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[anewaname]

Gentlemen, you can't Russia here! This is the America room!

If Americans can go anywhere in the world and start behaving as if their presence improves the place, why can't Russians? Gunboat diplomacy is universally understood.

[Rolan7]

CNN's argument against ID is: "Filling out a voter ID form is too hard, African Americans may not understand"

facepalm

I can at least get behind the other stuff but this is just literally racist.

I can't speak for CNN, but the real argument is that communities of color have less access to relevant services.  Libraries, post offices, polling stations in general, the heckin internet - There are a lot of reasons why people in impoverished communities might have more trouble going to a distant location and correctly filling out a form.  Spending a significant amount of time and also literal money just to vote, when confidence in our elections is at an all time low, is a big ask from people who have little.

Maybe CNN brought up how "literacy tests" were used in the past to prevent black people from voting?  The recently freed slaves weren't stupid, they were... undereducated, intentionally, by our system.  Back then it had been illegal for them to learn, nowadays their schools are very insidiously underfunded.  It says nothing about their ability to learn in an equal playing field.

(Schools are funded by local property taxes, and redlining made sure all the people of color had to form "their own" neighborhoods where they couldn't get property loans, forming impoverished communities that happen to be non-white.  As a deliberate result the schools are underfunded, which makes it that much harder for young people of color to succeed.  Or vote.  Since redlining was officially ended, this policy sometimes catches some affluent people, which is why the Republicans push school vouchers - rich people should be paid for the privilege of avoiding those gross yucky public schools which keep mysteriously failing.)

Mail-in voting is far easier and has been demonstrated to be reliable.  The only honest motivation for voter ID is voter suppression, the rest is simply lies from people who can't win fair elections.

[martinuzz]

The only honest motivation for voter ID is voter suppression, the rest is simply lies from people who can't win fair elections.

Bullshite.
I am very much against Ausweisspflicht, but the nescessity to properly identify yourself is crucial to having fair elections, and for protecting your voters against identity fraud and intimidation.

[hector13]

The only honest motivation for voter ID is voter suppression, the rest is simply lies from people who can't win fair elections.

Bullshite.
I am very much against Ausweisspflicht, but the nescessity to properly identify yourself is crucial to having fair elections, and for protecting your voters against identity fraud and intimidation.

In the UK you give the volunteer your name and address and they check the voter roll they have and very assiduously cross it off with a ruler and a pencil, though it’s been almost a decade since I was in the UK to vote, so mileage may vary now.

That’s all that’s really needed, to be perfectly honest. If an issue comes up with that then sure, an ID would’ve useful to deal with it, but as you mentioned previously, if it’s required it needs to be freely available and easily accessible in order for it to not become a barrier rather than a precaution.

[Grim Portent]

The only honest motivation for voter ID is voter suppression, the rest is simply lies from people who can't win fair elections.

Bullshite.
I am very much against Ausweisspflicht, but the nescessity to properly identify yourself is crucial to having fair elections, and for protecting your voters against identity fraud and intimidation.

In the UK you give the volunteer your name and address and they check the voter roll they have and very assiduously cross it off with a ruler and a pencil, though it’s been almost a decade since I was in the UK to vote, so mileage may vary now.

That’s all that’s really needed, to be perfectly honest. If an issue comes up with that then sure, an ID would’ve useful to deal with it, but as you mentioned previously, if it’s required it needs to be freely available and easily accessible in order for it to not become a barrier rather than a precaution.

Still works that way. Usually two people though, one to cross your name off and one to hand you the ballot and clarify how to use it.

[Dunamisdeos]

OK so this is an important issue, and I admit I've taught myself almost nothing about it.

What's all this voter ID shit? I understand the ways that bad-faith "VoTeR ID" has been used in the past to stop poor unwhite people from voting. But when I go to vote, I need to give them my driver's license, which is a phot ID with not only my name but a unique ID code. They check that before giving me a ballot.

What are the Repubs saying to justify their bill? That people are somehow getting around this in appreciable numbers and we need more or different ID? Are the Dems saying that we should need no ID? Because my first (uneducated) impression is that the former has reams of proof that it's not happening, and the latter is dumb. Of course we need a bare minimum of ID.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The current laws differ between states. In some states, and the way it has traditionally been since the Voting Rights Act, your identity is checked through:

a)registering to vote in the first place

and

b)stating your name, address, and sometimes party registration to the voting official

This is more than sufficient, as your polling place has a list of all people registered to vote at it. If you try to vote anywhere else you can only get a provisional ballot, which must then be cured after the fact. The polling place then crosses off your name as having voted.

If someone were to try and vote in your name, you'd figure it out when you arrived and your name was already crossed off. Similarly, if you arrive first then the fraudster would be in serious trouble. And for this reason there is negligible fraud already.

What the GOP wants to do is pass laws requiring extra gates of identity checking, weighted to not hinder wealthy landowners and to most hinder anyone who would vote against them. For example, in some of these "Papers, please" laws you're allowed to vote if you show them your home's utility bill, which in no serious way identifies you as you, while at the same time photo ID cards issued by tribal governments are "non-qualified ID".

"Oh, but just don't do it like that", you say? No. It will be exactly like that if you fall for the GOP psyop. That's the whole purpose of passing the law, because there is no significant fraud without it. "Papers, please" laws are naked voter suppression, one more weight on the side of shifting elections towards Republican victory.

[None]

When I was growing up, the argument was that the Democrats were bussing in homeless people from surrounding states to vote with their names as 'Mickey Mouse' and their address as 'Park Bench' to flip purple states, so we need voter IDs to make sure they're real people really from the state that aren't voting multiple times.

It definitely wasn't out of prejudice or fear-mongering at all, no sir, it's definitely cheating, and it's definitely the democrats.

Voter ID might make sense if the resources were readily available and at no cost to the disadvantaged, but given the nation has institutionalized disadvantaging people, it's hard to see it as anything besides an attack against them. It's not an effective control against fraud, particularly when name/address worked just fine for mail-in ballots (sounds an awful like like the UK voting process (isn't their conservative government trying to instate voter ID laws?)), which is why republican legislators are trying to curb mail-in voting with their stop-the-steal narrative.

[scriver]

I'm with MSH on this (for once ). I don't think there's anything inherently voter suppressive about ID voting but you gotta take into the account the infrastructure of how these things are not just what they could be (and that's beside straight out hostile bureaucratic things like the "power bill counts as identification but ID cards does not" that I hadn't even heard of before). Like, in most European countries an ID requirement is a non issue because 99% of people have a driver's license or a passport, and for the rest you can order identification papers with relative ease. But if you don't already have that infrastructure then you both need to create that infrastructure and make use of it customary before you put in place voting requirements like that. And those requirements can't be written in a way that disallows the most common forms of plausible ID, like say drivers licenses, that works just fine to ID you in other circumstances.

[Dunamisdeos]

I mean do we have a legit problem with people being physically unable to obtain a government ID? Do you need a driver's license, or just an ID? Those are quite easy to obtain, costing something like 10$ in VA. If that's true, the only reason to change requirements for voting would indeed be an ulterior motive, since it would mean that we already have perfectly functional voter ID.

Second question: are the Dems actually in favor of less voter ID? That would seem equally disingenuous, but it's also something I generally hear claimed by the same people who think that microchips are in our vaccines so the lizard people who staged the capital attacks can monitor our thoughts. What is the actual Democrat stance on voter ID? If they just want to keep it the way it is, I say let em'.

[KittyTac]

As you can see in this thread it's kinda split I guess.

However as an European this doesn't make much sense to me.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

A thing that should be remembered is that the United States does not have a national ID system, at all. ID is only issued by the states and regulated as such. This makes the difference in ID standards between states as big as all the other legal standards between, say, Mississippi and Vermont.

The thing that is often used in the national ID role for lack of any other option is social security numbers, but ironically those are subject to immense amounts of fraud. The social security numbers aren't even random, and they certainly aren't connected to a photograph of you.

[martinuzz]

How are you ever going to prove that you are you, if there is no nationwide system of identification?
A nation without any form of standardized identification system is terrifying (especially in this digital age).

[Dunamisdeos]

There's the piece of the puzzle I was missing, right there. That's yuge and I cannot believe I didn't know that. Or if I did it never really sunk in.

Frankly that sounds like having a federally-managed ID system for voting would solve the issue. I understand that people don't want to be tracked by big brother, but this is 2021 and everyone is tracked by something at all times regardless. Are people worried about the precedent that could set?

[TamerVirus]

How are you ever going to prove that you are you, if there is no nationwide system of identification?

"dude just trust me"