> Nearly 500,000 eligible voters do not have access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from the nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. Many of them live in rural areas with dwindling public transportation options.
> More than 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week.
> According to the study, between 15 and 18 million people in the U.S. lack access to documents proving their birth or citizenship, which can be integral to acquiring other forms of IDs.
This can force circular dependencies: for example, older black or Native American people who were born when they weren’t welcome at hospitals might never have been issued a birth certificate so they first need the travel, expense, and difficulty to get one from the clerk where they were born. Poor people are far more likely not to have bank accounts, so they can’t establish their in-state residency that way, etc.
None of these are insolvable problems but the people pushing restrictions haven’t been willing to put effort into solving them and often make things worse by cutting office locations and hours in ways which disproportionately impact poor and minority voters.
That doesn't explain why democrat run states like California can't have a sensible voter ID law that accepts such identifications?
If they just said "accept more IDs" instead of "stop voter ID requirements" people wouldn't think its a problem, but that isn't what democrats are saying.
The crux of the argument is that voting is a right, and voter ID laws create a unnecessary burden to exercising that right given the extremely low levels of individual voter fraud. Do I need my driver's license to practice free speech? Do I need my passport to be allowed to be an atheist?
It would be different if we were solving a problem with voter ID laws because then you're balancing rights with real pragmatism. You can as hypothetical about it as you want, you can go down the slippery slope fallacy if you want, but the evidence shows us we do not have an issue here.
It would also be different if IDs were easier to come by, because then the burden is not disproportionate to the problem. But neither of these things are true.
Instead we're just enacting barriers to the use of our constitutional rights, barriers to participation in society, not to solve a problem but to enact a political end.
What problem are you trying to solve here? Republicans say the problem is people voting who are ineligible, Democrats accuse them of trying to make it harder for democratic voters to vote.
People using others papers to vote, that is much harder if you must display a photo ID together with the papers you received that says you are allowed to vote.
Voting without an ID is like opening a bank account without an ID, its just dumb. Oh wait, I heard you had that as well in USA, which is why you have issues with identity theft...
Except every analysis has shown people are not doing this. Oddly, the few times there have been real cases, it's often GOP voting more than once or for their dead spouse or some such.
Think of it, if someone is truly not eligible to vote, why expose themselves to additional scrutiny for a single likely inconsequential vote?
Where fraud could happen is at scale, and with DOGE getting access to all systems and dismantling the agencies that guard against voting fraud, I feel that once again we're seeing that every accusation is an admission.
What analysis has shown that people are not doing this? All I have seen is that there aren't a significant number of convictions, but that doesn't really hold wait if you aren't actually trying to catch/prevent people from doing it. If it never happened, there wouldn't be a standard well known practice of casting a provisional ballot if you have already "voted".
When you show your id they check if you are allowed to vote, the id is just to identify you as a person it doesn't mean everyone with an id gets to vote.
I misunderstood what my West Virginian friend wrote me then, from my understanding the new ID laws will require an ID as 'proof of citizenship' to register to vote, which a driver license isn't. Those who vote among his group are a bit mad about it.
Not everyone has drivers licenses, especially poorer folks, especially minorities. The requirements for drivers IDs are now to get RealIDs and some of these folks don't have access to things like birth certificates and other requirements of getting a RealID.
There's also additional requirements of your gender matching your ID (which eliminates many transgender folks), your name matching on all documents (good luck if you're a married woman), etc.
Folks are rightly pointing out that these laws are engineered to suppress votes, and you seem to not be willing to listen to understand why.
> Folks are rightly pointing out that these laws are engineered to suppress votes, and you seem to not be willing to listen to understand why.
Are you saying democrats will engineer these laws to suppress votes? Is that why democrats don't have voter id laws? The GOP isn't relevant here, we are just wondering why democrat states can't seem to do this.
A black woman jumping between three jobs to make ends meet in Alabama doesn't have a "normal" life, then. Too bad for her! And for millions like her, in a country where elections are decided by single-digit majorities.
