if you got married then often times the women would have a different last name and now it doesn’t match your birth certificate. Normally you’d just have to prove you got married too but this new law would say no, you have to have the exact name or you can’t vote.
Since women typically take the man’s last name, it would effectively mean any married women registering to vote would not be allowed. And since the bill is worded confusingly on purpose, many women would not even realize this until they went to register to vote, and told they couldn’t because of their new last name.
It’s not effectively any woman, it’s a women who is using their birth certificate for ID. Which is effectively 1/3 of the options so it’s significant but not “effectively mean any married woman can’t vote.”
They can use a passport, state issued ID such as Drivers license or ID card or a birth certificate. The new drivers licenses and IDs that are “real IDs” which is required now are also proof of citizenship.
Additionally, minorities and underprivileged folks don’t often have the means to get drivers licenses. How do you take the exam if you don’t have a car to practice? Or can’t get the time off work to go to the DMV for a government ID? It might not be the stated intent of the law, but the few places it’s been implemented have seen drastic reductions in the incident rate of black and Latino voters.
Here’s my perspective from other countries (I’ve lived and voted in two). The America right will go absolutely apeshit if you criticize them from the point of view of a other country by saying “you have voter ID laws, you just want the USA to fail by allowing illegals to vote”
The thing is, for example Canada or the UK (both where I never once needed to show ID to vote) have voter ID laws in case you need to produce ID, but you probably don’t. Because for most people you are registered to vote, you pay taxes, the government knows where you live and who lives there.
I turn up at a polling place with my name and address and they hand me my ballot. If another me showed up earlier, or later it’d be immediately apparent there was a problem when I tried to vote again.
If you aren’t in this position, that’s where vote ID comes in. What the right wingers in America never say is that almost any kind of ID at all that has your name on it is acceptable. There are hundreds of acceptable forms of ID and it’s as broad as possible.
Also if all that fails and you literally have nothing to show for it, you can literally ask someone who is registered to just vouch for you. Yep, that’s bill, he’s a citizen as far as I know. Now bill gets a ballot.
We’re allowed to have voter ID laws because we’re using them to make sure absolutely everyone is able to vote while still ensuring secure elections. We’re not using them to purge voter rolls and make sure you need an obscure specific government ID card in order to have the “privilege” (you see cause it’s not a privilege, it’s a right)
one thing you forgot to mention is that the american right wants these new voter IDs to implement a poll tax. they pretend like they aren’t pushing that when someone explains to them why voter IDs are racist and classist, but the entire point is to disenfranchise non-white and poor voters with a poll tax. it fits right in line with red areas removing polling places from e.g. majority black neighborhoods.
There’s no issue, we just like to argue over stupidity.
Of course you should have to use ID, like everywhere else on Earth. But we don’t, because really it doesn’t matter. It’s not as if the elected candidates are all that different in USA. It’s not like you can vote pro-labor or anything.
Amazon gets what it wants and the election is to decide… will the candidate pretend to care but not care, or not care enough to even pretend?
I’ve never needed ID to vote in my life and it’s not normal.
Okay, thanks but I never said or implied that it was “normal”.
But it should be! EU knows what’s up, good on them
You LITERALLY cannot register to vote without already being a fucking citizen.
The ID thing is a complete non issue bullshit smoke screen to disenfranchise voters.
Not yelling at you at all, but this issue makes my blood boil.
It’s not in a vacuumm, but when you look at the material conditions in the US, the way it is argued to happen is really for one reason only: voter suppression. I always said if anyone was arguing for it in good faith, they would set in motion a multiple-year program with a dedicated agency that’s sole goal is to make sure every eligible voter has an ID first, and then make it a requirement. The way things are, many eligible voter have been kept from aquiring IDs via various historical and beuracratic systems.
You LITERALLY cannot register to vote without already being a fucking citizen.
True, but without taking IDs at polling places, I can go claim to be my non-voting friend without even needing a disguise.
Not that I’m saying it’s common (nor could any of us possibly know if it was), but it is possible.
I’ve never once had to prove I am whoever I say I am at the little table they set up, “if I wasn’t, then why would I say I am” always works.
Is it common? How would we know? By investigating.
Come on, quit thinking abstractly and use reality as a test. Trump has been looking for those fake voters for a decade. A decade! He didn’t find any… Why is that? Not because of your master plan, my friend. But because voter fraud is just not happening on a measurable scale… Or, to put it differently, are you smarter than state election officials and the DoJ? And even if one of you is, scale that up. How many people are as magical as you?
We have the data on how often this happens, spoiler, it doesn’t, who does it, almost exclusively republicans, and how it happens generally, which is dead relatives.
The call is coming from inside the home!
- Your first claim is not supported by “data”.
- Your second claim is not supported by anything…ever, and refutes your first claim.
- Your third claim refutes your first and second claim.
good job
Don’t be ignorant on purpose, there is no reason for a voter ID law.
Here you want the sources you lazy ass?
How widespread is election fraud in the United States? Not very | Brookings https://share.google/hSb96tqZELBjj4AS6
The Effect of Voter and Election Fraud Misperceptions on U.S. Election Legitimacy | MIT Election Lab https://share.google/MuOIar2tC7CznE5zU
it doesn’t
who does it, almost exclusively republicans, and how it happens generally, which is dead relatives
Pick one lol.
But how do you know I don’t go vote in place of my friend every time and write in Bruce Campbell because I think it’s funny, and I just don’t get caught? There’s literally no way to know, he’d have to vote for once to catch me.
It’s like my mom said when I was a kid “you get caught EVERY TIME you do bad stuff…” yes mom, every time. Pay no attention to the 500 nights you didn’t catch me sneaking out, must not have snuck out yup that’s it, nothing to see here…
Well it’s far simpler than you think. If your friend votes, then two votes bynhim show up. Easy detect. If you friend doesn’t, they also probably didn’t bother to register. So trying to vote as them won’t work, and will get you identified. You need someone you know registered and you know isn’t going to vote. It’s not super common to have that kind of situation and truely know they won’t vote. Thus they mentioned the dead relative situation. But that is detectable on audit.
If your friend votes
Covered that already:
he’d have to vote for once to catch me.
There’s a reason I’m referring to my non-voting friend as non-voting, it’s to imply that he doesn’t vote, so that kinda sorta precludes the whole “he votes” thing anyway because the premise is that he does not, in fact, vote.
they also probably didn’t bother to register.
He was born with a penis, he’s registered for the draft since 18 and therefore to vote since 18 as well, because those are coupled for people born with a penis. Unless he changes his name (unlikely) or political affiliation (for what, to vote in primaries? He doesn’t vote.) Technically he should re-register because he changed his address, but again why would he if he doesn’t vote? Literally no consequences could befall him, there’s no incentive for him to do it. Bro I’m still registered at my mom’s despite having bought a house (which the government knows about because it’s public info), because it’s easier to just drive 15min to my old polling place every few years than to go fill out a form, been doing it for years, and I vote! There’s no way in hell he’s ever going to change that address from his parents’ just to continue not voting.
You need someone you know registered
Literally all 18+ AMABs in the US
and you know isn’t going to vote.
Know any AMABs that don’t vote? There’s one right there. Not as uncommon as you might think.
Interesting. So while signing up for the selective service that I assume you are referring to, does not have anything to do with registering to vote. Some states do automatically register you when you get your drivers license. My state did not, so I didn’t know some did. That said, when you register or even automatically get registered by the dmv. They attach your signature to the registration. And in states that don’t require id, they require you to sign the poll book. And they compare that to the registration.
So if you live in an auto registration state, you still can’t vote for your friend unless you can also forge thier signature.Huh, I done googled it, and it appears we were lied to, but my high school told us all that was the case. I guess I just forgot that I must have separately registered to vote? Or maybe I live in one of those states, idk, it was decades ago to be fair, but we were for sure told that in order to vote we had to register for the draft. Glad to learn it isn’t true, thanks!
I guess you’re right then, he had to have registered at some point (or we live in one of the auto states). Also probably why you shouldn’t make your signature some squiggles though…
And odd that they haven’t called me on the fact that my actual signature has changed since then, since I worked on it at one point out of boredom.
Except that the US and multiple organizations have conducted research on voter fraud and guess what it’s .003% of voting AND it’s nearly always the people clamoring for the ID.
Don’t believe the bullshit.
But how exactly? Only the ones who got caught? Self reporting?
How? How do you specifically know I specifically don’t write in Bruce Campbell for my friend every presidential election because I think it’s fucking hilarious? I’ve never been caught, for all they know he really thinks the president should have a Boomstick to save us from Deadites.
What do you think they review security cam footage? Think the nameless volunteer who has never met me nor my friend is going to notice that I’m not really Steve I’m actually three kids in a trenchcoat?
You have to understand the roots of the voting registration rules here to understand it better. The whole point of them was to keep black men and all women from having a vote.
That’s it - that is what they were for. So every permutation since is built on that framework, it’s always "the wrong people might vote’ instead of “we want to make sure everyone votes”.
So voter ID is not a bad idea on its face, you go in to vote the poll workers need to know who you are, right? The lady who sits across from me at work is old, she went to renew her driver’s license in February this year and they said no, your current license (that they issued) is not enough, there are new requirements - we need your birth certificate, your first marriage license, your divorce paperwork, your second marriage license, your divorce decree from that marriage, then we can renew your license.
She just managed to get all this by mid-October, so she did get through in time to vote but what the fuck? She had to reach out to 3 states and getting a birth certificate from like the 1950s is not easy. Why is it not easy to renew? Because the laws were written to prevent voting not to enable it.
mmmm…not exactly.
JFK and his father used the Mob to generate thousands of votes to get him elected in 1960. There was serious fuckery in that election.
in other countries its feasible and easy to have a national iD, in the states you have to go through a huge process to get one. also having more people votes hurts the estasblishment politicians in general.
If the government wants to make everyone have an certain ID to vote, it has to be the governments responsibility to actively make sure everyone gets that ID without any cost or hassle. We know that’s not what will happen because the whole point of this is that the Republicans want to disenfranchise certain people.
The knockdown problem is that creating such an ID is a mere half a thought from “vere are your papers?” That’s basically a guaranteed outcome.
they also dont want everyone to vote, lower voter turn often results in having R wins, and or have the run of the mill coporate dem win too.
Here’s a perspective. Some years ago a nonprofit (aclu maybe?) offered a large sum of money for an example of voter fraud that would have been prevented by an ID, they never had to pay out, iirc. If IDs don’t prevent voter fraud, why require the extra burden?
I will give you an example I overheard for five whole minutes while at the early voting place in my state:
We present our ID and it has to match with the record. You have to confirm your name and address by saying them out loud to the poll worker. Easy, right? Not for this one guy. I’m not sure what the specific issue was, but he could not follow the instructions. The poll worker asked for his name, which went ok. Then she asked for his address. He could not give the address. She asked again. He gave his name. She asked again. He couldn’t answer. She tried all variations of “where do you live?” She was willing to settle for him writing it down. She got to the point where she asked if he could read it off the ID card and he couldn’t. I have no idea what it took, but he was eventually given a ballot about the time I left.
There are many reasons he may not have been able to understand what to do or verbalize (some kind of disability, maybe a language barrier), and it was a bullshit step that depended entirely on who was behind the table and their level of patience. It could have easily disenfranchised him despite having an ID.
It’s a whole can of worms. For the golden standards of what counts as an ID, getting a State ID, Driver’s License, or Passport can be hard. My first time getting a passport was an over 6 month long journey and was hell, getting my Driver’s License was a long journey and cost me like $30, and then what counts as a good form of ID?
Back when I lived in Texas, my license for Concealed Carry worked as a valid form of ID but my Student ID when I was attending Uni there wasn’t. So why is a CCL a valid form of ID but a student ID isn’t?
My opposition to Voter ID is because of this, it would be handled on a state level and not the federal level. This would disenfranchise a lot of people who might not be able to get a valid form of ID.
DMVs are slow and in many areas hard to get to. I know people who live like 100 miles away from any and that is where you get your either State ID or Driver’s License. How are they supposed to prove who they are?
I would support a Voter ID law if and only if we had a free and easily accesible way to get a form of identification.
paspport you have to make appt which can be weeks or months out to schedule your picture, and the process too and only at specific USPS offices. and apparently red states never worried about having to get passports/birth certificates, because theier voting is not disenfranchised there. when the republicans reccommended last year, they freaked out as red areas are unlikely to have post offices that afford passport services.
Not a single thing you say changes my opinion.
I’m pretty sure they are agreeing with your point.
Maybe. I’m not literate.
What it comes down to is the whole “presenting proof of identity” idea isn’t terrible in itself for the most part, it’s a) what counts as proof, b) how is that ID issued and what obstacles are they adding to get it, and what will it cost you, b) how is it checked and otherwise used to track you.
The hard part to understand for those of us in civilized countries is, you have to figure all this out in a country where no one can trust anything from anyone ever. Governments, people, churches companies, charities, not even yourself. You can’t ever trust anyone in the US, because almost everyone is lying about something, and there’s never any consequences for it. Their real motto should be “Caveat Emptor.”
What really gets to me is that even if, even if there were a few dozen or even a few hundred scattered votes that shouldn’t count…no presidential election is decided by a such a small number of invalid votes. There’s so much effort by the GOP to suggest fraud will cost them the election when its just not true. The amount of effort someone would have to go through just to get a 2nd vote is monumental, and for what 1 extra vote among 10s of thousands… And the risk of getting g caught is high and penalties are severe. Vote fraud is not worth the risk.
It would only let people with their names matching their birth certificates vote, disenfranchising trans people and married women that have taken their spouse’s name.
Also immigrants whose US name doesn’t match their original birth cert exactly. For example, in my birth country we have two last names but I dropped one in the US.
And the dozen of us men who took our wife’s name
Oh yes, sorry, you’re right.
The problem is primarily that it falsely validates a fascist conspiracy theory which is being weaponized to dismantle western democracy. That’s really most of it.
If it validates a conspiracy theory then has it not proven the conspiracy theory to be more likly. When one is doing science and one discovered evidence that supports a conclusion you cannot dismiss the evidence or change you methodology to avoid the evidence simply because you don’t like what the evidence implies. Follow the science mate don’t change ur methodology cos the science disagrees with ur preconceived notions.
Voter fraud is incredibly rare in the US. The conspiracy theory is that elections are horrifically insecure and the result of every vote is fraudulent.
The proposed voter id laws take that as an inroad to erode the right to vote for all citizens.
How can u know its rare worhout checking id? I’m not a us citizen whats stopping me from walking into a polling booth and voting? It seems pretty insecure to me. One cannot simply assert an assumption and proclaim it to be true.
In 25 years of records, there have been fewer than 1500 convictions for voter fraud. In Arizona, there were 36 proven cases against 42 million ballots cast.
What’s stopping me from walking into a polling booth and voting?
The wonderful thing here is you aren’t American, so you convince yourself far more thoroughly than my words ever could. The election is Tuesday, come over and try to vote.
U didn’t address my point. Without id how can u know if the fraud isnt happening. Absense of evidence is not evidence of absence. Its not like they send an FBI agent to go id a couple hundred people to do a proper statistical analysis. They caught the dumbest most obvious worst offenders that’s it.
Ur stats are the absolute lowest bound they are not a statistical sample. Ur attempt at purposefully implicating that it is such when it is not is very telling of your priorities here.
A sarcastic reply does not count as good faith argument do better.
I don’t have to do better - you’ve already made up your mind and are just here to muddy the waters by “just asking questions” you could easily lookup yourself.
Have a blessed day.
I’m not here to ask questions or muddy waters. I’m here to present a logical factual argument in favour of achieving my goals. Your failure to answer or engage in good faith is my endgame as it proves that your argument cannot hold up to basic logical strutiny. Your here to win I’m here to discover the truth by presenting what I believe is the best hypothesis. Your failure to disprove my hypothesis or provide evidence in favour of your own is either a failure or ur capability as a good faith rational actor or failure of your hypothesis.
Google it my friend. It’s very easy to detect fraud when you’re working with big numbers.
I’m with you mate, as an European and after reading some of the comments I still have no clue how they monitor voting without any ID… I assume everyone has to pre-register but how do they do that without an ID? Birth certificates? Also, I’m antifascist which doesn’t mean I don’t believe in organizing society in an efficient way to minimize the chance of cheating to a minimum. In an ideal world there would be no borders and we could vote wherever we live but as I understand the US seems to have a vulnerable system and fascists are using it as an argument in favour of their current agenda… It’s likely a complex issue to solve due to other complex issues that have been left unsolved throughout the years but not admiting it to “own the fascist Republicans” is not the way to approach it imo.
Registering to vote is done by proving citizenship and residency, this is the step at which documents are checked. Doing it again at the polls duplicates work for little benefit.
The US system isn’t vulnerable. They meaningfully swing an election, it would require massed coordination between millions of people spread across hundreds of precincts. Each one would need to know that the person they are pretending to be has not voted and is not planning to vote after them - multiple voters for a single voter registration begins an investigation.
Voter rolls are purged frequently, so inactive registrations are not widely available for this kind of fraud. The rules vary by state, but generally if the voter does not cast a ballot for 2 consecutive elections they are deactivated.
Voters can only vote at their assigned polling places, meaning any large scale fraud must be distributed, increasing the number of people who must be involved and decreasing the likelihood it goes undetected.
So the argument against voter id is that some people can’t get the id they need due to financial reasons or whatever and thus this is disenfranchising minorities. But if you need that very same id to register to vote then your entire argument falls flat on its face.
Ahh this asshole again. Can you confine the bad faith arguments to one thread?
The documents used to prove residency and citizenship aren’t exclusively photo IDs. Voter ID laws of recent conversation have all required photo IDs.
Different IDs. Not ‘the very same’ IDs.
Which you would know if you cared about any of this beyond mud slinging and muddying the waters.
