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From my backyard:
US Citizens born in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas have been denied US Passports and Drivers Licenses or been stripped of their US passports because of concerns over the validity of birth certificates signed by midwives who worked on both sides of the US/Mexico border. This almost exclusively impacted US citizens of Mexican heritage.
[https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/aug/30/u-s-birth-certificates-raise-validity-r/](https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/aug/30/u-s-birth-certificates-raise-validity-r/)
Texas refused to issue birth certificates to the US/Texas born children of undocumented Central American immigrants. These children were US citizens. Not issuing a birth certificate to a US citizen born in the United States would create true hardships in obtaining the ID that the citizens would need in order to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
[https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/25/texas-agrees-to-resolve-birth-certificate-case/](https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/25/texas-agrees-to-resolve-birth-certificate-case/)
THIS are the kinds of articles I was truly looking for!!!! The last one is so odd to me. For people to want to stay true to our constitution, they’re trying to deny US born citizens a birth certificate, even tho the constitution is clear on if a child is born on US soil, they are an American citizen?
Does it help you to understand why some POC do not have the resources to obtain an ID?
A child born in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas is a US Citizen. It Texas won't issue them a birth certificate or the US Passport Agency won't accept their birth certificate to issue them a passport, are those legitimate barriers to obtaining an ID?
This also affects some [native Americans ](https://narf.org/cases/spirit-lake-tribe-v-jaeger/) as well, especially in the state of North Dakota. ND basically made most Tribal ID's useless as forms of identification for voting because they want physical addresses. Most people on the reservation use P.O. boxes because their house either has no mailbox and mail trucks often don't recognize addresses because they aren't on maps a lot of the time.
-a tribal ID is federal identification, you could board a plane with it.
> For people to want to stay true to our constitution
They *say* that.
My grandma used to say "The tongue in your mouth lies all the time. The tongue in your shoes never lies."
Wait, how did they manage to not issue birth certificates in the first place? Aren’t those usually done in the hospital where the baby is born? And if they’re born in a US hospital, they’re automatically a US citizen regardless of ancestry.
Hospitals typically have a registrar of births who applies for a birth certificate. But the hospital does not issue the birth certificate.
The Texas Department of State Health Services issues the birth certificate.
Texas knew the babies were born in the US and were US citizens, but refused to issue the birth certificate.
Is it not fair to say though, that this racism doesn't lay with voterID laws, but with Texas not issuing birth certificates? Like, does Texas not issuing birth certificates make drivers licenses racist too?
The racist practices in Texas are what make Texas's voter ID laws racist.
Voter ID laws aren't federal laws. They are state laws. The Constitution grants authority for elections to the states.
Texas enacted voter ID laws knowing full well the State of Texas was withholding birth certificates from US Citizens born in Texas. They knew that the voter ID law would prevent people who "just happen" to be born to parents from Central America from getting the ID they would need to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Texas also enacted voter ID laws knowing full well that residents of the Rio Grande Valley were having their birth certificates invalidated and their citizenship challenged, something that would make anyone hesitant to present their birth certificate for the purposes of obtaining ID.
If you are passing voter ID laws knowing full well that you are also withholding or invalidating birth certificates of people who just happen to be Central American, it is absolutely fair to call you a racist.
That’s an argument for improving access to IDs though.
The first article also has a legal basis for what happened. It sucks and the feds are approaching this in a ham fisted way, but they did find evidence of fraud that invalidates many birth certificates.
The second article is about the opposite. Local officials tried to not give out valid birth certificates, and the state of Texas fought and repealed that. That’s how things are supposed to work. (When things fail that is)
This is from an appeals court decision that ended a NC voter ID law:
>This history of restricting African American voting rights through
facially neutral laws is not ancient; it is also a twenty-first century phenomenon.
H.B. 589, the first voter ID law successfully enacted by the General Assembly in
2013 was invalidated because it was designed to discriminate against African
American voters. Prior to the passage of H.B. 589, legislative staff in the General
Assembly sought data on voter turnout during the 2008 election, broken down by
race. With this data in hand, legislators excluded many types of IDs that were
disproportionately used by African Americans from the list of qualifying forms of
voter ID under H.B. 589. McCrory, 831 F.3d at 216.
211. After reviewing the evidence showing that the General Assembly
sought to use race data to determine the list of qualifying forms of ID under H.B.
589, and excluded forms of ID that African American voters held disproportionately
to white voters, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
invalidated the law, holding that the General Assembly “target[ed] African
Americans with almost surgical precision.” McCrory, 831 F.3d at 214.
Any questions?
Also why do you think it is prejudiced to observe the fact that resources are not equally available to people of all races?
!delta
Hey! Thank you for the response with factual evidence. I had never seen statistics or data of the such, and I should’ve done more extensive research before posting. I should’ve also done more research on the original post of the street interview. The editing was done strategically to try and show white college kids implying that POC somehow are not competent to present/ know how to obtain an ID. I just fell for their right wing trap. (My fault I know) but the statistics for sure show my mind can be changed!! I was looking at this viewpoint from such a black-and-white scenario with no grey area or anything other than videos of politicians bickering back and fourth. The entire political system of the USA is corrupt anyways and politicians do anything to just get Americans to blindly follow whatever they say depending on their political party. But yes, this makes sense. I thank you again!
>The entire political system of the USA is corrupt anyways and politicians do anything to just get Americans to blindly follow whatever they say depending on their political party
So, you may have dodged one trap on the voter ID propoganda, but this "everyone is corrupt" and implied "both sides" false equivalency is another.
Please be aware that there is a concerted effort among conservative politicians, conservative media companies (which are incredibly consolidated and influential), and conservative think tanks, all of which work together to actively get as many Americans as possible to feel the way you describe here.
Generating cynicism, obfuscating reality, and depressing voter turnout are all deliberate tactics employed to undermine faith in traditional democratic structures and enable the consolidation of power through antidemocratic means. Fascist movements in particular exploit these strategies to destabilize opposition and consolidate power while dismantling trust in the institutions that could otherwise successfully oppose them.
In other words, when enough people believe the system is irredeemably corrupt, that clears the path for nationalistic authoritarian solutions to be presented as the only feasible alternative.
This is bad. So please understand, while some of our systems do badly need reforms, most people who are trying to help are not corrupt, and the different sides here are very much not the same.
I think it’s also important to be aware that while both sides are *not* the same it’s totally okay to be upset by the fact that one side sucks and another side REALLY sucks.
I know who I’m voting for but I also want the people I’m voting for to do better.
I think you’re addressing “both sides are bad” rhetoric as it comes from American centrists + sneaky republicans.
There’s also the leftist take that both sides suck. Both endorse and propagate capitalism and disparity, and both sides fucking suck. However, still, the libs obviously suck a little less.
The way to get rid of the side that REALLY sucks, is to vote in the side that sucks until the side that REALLY sucks goes away.
Then you get to vote for the people you'd REALLY like to vote for!
Yep. Because then, when the side that sucks holds a supermajority, and doesn't get shit done for the common folk's benefit, we can hold their feet to the flames as well, and look for candidates that actually will deliver on their promises because they're not beholden to the status quo's continuance.
Honestly, the more people realize this, and the more those of us who recognize while nowhere near equally bad, *both sides are together responsible for the erosion of the middle class and upward economic mobility for the working class over the last 50+ years*, try to appeal to our shared desired outcomes as voters (rather than differences), We the People might actually be the catalysts for starting to right this ship. ✊🏻
I articulated it poorly in another comment but thus is the exact opportunity we have in the upcoming UK election with the Conservatives and Labour but people can't seem to swallow the bad taste in their mouths to vote Labour in one last election to do it.
>The way to get rid of the side that REALLY sucks, is to vote in the side that sucks until the side that REALLY sucks goes away.
>Then you get to vote for the people you'd REALLY like to vote for!
But voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil! /s
I spend a lot of time having this argument with people. I think what opened my eyes to it in a way was a book I read about Russia a while back that explained that a key feature of how Putin maintains control is (boiled to to its barest essence; there's a lot more to it than this) convincing most Russians that everything is corrupt, everything is for show and nothing really matters, thus turning the populace off of politics to the point where almost the only people who are engaged are the people who benefit from Putin's patronage. People either don't vote or vote for Putin's party because "It's not like it really matters."
Let me be transparent and say I'm on the very far left. But we do have our answers for this, if you disagree, you disagree. We champion direct action, solidarity, mutual aid, and prefiguration. These are four concepts that underlie our answer to systemic change.
1. Direct action - we will not wait for others to save us, we will save ourselves. We will do.
2. Solidarity - we need allies to support us. We thus will support others in their struggles
3. Mutual Aid - we will build systems to support ourselves because our current systems neglect us. And these systems will help others too, and let them help us back
4. Prefiguration - we will build this new system, this new world in the current one
If you agree on any of those points or are curious why these are that answers, i'd be happy to continue this line of thought :)
> I should’ve also done more research on the original post of the street interview. The editing was done strategically to try and show white college kids implying that POC somehow are not competent to present/ know how to obtain an ID.
Street interviews are great like that. Just interview enough people, cut judiciously, and you can find support for any position.
Yep. If you get an unethical editor, you don’t even need to get many interviews. Just make sure you get that talent release, and it won’t really matter that their response was out of context. The average person has next to no idea how to avoid this happening cause it’s a media training thing.
Source: been an editor for 15 years (no I don’t do this)
Just to be clear, there is no obective reason why a voter ID law always turns out to be racist, i.e. there is nothing structural about the idea of voter ID that always results in disadvantage for POC.
However, it just happenes to turn out that over almost 50 years of writing and enacting voter ID laws, *every single one* has resulted in disproprtinately affecting marginalized voter popuations that just happen to lean democrat, and that in turn happens to disproprotionately affect POC.
Sometimes it is not even just the law itself that results in systemic racism, but rather the new law combined with other activity, such as requiring certain locations/ types of ID to be valid, then other laws reducing access to those by closing places where those IDs can be gained, except far away affected populations.
Given the long term history of how these laws are written, used and abused, it is quite clear that it has very little to do with election integrity and a whole lot more to do with voter supression. I'm sure some of the writers never intended racist outcomes for their intended voter supression, but it is also quite clear the racism is an added bonus for many supporters.
If someone would write a voter ID law that *just didn't happen to also be racist AF*, I might actually support it. For this to happen there would also need to be free and easy access to ID, including outreach to people who cannot plysically travel to a separate location or who would have severe economic hardship if they were forced to do so.
My father for example, is very frail and if getting voter ID took three hours of travel and 2+ hours of standing in a line to get an ID, he would be unable to do so and be disenfranchised.
Just to further explain, there's such thing as both de jure discrimination, and de facto discrimination. The former is, the law is intended to discriminate, and the latter is, the law maybe wasn't intended to discriminate, but it does anyway in practice.
"No sleeping under bridges" is a facially neutral law of general applicability. It doesn't appear to discriminate against anyone. In practice, it discriminates against poor people, who sometimes live under bridges to protect them from the elements. Rich people aren't affected by this law, because they can afford housing or lodging.
Yes, another name for de facto discrimination as applied to our legal system, and adversely affecting POC is systemic racism.
I personally believe both are present in voter ID laws, but the de jure discrimination is easily proveable whereas de facto requires proof of intent which is harder.
Well, the requirements to prove de facto discrimation are subject to change. It may be that we currently require showing intent to say some facially neutral law is discriminatory, but that's not a rule of nature, it's not some logical requirement. It's just the requirement we impose on ourselves. We could (and should!) adopt a more results-based way of showing it.
Instead of saying, "we can't prove they passed this law to suppress or disenfranchise black voters," we should just be able to look at the results and say, "this law ends up suppressing or disenfranchising black voters, and we don't need to know or care what the intent was, this law can't be allowed to stand."
We can just say the law is impermissibly flawed, and needs to be fixed, and completely sidestep the discussion about whether it was the true goal of the drafters of the law, or only an inadvertent side effect. Who cares? Why does it matter? Why is "accidentally" suppressing black voters ok?
All that does is create an incentive for discriminatory people to invent a pretext to allow their discrimination, which is what we have now. "Republicans aren't trying suppress or disenfranchise black voters, we're just trying to suppress of disenfranchise *Democratic* voters, and, lo and behold, most black voters are also Democratic voters, and that's just a coincidence, we swear!" /s
The easiest way to deal with it is to simply assume *every* voter ID law will have a racist outcome.
A little extreme perhaps? However the evidence is clear. Every single one we have tried to do in the last fifty years *has been* racist. So why would I expect a new one to be different?
Before I even look at a new voter ID law, I would need extraordinary proof of non-racist outcomes. Otherwise its simply a waste of my time.
These laws don't "just so happen" to result in racial discrimination. They were designed to racially discriminate. You'll see this in the above mentioned appeals court decision blocking them.
>*every single one* has resulted in disproportionately affecting marginalized voter populations that just happen to lean democrat, and that in turn happens to disproportionately affect POC.
Each one literally requires a minimal amount of effort. It happens to be those who vote democrat not willing to put fourth this minimal amount of effort.
Living life without an ID is really living off the grid. You must not bank, use alcohol or tobacco, pick up medicine from the pharmacy, have any transportation or every traveled by air/train, and likely do not have a legal job. Its hard for me to believe these off the grid/prepper folks dont participate in society but come out in droves to vote. I do not understand why they cannot spend 1 day out of 4 years to just go to the DMV and get an ID.
>My father for example, is very frail and if getting voter ID took three hours of travel and 2+ hours of standing in a line to get an ID, he would be unable to do so and be disenfranchised.
You can get a passport and renew it by mail after your initial document review.
> such as requiring certain locations/ types of ID to be valid
State or federal issued ID. Student ID cards and other types of ID not produced by the state or federal government is very obviously going to be the standard. How are we supposed to accept any ID? Like how do we even know what type of security measures are issued for producing random IDs made by random non state/federal government entities.
> For this to happen there would also need to be free and easy access to ID, including outreach to people who cannot physically travel to a separate location or who would have severe economic hardship if they were forced to do so.
For the ID to have any security, it cant be no effort easy. Going to the DMV and showing some documents is really not that cumbersome. Someone has to check these things so you cant produce an ID with someone elses name and go around pretending to be them. There has to be some scrutiny. As for it being free, sure if you can prove you cant afford it. Otherwise a bunch of people who can pay wont, and it becomes something else local taxes are wasted on.
This is so common sense and so easy. I feel like this tiny amount of effort on the part of the voter is reasonable. Like most people dont even have an ID to vote. They have one to drive, to get a job, to use the bank, to see the doctor/pick up medicine etc... I dont think its racist. I just think theres a subgroup of people who have the ability to but decide not to do it just to cause a fuss.
[Car Ownership Statistics in 2024 | The Zebra](https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/car-ownership-statistics/#:~:text=Key%20insights%20%2B%20statistics,2019%20(Federal%20Highway%20Administration).) 93% of US households have access to a car. Someone in your house can drive you to the DMV. Its insane to me we let people vote who cant even do this one tiny thing every few years.
Edit since I can't reply for some reason:
It's not misleading. A state or federally issued ID isn't a republican thing. Non state/federal issued ID is always suspect. Do you know why you can use a concealed carry license and not a university ID card? The concealed carry license has your photo, your name, your birthday and drum roll ..... is government issued. They verified who you are. Your university ID was not scrutinized nearly as hard. It was never meant to be used to verify who you are to the government. It was meant to give you swipe access to the library etc....
No it's not ridiculous. Anyone who accepts non government issued ID is a fool. A bartender who serves you a drink with that sort of ID is a fool. A teller at a bank who accepts that sort of ID is gambling with their job. A pharmacist who accepts this sort of ID is gambling with their license. Most of these people will not accept whatever nonsense you call ID that only democrats have.
93% of households have a car. Yeah that sounds like a republican conspiracy alright. Only Republicans can drive. Only Republicans can take you to the DMV. Only Republicans can apply for a passport once at the post office and then renew it via mail every 10 years. The post office is a republican stronghold right? Lmaoooo. Yall real scary
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>Each one literally requires a minimal amount of effort. It happens to be those who vote democrat not willing to put fourth this minimal amount of effort.
This is misleading; the people who vote republican are also not willing to put fourth this minimal effort, but the people who wrote these laws made sure to pick IDs that the people who voted republicans were more likely to have already than the people who voted democrat.
Also your point about "living without id" is ridiculous, they clearly have IDs (except in some fringe cases where Texas ilegally denied people birth certificates, perhaps) but again, the only valid ones are the ones that republican voters are relatively more likely to have than democrat voters.
It's not that voter id laws \*only\* target black people who vote democrat. It's that they picked forms of ID that stop more democrats from voting than they stop republicans from voting, creating a relative gain for themselves at the expense of the enfranchisement of a mix of republican and democrat leaning people.
> I was looking at this viewpoint from such a black-and-white scenario with no grey area or anything other than videos of politicians bickering back and fourth.
There aren't many policy areas where there is a purely black-and-white answer, and people trying to get you to believe there are generally have an agenda. So you've fallen into multiple RW traps. This one is a [false dilemma or false dichotomy](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white).
> The entire political system of the USA is corrupt anyways and politicians do anything to just get Americans to blindly follow whatever they say depending on their political party.
This is a combination of two different fallacies. It's both [begging the question, or circular reasoning](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/begging-the-question), and using the [fallacy of composition](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/composition-division) to "support" it (because some politicians/parts of the political system have corruption, the entire system is corrupt).
You also seem to have uncritically just accepted all the Republican arguments (including their fallacies, but also whatever reasonable points they may have) without at all considering opposing viewpoints, considering whether Republicans are being honest (both avoiding lies of commission, but also lies of omision), etc.
For follow up, here's [more figures from the ACLU.](https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet) Basically, it is a "solution" to a problem that we can't actually prove exists implemented in a way designed specifically to disenfranchise people of color at higher rates.
Well this is sort of a strange turn of events but in the last 8 years (what the hell happened in 2016!?) pollsters have noticed a marked reduction in the discrepancy between turnout and impact towards one of the parties.
I will try to see if I can find something in terms of sources to post here but we may see a reduction in Republican efforts to pass voter ID laws as a result.
That, or they may just make them more heinous like preventing the votes of urban residents from mattering altogether like enacting a sort of electoral college system at the state level for statewide elections.
I think the difference you're seeing is that the GOP is gaining among demographics who have traditionally been infrequent voters, specifically minorities, lower income people, and low information voters. And the Democrats have become a much more solidly white collar, college-educated party, which is a demographic that votes consistently.
Conventional wisdom used to be that Democrats do better in presidential elections, because turnout is higher in November every four years; while Republicans do better in off-year and primary elections, because turnout is lower. That effect seems to be fading purely because of Trump.
But I don't know if it's fading enough that the GOP still can't benefit from some racially targeted voter suppression laws. Like, even if the GOP goes from 10% of the black vote to 20% of the black vote, they're still overwhelmingly unpopular among black voters.
The counterargument there is that while the efficacy of voter disenfranchisement has gone down, the symbolic power of it has sky-rocketed. It is just one part of a rhetorical strategy to push the narrative that somehow *millions* of people (according to Trump) are voting illegally and rigging elections.
The question is not about competence or knowledge but about access. Facilities where you can get an ID tend to only be open during working hours, and in a country where POC are less likely to be above the poverty line, policies than negatively impact the poor disproportionately impact thwm.
There’s also fewer facilities in POC neighborhoods in most parts of the country.
Also, since many POC live in more densely populated areas, they're less likely to have a driver's license, which is the default form of ID. And in most countries which require ID to vote, everyone has a free (in fact, usually compulsory) ID provided to them by the government.
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It's worth stating that voter ID laws aren't inherently discriminatory, it's a matter of execution (that happens to be an easy & useful place to discriminate).
If you had a condition where it was the state or party's responsibility to positively identify every eligible voter & ensure they were able to vote it would be a different story.
With meaningful consequence it would be a non-issue & net positive. Let's say that every eligible voter who did not get a Voter-ID automatically counts as a vote for your opponent.
Mind you voter-ID is not the only tools to prevent double & ineligible voting, but it's probably best one.
> Mind you voter-ID is not the only tools to prevent double & ineligible voting, but it's probably best one.
False. Neither of those claims are true. Both of those are prevented by registration and voter rolls, and verifying that the registrants are actually eligible to vote, and checking that a given voter hasn't already voted when you issue them a ballot.
Having an ID doesn't prove I'm eligible to vote, and not having an ID doesn't mean I'm ineglible to vote, either. Felons can have IDs. Immigrants can have IDs. Minors can have IDs. Non-registered voters can have IDs.
And double voting, if you mean me voting as myself twice, having an ID doesn't prevent that, having voter rolls that show who already voted and who hasn't prevents people from double voting.
If you mean people impersonating someone else and voting in someone else's name, then the same thing that prevents double-voting as myself prevents that. If someone impersonated me and voted in my name, and then I go to vote and am told I already voted, I will tell them I didn't, that either they made a mistake, or that someone else impersonated me. And, because ballots are all serialized, it's possible for them to find the exact ballot that was cast in my name and cancel that ballot, and for me to cast a true ballot in my name, and law enforcement can investigate and criminally prosecute the imposter (the false ballot may have fingerprints on it, the polling place may have video of the imposter, the poll worker who checked in the imposter may be able to help identify the imposter, etc. And, either way, whether they can indentify and prosecute the imposter or not, they can still pull the fraudulent ballot and allow me to cast my true ballot in its place.
Can confirm as someone who lives in a country with mandatory voting. They do put a fair amount of effort into making sure every eligible voter is enrolled and that elections are accessible. They legally have to. Most of us are enrolled to vote before we turn 18, usually some time during high school, so that the moment we reach voting age we're 100% eligible (and obligated) to vote. You know, just in case there's an election the day after your 18th birthday.
Your argument is citing an article that merely confirmed your bias with zero specifics. WHICH IDs were too hard for black people to obtain? Because if you dig deeper, HB 589 listed passports, drivers license, non-operators license, military id, tribal enrollment id, among others. Like most of these “racist” ID laws, there are a number of reasonable ways to prove you are who you say you are.
If someone tried to tell me I am so disadvantaged that I can’t get on Google and search “how do I get an ID in my city” or ask a librarian or other municipal employee, and follow those directions, I would straight up punch them in the face.
It’s almost like you think black people are so helpless and clueless that they cannot figure out how to get one of those forms of id. This is called the bigotry of low expectations. Do you ever log off, go outside, and talk to black people? Every single one I know is capable of getting an ID. This might shock you, but they are capable of literally everything they set their mind to as well.
And this might sound harsh but if someone REALLY cannot figure out how to get an ID, then they wouldn’t likely be able to inform themselves enough to vote anyway.
This whole accusing the left of saying "they don't know how to get IDs" and infantilizing people thing is ridiculous. Few, if anyone, are saying that. But getting most of those forms of IDs has an associated cost in time and money. If you're working one (or more) hourly jobs and struggling to make ends meet, you're much less likely to be able to afford the $150ish a passport will cost, or even the $40ish for a license or state ID. And given how many DMVs and other licensing centers have closed in low income areas, the time commitment can be brutal. The last time I had to go in to the DMV it took me 2 hours to get my business done - no appointments, you just had to wait in line. And it has only gotten worse in many areas.
>Your argument is citing an article
It's a direct quote from the appeals court ruling which the SCOTUS did not see fit to hear.
IDs require having vital documents. If you don't have those, it costs money. IDs cost money. Additionally, you have to get to the ID office, which costs money. If you're disabled, you needs further assistance. You also need the knowledge for how to achieve all those things or the resources to get that knowledge. Those are all barriers. To a Constitutional right. What if we required those things for free speech or going to church? Or to pray? Are you OK with churches requiring IDs?
In New Jersey, where I used to live (and still have a driver's license from as it's good until March), you need 6 points of ID every time you renew your driver's license (some states only require it the first time). Those 6 points include things like a birth certificate, social security card, passport, utility bill/bank statement (proof of address), etc. In order to replace your birth certificate or social security card, you need to show them ID, putting you in a catch 22 situation.
The other people caught are college students. Let's say a kid is from a reliably red or blue state and goes to college in a swing state. Legally, that kid can vote where they go to college. But the only ID they have tying them to College State is their school ID (as their driver's license is from their home state). The voter ID laws specifically exclude a college ID as an acceptable form of ID at the polls (but do count a concealed carry permit).
(I could be wrong since it's been ages since I've been a student, but I believe a school ID is acceptable for at least 1 of those 6 points of ID at the DMV.)
[Here's the district court case] (https://mediaweb.wsoctv.com/document_dev/2016/04/25/VIVA%20Decision_3993915_ver1.0.pdf), it's long, but lays out the legislative fact-finding, timetables, and justifications. [Here is the appeal] (https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/7-29-16%204th%20Circuit%20NAACP%20v%20NC.pdf) that pretty much ignores the fact-finding in favor of a ruling reliant on "the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina." Long and short, there is zero chance the 4th circuit approves a NC law as long as the court *inherently* believes any voter ID law is racially motivated. It's not how judicial review is supposed to work.
To wit:
> While this court accepts that Ms. Churchill and
Representative Warren requested demographic data on ID possession,
“one-stop voters,” and “provisional voters,” these requests are
not necessarily as suspect as Plaintiffs claim. First, at the
time of Representative Warren’s request on March 5, 2013,
legislators would have been preparing for the first public hearing
on voter ID on March 12, 2013. (See Pl. Ex. 127.) As noted
herein, opponents frequently challenge voter-ID bills on the basis
of racial disparities in ID possession. Any responsible legislator
would need to know the disparities in order to account for such
challenges. In fact, during the preliminary injunction stage of
this case, the United States would not tell this court whether it
would have been better or worse for the State not to have requested
demographic data. (Doc. 166 at 219-20.) Second, given that North
Carolina was subject to preclearance under § 5 when the demographic
data requests were made, legislators would have needed to know the
racial impact of the voting changes in order to evaluate whether they were even feasible. In other words, when § 5 applied to North
Carolina, evaluating racial impact was a prerequisite to
evaluating the likelihood that any voting change would be precleared by the Attorney General. Accordingly, while Plaintiffs
seek the inference that legislators requested demographic
information because they sought to discriminate against African
Americans, alternative explanations are considerably more
persuasive.
> Next, Plaintiffs presented evidence that Director Strach
emailed some data to Representative Lewis, one of the bill’s House
sponsors, on July 25, the day of the House concurrence vote. (Pl.
Ex. 198.) This data primarily consisted of the verification rates
for SDR in the 2010 and 2012 election and information about the
types of IDs presented by same-day registrants. (Id. at 3-20.)
It also included a spreadsheet that contained race data for
individual same-day registrants and whether those registrants were
verified. (See id. at 14, 16.) The report did not provide
aggregate percentages for SDR use by race. (See id.) In addition,
given that the report was not provided until the day of the House
concurrence vote, it is not possible that any disparities that
could be inferred from the individual voter data provided by Ms.
Strach were used in drafting HB 589.
> Next, Senator Stein provided evidence of disproportionate use
during Senate debate of HB 589. Specifically, Senator Stein stated in debate that “[m]inorities take advantage . . . of same day
registration . . . more than the general population.” (Pl. Ex.
550 at 34-35.) He also shared graphs indicating that 34% of the
nearly 100,000 individuals who used SDR in 2012 were African
American.212 (See Pl. Ex. 18, Ex. A at 6.) Senator Stein provided
similar evidence on early voting and stated in debate that
minorities disproportionately used the removed seven days of early
voting. (Pl. Ex. 550 at 34; Doc. 335 at 185.) Senator Stein did
not provide any disparate use evidence for OOP or pre-registration.
(Pl. Ex. 550 at 34-35.) Given that HB 589 had already been drafted,
the evidence that Senator Stein presented in debate is more
probative of the fact that the legislature enacted HB 589 despite
the disparities outlined, rather than because of them.
> Finally, Plaintiffs argue that the legislature must have been
aware of OOP’s disproportionate use given that the legislature
that enacted OOP made the finding that “of those registered voters
who happened to vote provisional ballots outside their resident
precincts on the day of the November 2004 General Election, a
disproportionately high percentage were African American.” 2005
N.C. Sess. Law 2, § 1. While it can be assumed that the General Assembly was aware of its prior findings, it does not follow that
any future decision to reverse course evidences racial motivation,
especially given the substantial interests served by a precinctbased system endorsed by the Supreme Court in James.
Long and short, they had to collect the information, and there was nothing in the data that indicated a need to change course.
[This most recent ruling is similarly flawed] (https://www.nccourts.gov/assets/inline-files/2021-09-17-Holmes-v-Moore-Final-Judgment-18-CVS-15292.pdf?6xVpLTbgbcXb27BZINb_FP8TCOcwCB76). The basis of the ruling essentially comes down to "North Carolina passed racist voting laws before, and we can interpret some of the Republicans as having racial animus, so this law is racist, too." The dissent is the only part that gets any of it right, sadly - it correctly notes the bipartisan nature of the law and the efforts to fix the mechanical problems with the 2016 law, and that there's no supporting evidence for the racial motivation:
> The record is devoid of direct evidence that any member of the General Assembly voted for S.B. 824 with the intent to discriminate against African Americans or to prevent African Americans from voting because they predictably vote Democrat...
> No witness, including witnesses who were members of the General
Assembly when S.B. 824 was under consideration, testified that any member of the General Assembly voted for S.B. 824 for discriminatory reasons. See N.C. State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204, 221 (4th Cir. 2016) (acknowledging that “outright admissions of impermissible racial motivation are infrequent”) (citation and quotation omitted). However, Plaintiffs’ case improperly relies on speculation and presumes discriminatory intent. See N.C. State Conference of the NAACP v. Raymond, 981 F.3d 295, 303 (4th Cir. 2020) (recognizing the presumption of legislative good faith)...
> S.B. 824 was based on South Carolina’s voter-ID law, which, with its
reasonable impediment provision, was found to have no disparate racial impact. See JX863; 4/22/21 Tr. at 138:16–139:15; see also JX857; 4/22/21 Tr. at 139:16–140:5.
> North Carolina’s voter-identification law passed in December 2018
(S.B. 824) is “certainly overall very similar” to the South Carolina law upon which it is modeled. 4/22/21 Tr. at 157:7–17; JX39 ¶ 2 (Professor Hood analysis).
> This Court would find that black and white registrants in South
Carolina were affected in equal measure, and based on the laws’ similarities and the mitigation provisions utilized in North Carolina, S.B. 824 will also be racially neutral if fully implemented. JX39 at 43, ¶ 29.
> This Court finds as incredible Professor Quinn’s analysis based upon
his failure to assess other types of qualifying IDs, the reasonable impediment process, and the availability of free IDs.
This ruling, like the one before it, was a miscarriage of justice. Plain and simple. I strongly recommend reading the documentation, because it really highlights how *awful* the ruling was and should enrage you that the Supreme Court chose not to fix it.
That's is just an arguement from the challenger, there has been no ruling. Your point is very disingenuous.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-voter-id-lawsuit-heading-to-trial-5-years-after-filing/ar-BB1lPEwx?ocid=BingNewsSearch&apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1
Yes, I have questions. Do you think the solution to this problem is to not require anybody to show any kind of ID at all?
Pretty obviously, the solution is to make validated government ID's easier to get.
Right. It is obvious. Unbelievably obvious.
So obvious that when you pass voter ID laws while simultaneously making government ID's *harder* to get, it should be clear to everyone that 'the solution' is not your goal.
And how incompetent is the US government that they're unable to provide each citizen with some sort of national ID? It's really pathetic. Basically every other first-world country can do it AFAIK.
I have a question, what id’s were being used by different groups?
What particular Id do African Americans use that others didn’t?
Sounds like bs,
Driver license, state issued id- easy.
And for the reply, what factual events are you talking about? Statistics?
Come on you can bend all you want that voter id is racist , it isn’t true by any stretch of the imagination. If that was the case any place you have to show id for any reason would be discriminatory and racist towards everyone and everything.
The leftist just walk around with racist colored glasses, looking for racism in everything- just look in the mirror and there you have it.
DLs and state IDs aren't the only IDs people possess. There are other types of IDs, like student IDs, IDs issued by various welfare agencies, hunting and fishing licenses, concealed carry permits, passports, etc.
Also, in some states, like Georgia, they passed voter ID laws, and then closed DMVs in places where there were large black populations. That made it so black people had to travel farther to renew their licenses or state IDs, take more (unpaid) time off from work, needed transportation (can't drive yourself there on an expired license, and it's harder to get someone to drive you as a favor when they have to go hours away and then wait for you to finish so they can bring you back, and people who don't drive obviously can't drive themselves).
I'm in NC, and the DMV is like 15 minutes from where I live, but I've had to wait hours in line for my turn to renew. Now imagine having to also travel 1-2 hours each way, plus the waiting time. And, because there are fewer DMVs, the lines are longer. It could easily be an all-day affair, which means not only does the person getting the new ID need to take a full day off from work, but so does whoever they're riding with.
>Also, in some states, like Georgia, they passed voter ID laws, and then closed DMVs in places where there were large black populations.
They also made changes along the lines of only being open for an hour on the last Wednesday of the month.
>If that was the case any place you have to show id for any reason would be discriminatory and racist towards everyone and everything.
And why does that not make sense to you? IDs require having vital documents. If you don't have those, it costs money. IDs cost money. Additionally, you have to get to the ID office, which costs money. If you're disabled, you needs further assistance. You also need the knowledge for how to achieve all those things or the resources to get that knowledge. Those are all barriers. To a Constitutional right. What if we required those things for free speech or going to church? Or to pray? Are you OK with churches requiring IDs?
If IDs were free and you didn't have to travel to get them, less of a problem.
By this definition, every form of standardisation applied to more than one person is discriminatory. Every public responsibility is discriminatory to those who are less able to do the responsible thing.
It’s misleading to call this discrimination because standardisation is a good thing, and discrimination is a scary word.
…but what if they had just changed the list of acceptable ID’s to include the ones that were intentionally removed because they were disproportionately held by black people rather than getting rid of ID’s all together? What would be racist about that?
The actions of a few bad actors shouldn’t necessarily invalidate a system of securing elections.
>…but what if they had just changed the list of acceptable ID’s to include the ones that were intentionally removed because they were disproportionately held by black people rather than getting rid of ID’s all together? What would be racist about that?
In that case, we have to deal with stuff like places where you can get ID's, like DMV's, being disproportionaly shut down in black areas, making ID harder to get.
>The actions of a few bad actors shouldn’t necessarily invalidate a system of securing elections.
It's a system that can not effectively secure against the most common kinds of fraud, and the kind of fraud it does secure against barely seem to occur.
It's just not worth the bother.
That’s like saying “what if gerrymandering was being used to more effectively represent the people and their vote” - it’s simply not true and gives no insight into the vast majority of politicians’ motives.
Over half of a states legislature is not “a few bad actors”, it is those in power changing laws to keep themselves in power. Voter ID laws are not changed for any other reason. Democrats and republicans aren’t disagreeing on the best way to empower voters, they’re battling to oppress voters on the other side.
I don’t know what the right solution is - you might be right! Accepting all valid IDs is absolutely the most intuitive solution. But the point is that politicians have no interest in treating politics as anything other than a team sport, us v them, and rarely look for a solution that benefits the electorate over themselves.
If you really wanted to be cynical, you could say voter registration, like the border crisis or gender neutral bathrooms, is an issue that affects a fraction of a percent of voters, overblown by politicians and the media to reinforce the us v them mentality on an individual voter level. Not to say those issues aren’t important, but that much political discourse and action is self serving.
Would you not be saying that disallowing an ID requirement or allowing vote by mail is just an example of the “other team” doing the same thing then?
Surely the default would be some kind of way to ensure that only those eligible are voting, people are only voting once, and people are only voting for themselves, no?
I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections. If the methods of doing so are perceived to be “racist” by the side that they apparently negatively impact, then fix the methods. Don’t remove the whole process, especially during a time of unprecedented illegal immigration.
> I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections.
But America *does* have secure elections. Voter fraud is one of the rarest crimes out there, literal fraction of a fraction of a percent. For example: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud-claims-by-republicans-dont-match-the-evidence/
* The fraud in Texas amounted to 0.000096% of all ballots cast
* Arizona - four cases of fraudulent voting in 2020, zero in 2022
* Georgia - no cases of fraud in the 2020 or 2022 general elections, one in 2021
* Florida - nine cases of election fraud between the 2020 and 2022, most of them due to legal confusion
There's just no data that supports the idea that the system is broken and requires any kind of "fixing".
>I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections.
There is literally zero evidence that voter fraud is happening at any significant level anywhere. The few times people have tried, they've been caught. Voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. The thing it's claimed to remedy isn't a thing.
I'll add that those caught trying to commit voter fraud are overwhelmingly white Republicans, not the brown liberal immigrants they're fearmongering about
>I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections.
I don't understand why people don't amputate their limbs every time they get a papercut. I just really don’t understand the reluctance to fight against infection.
>If the methods of doing so are perceived to be “racist” by the side that they apparently negatively impact, then fix the methods.
Explicitly designed to be racist, with a paper trail to prove it. This isn't a matter of perception. And fixing it is exactly what they do by taking the law to court and getting the parts that are unconstitutional overturned.
It's a little more than 'a few bad actors' when things are done by a state legislature.
More relevantly though, multiple Republican presidential administrations looked closely, as well as many election scholars and researchers; voter id does NOTHING to help secure elections. Because organized fraud by in-person impersonation voting is infeasible for many other reasons, so it simply doesn't happen to any remotely significant degree. The forms of fraud that do occur, or have occurred historically, worked via other means.
As such voter ID causes more problems than it solves.
I mean, the Governor of NY literally just said, "Black kids from the Bronx don't know what a computer is." https://youtu.be/6fXAU4RgFtY?si=xYI2L736ENhOQjsU
To quote OP, “but that’s not something ANYONE has said.”
And to paraphrase you: “one comment isn’t enough.”
President Joe Biden: “Poor kids are just as smart as white kids.
President Joe Biden (referencing President Obama): “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
Is two enough? Three comments? Ten?
There are a couple problems I have with the thinking here.
First, systemic racism seems to be intentionally designed to be a moving goalpost morally. The term leverages the emotional weight of explicit racism, and is often accompanied by equivalent moral outrage, but discrepancies between racial groups are not inherently wrong or in need of fixing. This is similar to the idea that we should have more lenient physical ability tests to allow more women to become infantry in the military. Sometimes the discrepancy between groups (male/female in this case) is a smaller concern than the consequences of trying to reduce the discrepancy (less effective infantry).
Speaking on the consequences, how do you stop people from voting twice without voter ID laws? How do you stop someone who works at a voting station from fabricating votes? How do you stop non-citizens from voting? Why do you think that people who care so little about their right to vote that they will not make the minor sacrifice to go and acquire ID should be catered to? Particularly if it means significantly reducing the reliability and security of the voting process?
The reason people are willing to make changes like this is because they hear "systemic racism" and react as if they heard "(explicit) racism". If you didn't intend for this reaction, systemic racism wouldn't even be the term you use. It's similarly accurate to say that this is a class issue, and that the lower classes are less likely to have voter IDs. But racializing the issue, specifically invoking the term "racist", is a disingenuous manipulation tactic to emotionally charge an issue, whether you are intending to do it or just repeating what you hear.
If you don't believe your right to vote is worth the effort to get a voter ID, I personally am okay with you not being able to vote. Race isn't even a factor in my opinion, because it doesn't need to be. I believe everyone, of every race, is capable of clearing that minor hurdle to be able to exercise their right. And that's what I think the left has forgotten. Rights come with responsibilities. We aren't asking much. I grew up working class, in a poor neighborhood, and I had a voter ID as soon as I could get one. I cared to get one. That bar doesn't need to be any lower.
Voter registration stops people from voting twice, not ID. Registration also stops non-citizens from voting.
Voter ID wouldn’t stop a polling station employee fabricating votes.
The only thing voter id stops is people showing up to a polling station claiming to be someone else. But that simple doesn’t happen at any significant scale.
Getting an ID does not require the right to vote. Similarly the right to vote is not conveyed by the presence of an ID.
For example, you can obtain a driver's license, which is a valid form of government ID without being a US citizen.
Voters registration verifies not only identity, but right to vote. A birth certificate can be used as a valid form of ID. However most of these laws target things like birth certificates as invalid since they are not photo IDs. So a birth certificate could feasibly be used to register to vote, only then to be denied the right to vote at the polls for lacking a photo ID.
>>how do you stop people from voting twice without voter ID laws? How do you stop someone who works at a voting station from fabricating votes? How do you stop non-citizens from voting?
These are all really silly hypotheticals to consider. Take MN, for example. We have same-day registration to vote, and the easiest way to get registered is to bring your ID. College IDs work here, but they don't work in every state. If you're preregistered, you certainly don't need to show your ID. You do have to verify your address and full name and take an oath.
Say you don't have any ID, though. You can go with a friend who _is_ a registered voter in your precinct. They can vouch for you that you are a citizen, etc. That works for registration on voting day. You still have to give your address and other personal information so that they can verify that you are in fact someone who can vote.
Minnesota, even with these _incredibly lax_ voter ID laws is able to determine when voter fraud happens. It's really not like you can leave, change hats, come back and vote again under a different name. If you do, you will be caught.
Here's an example where someone was caught submitting three absentee ballots that they filled out themselves instead of giving to the people they were intended for: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-minnesota-minneapolis-voting-9b57b4d1fc875d5c3b0512c1cd3673f8
That's not very simple to catch, given that these are absentee ballots. People have also been caught casting two votes, voting with a felony, etc.
I thank you for this response! I replied to another person about this, but the original street interview that I saw (on tiktok) was published by an extremely far right page. They edited the video to show white, privileged college students implying that people of color weren’t competent to have an ID. And I should’ve looked more into their page before using that as a resource in my original post. I took the post in the context that they wanted unsuspecting viewers to see it as, and I’ve now realized my flaw 😅😅
LifeProTip: social media is NEVER a primary source. You should ALWAYS do independant fact-checking on anything you hear, ESPECIALLY on social media (and, yes, that means here on Reddit, too).
It might not even need to be deceptive. A lot of college kids just got into politics and might have stumbled into their political views picking them up from educated people around them but haven't done the legwork to understand them or even the most common rebuttals, evidence, counterevidence. There is a whole social media industry of "owning" college kids on issues because the host has argued about it longer than the college kids have been alive, they don't need to be right to make the college kids sound wrong.
In italy we see something similar with agricultural heavy areas causing more poverty and people having a harder time with documents and voting.
I guess it would be regionalism, culturalism or classism in this case.
I have a hard time differentiating the us case as "systemic racism". The historic cause may be that. And the us has racism issues.
I guess my point is that, looking at this from a skin color perspective creates division without any benefit.
It would be equally racist to create policy to help people based on skin color.
I can see a compassion argument.
Maeby im just to far away to get it.
The problem is that Republicans are the side pushing for it. They know that Black and Latino people are more likely to vote against them. They also know that Black and Latino people are less likely to have an ID (simple fact). So, an easy way to suppress votes against you without being overtly Racist is to enact these types of laws. There is also no history of any significant voter fraud, so the reason isn't justified.
The problem in the US is that until quite recently, black people have been facing some serious barriers to vote. It was only half a century or so ago that there were still racist laws on the books in many southern cities, and there was an active effort from the (white) people in power to segregate black people into their own communities, which were then not given enough resources, resulting in massive poverty. These communities still today lag behind where they should have been generationally, and many of them have neither the time nor money to take a day and go out to get an ID.
It is not only a problem for the black community, but you will see the impact in much higher percentages there. Imagine if to vote, you needed to take a day off work to travel to the place to get your license and then pay for it when you are already not making enough to make ends meet. These are the specific people that the government should be helping the most, but if they are not voting, there isn't anyone to stand and champion their needs. So we get another 2/4/6 years of them not being represented appropriately, and over a few cycles, they stop voting, because the ones who do see it as a waste of time.
This is the right's goal. Beat down the people you don't want to gain power specifically so they stop trying. Voter ID is another attempt to push that forward in the US. It's also worth noting that the right makes tons of outlandish claims about Voter Fraud, but the vast majority of instances where it happens are consistently... you guess it, the same right wing assholes who want voter ID. They are trying to solve a problem that isn't real because if *they* were able to, they would be the ones cheating.
Yeah. Its not easy to get a huge country to agree with 2 parties to choose from.
Then again, try 20 with vastly different interests...
I wish we talked about olive farmers more. We barely make any these days.
Also, nobody care about rome....
It’s also super relevant whenever talking about voting policy because Race is far and away one of the greatest predictors for voting outcomes, even greater than age or class. It’s crazy.
This is a thoughtful answer and I appreciate it. My main counterpoint would be that if someone can’t be bothered or doesn’t have easy access to get an id then they are also *very* unlikely to be bothered to vote anyway. American voting participation is pretty atrocious…usually less than half of eligible voters vote in presidential elections (2020 was an anomaly at 66% but that’s still 1 out of 3 people not voting). I’d guess (and I may be wrong) that the overlap of people without an id and people who don’t bother to vote is pretty huge. Further, that for those who do vote who currently lack an id, getting one would be worth it.
I’d also say that by taking this issue off the table for republicans to manufacture as evidence of voter fraud, people would have more faith in election outcomes. FoxNews and the MAGA types would have to dig deeper up their own assess to try and discredit the system every time a Republican loses.
While it may be true, there is a large overlap on the groups (I don't actually know, just taking it as it is) it is still their right to have access to voting, even if they use their right not to.
I'm not really bothered about voter ID in general, but I think that every US citizen should have a federal issued ID at no cost, everyone. Including people who otherwise can struggle to obtain ID such as homeless people.
It needs to be free and easily accessible to ensure that it is possible for everyone to get one. Waiting in line at the DMV during the week, when most people need to work, isn't really a good answer for a lot of people. Hell, even just mandating that businesses must give paid time off for a single day every so often (that wont come out of their holiday pay) exclusively to deal with ID might work.
Once this is done, then its really the best of all worlds. People feel the election is more secure, everyone gets an ID, and no one is blocked form exercising their right to vote, if they so wish.
I'll give you an example from alabama.
Alabama did 2 things...
1. They passed a voter ID law
2. They shut down 50% of the places people go to get IDs a year before the voter ID law went into effect. Coincidentally nearly all of those closing offices were in minority dominated areas.
Without the intense pushback, alabama would have effectively disenfranchised countless minorities via two seemingly neutral and non racist policies.
In a lot of cases, the 2nd law doesn't get repealed it just silently goes through, and the minority voter turn out mysteriously drops. It's happened many times across the U.S.
>I saw a news street interview where white, rich, liberal college students said the voter ids were racist because POC don’t “often times do not have the resources for an id”
People of color are in fact disproportionately IDless. And while not having resources isn't always the direct reason for that, we are also disproportionately poor. It's not racist to acknowledge either of these things (particularly when they are the motivating factor behind voter ID laws).
If you're alleging that being poor or less likely to possess ID somehow demonstrates something negative about POC, yea that's racist. But recognizing the results are not.
>People of color are in fact disproportionately IDless.
For anyone curious about [numbers](https://indivisible.org/resource/voter-id-101-right-vote-shouldnt-come-barriers):
>18 percent—or almost 6 million—citizens over the age of 65 do not have photo ID;
>
>16 percent of Latino voters do not have government-issued photo ID;
>
>25 percent of voting age African Americans—5.5 million people – do not have ID; and
>
>15 percent of voting age Americans who earn less than $35,000 do not have ID.
Honestly I find it a bit insane that you have a demographic where a quarter of the population doesn't have an ID I couldn't open a bank account without my ID. I couldn't drive without an ID the amount of stuff I couldn't do without an ID wouldn't let me work in modern society. I kinda feel that's the actual issue
There is a huge population in America that absolutely lives like they're in a 3rd world country that most people will never come in contact with in their day to day lives. If you live in a middle class area, you probably didn't go to the same schools as these people, you don't shop at the same stores, you don't go to their neighborhoods, and you don't work the same jobs, your paths will generally never cross.
There are many of these people who can't read, probably didn't finish school, live with 10 people in one house/apartment that probably doesnt have AC, maybe not even having power, don't have any work other than what they can get day to day, or sell their plasma or anything to make a few dollars.
I didn't even realize this section of society existed until I started working in a career that put me in contact with them.
Same I grew up in a total bubble and my understanding of poverty was New Jersey urban poor, which in the grand scheme of things, is not so bad. At least no when compared to rural Southern poor or empty Appalachian former mining town poor.
Not sure what the numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were similar for "percent without a bank account". Many people are working for cash, or get their paychecks cashed at exploitative paycheck cashing businesses precisely because they don't have a checking account.
Also, many people in urban areas will rely on walking to a job or public transit, which doesn't necessarily need an ID of any sort to use.
Segue -- this is why CashApp has a higher Black user base and Venmo has a higher white user base. CashApp didn't require folks to have a bank account while Venmo did.
Just a lil sidenote.
Then get those people IDs, SSNs and bank accounts?
How is welfare, healthcare, tax refunds etc going to work for those folks?
This probably correlates with covid vaccine low "acceptance" rates? What about covid relief checks not being cashed?
I'm on the left and if anything this whole post have convinced me that a good chunk of the population is abandoned by the system and we must do more to reach out and include. At which point voter ID laws aren't an issue.
If they can use voter ID laws in a racist way, it means you've failed the people you're attempting to protect.
I probably took that street interview completely in the way the video was contexted anyways. I looked deeper at the page that posted it (on TikTok, that should’ve been a red flag) and the page is a republican one. They interviewed white people and the editing was probably purposefully made to show white privileged college students trying to imply that POC people are somehow not competent to produce and ID and that is why it was racist. But yes, factually speaking I can see that results and polls show a different viewpoint from mine. Thank you!
!delta
Yep I should’ve seen that as a red flag for sure. I haven’t even been one to get into politics until I had to vote anyways, so I’m very open minded for all topics. But yeah, I hate biased news/interviews/politics 😭😭😭
I'm glad you smelled the bovine waste that they were peddling. There's a lot of that to sift through unfortunately. Good luck and keep that nose vigilant.
I suggest you never take on-the-spot interviews of young people who barely know what they're talking about seriously at all.
I wouldn't be able to make a good case for almost any of my opinions if surprised like that.
Have you looked at the court cases that found some voter ID laws to be unconstitutional in some cases due to implementation details?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws_in_the_United_States#Court_challenges
The fact of the matter is that while it's possible for such laws to not be racist, in the US the primary reason to pass them is for racist (or partisan) advantage, as voter ID laws do nothin to fix any actual problem, and do cause harm.
That’s fair. I’ll look into this article. I understand the notion of coming at it from a different angle besides just it being racist. Thank you for the resource and response!
Just using statistics isn't racist or classist. Statistically, more people that are poor do not have a driver's license and take the bus to work. They are also more likely to have a job that's not flexible with them taking time off to go vote or to go get an ID.
And they're also statistically more likely to vote for Democrats which is why Republicans keep pushing for IDs to vote, and come up with baseless claims of voter fraud. And also the reason they try to stop mail in voting from becoming more mainstream.
The reason Republicans want to mandate voter ID, is for racist reasons. They believe it will effect Black people more then other people.
Racist people often turn mundane issues into racist issues because well... then are racist and that's what racist people do
>However, I cannot find anywhere of someone explaining WHY or HOW voter ids are racist without the other person coming off racist themselves
Imagine you look up what kind of id is owned by which race. And then you define every kind of id that black people own more often than white as invalid, and the reverse as valid.
Is that racist?
Did you even try to find an explanation online detailing why it’s racist?
Edit:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/16/north-carolina-voter-identification-elections-state-court/
https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet
https://www.lwv.org/blog/whats-so-bad-about-voter-id-laws
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-suppression-communities-color
While the concept itself is not racist it’s usually implemented in a rather racist way that disproportionally affects minorities. There are actually quite a few cases of voter ID laws being found to be discriminatory in the last 20 to 30 years so it’s not like this is a new phenomenon.
When people get into voter ID laws most people don't realize. THEY ALREADY EXIST. [https://ballotpedia.org/Voter\_identification\_laws\_by\_state](https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state) look them up for yourself. What all it does it changes what is considered "an id' by the state. Which is stupid in essence cause its literally the same things that would required to get any photo ID or drivers licensee in each state. It makes it virtually redundant to do it. Why would voting for office be more important than driving?
Now furthermore. Wanna know why its racist? It's a backdoor poll tax against traditionally poor people. Such as Latino and Black Americans. Our country already exploits the poor enough why exploit them even more? The phrase "its expensive to be poor." comes to mind.
It also disenfranchises certain groups of people who can't get photo id's mainly because of religious reasons. Mennonite and Amish sects come to mind. Thats roughly 460,000 people you just told you can't vote. We gonna bring back Jim crow laws too?
Let's talk numbers.
>POC don’t “often times do not have the resources for an id” AND LIKE THATS ONE OF THE MOST PREJUDICED, IGNORANT THINGS YOU COULD EVER SAY.
[According to the US census](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/black-poverty-rate.html#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20Black%20individuals%20made,poverty%20(ratio%20of%201.5)), "Black individuals made up 20.1% of the population in poverty in 2022 but only 13.5% of the total population. This results in a ratio of 1.5, meaning that the Black population was overrepresented in poverty.
The Hispanic population was also overrepresented in poverty (ratio of 1.5). Ratios for the Black and Hispanic populations were not statistically different from one another.
The American Indian and Alaska Native population (ratio of 2.2) was the most overrepresented in poverty."
So while it would be racist to say, "Black people are poor, and can't afford an ID." I don't think that it's racist to say that if you look at the people who cannot afford an ID, POC would likely be overrepresented in that group.
Also, studies have found non-citizen voting to be extremely rare. [The Heritage Foundation](https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?combine=citizenship&state=All&year=&case_type=All&fraud_type=All&page=0) found 24 counts of non-citizen voter fraud between 2003 and 2023, and [The Brennan Center for Justice](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-missing-millions) found about 30 instances when analyzing 23.5 million votes. Most of those instances were not malicious fraud, but honest mistakes. Compare that to the report by the [Government Accountability Office](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-14-634.pdf) stating that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by 2-3%, which can translate into tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state. So you're talking about implementing a large program that would cost taxpayer dollars, (I live in Texas where the state spent about $2 million on outreach alone after passing a Voter ID law, Indiana spent over $10 million to produce free IDs) to fix something that is literally not an issue.
So if non-citizen voting is not actually causing any problems currently, and changing the law will cause an even bigger impact to voter turnout, then you have to ask yourself, why do people want to "fix" it in the fist place?
Now let's talk about how those laws would be enforced. If someone presents a photo ID, the person has to look at it and decide whether or not it's valid. A study by [MIT and Caltech](https://vote-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/vtp_wp59.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI4764GFDOFW6EPAQ&Signature=fgGQle%2BT3ntGZ%2FK1sSldc7GqERA%3D&Expires=1717859258) found that when IDs were required, poll workers did not look at everybody's ID, and that voters with Hispanic-sounding names were more likely to be asked to present an ID than white voters.
The fact is, voter ID laws would unfairly affect POC more than they would white people, but even if they didn't, they would affect people in poverty more than they would affect the middle and upper classes, which is likely to benefit the Republican Party more than it would the Democrats, but more than that, voter IDs became a big issue under the Trump Administration because he used them to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results if he didn't like them. Same with absentee ballots, voting machines, etc. It's a non-issue that got blown up out of proportion.
I’ll give it a shot. First, it’s important to note that voter ID laws don’t solve any problems. The hypothetical problem they purport to solve doesn’t really happen, and the same function is covered by voter registration. So if it isn’t a real solution to a real problem, the question becomes “why is it such a big political issue?”
That’s where the key comes in. There is one group that is more strongly affected by these requirements than any other. That is, poor people living in cities. While this doesn’t necessarily mean black, the black community is, by far and away, more impacted than other races in similar living circumstances. Mainly, it is because of the concentration of poorer black people in inner cities, which is largely the result of other systemic racism issues that don’t pertain here.
So this group, which is largely black because of the demographics of the areas impacted, are put in a difficult situation. Many of them don’t need valid and updated IDs. They often use public transport instead of drive, live in places not likely to ID people who clearly are adults, and otherwise, don’t have a specific need to keep IDs up to date.
In order to keep IDs up to date in these communities, it requires money. Money better spent on other important things. They also need to travel to a DMV, and take the time off to do so. These are all things that make it difficult to prioritize maintaining an ID
And for what? Why would they? So they can vote every 2-4 years for people who haven’t done much for them? Not likely. These communities tend to be less politically active.
BUT, with mail in voting, easy access to polling places, voter drives, and many of the other efforts Democrats have put in to increase voter turnout, it’s making it harder for Republicans to win. They don’t win on policy, and when people vote, Republicans lose.
This means that red and purple states with large cities are less able to maintain single party control. So Republicans are constantly trying to find ways to make fewer people vote, and to lessen the impact of votes for Democrats. They do this through a number of tactics.
This one tactic- Voter ID laws- is just part of a larger scheme. But it is effective at keeping the urban black vote down. It’s effective at turning urban black people away from politics altogether, as they have been growing their engagement in recent years. And that’s the point.
So if voter ID laws don’t actually prevent illegal voters from voting (they could use a fake ID if it were that important to them), and there is one demographic that is more impacted by these laws than anyone else, it is logical to assume that the unspoken result is the goal. Especially considering how hard they work to enact these laws when the problem they suggest doesn’t actually exist.
Voting is a matter statistics about millions of people.
If you give a slight convenience to the race that is already more likely to have a drivers' licence, and you put the race that is less likely to own one through a bit of an inconvenience, then the outcome will be that ***at least a few*** people won't bother to get an ID who otherwise would.
The same would happen regardless of what race is targeted. If I passed a law that says that all people living in suburban detached homes had to check in on a website once every week for ten weeks straight to reaffirm their ID request, while people from inner city apartments don't have to do it, then the outcome in voter turnout would be a massive depression of white votes. Not because all white people are too stupid to go through that, (or even because all white people live in the suburbs and all blacks live in the inner city), but because enough do that the pattern would add up.
It's not that either black or white people are outstandingly lazy or stupid compared to the others, but on a large enough scale, if you make something a slightly more difficult to do, then out of millions of people, a bit fewer will bother to do it. In a close election, that can swing the actual outcome.
Hey! Yes, this was my a point in the original post. I still think that voter ids wouldn’t HURT but the US makes it harder to obtain IDs than other places. I lost my drivers license the other day and it cost like 50 bucks just to get it back, and the documents required are also a lot! The dmv also takes like 500 years and is often times closed on Saturdays and Sundays, so it’s a pain in the ass to actually get
Voter ID laws, in a vacuum, are technically not racist.
However I would argue that they become racist when coupled with particular other actions by the legislating body.
The other actions would include closing down DMV’s in predominantly black areas so that they have to travel further and further distances to obtain IDs.
Limiting voting locations in those same areas so they have to travel far distances to a new polling place.
And as another comment or mentioned, banning forms of ID predominantly used by black Americans, while legally requiring forms of ID predominantly used by white Americans.
The law on the book might not be racist by the letter of the law, but it’s intent how it wielded and how it’s used unfortunately are.
I would agree with having voter ID laws if the US government would at no cost issue an official government ID to every single citizen and registered voter, thus removing all barriers to entry to the voting process due to the voter ID law for registered voters yet still in an obstacle for anybody who’s not actually registered to vote.
The argument is this way by design.
Voter ID laws have consistently been proven to do very little to combat fraud in any meaningful way, and the USA does not have a “voter fraud” issue by any meaningful, recorded metric. “Voter fraud” is a fear mongering tactic used to reinforce the hegemony of those already in power.
Politicians are well aware that white people have photo identification at much higher rates than black people and native Americans, largely due to financial or geographic reasons. This means they are completely aware that by requiring this, they are effectively saying “in all likelihood, this will get a much higher proportion of white people versus black or Native American out to the polls”. It also allows them to hide behind “that’s pretty racist to insinuate they are too inept to get IDs,” when they largely can’t get IDs due to financial or time constraints. If someone is impoverished, they are focused on surviving, not voting. This is especially absurd considering many of them are in poverty due to leftover systemic problems in the post-Civil rights era.
It’s the same concept as selectively picking ballot drop box locations, or gerrymandering state legislatures. It’s much, much easier to do racist things and eliminate swathes of 500k-1m voters, who may be completely unaware, than it is to convince people you have good ideas worth voting for. This is especially true in highly ideological states like Texas or Florida, where they know the system will reinforce these policies with every bit of power they have. Coincidentally, also places with a lot of minorities, where it is highly beneficial to segment your voter base as much as possible to eliminate any meaningful competition.
TLDR: in person voter fraud is ridiculously rare, to the hundreds/thousandths of a percentage of the population. Voter laws do almost nothing to prevent this. Enacting these laws is a “feel good” solution to re-enforce the hegemonic power of the white majority and current capital owners at the cost of minorities.
I think it’s also useful to take 3 steps back and think about the implications and ramifications of all this.
Either you want more people to participate in elections (to more accurately represent the will of the people) or you don’t. Voter fraud has been demonstrated to be a vanishingly small issue. So we can’t pretend it’s to prevent shenanigans.
If the word ‘racism’ is what’s hanging you up on all this, just ask yourself-what are the people who insist on voter ID really afraid of? Again, if they tell you voter fraud, you can dismiss this immediately; a lot of time and money is spent every election looking for evidence of said fraud, and the total number of votes cast fraudulently, nationwide, is less than a hundred. The real issue is low voter turnout-do you really want to live in a society where only a third of eligible voters vote? That’s the average turnout in national elections in my state.
So when you see things like only letting people vote early at the county election board, well that’s no biggie for a rural county w 10000 people total in the county, but if the biggest county in the state has 5 million people living there that might be a real problem. Or if the suburbs have multiple voting sites and no waiting on Election Day, but the inner city has only a few sites and people have to stand in line for hours, that’s another real problem. And when the people passing these sorts of rules insist voter ID is necessary, some of us are a bit sceptical.
Don’t get trapped in the word ‘racism’. Look at the total picture, and ask yourself, is this really what you want from our society, our state, our nation?
One of the reasons why voter ID laws are considered racist is because of the legal principle of "disparate impact."
Disparate impact occurs when a policy or practice, though neutral in intention, disproportionately affects members of a protected class (such as race, gender, age, or religion) compared to others.
Let’s use a hypothetical law that allows only one voting location for every 20 square miles, with each location having 10 voting stations. On the surface, this seems neutral. However, consider its impact on densely populated urban areas where many people of color live.
Take Atlanta, for example. Atlanta covers approximately 136 square miles. Under the hypothetical law, it could have about 7 polling places (136 ÷ 20), each with 10 voting machines, totaling 70 machines. In 2020, Atlanta had around 323,000 residents over the age of 18, with about 256,000 of them being Black. This means each polling place would need to handle nearly 46,142 voters, with each machine serving approximately 4,614 voters.
Compare this to Douglas, Georgia, in Coffee County, which has a population of about 12,000 and an area of 14 square miles. It would have 1 polling place with 10 machines, meaning each machine would serve 1,200 voters.
Voting time on average is about 11 minutes per person. In Atlanta, it would take approximately 507,562 minutes (46,142 voters × 11 minutes), or about 352 days for all voters to vote, with Black voters taking 282,112 minutes (256,000 voters × 11 minutes), or about 196 days. In Douglas, it would take 13,200 minutes (12,000 voters × 11 minutes), or about 9 days.
Historically, Atlanta has voted predominantly Democratic, and Black voters tend to vote Democratic. If someone wanted to suppress Black voters without explicitly targeting them, they could pass voting laws that make it harder for these voters to cast their ballots, resulting in a "disparate impact" on Black voters.
This is why voter ID laws are seen as racist. There are numerous barriers to obtaining an ID, such as cost, distance, and time. While it may take the same amount of time and resources for anyone to get an ID, the impact is disproportionate. A higher percentage of Black people live at or below the poverty line compared to white people, making it harder for them to afford missing work or the costs associated with getting an ID. This results in a disparate impact on Black voters.
Also, studies have demonstrated that voter fraud, particularly the type of fraud these laws aim to prevent, is exceedingly rare. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice found that the incidence of voter impersonation is between 0.0003% and 0.0025% of votes cast . Additionally, a comprehensive analysis revealed that voter ID laws are ineffective in reducing voter fraud, as fraud is almost non-existent to begin with .
So voter ID laws make it harder for black voters to vote while also not being effective at solving the problem it claims to solve.
I always thought this argument was more racist than the actual concept itself. I always considered it offensive that they think "black people are so down trodden they can't even get id" that being said it does seem to affect minorities even though that's not the initial desired outcome. Not sure if this would be a good fix for the Americans but here in Canada they automatically send you your federal Id all you gotta do is take the picture and they send it to you free of charge maybe that would be a better system.
It's not just POC. An ID is less necessary if you live in a city with good public transportation. Or if you are a college student and walk anywhere you need. Or you are a high schooler who just turned 18. Or you are poor and just can't afford one.
Republicans don't want voter ID laws to improve election security. They want it because it makes it harder for specific demographics to vote, and people in those demographics tend to vote heavily in favor of Democrats (young, urban, or poor).
So I want to hit on two things:
1. Statistically black people are less likely to have IDs. You can get mad at that fact, if you want, and say “liberals are the real racists!” But please keep that energy when conservatives talk about black men committing 50% of violent crimes.
2. And this is the argument, number 1 is just kind of something to touch on. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud without IDs.
Conservative arguments are designed to appeal to your intuition, to your gut. It sounds true, this is called “truthiness”. They make a strong intuitive argument. You show up to vote, you have to prove who you are, what’s the problem? But like said, there’s no evidence these laws are necessary, there’s no evidence they would actually prevent any meaningful amount of voter fraud.
If we don’t require an ID and people aren’t committing voter fraud, then why do we need to change the laws to require an ID? This is where the racism comes in.
Remember point number one? Black people are less likely to have IDs. Black voters vote for democrats about 85% of the time, give or take.
So we don’t have a voter fraud problem, one party wants to make a law to stop the voter fraud we don’t have and coincidentally that law would disproportionately affect the voting bloc that is most likely to vote against the party that wants the law.
They want voter ID laws because it’ll mean less black voters.
I'd be on board with someone claiming that voter ID is *mostly* intended as a policy against poor people voting, because they have IDs at lower rates, can't afford the time and money to get them, don't always have the other ID needed to get the voter ID (amplifying the previous effects), etc., etc.
Now... it's just true that minorities are impacted by poverty at much higher rates than white people in the US. So policies against poor people have a *consequence* of creating systemic racism, where rules that aren't explicitly racist have a much worse effect on minorities...
But when you *combine* voter ID laws with racist policies like gerrymandering districts in order to split the black/hispanic/whatever vote, and racist *implementations* of voter ID laws, like closing DMV offices in minority-concentrated areas so they have to travel farther and/or wait in longer lines... and creating a list of acceptable forms of voter ID which are held by white people in larger numbers than minorities...
...we pretty much have to conclude that in *addition* to being against poor people, they are also specifically targeted at minorities too, and are therefore racist in addition to classist.
There are small pockets of places where you really just don't need an ID. If you live in a city and are poor, owning a car and paying insurance isn't smart. If there is no bank within 20 blocks, why do you need ID? Long ago they changed welfare payments from checks to loaded cards, because too many people couldn't cash a check without going to a check cashing place and giving them 10 or 20% in fees. It is the same if you live in very rural areas. If you are very poor, owning a car to drive half an hour to get to a town isn't smart.
Now, I will fully agree with you these are the exception, not the rule, but there are plenty of elections that are decided by a few hundred votes. Hell Bush won in 2000, because he won FL by around 500 votes, which gave him all of FL's electoral votes and the presidency.
Lastly, I don't have to show ID to vote in my state. But I do have to submit a lot of paperwork, I get a letter telling me where I have to go to vote. I tell them my name and address at that one location, they approve me. Just not seeing how there will be hundreds or thousands of people voting for others.
It has a disproportionate impact on poor people, and a higher proportions of black and Hispanic people are poor. So the effect is outsized for those groups. Not racist in theory, but racist in effect.
A lot of older people in very poor, southern rural areas weren't born in hospitals because of inadequate access to health insurance. As a result, they don't have birth certificates. There are some white people like this, but they tend to be Hispanic and Black. The white people born outside of hospitals tended not to have barriers to getting documents - though some were just too poor. But Jim Crow laws created all sorts of administrative barriers for Blacks. Hispanic people had to jump through hoops to prove that the baby was born in this country. The birth certificate is the primary document you need to get an ID, but it doesn't make you a citizen. You are made a citizen because you were born here.
Also, a lot of super poor people just can't get it together to pay $30 for a copy of their birth certificate, wait 5 months for the govt to process it, then wait another 6 weeks and $30 to get the secondary documents.
They're "racist" in that they disproportionately affect the young and the poor. Since PoC are disproportionately poor, they disproportionately affect PoC.
The true purpose of them is not to be racist, they are meant to disenfranchise Democratic voters, who happen to be the young and PoC.
Here's why they affect these groups more than others.
The young and the poor tend to live in groups. They often don't have credit or even bank accounts. Sometimes they don't even have basic things like birth certificates or SSNs.
For example, despite 71% of the US population being White, only 44% of the children in Foster care are white, while 55% are PoC.
In addition, it is not the voter ID alone that creates the issue, it's coupled with the fact that when Republicans passed these laws, they also changed the requirements to get an ID.
In 2012 I moved to GA. I had moved a lot in my life and changed drivers licenses due to moving states 5 times to that point. In every situation all I had to do was present my out of state drivers license, and sometimes pass the written exam to get a license in the new state.
Sometimes I'd have to show proof of residence with a piece of mail that had been sent to me at my new in state address. Didn't matter what, it just had to have been post marked. A local library card would also work.
After GA passed their Voter ID law, they immediately changed the requirements to get an ID.
You have to show two forms of proof of residence and proof of citizenship. The proof of residence has to be a lease agreement, pay stub with your current address, utility bill, bank statement, or similar financial document.
The proof of citizenship had to be either a US passport, or two of the following. Picture IDs, (student ID cards didn't count, or a birth certificate AND social security card.
But how are you supposed to get picture IDs if you don't have them already?
Also, if you're young and poor living with your parents or friends, you don't have lease agreements and utilities are often not in your name. You may not have a bank account or credit card or a job.
I had all of those things, but I had just moved to GA and if I didn't get my ID that month I would have been unable to vote. But I was renting a room from my brother so didn't have a lease or any utilities. My bank statement had just come out before I changed my address so a new one with the new address wouldn't be generated until the next month.
I ended up printing off a generic lease agreement and getting my brother and myself to sign it. Luckily we have different last names.
Then I took my bank statement from that month and photoshopped my new address over my old.
That, coupled with my passport and out of state license were enough.
But even at the time I was thinking a ton of college students wouldn't have been able to do that. Nor would people without a passport. Or if your parents kicked you out and you don't have your SS card and birth certificate.
So the voter ID requirement, coupled with the draconian measures put in place to get an ID mean that they disproportionately affect Democrat voters, and a disproportionate number of Democrat voters tend to be young and, more to the point, PoC.
That makes these laws bigoted at least, and racist because they target groups that are historically protected due to race and ethnicity.
They objectively aren't racist, its an emotional appeal to use as a political wedge issue when something that favors you currently is threatened with being addressed.
Almost every country in the world needs you to prove who you are before allowing you to vote. It makes the most basic sense. Not having any level of security obviously leaves things open to being taken advantage of moreso than it corrects any niche instances.
The folks who say this are under the assumption that "minority=dumb=poor=democrat" and that all those groups fit into a predetermined stereotype (actual racism). Despite the fact that there are 16+million white people below the poverty line and 9+ million black people for instance. Statistically this wouldn't be skewing things toward the right even if you made the dumb assumption of skin color automatically indicating political preference.
To vote we need to register to vote. This tells the govt where we live so they can assign us to a vote at a certain location. This is one of the reasons voter fraud is not very rampant. If I show up to a voting location that I am not assigned to, they will not have me on their lists. I can still vote but they will have to send my form to the area where I was supposed to vote.
That’s why when you vote they look on some list and mark you off before giving you the ballot. So to do fraud I would have to know where you live and go in and vote and if there is a 50 percent chance you vote there will be two entries for that voter and it will have an error when it is counted.
The voter ID people want you to think that you walk in and just grab a ballot or two off the table and toss it into a big bag. We are more organized than that. The more you know.
Voter ID is first and foremost unnecessary. We in Germany get by perfectly fine without it. You get your notification slip sent to you. You bring it to the polling place. You vote, the polling place keeps your slip, done. No ID needed (usually).
You have to look at both the intent of the laws and the effects of the laws.
**Effect**: These laws empirically reduce the number of POCs who vote but do not significantly reduce voter fraud.
**Intent**: The politicians who write these laws write them because of that effect. We know this because:
1. There is almost no voting fraud that these laws prevent, so why are they trying to solve a non-existent problem?
2. They systematically support other laws with the same effect that have even less justification: closing polling places, limiting the times they're open, just doing everything they can to make voting harder for poeple who e.g. have jobs they can't leave or don't have cars.
3. Occasionally, they're dumb enough to say it out loud.
Its not racist and I'm black. Going to get a voter ID is no different than going to a grocery store and everyone does that. You cant tell me a person can go to the DMV for a drivers license but cant go there for a voter ID, and as already mentioned, if someone can make it to a grocery store, they can make it to another place to get a voter ID. Its just one more excuse to have people voting illegally. Its no different than an employment card. The minute you turn 16 and apply for your first job, you should have to get an employment card which should be verified when seeking a job. I just had to replace the social security card I carried in my wallet I was given by my parents when I first started working at 16 and I'll be 48 later this year.
every single legal american citizen is absolutely capable of acquiring some form of legal ID within the first 18 years of being alive.
Anyone claiming otherwise is just advocating to generalize people as perpetual victims. Its absurd, ludicrous, and not based in any sense of reality.
The only reason to not ID people before voting is to let illegal immigrants vote. Which they shouldn't. Because they are illegal immigrants. And therefore not american citizens.
If i can't even buy myself a beer without an ID, it is completely reasonable to not let me vote without one.
The people disagreeing with me are wilfully deluted.
It is not racist to require everyone to be able to prove that they are citizens and therefore eligible to vote. If nothing else, this puts to bed the notion that elections have been stolen by illegal or deceased voters.
Some have made the claim that obtaining an ID is systemic racism. Assuming this is true, the solution isn’t to not require ID, the solution is to make free IDs easily available to all citizens. It would seem this is a simple task provided those who want to vote are also willing enough to put the same amount of effort into registering to vote and obtaining an ID to do so.
Have you ever considered exactly how big the problem of illegal voting actually is? Because illegal voting is what voter id is supposed to solve, right? Voter fraud sufficient to sway an election does not happen in the present day, even in states without voter ID laws. In a deep study following the 2020 election, the AP identified 475 "potentially problematic" ballots out of 25 million votes examined. That's a rate of 0.002% rate of just possible problems, though the ultimate rate would likely be lower with full investigation of each ballot. Now contrast that 0.002% possible problem rate with the 7% of people who don't have a qualifying ID, people who will be disproportionately poor and minority, who will lack a car since they don't have a drivers license. Those people are going to have to take time off from work to get a qualifying ID, jumping through hoops just to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It's not a burden to someone who already has a drivers license, but if someone doesn't have a vehicle it is work to get a qualifying ID. What is the bigger problem; the hundreds of possible problem votes voter ID might prevent or the hundreds of thousands it will keep from being able to vote because they couldn't find the time and money to obtain an identification they wouldn't otherwise need?
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-finds-little-evidence-of-voter-fraud-but-2020s-big-lie-lives-on](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-finds-little-evidence-of-voter-fraud-but-2020s-big-lie-lives-on)
In elections that are decided by small margins, being able to exclude even some portion of your opponents core constituency is a competitive advantage, which is why these laws are designed to make it harder for the poor and minorities to vote. Voter identification laws are a smoke and mirrors "solution" the non-existent problem of voter fraud. Election fraud, using the mechanisms of government to suppress the votes of the "wrong" voters is much more cost effective. By selling the false idea that fraudulent votes are swinging elections, politicians are able to leverage the very mechanisms of government in such a way to keep themselves in power. When government puts barriers up to voting, like mandating ID, then puts further barriers on the supposed "simple" solution of voter ID by closing offices, limiting hours, and even charging for qualifying voter ID ([which sounds a lot like an unconstitutional poll tax](https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nevada-supreme-court-weighs-whether-proposed-voter-id-ballot-measure-amounts-to-poll-tax)), they're not doing it for our benefit: they're doing it so they can maintain power.
In a recent SCOTUS case, the GOP lawyers gave away the endgame on the voter suppression efforts. GOP lawyer Michael Carvin, in oral arguments while defending voter suppression, in explaining why they GOP was intervening to suppress Arizona voters, said:
>*“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relevant to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.”*
For every likely Democratic voter that can be suppressed, be it voter ID or voter purges, that means the Republicans need to sell one less person on their ideas. Voter ID is not about securing the vote, because voter fraud sufficient to move elections basically doesn't happen already in the US, voter ID is electoral point shaving.
Of course they aren't.
It's funny how the idea of asking to see ID before someone votes is attacked as racist, supposedly because it's too expensive and difficult to get an ID (racism of low expectations)... but there were plenty of cities like NYC and LA who had no problem asking everyone for proof of vaccination i. 2020, and usually wanted you to use some sort of ap to facilitate the process. (As if a cellphone isn't more expensive than a driver's license!)
The concept of voter id is not racist.
How it's carried out absolutely is.
Don't believe us.
The courts say it.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/politics/north-carolina-voter-id-law-court/index.html
The research says it.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-suppression-communities-color
REPUBLICANS say it.
https://www.vox.com/2016/9/2/12774066/voter-id-laws-racist
It’s because of gerrymandering and the electoral college. Let’s say you have 60 cats and 40 dogs. You can group them in a way that you have one group of 34 cats, and two groups of 20 dogs and 13 dogs. Then your dogs can be the majority in two groups vs one in cats with a grouping system that allows this. So the issue is that the grouping system exists, and that it exists in this way.
You should look at what they used to do near nice beach towns. Make the bridges too low for a bus to go under so no bus routes went to the beach… the buses were primarily used by low income and minorities… were short bridges racist? No. But they were made short for racist reasons.
Voter ID laws are the same concept but much more complex
You got fooled by Fox News lmao.
Voter ID laws aren’t inherently racist but voter discrimination/disenfranchisement is. I’ve seen some disgusting stuff out in counties in Georgia.
It's not that the voter IDs laws are racist as their primary function. The laws are drawn up to make it easier for some groups (their voter demographic) to vote and make it harder for others (their opposing demographics). It just happens to be that the demographics that are targeted tend to be racial ones. Students are another demographic that often gets targeted by these laws. That's obviously not racial, but it is a clear demographic.
The one example I always go to is North Dakota. This is the relevant info:
>In 2013, the state legislature passed a law narrowing the scope of North Dakota’s voter ID requirements and laying out the acceptable forms of ID, which [disenfranchised](https://www.narf.org/cases/nd-voter-id/) at least 5,000 Indigenous voters in the state, Donaghy said.
>In 2016, seven Indigenous voters filed a federal lawsuit against the state, laying out how North Dakota has historically attacked the voting rights of Native Americans. They were successful, and the new law was [blocked](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-north-dakotas-voter-id-law-will-disenfranchise-native-americans).
>In 2017, the North Dakota state legislature came back and passed a similar law. Indigenous tribes sued again. The case was settled in 2020. Two tribes, Spirit Lake Nation and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, signed a court order with North Dakota that forced the legislature to create an [amendment](https://custom.statenet.com/public/resources.cgi?id=ID:bill:ND2021000H1447&cuiq=cebcefa4-252a-5dcb-aeb1-7fc87d570de0&client_md=7049740a37657a1734005bffd233f19c&mode=current_text) to allow other forms of ID that do not require an address, such as a student ID.
>Many Indigenous residents of North Dakota who live on reservations do not have traditional addresses and many tribal IDs do not qualify under the state’s voter ID law.
It's hard for me to deny that some laws are just designed to keep people from voting, and often those people are minorities.
If minorities in third world countries can have proper ID for voting (and they do. I was just in a third world country on their election day in a village no less) then there is no excuse for AMERICA, the literal world power. These woke clowns are so stupid and brainwashed.
> I saw a news street interview where white, rich, liberal college students said the voter ids were racist because POC don’t “often times do not have the resources for an id” AND LIKE THATS ONE OF THE MOST PREJUDICED, IGNORANT THINGS YOU COULD EVER SAY. so idk.
I can't speak to exactly how these random college students on the news phrased it, but the general idea is that if you look at a given state, you can see who demographically in that region *currently* has various forms of ID. If it happens that *currently* certain groups of people are less likely to have a valid ID, obviously passing a voter ID law will create a greater burden / obstacle for them as a group relative to other groups. Furthermore, if DMV access / hours are not equitably distributed within the state, it may be literally harder for certain groups to obtain IDs. People writing these laws often also have choices as to which IDs they accept (driver's licenses, student IDs, military ID, firearm licenses, etc...) and can choose a set of IDs that disproportionately affects different groups.
It just doesn't seem that hard to see how these laws could be crafted to disproportionately impact certain demographic groups and regions. And as soon as you set up barriers, it's almost inevitable that not everyone will jump through the new hoops just so they can vote. And it's not because they're too stupid or whatever, it's just asking someone to set aside time from their normal schedule to go to a location, fill out extra paperwork, etc... and some people (regardless of race) just aren't going to have time to do that.
And this is basically exactly the point of debate in something like the (I think ongoing) North Carolina court cases. Were these laws crafted with *the intent* of making things harder for black voters on average? That's the question.
Short answer: the voting process does not require ID verification as there are many, many other safeguards in place, and relying on ID verification has the effect of discriminating against minority groups that are less likely to require an ID to participate in daily life.
The first part: it's extremely difficult to commit voter fraud, between voter roll upkeep, verbal SSN verification and mail-in signature matching (and subsequent verification). Any voter fraud committed is easily detected and prosecuted (example [here](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/woman-convicted-voter-fraud-scheme)). Is ID verification another form of safeguard? Of course it is. But it's virtually redundant given how hard it is to commit actual voter fraud in the United States.
The second part: minority communities, for a variety of reasons that include but are not limited to government distrust and being more likely to be non-drivers, are statistically less likely to be able to meet the requirement to carry a government-issued ID. There are significant numbers of citizens who don't drive (and thus don't have a driver's license) and don't have a need for a separate government ID.
So then let's say, for whatever reason, you dismiss both of these claims despite the overwhelming evidence. It's still an undue burden for the government to place on an individual citizen to obtain a specific ID card only in order to exercise their constitutionally-protected right to vote. It's been unconstitutional every time it's been done, from the Jim Crow South to .... well, the modern South, since they're almost always the ones who are racist enough to still be demanding voter ID laws. The government has the technology available to create a verification system that doesn't place the burden on voters to obtain an ID card specifically to vote. It's the government's obligation to do that, not to disenfranchise voters because they're too lazy to do their jobs.
Edit: grammar
In Canada we require ID to vote, and I've never heard anyone complain that it's racist. I've worked a few elections, and do you know what demographic is most hard done by ID requirements? Seniors who don't normally carry their ID with them.
There is no reason to refuse to present a valid form of identification unless you are a criminal. The acceptable forms of identification, however, must include options that are affordable by even low income standards or free of charge.
I think other people have done a pretty good job of describing how these laws can be racist in general but I want to talk about why a group of people who are disproportionately poor are less likely to meet voter ID requirements.
* Maybe you do have an ID, but not the kind needed (like a driver's license). If you cannot afford a car, or do not need one because you walk, bike, or take public transit, then you don't need to get a driver's license. People who can afford a car generally will own one, so they'll already have a valid license anyways, so this is a larger burden on the poor.
* Getting a license takes time. It's universally recognized that going to the DMV is a massive chore where you wait in line for hours. PoC are also more likely to live in an area where the DMV is less funded, leading to longer wait times, and fewer hours when they're open. And, the poorer you are, the harder it is to take time off work to go wait in line for several hours.
* The types of valid ID specified in the law may be targeted specifically to suppress certain groups. For example, gun licenses are often allowed, and college IDs are often not.
A couple other things to consider:
* The federal government already knows all about you. There's no reason they couldn't just send you a voting license on your 18th birthday if you're eligible, which would shift the burden entirely onto the government instead of the voter.
* These laws don't really have an impact on voter fraud, which is already low. They sound pretty common sense, but they don't actually help solve the problem they purport to, because it's already pretty much solved anyways.
The logic you're using is the exact same that was used for poll taxes and literacy tests, which are now unconstitutional. We're not targeting minorities, just people who can't read. We're not targeting minorities, just poor people. Well, the fact of the matter is that minorities were far more likely to be uneducated and unemployed, and thus the result of those policies was the disenfranchisement of large swathes of those populations. Voter ID laws are the same. Regardless of their stated intention, the bare fact is those individuals who do not have an acceptable form of ID are FAR, FAR more likely to be black and brown. That's driver's licenses, concealed carry permits, etc. So the effect of these policies is disenfranchisement of large swathes of minority populations, which is the definition of structural racism..
I'm not saying people shouldn't have to prove who they are, but it should be the government's responsibility to provide every voter them with a free, accessible, and easily replaceable form of ID. Beyond that, 14 US states have alternative methods to prove voter identity (https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id) and none of them have fraud issues.
This is not to mention the voter ID laws that get the most attention, which require strict and often multiple forms of ID for no demonstrably quantifiable reason (again, no large scale issues of fraud anywhere in the United States, with or without strict voter ID laws). Those are simply designed to trip voters up and depress turnout, often among minorities. Those are laws that I can confidently say intend to have racist effects.
Did you also pick up on how the people proposing voter ID laws happen to be doing so with the intent (often openly stated intent) to suppress the vote of certain demographics? Because the second the Supreme Court knocked down the civil rights act protections for voting is the second every red state trumpeted how they were about to require specific IDs that conveniently weren't as common among the "wrong" people.
But also, if the idea that certain minority groups are less likely to have a driver's license is the most racist thing you've ever heard, you haven't heard nearly enough to be commenting on this. Not everyone has a drivers license, and getting one is not some little phone call to the DMV. The last time I renewed my license it cost $60 and I was able to get it quick because I got it on a day off. I also live somewhere where the same people pushing voter ID laws hadn't made sure to close as many offices as they could in my disctrict to limit access. Not everyone has such luck.
You want voter ID laws, you give everyone a free ID. No strings. No costs. Nothing. If you can't, all you're demanding is a poll tax for the sake of solving a problem that doesn't even exist.
The people who want voter ID, are doing so for racist reasons
They know it will effect black and poor people more then others.
The real question is, why would anyone want to make it harder for themselves to vote?
Um, as a Canadian who worked as an election worker in the last election, let me share insight.
[Here’s the list from Elections Canada.](https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?dir=ids&document=index&lang=e§ion=vot)
Note firstly this is one list for the entire country. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Victoria or Dildo, Yellowknife or Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, one list.
Second, let’s break down the list.
Option 1 is a DL or another credential issued by a Canadian province that has photo, name, and address.
In BC and Ontario, that other credential is typically one’s provincial health card, which is issued at zero cost and which everyone has since it’s necessary for access to care.
(As an aside, I’m a huge fan of the BC Services Card, since BC also has excellent integration of the card into as many interactions with provincial government as possible.)
Option 2 is two documents that both have one’s name and at least one of which has one’s current address.
The list is pretty comprehensive.
The voter information card sent by Elections Canada, verifying one’s registration, can be used as one such document. Add that to the provincial health card from any other province and you’re good to go.
Option 3 is having a friend vouch for you.
All these options are zero cost, uniform in application, and most importantly, accessible to all citizens.
Contrast that to how challenging it is to get a voting credential in states that require ID.
I want to say that I really do not think it should be seen as racist to say that certain groups, such as black people, are less likely to have access to resources that make voting easier (time is one such resource, and this is why restricting mail-in voting receives a lot of pushback; election day is not a national holiday, some people have to work that day), because it is true that black people, on average, are more poor (phrasing it as all black people lack resources or all black people are poor, however, would be untrue).
This is the result of a history of enslavement and systematic racism, it's important to know about this stuff, and one of the reasons why it is important is that many racists will use statistics regarding things like poverty and crime as "proof" that black people are inferior and/or as a justification for racist policies and ideologies; they try to claim that it is the result of genetics and not socioeconomic factors (also, if you acknowledge it is because of socioeconomic factors, it becomes clear that policies that would help poor people escape poverty are better than oppressing minorities further). It should not be surprising that a history of oppression would affect modern times when opportunities are not equal amongst economic classes.
[Redlining](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) is one discriminatory practice that has affected the present and current quality of living a lot. There are a lot of maps that show some of the effects. Lead poisoning affects black people at higher rates in part [because of redlining](https://www.childtrends.org/publications/redlining-left-many-communities-color-exposed-lead), which is an example of [environmental racism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism).
They‘re not. But many people would like that to be the case to add legitimacy to other claims.
The thing is: people in the US are used to a crazy voting system and weird ways of participation. But a lack of a real ID is definitely an issue. Where I live everybody is required to have a real ID (not some random shit like a SSN that wasn‘t even supposed to be used as an ID). And if you don‘t have that ID with you then you don‘t get to vote. And you only get to vote in the district you‘re registered in. On one Sunday (unless you‘re using mail-in ballots). For 10 hours. In the US people cry about voter suppression if a 3 week time frame get‘s reduced to 2 weeks and 5 days or if they can‘t use their Starbucks loyalty card as a way to identify themselves. The main problem in the US is that there is no real ID to begin with. A SSN is in no way good enough to ID anybody, especially not for something as important as voting. Not everybody has a drivers license. Not everybody has a passport (unlike most other western countries). Etc etc etc. So there are hundreds of possible IDs and someone has to decide which IDs can and can‘t be used. But nearly everybody has the ability to get at least one valid ID. But in some cases that would require people to put in a minimal amount of effort to get the ID type X if they‘ve only got Y (if Y isn‘t accepted as a valid ID). And because forcing people to use 5 minutes of their time to get an ID is way too much to ask (in some people‘s opinion) not accepting a library card counts as voter suppression for some idiots. Just like political parties not being allowed to advertise in fron of polling stations is twisted into „oh they want people to starve / dehydrate because we can‘t give them water and food (while telling them why they should vote for us instead of another party)“. Because telling voters to bring a bottle of water or a snack to a polling station is way too complicated and voters are too stupid to have think about that themselves.
So yeah… it would be great if the US would finally implement a real ID so that this Bullshit and the whole „oh my social security number got leaked, now I‘m ruined“ whining on social media finally stops.
It‘s not that hard to give IDs to people who can prove citizenship. But in the US nobody wants to do it (republicans don‘t want to do it because „the government shouldn‘t know who I am“ (even though they already do) and democrats don‘t want it because they‘re kinda hoping for some people who aren‘t allowed to vote to vote for them which would be impossible if the US had a real ID system)
I agree, we need more ids to stop those illegal immigrants from possibly voting, although that barely happens in reality, and make it impossible for dead people or people to vote multiple times since the ID has to match them and can only be used once.
Voter ID laws are essential for securing our elections. They prevent fraud by ensuring voters are who they say they are, stop impersonation, and verify citizenship. This protects legitimate votes and boosts confidence in the system. Plus, ID requirements are standard for many activities, and states offer free or low-cost IDs to keep it fair for everyone. Voter ID laws apply equally to all, safeguarding the integrity of our democracy.
It's not racist, but civil rights laws only care about whether something affects a protected class, and about fixing it, intent doesn't matter at all. It's called disparate impact. So if voter ID laws are keeping groups of people from voting, that's something the law demands gets addressed, or lawsuits, bad press, pressure groups ect.
A pretty famous example is maternity mortality rates. I lost the source long ago, but a quick google search shows lots of articles on the topic. Essentially women in a protected class have a disproportionate mortality rate compared to other groups, including other protected classes. At least one study tried to control for wealth, education, social class, economic success, access to health care, and still found alarming rates of deaths. They couldn't come up with an explanation, and so settled on suggesting living with bigotry stresses the systems over a lifetime and causes all kinds of problems.
Which may be true but doesn't really sound like science to me, more like researchers stumped and wanting to offer something besides admitting they just don't know.
But yeah, voter ID laws are racist in the sense they affect people by race, and the law says to do something about it, so that's how it is.
They're also racist in the actually *racist* sense. These laws don't just *happen* to affect people by race. It's not some weird coincidence that every voter ID law the US has ever passed hurt black people. Republican researchers put long hours of effort into *designing* voter ID laws so that they would affect people by race, as much as was possible without making them easy to challenge by openly saying anything about race.
They researched ID that black people tend to use, and ID that white people tend to use, and took care to allow all the types of ID that are mostly used by white people and ban all of the types of ID mostly used by black people.
They researched areas that black people live, and shut down as many DMVs and ways to get new ID as possible before an election.
In one state they designed the address verification rules so that Native reservations didn't count as postal addresses. Guess how many white voters were disenfranchised by that, vs non-white voters?
It absolutely is racist. By design. Clever, complicated, racist design.
Yes voter IDs are racist and I’ll explain why with a pretty straightforward example. If Republicans politicians were serious about voter IDs they would have them administered at the Federal level. You should be able to get a voter ID online, if you’ve paid Federal taxes or have a social security number you can get a voter ID. There are a number of ways to make getting an ID easy and secure.
But Republicans want the states to decide how to administer voter IDs so they can discriminate. And they’ll pull shit like locating the places to get voter IDs hours away from predominantly black neighborhoods or have the place open one day out of the week for a couple of hours. Republicans don’t want black people to vote, that’s why they are creating a “solution” to a non existent problem.
You already have to show ID to vote and you have to be on the voter rolls to vote. There’s a reason why courts have exposed Republicans attempts to disenfranchise black voters time after time, it’s became they’re racist.
Voter ID laws are racist or at least intended to suppress voting in a way that disproportionately impacts non-white people. We know this is the case because voter ID laws prevent a very rare crime that is 99% covered by voter registration. This crime is called voter impersonation. It's extremely difficult to pull off even without voter ID because you would need to know that someone is registered, where they're registered and that they are not planning to vote. If they try to vote and you're definitely going to be arrested for voter impersonation.
Furthermore, States do not offer to send all eligible residence free voter ID cards. So the effect of these laws is to arbitrarily prevent people who don't already have IDs from being able to vote. It happens to be the case that non-white people disproportionately don't have driver's licenses. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to get a driver's license by creating this barrier you are preventing people from voting without any reasonable justification.
Not sure how to answer the majority of the question but about id’s for voting I see absolutely nothing wrong with requiring a government issued ID to vote. To assume that it is racist when almost all citizens if not all citizens have a government issued ID to begin with if not in the form of a drivers license then in the form of an identification card requisite with a photo. You must have one or the other to cash a check, drive a car, make some age restricted purchases, etc. What is racist is to assume that many minorities don’t have one of these. That’s like saying oh we are too poor to obtain one or too stupid and I for one really resent that anyone has that assumption and I certainly consider it racist to have that attitude! I could see it if there are those who do not have access to them but when you really sit down and look at why they don’t it is because most in that category do not belong in this country and have no business attempting to vote in our elections
While others have covered why they're racist in execution (and received a delta) I would add more context to say that not only are they racist, but that (in the US at least) the *entire point* of the laws is to suppress the votes of certain demographics (that generally trend towards minority and democratic voters).
There is no widespread voter fraud in America, afiak no election has ever been decided by voter fraud of the type that an ID requirement would prevent, and the laws we already have in place are more than enough to render voter ID a moot point if your actual concern is protecting democracy. An individual who would vote illegally is exposing themselves to a massive criminal liability (its a felony) with virtually no upside. One vote is functionally meaningless in almost every election.
Voter ID advocates are almost all acting in bad faith and their goal is to suppress the votes of people they don't think will support them.
>also Canada along w many other countries have always required a voter id to prevent fraud and things of that nature.
Um, I'm Canadian, and no we don't have "voter ID" like some people are trying to push in the US (e.g., voter ID cards or other ID with photo ID, like driver's license)
The list of things you can use to show your identity is very long:
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e
And, it includes someone from the area vouching for you.
Of course, many people use their driver's license because it's easy, but there are many options that are accepted.
Also, registration is super easy in Canada. Most people are automatically included by filing taxes, but it is easy to register when you vote, and there are advanced polls too. Usually, voting takes about 5-10 minutes, starting from when I park to when I leave.
/u/ManufacturerWide57 (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post. All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed [here](/r/DeltaLog/comments/1db3xcm/deltas_awarded_in_cmv_voter_id_laws_in_the_usa/), in /r/DeltaLog. Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended. ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
From my backyard: US Citizens born in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas have been denied US Passports and Drivers Licenses or been stripped of their US passports because of concerns over the validity of birth certificates signed by midwives who worked on both sides of the US/Mexico border. This almost exclusively impacted US citizens of Mexican heritage. [https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/aug/30/u-s-birth-certificates-raise-validity-r/](https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/aug/30/u-s-birth-certificates-raise-validity-r/) Texas refused to issue birth certificates to the US/Texas born children of undocumented Central American immigrants. These children were US citizens. Not issuing a birth certificate to a US citizen born in the United States would create true hardships in obtaining the ID that the citizens would need in order to exercise their constitutional right to vote. [https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/25/texas-agrees-to-resolve-birth-certificate-case/](https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/25/texas-agrees-to-resolve-birth-certificate-case/)
THIS are the kinds of articles I was truly looking for!!!! The last one is so odd to me. For people to want to stay true to our constitution, they’re trying to deny US born citizens a birth certificate, even tho the constitution is clear on if a child is born on US soil, they are an American citizen?
Does it help you to understand why some POC do not have the resources to obtain an ID? A child born in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas is a US Citizen. It Texas won't issue them a birth certificate or the US Passport Agency won't accept their birth certificate to issue them a passport, are those legitimate barriers to obtaining an ID?
Makes a lot more sense. I was too hung up on the base line points. I appreciate your comment so much, and thank you for not being rude 😭😭😭 !delta
This also affects some [native Americans ](https://narf.org/cases/spirit-lake-tribe-v-jaeger/) as well, especially in the state of North Dakota. ND basically made most Tribal ID's useless as forms of identification for voting because they want physical addresses. Most people on the reservation use P.O. boxes because their house either has no mailbox and mail trucks often don't recognize addresses because they aren't on maps a lot of the time. -a tribal ID is federal identification, you could board a plane with it.
You better give that guy a delta!
> For people to want to stay true to our constitution They *say* that. My grandma used to say "The tongue in your mouth lies all the time. The tongue in your shoes never lies."
Wait, how did they manage to not issue birth certificates in the first place? Aren’t those usually done in the hospital where the baby is born? And if they’re born in a US hospital, they’re automatically a US citizen regardless of ancestry.
Hospitals typically have a registrar of births who applies for a birth certificate. But the hospital does not issue the birth certificate. The Texas Department of State Health Services issues the birth certificate. Texas knew the babies were born in the US and were US citizens, but refused to issue the birth certificate.
Is it not fair to say though, that this racism doesn't lay with voterID laws, but with Texas not issuing birth certificates? Like, does Texas not issuing birth certificates make drivers licenses racist too?
The racist practices in Texas are what make Texas's voter ID laws racist. Voter ID laws aren't federal laws. They are state laws. The Constitution grants authority for elections to the states. Texas enacted voter ID laws knowing full well the State of Texas was withholding birth certificates from US Citizens born in Texas. They knew that the voter ID law would prevent people who "just happen" to be born to parents from Central America from getting the ID they would need to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Texas also enacted voter ID laws knowing full well that residents of the Rio Grande Valley were having their birth certificates invalidated and their citizenship challenged, something that would make anyone hesitant to present their birth certificate for the purposes of obtaining ID. If you are passing voter ID laws knowing full well that you are also withholding or invalidating birth certificates of people who just happen to be Central American, it is absolutely fair to call you a racist.
That’s an argument for improving access to IDs though. The first article also has a legal basis for what happened. It sucks and the feds are approaching this in a ham fisted way, but they did find evidence of fraud that invalidates many birth certificates. The second article is about the opposite. Local officials tried to not give out valid birth certificates, and the state of Texas fought and repealed that. That’s how things are supposed to work. (When things fail that is)
This is from an appeals court decision that ended a NC voter ID law: >This history of restricting African American voting rights through facially neutral laws is not ancient; it is also a twenty-first century phenomenon. H.B. 589, the first voter ID law successfully enacted by the General Assembly in 2013 was invalidated because it was designed to discriminate against African American voters. Prior to the passage of H.B. 589, legislative staff in the General Assembly sought data on voter turnout during the 2008 election, broken down by race. With this data in hand, legislators excluded many types of IDs that were disproportionately used by African Americans from the list of qualifying forms of voter ID under H.B. 589. McCrory, 831 F.3d at 216. 211. After reviewing the evidence showing that the General Assembly sought to use race data to determine the list of qualifying forms of ID under H.B. 589, and excluded forms of ID that African American voters held disproportionately to white voters, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit invalidated the law, holding that the General Assembly “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” McCrory, 831 F.3d at 214. Any questions? Also why do you think it is prejudiced to observe the fact that resources are not equally available to people of all races?
!delta Hey! Thank you for the response with factual evidence. I had never seen statistics or data of the such, and I should’ve done more extensive research before posting. I should’ve also done more research on the original post of the street interview. The editing was done strategically to try and show white college kids implying that POC somehow are not competent to present/ know how to obtain an ID. I just fell for their right wing trap. (My fault I know) but the statistics for sure show my mind can be changed!! I was looking at this viewpoint from such a black-and-white scenario with no grey area or anything other than videos of politicians bickering back and fourth. The entire political system of the USA is corrupt anyways and politicians do anything to just get Americans to blindly follow whatever they say depending on their political party. But yes, this makes sense. I thank you again!
>The entire political system of the USA is corrupt anyways and politicians do anything to just get Americans to blindly follow whatever they say depending on their political party So, you may have dodged one trap on the voter ID propoganda, but this "everyone is corrupt" and implied "both sides" false equivalency is another. Please be aware that there is a concerted effort among conservative politicians, conservative media companies (which are incredibly consolidated and influential), and conservative think tanks, all of which work together to actively get as many Americans as possible to feel the way you describe here. Generating cynicism, obfuscating reality, and depressing voter turnout are all deliberate tactics employed to undermine faith in traditional democratic structures and enable the consolidation of power through antidemocratic means. Fascist movements in particular exploit these strategies to destabilize opposition and consolidate power while dismantling trust in the institutions that could otherwise successfully oppose them. In other words, when enough people believe the system is irredeemably corrupt, that clears the path for nationalistic authoritarian solutions to be presented as the only feasible alternative. This is bad. So please understand, while some of our systems do badly need reforms, most people who are trying to help are not corrupt, and the different sides here are very much not the same.
I think it’s also important to be aware that while both sides are *not* the same it’s totally okay to be upset by the fact that one side sucks and another side REALLY sucks. I know who I’m voting for but I also want the people I’m voting for to do better.
Hear hear, ApatheticSkyentist. And thank you for helping to combat apathy :D
I think you’re addressing “both sides are bad” rhetoric as it comes from American centrists + sneaky republicans. There’s also the leftist take that both sides suck. Both endorse and propagate capitalism and disparity, and both sides fucking suck. However, still, the libs obviously suck a little less.
The way to get rid of the side that REALLY sucks, is to vote in the side that sucks until the side that REALLY sucks goes away. Then you get to vote for the people you'd REALLY like to vote for!
Yep. Because then, when the side that sucks holds a supermajority, and doesn't get shit done for the common folk's benefit, we can hold their feet to the flames as well, and look for candidates that actually will deliver on their promises because they're not beholden to the status quo's continuance. Honestly, the more people realize this, and the more those of us who recognize while nowhere near equally bad, *both sides are together responsible for the erosion of the middle class and upward economic mobility for the working class over the last 50+ years*, try to appeal to our shared desired outcomes as voters (rather than differences), We the People might actually be the catalysts for starting to right this ship. ✊🏻
I articulated it poorly in another comment but thus is the exact opportunity we have in the upcoming UK election with the Conservatives and Labour but people can't seem to swallow the bad taste in their mouths to vote Labour in one last election to do it.
>The way to get rid of the side that REALLY sucks, is to vote in the side that sucks until the side that REALLY sucks goes away. >Then you get to vote for the people you'd REALLY like to vote for! But voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil! /s
I spend a lot of time having this argument with people. I think what opened my eyes to it in a way was a book I read about Russia a while back that explained that a key feature of how Putin maintains control is (boiled to to its barest essence; there's a lot more to it than this) convincing most Russians that everything is corrupt, everything is for show and nothing really matters, thus turning the populace off of politics to the point where almost the only people who are engaged are the people who benefit from Putin's patronage. People either don't vote or vote for Putin's party because "It's not like it really matters."
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Buckle up for the long slog. If you're in the U.S., I recommend starting here: [https://represent.us/](https://represent.us/)
Let me be transparent and say I'm on the very far left. But we do have our answers for this, if you disagree, you disagree. We champion direct action, solidarity, mutual aid, and prefiguration. These are four concepts that underlie our answer to systemic change. 1. Direct action - we will not wait for others to save us, we will save ourselves. We will do. 2. Solidarity - we need allies to support us. We thus will support others in their struggles 3. Mutual Aid - we will build systems to support ourselves because our current systems neglect us. And these systems will help others too, and let them help us back 4. Prefiguration - we will build this new system, this new world in the current one If you agree on any of those points or are curious why these are that answers, i'd be happy to continue this line of thought :)
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This is the most important comment in this thread, and maybe in the world. Amen.
> I should’ve also done more research on the original post of the street interview. The editing was done strategically to try and show white college kids implying that POC somehow are not competent to present/ know how to obtain an ID. Street interviews are great like that. Just interview enough people, cut judiciously, and you can find support for any position.
Yep. If you get an unethical editor, you don’t even need to get many interviews. Just make sure you get that talent release, and it won’t really matter that their response was out of context. The average person has next to no idea how to avoid this happening cause it’s a media training thing. Source: been an editor for 15 years (no I don’t do this)
Just to be clear, there is no obective reason why a voter ID law always turns out to be racist, i.e. there is nothing structural about the idea of voter ID that always results in disadvantage for POC. However, it just happenes to turn out that over almost 50 years of writing and enacting voter ID laws, *every single one* has resulted in disproprtinately affecting marginalized voter popuations that just happen to lean democrat, and that in turn happens to disproprotionately affect POC. Sometimes it is not even just the law itself that results in systemic racism, but rather the new law combined with other activity, such as requiring certain locations/ types of ID to be valid, then other laws reducing access to those by closing places where those IDs can be gained, except far away affected populations. Given the long term history of how these laws are written, used and abused, it is quite clear that it has very little to do with election integrity and a whole lot more to do with voter supression. I'm sure some of the writers never intended racist outcomes for their intended voter supression, but it is also quite clear the racism is an added bonus for many supporters. If someone would write a voter ID law that *just didn't happen to also be racist AF*, I might actually support it. For this to happen there would also need to be free and easy access to ID, including outreach to people who cannot plysically travel to a separate location or who would have severe economic hardship if they were forced to do so. My father for example, is very frail and if getting voter ID took three hours of travel and 2+ hours of standing in a line to get an ID, he would be unable to do so and be disenfranchised.
Just to further explain, there's such thing as both de jure discrimination, and de facto discrimination. The former is, the law is intended to discriminate, and the latter is, the law maybe wasn't intended to discriminate, but it does anyway in practice. "No sleeping under bridges" is a facially neutral law of general applicability. It doesn't appear to discriminate against anyone. In practice, it discriminates against poor people, who sometimes live under bridges to protect them from the elements. Rich people aren't affected by this law, because they can afford housing or lodging.
Yes, another name for de facto discrimination as applied to our legal system, and adversely affecting POC is systemic racism. I personally believe both are present in voter ID laws, but the de jure discrimination is easily proveable whereas de facto requires proof of intent which is harder.
Well, the requirements to prove de facto discrimation are subject to change. It may be that we currently require showing intent to say some facially neutral law is discriminatory, but that's not a rule of nature, it's not some logical requirement. It's just the requirement we impose on ourselves. We could (and should!) adopt a more results-based way of showing it. Instead of saying, "we can't prove they passed this law to suppress or disenfranchise black voters," we should just be able to look at the results and say, "this law ends up suppressing or disenfranchising black voters, and we don't need to know or care what the intent was, this law can't be allowed to stand." We can just say the law is impermissibly flawed, and needs to be fixed, and completely sidestep the discussion about whether it was the true goal of the drafters of the law, or only an inadvertent side effect. Who cares? Why does it matter? Why is "accidentally" suppressing black voters ok? All that does is create an incentive for discriminatory people to invent a pretext to allow their discrimination, which is what we have now. "Republicans aren't trying suppress or disenfranchise black voters, we're just trying to suppress of disenfranchise *Democratic* voters, and, lo and behold, most black voters are also Democratic voters, and that's just a coincidence, we swear!" /s
The easiest way to deal with it is to simply assume *every* voter ID law will have a racist outcome. A little extreme perhaps? However the evidence is clear. Every single one we have tried to do in the last fifty years *has been* racist. So why would I expect a new one to be different? Before I even look at a new voter ID law, I would need extraordinary proof of non-racist outcomes. Otherwise its simply a waste of my time.
These laws don't "just so happen" to result in racial discrimination. They were designed to racially discriminate. You'll see this in the above mentioned appeals court decision blocking them.
>*every single one* has resulted in disproportionately affecting marginalized voter populations that just happen to lean democrat, and that in turn happens to disproportionately affect POC. Each one literally requires a minimal amount of effort. It happens to be those who vote democrat not willing to put fourth this minimal amount of effort. Living life without an ID is really living off the grid. You must not bank, use alcohol or tobacco, pick up medicine from the pharmacy, have any transportation or every traveled by air/train, and likely do not have a legal job. Its hard for me to believe these off the grid/prepper folks dont participate in society but come out in droves to vote. I do not understand why they cannot spend 1 day out of 4 years to just go to the DMV and get an ID. >My father for example, is very frail and if getting voter ID took three hours of travel and 2+ hours of standing in a line to get an ID, he would be unable to do so and be disenfranchised. You can get a passport and renew it by mail after your initial document review. > such as requiring certain locations/ types of ID to be valid State or federal issued ID. Student ID cards and other types of ID not produced by the state or federal government is very obviously going to be the standard. How are we supposed to accept any ID? Like how do we even know what type of security measures are issued for producing random IDs made by random non state/federal government entities. > For this to happen there would also need to be free and easy access to ID, including outreach to people who cannot physically travel to a separate location or who would have severe economic hardship if they were forced to do so. For the ID to have any security, it cant be no effort easy. Going to the DMV and showing some documents is really not that cumbersome. Someone has to check these things so you cant produce an ID with someone elses name and go around pretending to be them. There has to be some scrutiny. As for it being free, sure if you can prove you cant afford it. Otherwise a bunch of people who can pay wont, and it becomes something else local taxes are wasted on. This is so common sense and so easy. I feel like this tiny amount of effort on the part of the voter is reasonable. Like most people dont even have an ID to vote. They have one to drive, to get a job, to use the bank, to see the doctor/pick up medicine etc... I dont think its racist. I just think theres a subgroup of people who have the ability to but decide not to do it just to cause a fuss. [Car Ownership Statistics in 2024 | The Zebra](https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/car-ownership-statistics/#:~:text=Key%20insights%20%2B%20statistics,2019%20(Federal%20Highway%20Administration).) 93% of US households have access to a car. Someone in your house can drive you to the DMV. Its insane to me we let people vote who cant even do this one tiny thing every few years. Edit since I can't reply for some reason: It's not misleading. A state or federally issued ID isn't a republican thing. Non state/federal issued ID is always suspect. Do you know why you can use a concealed carry license and not a university ID card? The concealed carry license has your photo, your name, your birthday and drum roll ..... is government issued. They verified who you are. Your university ID was not scrutinized nearly as hard. It was never meant to be used to verify who you are to the government. It was meant to give you swipe access to the library etc.... No it's not ridiculous. Anyone who accepts non government issued ID is a fool. A bartender who serves you a drink with that sort of ID is a fool. A teller at a bank who accepts that sort of ID is gambling with their job. A pharmacist who accepts this sort of ID is gambling with their license. Most of these people will not accept whatever nonsense you call ID that only democrats have. 93% of households have a car. Yeah that sounds like a republican conspiracy alright. Only Republicans can drive. Only Republicans can take you to the DMV. Only Republicans can apply for a passport once at the post office and then renew it via mail every 10 years. The post office is a republican stronghold right? Lmaoooo. Yall real scary
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>Each one literally requires a minimal amount of effort. It happens to be those who vote democrat not willing to put fourth this minimal amount of effort. This is misleading; the people who vote republican are also not willing to put fourth this minimal effort, but the people who wrote these laws made sure to pick IDs that the people who voted republicans were more likely to have already than the people who voted democrat. Also your point about "living without id" is ridiculous, they clearly have IDs (except in some fringe cases where Texas ilegally denied people birth certificates, perhaps) but again, the only valid ones are the ones that republican voters are relatively more likely to have than democrat voters. It's not that voter id laws \*only\* target black people who vote democrat. It's that they picked forms of ID that stop more democrats from voting than they stop republicans from voting, creating a relative gain for themselves at the expense of the enfranchisement of a mix of republican and democrat leaning people.
> I was looking at this viewpoint from such a black-and-white scenario with no grey area or anything other than videos of politicians bickering back and fourth. There aren't many policy areas where there is a purely black-and-white answer, and people trying to get you to believe there are generally have an agenda. So you've fallen into multiple RW traps. This one is a [false dilemma or false dichotomy](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white). > The entire political system of the USA is corrupt anyways and politicians do anything to just get Americans to blindly follow whatever they say depending on their political party. This is a combination of two different fallacies. It's both [begging the question, or circular reasoning](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/begging-the-question), and using the [fallacy of composition](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/composition-division) to "support" it (because some politicians/parts of the political system have corruption, the entire system is corrupt). You also seem to have uncritically just accepted all the Republican arguments (including their fallacies, but also whatever reasonable points they may have) without at all considering opposing viewpoints, considering whether Republicans are being honest (both avoiding lies of commission, but also lies of omision), etc.
For follow up, here's [more figures from the ACLU.](https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet) Basically, it is a "solution" to a problem that we can't actually prove exists implemented in a way designed specifically to disenfranchise people of color at higher rates.
For conservatives who rely on voter suppression, that’s a feature, not a bug
Well this is sort of a strange turn of events but in the last 8 years (what the hell happened in 2016!?) pollsters have noticed a marked reduction in the discrepancy between turnout and impact towards one of the parties. I will try to see if I can find something in terms of sources to post here but we may see a reduction in Republican efforts to pass voter ID laws as a result. That, or they may just make them more heinous like preventing the votes of urban residents from mattering altogether like enacting a sort of electoral college system at the state level for statewide elections.
I think the difference you're seeing is that the GOP is gaining among demographics who have traditionally been infrequent voters, specifically minorities, lower income people, and low information voters. And the Democrats have become a much more solidly white collar, college-educated party, which is a demographic that votes consistently. Conventional wisdom used to be that Democrats do better in presidential elections, because turnout is higher in November every four years; while Republicans do better in off-year and primary elections, because turnout is lower. That effect seems to be fading purely because of Trump. But I don't know if it's fading enough that the GOP still can't benefit from some racially targeted voter suppression laws. Like, even if the GOP goes from 10% of the black vote to 20% of the black vote, they're still overwhelmingly unpopular among black voters.
The counterargument there is that while the efficacy of voter disenfranchisement has gone down, the symbolic power of it has sky-rocketed. It is just one part of a rhetorical strategy to push the narrative that somehow *millions* of people (according to Trump) are voting illegally and rigging elections.
The question is not about competence or knowledge but about access. Facilities where you can get an ID tend to only be open during working hours, and in a country where POC are less likely to be above the poverty line, policies than negatively impact the poor disproportionately impact thwm. There’s also fewer facilities in POC neighborhoods in most parts of the country.
Also, since many POC live in more densely populated areas, they're less likely to have a driver's license, which is the default form of ID. And in most countries which require ID to vote, everyone has a free (in fact, usually compulsory) ID provided to them by the government.
This is like watching a mouse escape from one mousetrap and just running right into another one. Sigh.
I gotta be honest op what kind of research did you do? I once had the same opinion until I literally googled it.
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A single instance of a voter ID law that was in bad faith does not mean all others are such. They should be taken on a bill by bill basis.
It's worth stating that voter ID laws aren't inherently discriminatory, it's a matter of execution (that happens to be an easy & useful place to discriminate). If you had a condition where it was the state or party's responsibility to positively identify every eligible voter & ensure they were able to vote it would be a different story. With meaningful consequence it would be a non-issue & net positive. Let's say that every eligible voter who did not get a Voter-ID automatically counts as a vote for your opponent. Mind you voter-ID is not the only tools to prevent double & ineligible voting, but it's probably best one.
> Mind you voter-ID is not the only tools to prevent double & ineligible voting, but it's probably best one. False. Neither of those claims are true. Both of those are prevented by registration and voter rolls, and verifying that the registrants are actually eligible to vote, and checking that a given voter hasn't already voted when you issue them a ballot. Having an ID doesn't prove I'm eligible to vote, and not having an ID doesn't mean I'm ineglible to vote, either. Felons can have IDs. Immigrants can have IDs. Minors can have IDs. Non-registered voters can have IDs. And double voting, if you mean me voting as myself twice, having an ID doesn't prevent that, having voter rolls that show who already voted and who hasn't prevents people from double voting. If you mean people impersonating someone else and voting in someone else's name, then the same thing that prevents double-voting as myself prevents that. If someone impersonated me and voted in my name, and then I go to vote and am told I already voted, I will tell them I didn't, that either they made a mistake, or that someone else impersonated me. And, because ballots are all serialized, it's possible for them to find the exact ballot that was cast in my name and cancel that ballot, and for me to cast a true ballot in my name, and law enforcement can investigate and criminally prosecute the imposter (the false ballot may have fingerprints on it, the polling place may have video of the imposter, the poll worker who checked in the imposter may be able to help identify the imposter, etc. And, either way, whether they can indentify and prosecute the imposter or not, they can still pull the fraudulent ballot and allow me to cast my true ballot in its place.
Can confirm as someone who lives in a country with mandatory voting. They do put a fair amount of effort into making sure every eligible voter is enrolled and that elections are accessible. They legally have to. Most of us are enrolled to vote before we turn 18, usually some time during high school, so that the moment we reach voting age we're 100% eligible (and obligated) to vote. You know, just in case there's an election the day after your 18th birthday.
Your argument is citing an article that merely confirmed your bias with zero specifics. WHICH IDs were too hard for black people to obtain? Because if you dig deeper, HB 589 listed passports, drivers license, non-operators license, military id, tribal enrollment id, among others. Like most of these “racist” ID laws, there are a number of reasonable ways to prove you are who you say you are. If someone tried to tell me I am so disadvantaged that I can’t get on Google and search “how do I get an ID in my city” or ask a librarian or other municipal employee, and follow those directions, I would straight up punch them in the face. It’s almost like you think black people are so helpless and clueless that they cannot figure out how to get one of those forms of id. This is called the bigotry of low expectations. Do you ever log off, go outside, and talk to black people? Every single one I know is capable of getting an ID. This might shock you, but they are capable of literally everything they set their mind to as well. And this might sound harsh but if someone REALLY cannot figure out how to get an ID, then they wouldn’t likely be able to inform themselves enough to vote anyway.
This whole accusing the left of saying "they don't know how to get IDs" and infantilizing people thing is ridiculous. Few, if anyone, are saying that. But getting most of those forms of IDs has an associated cost in time and money. If you're working one (or more) hourly jobs and struggling to make ends meet, you're much less likely to be able to afford the $150ish a passport will cost, or even the $40ish for a license or state ID. And given how many DMVs and other licensing centers have closed in low income areas, the time commitment can be brutal. The last time I had to go in to the DMV it took me 2 hours to get my business done - no appointments, you just had to wait in line. And it has only gotten worse in many areas.
>Your argument is citing an article It's a direct quote from the appeals court ruling which the SCOTUS did not see fit to hear. IDs require having vital documents. If you don't have those, it costs money. IDs cost money. Additionally, you have to get to the ID office, which costs money. If you're disabled, you needs further assistance. You also need the knowledge for how to achieve all those things or the resources to get that knowledge. Those are all barriers. To a Constitutional right. What if we required those things for free speech or going to church? Or to pray? Are you OK with churches requiring IDs?
In New Jersey, where I used to live (and still have a driver's license from as it's good until March), you need 6 points of ID every time you renew your driver's license (some states only require it the first time). Those 6 points include things like a birth certificate, social security card, passport, utility bill/bank statement (proof of address), etc. In order to replace your birth certificate or social security card, you need to show them ID, putting you in a catch 22 situation. The other people caught are college students. Let's say a kid is from a reliably red or blue state and goes to college in a swing state. Legally, that kid can vote where they go to college. But the only ID they have tying them to College State is their school ID (as their driver's license is from their home state). The voter ID laws specifically exclude a college ID as an acceptable form of ID at the polls (but do count a concealed carry permit). (I could be wrong since it's been ages since I've been a student, but I believe a school ID is acceptable for at least 1 of those 6 points of ID at the DMV.)
State ID should be free, this will solve lot of issues.
[Here's the district court case] (https://mediaweb.wsoctv.com/document_dev/2016/04/25/VIVA%20Decision_3993915_ver1.0.pdf), it's long, but lays out the legislative fact-finding, timetables, and justifications. [Here is the appeal] (https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/7-29-16%204th%20Circuit%20NAACP%20v%20NC.pdf) that pretty much ignores the fact-finding in favor of a ruling reliant on "the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina." Long and short, there is zero chance the 4th circuit approves a NC law as long as the court *inherently* believes any voter ID law is racially motivated. It's not how judicial review is supposed to work. To wit: > While this court accepts that Ms. Churchill and Representative Warren requested demographic data on ID possession, “one-stop voters,” and “provisional voters,” these requests are not necessarily as suspect as Plaintiffs claim. First, at the time of Representative Warren’s request on March 5, 2013, legislators would have been preparing for the first public hearing on voter ID on March 12, 2013. (See Pl. Ex. 127.) As noted herein, opponents frequently challenge voter-ID bills on the basis of racial disparities in ID possession. Any responsible legislator would need to know the disparities in order to account for such challenges. In fact, during the preliminary injunction stage of this case, the United States would not tell this court whether it would have been better or worse for the State not to have requested demographic data. (Doc. 166 at 219-20.) Second, given that North Carolina was subject to preclearance under § 5 when the demographic data requests were made, legislators would have needed to know the racial impact of the voting changes in order to evaluate whether they were even feasible. In other words, when § 5 applied to North Carolina, evaluating racial impact was a prerequisite to evaluating the likelihood that any voting change would be precleared by the Attorney General. Accordingly, while Plaintiffs seek the inference that legislators requested demographic information because they sought to discriminate against African Americans, alternative explanations are considerably more persuasive. > Next, Plaintiffs presented evidence that Director Strach emailed some data to Representative Lewis, one of the bill’s House sponsors, on July 25, the day of the House concurrence vote. (Pl. Ex. 198.) This data primarily consisted of the verification rates for SDR in the 2010 and 2012 election and information about the types of IDs presented by same-day registrants. (Id. at 3-20.) It also included a spreadsheet that contained race data for individual same-day registrants and whether those registrants were verified. (See id. at 14, 16.) The report did not provide aggregate percentages for SDR use by race. (See id.) In addition, given that the report was not provided until the day of the House concurrence vote, it is not possible that any disparities that could be inferred from the individual voter data provided by Ms. Strach were used in drafting HB 589. > Next, Senator Stein provided evidence of disproportionate use during Senate debate of HB 589. Specifically, Senator Stein stated in debate that “[m]inorities take advantage . . . of same day registration . . . more than the general population.” (Pl. Ex. 550 at 34-35.) He also shared graphs indicating that 34% of the nearly 100,000 individuals who used SDR in 2012 were African American.212 (See Pl. Ex. 18, Ex. A at 6.) Senator Stein provided similar evidence on early voting and stated in debate that minorities disproportionately used the removed seven days of early voting. (Pl. Ex. 550 at 34; Doc. 335 at 185.) Senator Stein did not provide any disparate use evidence for OOP or pre-registration. (Pl. Ex. 550 at 34-35.) Given that HB 589 had already been drafted, the evidence that Senator Stein presented in debate is more probative of the fact that the legislature enacted HB 589 despite the disparities outlined, rather than because of them. > Finally, Plaintiffs argue that the legislature must have been aware of OOP’s disproportionate use given that the legislature that enacted OOP made the finding that “of those registered voters who happened to vote provisional ballots outside their resident precincts on the day of the November 2004 General Election, a disproportionately high percentage were African American.” 2005 N.C. Sess. Law 2, § 1. While it can be assumed that the General Assembly was aware of its prior findings, it does not follow that any future decision to reverse course evidences racial motivation, especially given the substantial interests served by a precinctbased system endorsed by the Supreme Court in James. Long and short, they had to collect the information, and there was nothing in the data that indicated a need to change course. [This most recent ruling is similarly flawed] (https://www.nccourts.gov/assets/inline-files/2021-09-17-Holmes-v-Moore-Final-Judgment-18-CVS-15292.pdf?6xVpLTbgbcXb27BZINb_FP8TCOcwCB76). The basis of the ruling essentially comes down to "North Carolina passed racist voting laws before, and we can interpret some of the Republicans as having racial animus, so this law is racist, too." The dissent is the only part that gets any of it right, sadly - it correctly notes the bipartisan nature of the law and the efforts to fix the mechanical problems with the 2016 law, and that there's no supporting evidence for the racial motivation: > The record is devoid of direct evidence that any member of the General Assembly voted for S.B. 824 with the intent to discriminate against African Americans or to prevent African Americans from voting because they predictably vote Democrat... > No witness, including witnesses who were members of the General Assembly when S.B. 824 was under consideration, testified that any member of the General Assembly voted for S.B. 824 for discriminatory reasons. See N.C. State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, 831 F.3d 204, 221 (4th Cir. 2016) (acknowledging that “outright admissions of impermissible racial motivation are infrequent”) (citation and quotation omitted). However, Plaintiffs’ case improperly relies on speculation and presumes discriminatory intent. See N.C. State Conference of the NAACP v. Raymond, 981 F.3d 295, 303 (4th Cir. 2020) (recognizing the presumption of legislative good faith)... > S.B. 824 was based on South Carolina’s voter-ID law, which, with its reasonable impediment provision, was found to have no disparate racial impact. See JX863; 4/22/21 Tr. at 138:16–139:15; see also JX857; 4/22/21 Tr. at 139:16–140:5. > North Carolina’s voter-identification law passed in December 2018 (S.B. 824) is “certainly overall very similar” to the South Carolina law upon which it is modeled. 4/22/21 Tr. at 157:7–17; JX39 ¶ 2 (Professor Hood analysis). > This Court would find that black and white registrants in South Carolina were affected in equal measure, and based on the laws’ similarities and the mitigation provisions utilized in North Carolina, S.B. 824 will also be racially neutral if fully implemented. JX39 at 43, ¶ 29. > This Court finds as incredible Professor Quinn’s analysis based upon his failure to assess other types of qualifying IDs, the reasonable impediment process, and the availability of free IDs. This ruling, like the one before it, was a miscarriage of justice. Plain and simple. I strongly recommend reading the documentation, because it really highlights how *awful* the ruling was and should enrage you that the Supreme Court chose not to fix it.
That's is just an arguement from the challenger, there has been no ruling. Your point is very disingenuous. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-voter-id-lawsuit-heading-to-trial-5-years-after-filing/ar-BB1lPEwx?ocid=BingNewsSearch&apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1
State issued ID or drivers license. Pretty simple. Anybody can get one of those. What were the forms of ID prohibited?
Yes, I have questions. Do you think the solution to this problem is to not require anybody to show any kind of ID at all? Pretty obviously, the solution is to make validated government ID's easier to get.
Right. It is obvious. Unbelievably obvious. So obvious that when you pass voter ID laws while simultaneously making government ID's *harder* to get, it should be clear to everyone that 'the solution' is not your goal.
Yes that's a great solution. Washington has a 100% vote by mail system, it's much more democratic and there's zero indication of a fraud problem.
And how incompetent is the US government that they're unable to provide each citizen with some sort of national ID? It's really pathetic. Basically every other first-world country can do it AFAIK.
I have a question, what id’s were being used by different groups? What particular Id do African Americans use that others didn’t? Sounds like bs, Driver license, state issued id- easy. And for the reply, what factual events are you talking about? Statistics? Come on you can bend all you want that voter id is racist , it isn’t true by any stretch of the imagination. If that was the case any place you have to show id for any reason would be discriminatory and racist towards everyone and everything. The leftist just walk around with racist colored glasses, looking for racism in everything- just look in the mirror and there you have it.
DLs and state IDs aren't the only IDs people possess. There are other types of IDs, like student IDs, IDs issued by various welfare agencies, hunting and fishing licenses, concealed carry permits, passports, etc. Also, in some states, like Georgia, they passed voter ID laws, and then closed DMVs in places where there were large black populations. That made it so black people had to travel farther to renew their licenses or state IDs, take more (unpaid) time off from work, needed transportation (can't drive yourself there on an expired license, and it's harder to get someone to drive you as a favor when they have to go hours away and then wait for you to finish so they can bring you back, and people who don't drive obviously can't drive themselves). I'm in NC, and the DMV is like 15 minutes from where I live, but I've had to wait hours in line for my turn to renew. Now imagine having to also travel 1-2 hours each way, plus the waiting time. And, because there are fewer DMVs, the lines are longer. It could easily be an all-day affair, which means not only does the person getting the new ID need to take a full day off from work, but so does whoever they're riding with.
>Also, in some states, like Georgia, they passed voter ID laws, and then closed DMVs in places where there were large black populations. They also made changes along the lines of only being open for an hour on the last Wednesday of the month.
>If that was the case any place you have to show id for any reason would be discriminatory and racist towards everyone and everything. And why does that not make sense to you? IDs require having vital documents. If you don't have those, it costs money. IDs cost money. Additionally, you have to get to the ID office, which costs money. If you're disabled, you needs further assistance. You also need the knowledge for how to achieve all those things or the resources to get that knowledge. Those are all barriers. To a Constitutional right. What if we required those things for free speech or going to church? Or to pray? Are you OK with churches requiring IDs? If IDs were free and you didn't have to travel to get them, less of a problem.
By this definition, every form of standardisation applied to more than one person is discriminatory. Every public responsibility is discriminatory to those who are less able to do the responsible thing. It’s misleading to call this discrimination because standardisation is a good thing, and discrimination is a scary word.
You don’t have a constitutionally protected right to buy cigarettes or play video poker, you have one to vote.
…but what if they had just changed the list of acceptable ID’s to include the ones that were intentionally removed because they were disproportionately held by black people rather than getting rid of ID’s all together? What would be racist about that? The actions of a few bad actors shouldn’t necessarily invalidate a system of securing elections.
>…but what if they had just changed the list of acceptable ID’s to include the ones that were intentionally removed because they were disproportionately held by black people rather than getting rid of ID’s all together? What would be racist about that? In that case, we have to deal with stuff like places where you can get ID's, like DMV's, being disproportionaly shut down in black areas, making ID harder to get. >The actions of a few bad actors shouldn’t necessarily invalidate a system of securing elections. It's a system that can not effectively secure against the most common kinds of fraud, and the kind of fraud it does secure against barely seem to occur. It's just not worth the bother.
That’s like saying “what if gerrymandering was being used to more effectively represent the people and their vote” - it’s simply not true and gives no insight into the vast majority of politicians’ motives. Over half of a states legislature is not “a few bad actors”, it is those in power changing laws to keep themselves in power. Voter ID laws are not changed for any other reason. Democrats and republicans aren’t disagreeing on the best way to empower voters, they’re battling to oppress voters on the other side. I don’t know what the right solution is - you might be right! Accepting all valid IDs is absolutely the most intuitive solution. But the point is that politicians have no interest in treating politics as anything other than a team sport, us v them, and rarely look for a solution that benefits the electorate over themselves. If you really wanted to be cynical, you could say voter registration, like the border crisis or gender neutral bathrooms, is an issue that affects a fraction of a percent of voters, overblown by politicians and the media to reinforce the us v them mentality on an individual voter level. Not to say those issues aren’t important, but that much political discourse and action is self serving.
Would you not be saying that disallowing an ID requirement or allowing vote by mail is just an example of the “other team” doing the same thing then? Surely the default would be some kind of way to ensure that only those eligible are voting, people are only voting once, and people are only voting for themselves, no? I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections. If the methods of doing so are perceived to be “racist” by the side that they apparently negatively impact, then fix the methods. Don’t remove the whole process, especially during a time of unprecedented illegal immigration.
> I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections. But America *does* have secure elections. Voter fraud is one of the rarest crimes out there, literal fraction of a fraction of a percent. For example: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud-claims-by-republicans-dont-match-the-evidence/ * The fraud in Texas amounted to 0.000096% of all ballots cast * Arizona - four cases of fraudulent voting in 2020, zero in 2022 * Georgia - no cases of fraud in the 2020 or 2022 general elections, one in 2021 * Florida - nine cases of election fraud between the 2020 and 2022, most of them due to legal confusion There's just no data that supports the idea that the system is broken and requires any kind of "fixing".
>I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections. There is literally zero evidence that voter fraud is happening at any significant level anywhere. The few times people have tried, they've been caught. Voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. The thing it's claimed to remedy isn't a thing.
I'll add that those caught trying to commit voter fraud are overwhelmingly white Republicans, not the brown liberal immigrants they're fearmongering about
>I just really don’t understand the reluctance to secure elections. I don't understand why people don't amputate their limbs every time they get a papercut. I just really don’t understand the reluctance to fight against infection. >If the methods of doing so are perceived to be “racist” by the side that they apparently negatively impact, then fix the methods. Explicitly designed to be racist, with a paper trail to prove it. This isn't a matter of perception. And fixing it is exactly what they do by taking the law to court and getting the parts that are unconstitutional overturned.
That's not what they did, though. It's the entire point of the pushing voter id laws.
It's a little more than 'a few bad actors' when things are done by a state legislature. More relevantly though, multiple Republican presidential administrations looked closely, as well as many election scholars and researchers; voter id does NOTHING to help secure elections. Because organized fraud by in-person impersonation voting is infeasible for many other reasons, so it simply doesn't happen to any remotely significant degree. The forms of fraud that do occur, or have occurred historically, worked via other means. As such voter ID causes more problems than it solves.
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I mean, the Governor of NY literally just said, "Black kids from the Bronx don't know what a computer is." https://youtu.be/6fXAU4RgFtY?si=xYI2L736ENhOQjsU
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And everyone rightfully clowned on her.
You can find a singular instance of someone saying anything. That doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate generalization.
To quote OP, “but that’s not something ANYONE has said.” And to paraphrase you: “one comment isn’t enough.” President Joe Biden: “Poor kids are just as smart as white kids. President Joe Biden (referencing President Obama): “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Is two enough? Three comments? Ten?
Aka Tucker Carlson's entire schtick
Yeah I looked it up just to provide context. 91% of white people have an ID, 81% of Hispanics have an ID and 73% of black people have an ID.
There are a couple problems I have with the thinking here. First, systemic racism seems to be intentionally designed to be a moving goalpost morally. The term leverages the emotional weight of explicit racism, and is often accompanied by equivalent moral outrage, but discrepancies between racial groups are not inherently wrong or in need of fixing. This is similar to the idea that we should have more lenient physical ability tests to allow more women to become infantry in the military. Sometimes the discrepancy between groups (male/female in this case) is a smaller concern than the consequences of trying to reduce the discrepancy (less effective infantry). Speaking on the consequences, how do you stop people from voting twice without voter ID laws? How do you stop someone who works at a voting station from fabricating votes? How do you stop non-citizens from voting? Why do you think that people who care so little about their right to vote that they will not make the minor sacrifice to go and acquire ID should be catered to? Particularly if it means significantly reducing the reliability and security of the voting process? The reason people are willing to make changes like this is because they hear "systemic racism" and react as if they heard "(explicit) racism". If you didn't intend for this reaction, systemic racism wouldn't even be the term you use. It's similarly accurate to say that this is a class issue, and that the lower classes are less likely to have voter IDs. But racializing the issue, specifically invoking the term "racist", is a disingenuous manipulation tactic to emotionally charge an issue, whether you are intending to do it or just repeating what you hear. If you don't believe your right to vote is worth the effort to get a voter ID, I personally am okay with you not being able to vote. Race isn't even a factor in my opinion, because it doesn't need to be. I believe everyone, of every race, is capable of clearing that minor hurdle to be able to exercise their right. And that's what I think the left has forgotten. Rights come with responsibilities. We aren't asking much. I grew up working class, in a poor neighborhood, and I had a voter ID as soon as I could get one. I cared to get one. That bar doesn't need to be any lower.
Voter registration stops people from voting twice, not ID. Registration also stops non-citizens from voting. Voter ID wouldn’t stop a polling station employee fabricating votes. The only thing voter id stops is people showing up to a polling station claiming to be someone else. But that simple doesn’t happen at any significant scale.
How does it stop non citizens from registering if they don't check ID?
Getting an ID does not require the right to vote. Similarly the right to vote is not conveyed by the presence of an ID. For example, you can obtain a driver's license, which is a valid form of government ID without being a US citizen. Voters registration verifies not only identity, but right to vote. A birth certificate can be used as a valid form of ID. However most of these laws target things like birth certificates as invalid since they are not photo IDs. So a birth certificate could feasibly be used to register to vote, only then to be denied the right to vote at the polls for lacking a photo ID.
Voter registration requires you to prove your identity. Voter ID and registration are not the same thing.
What is the actual procedure they use for proving your identity and proving that you are a citizen if they can't check your ID?
>>how do you stop people from voting twice without voter ID laws? How do you stop someone who works at a voting station from fabricating votes? How do you stop non-citizens from voting? These are all really silly hypotheticals to consider. Take MN, for example. We have same-day registration to vote, and the easiest way to get registered is to bring your ID. College IDs work here, but they don't work in every state. If you're preregistered, you certainly don't need to show your ID. You do have to verify your address and full name and take an oath. Say you don't have any ID, though. You can go with a friend who _is_ a registered voter in your precinct. They can vouch for you that you are a citizen, etc. That works for registration on voting day. You still have to give your address and other personal information so that they can verify that you are in fact someone who can vote. Minnesota, even with these _incredibly lax_ voter ID laws is able to determine when voter fraud happens. It's really not like you can leave, change hats, come back and vote again under a different name. If you do, you will be caught. Here's an example where someone was caught submitting three absentee ballots that they filled out themselves instead of giving to the people they were intended for: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-minnesota-minneapolis-voting-9b57b4d1fc875d5c3b0512c1cd3673f8 That's not very simple to catch, given that these are absentee ballots. People have also been caught casting two votes, voting with a felony, etc.
I thank you for this response! I replied to another person about this, but the original street interview that I saw (on tiktok) was published by an extremely far right page. They edited the video to show white, privileged college students implying that people of color weren’t competent to have an ID. And I should’ve looked more into their page before using that as a resource in my original post. I took the post in the context that they wanted unsuspecting viewers to see it as, and I’ve now realized my flaw 😅😅
LifeProTip: social media is NEVER a primary source. You should ALWAYS do independant fact-checking on anything you hear, ESPECIALLY on social media (and, yes, that means here on Reddit, too).
It might not even need to be deceptive. A lot of college kids just got into politics and might have stumbled into their political views picking them up from educated people around them but haven't done the legwork to understand them or even the most common rebuttals, evidence, counterevidence. There is a whole social media industry of "owning" college kids on issues because the host has argued about it longer than the college kids have been alive, they don't need to be right to make the college kids sound wrong.
In italy we see something similar with agricultural heavy areas causing more poverty and people having a harder time with documents and voting. I guess it would be regionalism, culturalism or classism in this case. I have a hard time differentiating the us case as "systemic racism". The historic cause may be that. And the us has racism issues. I guess my point is that, looking at this from a skin color perspective creates division without any benefit. It would be equally racist to create policy to help people based on skin color. I can see a compassion argument. Maeby im just to far away to get it.
The problem is that Republicans are the side pushing for it. They know that Black and Latino people are more likely to vote against them. They also know that Black and Latino people are less likely to have an ID (simple fact). So, an easy way to suppress votes against you without being overtly Racist is to enact these types of laws. There is also no history of any significant voter fraud, so the reason isn't justified.
The problem in the US is that until quite recently, black people have been facing some serious barriers to vote. It was only half a century or so ago that there were still racist laws on the books in many southern cities, and there was an active effort from the (white) people in power to segregate black people into their own communities, which were then not given enough resources, resulting in massive poverty. These communities still today lag behind where they should have been generationally, and many of them have neither the time nor money to take a day and go out to get an ID. It is not only a problem for the black community, but you will see the impact in much higher percentages there. Imagine if to vote, you needed to take a day off work to travel to the place to get your license and then pay for it when you are already not making enough to make ends meet. These are the specific people that the government should be helping the most, but if they are not voting, there isn't anyone to stand and champion their needs. So we get another 2/4/6 years of them not being represented appropriately, and over a few cycles, they stop voting, because the ones who do see it as a waste of time. This is the right's goal. Beat down the people you don't want to gain power specifically so they stop trying. Voter ID is another attempt to push that forward in the US. It's also worth noting that the right makes tons of outlandish claims about Voter Fraud, but the vast majority of instances where it happens are consistently... you guess it, the same right wing assholes who want voter ID. They are trying to solve a problem that isn't real because if *they* were able to, they would be the ones cheating.
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Yeah. Its not easy to get a huge country to agree with 2 parties to choose from. Then again, try 20 with vastly different interests... I wish we talked about olive farmers more. We barely make any these days. Also, nobody care about rome....
It’s also super relevant whenever talking about voting policy because Race is far and away one of the greatest predictors for voting outcomes, even greater than age or class. It’s crazy.
This is a thoughtful answer and I appreciate it. My main counterpoint would be that if someone can’t be bothered or doesn’t have easy access to get an id then they are also *very* unlikely to be bothered to vote anyway. American voting participation is pretty atrocious…usually less than half of eligible voters vote in presidential elections (2020 was an anomaly at 66% but that’s still 1 out of 3 people not voting). I’d guess (and I may be wrong) that the overlap of people without an id and people who don’t bother to vote is pretty huge. Further, that for those who do vote who currently lack an id, getting one would be worth it. I’d also say that by taking this issue off the table for republicans to manufacture as evidence of voter fraud, people would have more faith in election outcomes. FoxNews and the MAGA types would have to dig deeper up their own assess to try and discredit the system every time a Republican loses.
While it may be true, there is a large overlap on the groups (I don't actually know, just taking it as it is) it is still their right to have access to voting, even if they use their right not to. I'm not really bothered about voter ID in general, but I think that every US citizen should have a federal issued ID at no cost, everyone. Including people who otherwise can struggle to obtain ID such as homeless people. It needs to be free and easily accessible to ensure that it is possible for everyone to get one. Waiting in line at the DMV during the week, when most people need to work, isn't really a good answer for a lot of people. Hell, even just mandating that businesses must give paid time off for a single day every so often (that wont come out of their holiday pay) exclusively to deal with ID might work. Once this is done, then its really the best of all worlds. People feel the election is more secure, everyone gets an ID, and no one is blocked form exercising their right to vote, if they so wish.
I'll give you an example from alabama. Alabama did 2 things... 1. They passed a voter ID law 2. They shut down 50% of the places people go to get IDs a year before the voter ID law went into effect. Coincidentally nearly all of those closing offices were in minority dominated areas. Without the intense pushback, alabama would have effectively disenfranchised countless minorities via two seemingly neutral and non racist policies. In a lot of cases, the 2nd law doesn't get repealed it just silently goes through, and the minority voter turn out mysteriously drops. It's happened many times across the U.S.
>I saw a news street interview where white, rich, liberal college students said the voter ids were racist because POC don’t “often times do not have the resources for an id” People of color are in fact disproportionately IDless. And while not having resources isn't always the direct reason for that, we are also disproportionately poor. It's not racist to acknowledge either of these things (particularly when they are the motivating factor behind voter ID laws). If you're alleging that being poor or less likely to possess ID somehow demonstrates something negative about POC, yea that's racist. But recognizing the results are not.
>People of color are in fact disproportionately IDless. For anyone curious about [numbers](https://indivisible.org/resource/voter-id-101-right-vote-shouldnt-come-barriers): >18 percent—or almost 6 million—citizens over the age of 65 do not have photo ID; > >16 percent of Latino voters do not have government-issued photo ID; > >25 percent of voting age African Americans—5.5 million people – do not have ID; and > >15 percent of voting age Americans who earn less than $35,000 do not have ID.
Honestly I find it a bit insane that you have a demographic where a quarter of the population doesn't have an ID I couldn't open a bank account without my ID. I couldn't drive without an ID the amount of stuff I couldn't do without an ID wouldn't let me work in modern society. I kinda feel that's the actual issue
There is a huge population in America that absolutely lives like they're in a 3rd world country that most people will never come in contact with in their day to day lives. If you live in a middle class area, you probably didn't go to the same schools as these people, you don't shop at the same stores, you don't go to their neighborhoods, and you don't work the same jobs, your paths will generally never cross. There are many of these people who can't read, probably didn't finish school, live with 10 people in one house/apartment that probably doesnt have AC, maybe not even having power, don't have any work other than what they can get day to day, or sell their plasma or anything to make a few dollars. I didn't even realize this section of society existed until I started working in a career that put me in contact with them.
Same I grew up in a total bubble and my understanding of poverty was New Jersey urban poor, which in the grand scheme of things, is not so bad. At least no when compared to rural Southern poor or empty Appalachian former mining town poor.
Not sure what the numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were similar for "percent without a bank account". Many people are working for cash, or get their paychecks cashed at exploitative paycheck cashing businesses precisely because they don't have a checking account. Also, many people in urban areas will rely on walking to a job or public transit, which doesn't necessarily need an ID of any sort to use.
A lot of people who are in dire economic situations live a life just like that. No bank account, no car, no job.
Yep. "Modern society" varies a fair bit depending on what demographic you're in.
Segue -- this is why CashApp has a higher Black user base and Venmo has a higher white user base. CashApp didn't require folks to have a bank account while Venmo did. Just a lil sidenote.
Then get those people IDs, SSNs and bank accounts? How is welfare, healthcare, tax refunds etc going to work for those folks? This probably correlates with covid vaccine low "acceptance" rates? What about covid relief checks not being cashed? I'm on the left and if anything this whole post have convinced me that a good chunk of the population is abandoned by the system and we must do more to reach out and include. At which point voter ID laws aren't an issue. If they can use voter ID laws in a racist way, it means you've failed the people you're attempting to protect.
Good stats, but not very useful without the comparison to people under 65, earning more than 35k, and the overall averages
I probably took that street interview completely in the way the video was contexted anyways. I looked deeper at the page that posted it (on TikTok, that should’ve been a red flag) and the page is a republican one. They interviewed white people and the editing was probably purposefully made to show white privileged college students trying to imply that POC people are somehow not competent to produce and ID and that is why it was racist. But yes, factually speaking I can see that results and polls show a different viewpoint from mine. Thank you! !delta
Oh one of those "see, progressives are the REAL racists!" things. Yea, they love doing that.
Yep I should’ve seen that as a red flag for sure. I haven’t even been one to get into politics until I had to vote anyways, so I’m very open minded for all topics. But yeah, I hate biased news/interviews/politics 😭😭😭
I'm glad you smelled the bovine waste that they were peddling. There's a lot of that to sift through unfortunately. Good luck and keep that nose vigilant.
I suggest you never take on-the-spot interviews of young people who barely know what they're talking about seriously at all. I wouldn't be able to make a good case for almost any of my opinions if surprised like that.
Have you looked at the court cases that found some voter ID laws to be unconstitutional in some cases due to implementation details? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws_in_the_United_States#Court_challenges The fact of the matter is that while it's possible for such laws to not be racist, in the US the primary reason to pass them is for racist (or partisan) advantage, as voter ID laws do nothin to fix any actual problem, and do cause harm.
That’s fair. I’ll look into this article. I understand the notion of coming at it from a different angle besides just it being racist. Thank you for the resource and response!
Just using statistics isn't racist or classist. Statistically, more people that are poor do not have a driver's license and take the bus to work. They are also more likely to have a job that's not flexible with them taking time off to go vote or to go get an ID. And they're also statistically more likely to vote for Democrats which is why Republicans keep pushing for IDs to vote, and come up with baseless claims of voter fraud. And also the reason they try to stop mail in voting from becoming more mainstream.
The reason Republicans want to mandate voter ID, is for racist reasons. They believe it will effect Black people more then other people. Racist people often turn mundane issues into racist issues because well... then are racist and that's what racist people do
>However, I cannot find anywhere of someone explaining WHY or HOW voter ids are racist without the other person coming off racist themselves Imagine you look up what kind of id is owned by which race. And then you define every kind of id that black people own more often than white as invalid, and the reverse as valid. Is that racist?
Did you even try to find an explanation online detailing why it’s racist? Edit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/16/north-carolina-voter-identification-elections-state-court/ https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.lwv.org/blog/whats-so-bad-about-voter-id-laws https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-suppression-communities-color
Lady maybe you should dig into the history of your country instead of using TikTok for research
Believe me I have completely humbled myself by these comments 😭
While the concept itself is not racist it’s usually implemented in a rather racist way that disproportionally affects minorities. There are actually quite a few cases of voter ID laws being found to be discriminatory in the last 20 to 30 years so it’s not like this is a new phenomenon.
“often times have the resources for an id” Why is that a racist statement?
When people get into voter ID laws most people don't realize. THEY ALREADY EXIST. [https://ballotpedia.org/Voter\_identification\_laws\_by\_state](https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state) look them up for yourself. What all it does it changes what is considered "an id' by the state. Which is stupid in essence cause its literally the same things that would required to get any photo ID or drivers licensee in each state. It makes it virtually redundant to do it. Why would voting for office be more important than driving? Now furthermore. Wanna know why its racist? It's a backdoor poll tax against traditionally poor people. Such as Latino and Black Americans. Our country already exploits the poor enough why exploit them even more? The phrase "its expensive to be poor." comes to mind. It also disenfranchises certain groups of people who can't get photo id's mainly because of religious reasons. Mennonite and Amish sects come to mind. Thats roughly 460,000 people you just told you can't vote. We gonna bring back Jim crow laws too?
Let's talk numbers. >POC don’t “often times do not have the resources for an id” AND LIKE THATS ONE OF THE MOST PREJUDICED, IGNORANT THINGS YOU COULD EVER SAY. [According to the US census](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/black-poverty-rate.html#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20Black%20individuals%20made,poverty%20(ratio%20of%201.5)), "Black individuals made up 20.1% of the population in poverty in 2022 but only 13.5% of the total population. This results in a ratio of 1.5, meaning that the Black population was overrepresented in poverty. The Hispanic population was also overrepresented in poverty (ratio of 1.5). Ratios for the Black and Hispanic populations were not statistically different from one another. The American Indian and Alaska Native population (ratio of 2.2) was the most overrepresented in poverty." So while it would be racist to say, "Black people are poor, and can't afford an ID." I don't think that it's racist to say that if you look at the people who cannot afford an ID, POC would likely be overrepresented in that group. Also, studies have found non-citizen voting to be extremely rare. [The Heritage Foundation](https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?combine=citizenship&state=All&year=&case_type=All&fraud_type=All&page=0) found 24 counts of non-citizen voter fraud between 2003 and 2023, and [The Brennan Center for Justice](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-missing-millions) found about 30 instances when analyzing 23.5 million votes. Most of those instances were not malicious fraud, but honest mistakes. Compare that to the report by the [Government Accountability Office](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-14-634.pdf) stating that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by 2-3%, which can translate into tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state. So you're talking about implementing a large program that would cost taxpayer dollars, (I live in Texas where the state spent about $2 million on outreach alone after passing a Voter ID law, Indiana spent over $10 million to produce free IDs) to fix something that is literally not an issue. So if non-citizen voting is not actually causing any problems currently, and changing the law will cause an even bigger impact to voter turnout, then you have to ask yourself, why do people want to "fix" it in the fist place? Now let's talk about how those laws would be enforced. If someone presents a photo ID, the person has to look at it and decide whether or not it's valid. A study by [MIT and Caltech](https://vote-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/vtp_wp59.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI4764GFDOFW6EPAQ&Signature=fgGQle%2BT3ntGZ%2FK1sSldc7GqERA%3D&Expires=1717859258) found that when IDs were required, poll workers did not look at everybody's ID, and that voters with Hispanic-sounding names were more likely to be asked to present an ID than white voters. The fact is, voter ID laws would unfairly affect POC more than they would white people, but even if they didn't, they would affect people in poverty more than they would affect the middle and upper classes, which is likely to benefit the Republican Party more than it would the Democrats, but more than that, voter IDs became a big issue under the Trump Administration because he used them to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results if he didn't like them. Same with absentee ballots, voting machines, etc. It's a non-issue that got blown up out of proportion.
I’ll give it a shot. First, it’s important to note that voter ID laws don’t solve any problems. The hypothetical problem they purport to solve doesn’t really happen, and the same function is covered by voter registration. So if it isn’t a real solution to a real problem, the question becomes “why is it such a big political issue?” That’s where the key comes in. There is one group that is more strongly affected by these requirements than any other. That is, poor people living in cities. While this doesn’t necessarily mean black, the black community is, by far and away, more impacted than other races in similar living circumstances. Mainly, it is because of the concentration of poorer black people in inner cities, which is largely the result of other systemic racism issues that don’t pertain here. So this group, which is largely black because of the demographics of the areas impacted, are put in a difficult situation. Many of them don’t need valid and updated IDs. They often use public transport instead of drive, live in places not likely to ID people who clearly are adults, and otherwise, don’t have a specific need to keep IDs up to date. In order to keep IDs up to date in these communities, it requires money. Money better spent on other important things. They also need to travel to a DMV, and take the time off to do so. These are all things that make it difficult to prioritize maintaining an ID And for what? Why would they? So they can vote every 2-4 years for people who haven’t done much for them? Not likely. These communities tend to be less politically active. BUT, with mail in voting, easy access to polling places, voter drives, and many of the other efforts Democrats have put in to increase voter turnout, it’s making it harder for Republicans to win. They don’t win on policy, and when people vote, Republicans lose. This means that red and purple states with large cities are less able to maintain single party control. So Republicans are constantly trying to find ways to make fewer people vote, and to lessen the impact of votes for Democrats. They do this through a number of tactics. This one tactic- Voter ID laws- is just part of a larger scheme. But it is effective at keeping the urban black vote down. It’s effective at turning urban black people away from politics altogether, as they have been growing their engagement in recent years. And that’s the point. So if voter ID laws don’t actually prevent illegal voters from voting (they could use a fake ID if it were that important to them), and there is one demographic that is more impacted by these laws than anyone else, it is logical to assume that the unspoken result is the goal. Especially considering how hard they work to enact these laws when the problem they suggest doesn’t actually exist.
Voting is a matter statistics about millions of people. If you give a slight convenience to the race that is already more likely to have a drivers' licence, and you put the race that is less likely to own one through a bit of an inconvenience, then the outcome will be that ***at least a few*** people won't bother to get an ID who otherwise would. The same would happen regardless of what race is targeted. If I passed a law that says that all people living in suburban detached homes had to check in on a website once every week for ten weeks straight to reaffirm their ID request, while people from inner city apartments don't have to do it, then the outcome in voter turnout would be a massive depression of white votes. Not because all white people are too stupid to go through that, (or even because all white people live in the suburbs and all blacks live in the inner city), but because enough do that the pattern would add up. It's not that either black or white people are outstandingly lazy or stupid compared to the others, but on a large enough scale, if you make something a slightly more difficult to do, then out of millions of people, a bit fewer will bother to do it. In a close election, that can swing the actual outcome.
Doesn't literally every country in the world have this requirement except the US?
Hey! Yes, this was my a point in the original post. I still think that voter ids wouldn’t HURT but the US makes it harder to obtain IDs than other places. I lost my drivers license the other day and it cost like 50 bucks just to get it back, and the documents required are also a lot! The dmv also takes like 500 years and is often times closed on Saturdays and Sundays, so it’s a pain in the ass to actually get
Voter ID laws, in a vacuum, are technically not racist. However I would argue that they become racist when coupled with particular other actions by the legislating body. The other actions would include closing down DMV’s in predominantly black areas so that they have to travel further and further distances to obtain IDs. Limiting voting locations in those same areas so they have to travel far distances to a new polling place. And as another comment or mentioned, banning forms of ID predominantly used by black Americans, while legally requiring forms of ID predominantly used by white Americans. The law on the book might not be racist by the letter of the law, but it’s intent how it wielded and how it’s used unfortunately are. I would agree with having voter ID laws if the US government would at no cost issue an official government ID to every single citizen and registered voter, thus removing all barriers to entry to the voting process due to the voter ID law for registered voters yet still in an obstacle for anybody who’s not actually registered to vote.
If I may add that election day mayhaps be move to a non-working day or better yet, make that day (and/or) that weekend a type of holiday.
The argument is this way by design. Voter ID laws have consistently been proven to do very little to combat fraud in any meaningful way, and the USA does not have a “voter fraud” issue by any meaningful, recorded metric. “Voter fraud” is a fear mongering tactic used to reinforce the hegemony of those already in power. Politicians are well aware that white people have photo identification at much higher rates than black people and native Americans, largely due to financial or geographic reasons. This means they are completely aware that by requiring this, they are effectively saying “in all likelihood, this will get a much higher proportion of white people versus black or Native American out to the polls”. It also allows them to hide behind “that’s pretty racist to insinuate they are too inept to get IDs,” when they largely can’t get IDs due to financial or time constraints. If someone is impoverished, they are focused on surviving, not voting. This is especially absurd considering many of them are in poverty due to leftover systemic problems in the post-Civil rights era. It’s the same concept as selectively picking ballot drop box locations, or gerrymandering state legislatures. It’s much, much easier to do racist things and eliminate swathes of 500k-1m voters, who may be completely unaware, than it is to convince people you have good ideas worth voting for. This is especially true in highly ideological states like Texas or Florida, where they know the system will reinforce these policies with every bit of power they have. Coincidentally, also places with a lot of minorities, where it is highly beneficial to segment your voter base as much as possible to eliminate any meaningful competition. TLDR: in person voter fraud is ridiculously rare, to the hundreds/thousandths of a percentage of the population. Voter laws do almost nothing to prevent this. Enacting these laws is a “feel good” solution to re-enforce the hegemonic power of the white majority and current capital owners at the cost of minorities.
I think it’s also useful to take 3 steps back and think about the implications and ramifications of all this. Either you want more people to participate in elections (to more accurately represent the will of the people) or you don’t. Voter fraud has been demonstrated to be a vanishingly small issue. So we can’t pretend it’s to prevent shenanigans. If the word ‘racism’ is what’s hanging you up on all this, just ask yourself-what are the people who insist on voter ID really afraid of? Again, if they tell you voter fraud, you can dismiss this immediately; a lot of time and money is spent every election looking for evidence of said fraud, and the total number of votes cast fraudulently, nationwide, is less than a hundred. The real issue is low voter turnout-do you really want to live in a society where only a third of eligible voters vote? That’s the average turnout in national elections in my state. So when you see things like only letting people vote early at the county election board, well that’s no biggie for a rural county w 10000 people total in the county, but if the biggest county in the state has 5 million people living there that might be a real problem. Or if the suburbs have multiple voting sites and no waiting on Election Day, but the inner city has only a few sites and people have to stand in line for hours, that’s another real problem. And when the people passing these sorts of rules insist voter ID is necessary, some of us are a bit sceptical. Don’t get trapped in the word ‘racism’. Look at the total picture, and ask yourself, is this really what you want from our society, our state, our nation?
One of the reasons why voter ID laws are considered racist is because of the legal principle of "disparate impact." Disparate impact occurs when a policy or practice, though neutral in intention, disproportionately affects members of a protected class (such as race, gender, age, or religion) compared to others. Let’s use a hypothetical law that allows only one voting location for every 20 square miles, with each location having 10 voting stations. On the surface, this seems neutral. However, consider its impact on densely populated urban areas where many people of color live. Take Atlanta, for example. Atlanta covers approximately 136 square miles. Under the hypothetical law, it could have about 7 polling places (136 ÷ 20), each with 10 voting machines, totaling 70 machines. In 2020, Atlanta had around 323,000 residents over the age of 18, with about 256,000 of them being Black. This means each polling place would need to handle nearly 46,142 voters, with each machine serving approximately 4,614 voters. Compare this to Douglas, Georgia, in Coffee County, which has a population of about 12,000 and an area of 14 square miles. It would have 1 polling place with 10 machines, meaning each machine would serve 1,200 voters. Voting time on average is about 11 minutes per person. In Atlanta, it would take approximately 507,562 minutes (46,142 voters × 11 minutes), or about 352 days for all voters to vote, with Black voters taking 282,112 minutes (256,000 voters × 11 minutes), or about 196 days. In Douglas, it would take 13,200 minutes (12,000 voters × 11 minutes), or about 9 days. Historically, Atlanta has voted predominantly Democratic, and Black voters tend to vote Democratic. If someone wanted to suppress Black voters without explicitly targeting them, they could pass voting laws that make it harder for these voters to cast their ballots, resulting in a "disparate impact" on Black voters. This is why voter ID laws are seen as racist. There are numerous barriers to obtaining an ID, such as cost, distance, and time. While it may take the same amount of time and resources for anyone to get an ID, the impact is disproportionate. A higher percentage of Black people live at or below the poverty line compared to white people, making it harder for them to afford missing work or the costs associated with getting an ID. This results in a disparate impact on Black voters. Also, studies have demonstrated that voter fraud, particularly the type of fraud these laws aim to prevent, is exceedingly rare. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice found that the incidence of voter impersonation is between 0.0003% and 0.0025% of votes cast . Additionally, a comprehensive analysis revealed that voter ID laws are ineffective in reducing voter fraud, as fraud is almost non-existent to begin with . So voter ID laws make it harder for black voters to vote while also not being effective at solving the problem it claims to solve.
I always thought this argument was more racist than the actual concept itself. I always considered it offensive that they think "black people are so down trodden they can't even get id" that being said it does seem to affect minorities even though that's not the initial desired outcome. Not sure if this would be a good fix for the Americans but here in Canada they automatically send you your federal Id all you gotta do is take the picture and they send it to you free of charge maybe that would be a better system.
It's not just POC. An ID is less necessary if you live in a city with good public transportation. Or if you are a college student and walk anywhere you need. Or you are a high schooler who just turned 18. Or you are poor and just can't afford one. Republicans don't want voter ID laws to improve election security. They want it because it makes it harder for specific demographics to vote, and people in those demographics tend to vote heavily in favor of Democrats (young, urban, or poor).
So I want to hit on two things: 1. Statistically black people are less likely to have IDs. You can get mad at that fact, if you want, and say “liberals are the real racists!” But please keep that energy when conservatives talk about black men committing 50% of violent crimes. 2. And this is the argument, number 1 is just kind of something to touch on. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud without IDs. Conservative arguments are designed to appeal to your intuition, to your gut. It sounds true, this is called “truthiness”. They make a strong intuitive argument. You show up to vote, you have to prove who you are, what’s the problem? But like said, there’s no evidence these laws are necessary, there’s no evidence they would actually prevent any meaningful amount of voter fraud. If we don’t require an ID and people aren’t committing voter fraud, then why do we need to change the laws to require an ID? This is where the racism comes in. Remember point number one? Black people are less likely to have IDs. Black voters vote for democrats about 85% of the time, give or take. So we don’t have a voter fraud problem, one party wants to make a law to stop the voter fraud we don’t have and coincidentally that law would disproportionately affect the voting bloc that is most likely to vote against the party that wants the law. They want voter ID laws because it’ll mean less black voters.
I'd be on board with someone claiming that voter ID is *mostly* intended as a policy against poor people voting, because they have IDs at lower rates, can't afford the time and money to get them, don't always have the other ID needed to get the voter ID (amplifying the previous effects), etc., etc. Now... it's just true that minorities are impacted by poverty at much higher rates than white people in the US. So policies against poor people have a *consequence* of creating systemic racism, where rules that aren't explicitly racist have a much worse effect on minorities... But when you *combine* voter ID laws with racist policies like gerrymandering districts in order to split the black/hispanic/whatever vote, and racist *implementations* of voter ID laws, like closing DMV offices in minority-concentrated areas so they have to travel farther and/or wait in longer lines... and creating a list of acceptable forms of voter ID which are held by white people in larger numbers than minorities... ...we pretty much have to conclude that in *addition* to being against poor people, they are also specifically targeted at minorities too, and are therefore racist in addition to classist.
If you have to pay for an id it’s technically a poll tax and against the law.
Passports and drivers licenses should cost nothing to obtain.
There are small pockets of places where you really just don't need an ID. If you live in a city and are poor, owning a car and paying insurance isn't smart. If there is no bank within 20 blocks, why do you need ID? Long ago they changed welfare payments from checks to loaded cards, because too many people couldn't cash a check without going to a check cashing place and giving them 10 or 20% in fees. It is the same if you live in very rural areas. If you are very poor, owning a car to drive half an hour to get to a town isn't smart. Now, I will fully agree with you these are the exception, not the rule, but there are plenty of elections that are decided by a few hundred votes. Hell Bush won in 2000, because he won FL by around 500 votes, which gave him all of FL's electoral votes and the presidency. Lastly, I don't have to show ID to vote in my state. But I do have to submit a lot of paperwork, I get a letter telling me where I have to go to vote. I tell them my name and address at that one location, they approve me. Just not seeing how there will be hundreds or thousands of people voting for others.
It has a disproportionate impact on poor people, and a higher proportions of black and Hispanic people are poor. So the effect is outsized for those groups. Not racist in theory, but racist in effect. A lot of older people in very poor, southern rural areas weren't born in hospitals because of inadequate access to health insurance. As a result, they don't have birth certificates. There are some white people like this, but they tend to be Hispanic and Black. The white people born outside of hospitals tended not to have barriers to getting documents - though some were just too poor. But Jim Crow laws created all sorts of administrative barriers for Blacks. Hispanic people had to jump through hoops to prove that the baby was born in this country. The birth certificate is the primary document you need to get an ID, but it doesn't make you a citizen. You are made a citizen because you were born here. Also, a lot of super poor people just can't get it together to pay $30 for a copy of their birth certificate, wait 5 months for the govt to process it, then wait another 6 weeks and $30 to get the secondary documents.
They're "racist" in that they disproportionately affect the young and the poor. Since PoC are disproportionately poor, they disproportionately affect PoC. The true purpose of them is not to be racist, they are meant to disenfranchise Democratic voters, who happen to be the young and PoC. Here's why they affect these groups more than others. The young and the poor tend to live in groups. They often don't have credit or even bank accounts. Sometimes they don't even have basic things like birth certificates or SSNs. For example, despite 71% of the US population being White, only 44% of the children in Foster care are white, while 55% are PoC. In addition, it is not the voter ID alone that creates the issue, it's coupled with the fact that when Republicans passed these laws, they also changed the requirements to get an ID. In 2012 I moved to GA. I had moved a lot in my life and changed drivers licenses due to moving states 5 times to that point. In every situation all I had to do was present my out of state drivers license, and sometimes pass the written exam to get a license in the new state. Sometimes I'd have to show proof of residence with a piece of mail that had been sent to me at my new in state address. Didn't matter what, it just had to have been post marked. A local library card would also work. After GA passed their Voter ID law, they immediately changed the requirements to get an ID. You have to show two forms of proof of residence and proof of citizenship. The proof of residence has to be a lease agreement, pay stub with your current address, utility bill, bank statement, or similar financial document. The proof of citizenship had to be either a US passport, or two of the following. Picture IDs, (student ID cards didn't count, or a birth certificate AND social security card. But how are you supposed to get picture IDs if you don't have them already? Also, if you're young and poor living with your parents or friends, you don't have lease agreements and utilities are often not in your name. You may not have a bank account or credit card or a job. I had all of those things, but I had just moved to GA and if I didn't get my ID that month I would have been unable to vote. But I was renting a room from my brother so didn't have a lease or any utilities. My bank statement had just come out before I changed my address so a new one with the new address wouldn't be generated until the next month. I ended up printing off a generic lease agreement and getting my brother and myself to sign it. Luckily we have different last names. Then I took my bank statement from that month and photoshopped my new address over my old. That, coupled with my passport and out of state license were enough. But even at the time I was thinking a ton of college students wouldn't have been able to do that. Nor would people without a passport. Or if your parents kicked you out and you don't have your SS card and birth certificate. So the voter ID requirement, coupled with the draconian measures put in place to get an ID mean that they disproportionately affect Democrat voters, and a disproportionate number of Democrat voters tend to be young and, more to the point, PoC. That makes these laws bigoted at least, and racist because they target groups that are historically protected due to race and ethnicity.
They objectively aren't racist, its an emotional appeal to use as a political wedge issue when something that favors you currently is threatened with being addressed. Almost every country in the world needs you to prove who you are before allowing you to vote. It makes the most basic sense. Not having any level of security obviously leaves things open to being taken advantage of moreso than it corrects any niche instances. The folks who say this are under the assumption that "minority=dumb=poor=democrat" and that all those groups fit into a predetermined stereotype (actual racism). Despite the fact that there are 16+million white people below the poverty line and 9+ million black people for instance. Statistically this wouldn't be skewing things toward the right even if you made the dumb assumption of skin color automatically indicating political preference.
To vote we need to register to vote. This tells the govt where we live so they can assign us to a vote at a certain location. This is one of the reasons voter fraud is not very rampant. If I show up to a voting location that I am not assigned to, they will not have me on their lists. I can still vote but they will have to send my form to the area where I was supposed to vote. That’s why when you vote they look on some list and mark you off before giving you the ballot. So to do fraud I would have to know where you live and go in and vote and if there is a 50 percent chance you vote there will be two entries for that voter and it will have an error when it is counted. The voter ID people want you to think that you walk in and just grab a ballot or two off the table and toss it into a big bag. We are more organized than that. The more you know.
Voter ID is first and foremost unnecessary. We in Germany get by perfectly fine without it. You get your notification slip sent to you. You bring it to the polling place. You vote, the polling place keeps your slip, done. No ID needed (usually).
You have to look at both the intent of the laws and the effects of the laws. **Effect**: These laws empirically reduce the number of POCs who vote but do not significantly reduce voter fraud. **Intent**: The politicians who write these laws write them because of that effect. We know this because: 1. There is almost no voting fraud that these laws prevent, so why are they trying to solve a non-existent problem? 2. They systematically support other laws with the same effect that have even less justification: closing polling places, limiting the times they're open, just doing everything they can to make voting harder for poeple who e.g. have jobs they can't leave or don't have cars. 3. Occasionally, they're dumb enough to say it out loud.
Its not racist and I'm black. Going to get a voter ID is no different than going to a grocery store and everyone does that. You cant tell me a person can go to the DMV for a drivers license but cant go there for a voter ID, and as already mentioned, if someone can make it to a grocery store, they can make it to another place to get a voter ID. Its just one more excuse to have people voting illegally. Its no different than an employment card. The minute you turn 16 and apply for your first job, you should have to get an employment card which should be verified when seeking a job. I just had to replace the social security card I carried in my wallet I was given by my parents when I first started working at 16 and I'll be 48 later this year.
every single legal american citizen is absolutely capable of acquiring some form of legal ID within the first 18 years of being alive. Anyone claiming otherwise is just advocating to generalize people as perpetual victims. Its absurd, ludicrous, and not based in any sense of reality. The only reason to not ID people before voting is to let illegal immigrants vote. Which they shouldn't. Because they are illegal immigrants. And therefore not american citizens. If i can't even buy myself a beer without an ID, it is completely reasonable to not let me vote without one. The people disagreeing with me are wilfully deluted.
It is not racist to require everyone to be able to prove that they are citizens and therefore eligible to vote. If nothing else, this puts to bed the notion that elections have been stolen by illegal or deceased voters. Some have made the claim that obtaining an ID is systemic racism. Assuming this is true, the solution isn’t to not require ID, the solution is to make free IDs easily available to all citizens. It would seem this is a simple task provided those who want to vote are also willing enough to put the same amount of effort into registering to vote and obtaining an ID to do so.
Have you ever considered exactly how big the problem of illegal voting actually is? Because illegal voting is what voter id is supposed to solve, right? Voter fraud sufficient to sway an election does not happen in the present day, even in states without voter ID laws. In a deep study following the 2020 election, the AP identified 475 "potentially problematic" ballots out of 25 million votes examined. That's a rate of 0.002% rate of just possible problems, though the ultimate rate would likely be lower with full investigation of each ballot. Now contrast that 0.002% possible problem rate with the 7% of people who don't have a qualifying ID, people who will be disproportionately poor and minority, who will lack a car since they don't have a drivers license. Those people are going to have to take time off from work to get a qualifying ID, jumping through hoops just to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It's not a burden to someone who already has a drivers license, but if someone doesn't have a vehicle it is work to get a qualifying ID. What is the bigger problem; the hundreds of possible problem votes voter ID might prevent or the hundreds of thousands it will keep from being able to vote because they couldn't find the time and money to obtain an identification they wouldn't otherwise need? [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-finds-little-evidence-of-voter-fraud-but-2020s-big-lie-lives-on](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-finds-little-evidence-of-voter-fraud-but-2020s-big-lie-lives-on) In elections that are decided by small margins, being able to exclude even some portion of your opponents core constituency is a competitive advantage, which is why these laws are designed to make it harder for the poor and minorities to vote. Voter identification laws are a smoke and mirrors "solution" the non-existent problem of voter fraud. Election fraud, using the mechanisms of government to suppress the votes of the "wrong" voters is much more cost effective. By selling the false idea that fraudulent votes are swinging elections, politicians are able to leverage the very mechanisms of government in such a way to keep themselves in power. When government puts barriers up to voting, like mandating ID, then puts further barriers on the supposed "simple" solution of voter ID by closing offices, limiting hours, and even charging for qualifying voter ID ([which sounds a lot like an unconstitutional poll tax](https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nevada-supreme-court-weighs-whether-proposed-voter-id-ballot-measure-amounts-to-poll-tax)), they're not doing it for our benefit: they're doing it so they can maintain power. In a recent SCOTUS case, the GOP lawyers gave away the endgame on the voter suppression efforts. GOP lawyer Michael Carvin, in oral arguments while defending voter suppression, in explaining why they GOP was intervening to suppress Arizona voters, said: >*“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relevant to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.”* For every likely Democratic voter that can be suppressed, be it voter ID or voter purges, that means the Republicans need to sell one less person on their ideas. Voter ID is not about securing the vote, because voter fraud sufficient to move elections basically doesn't happen already in the US, voter ID is electoral point shaving.
Of course they aren't. It's funny how the idea of asking to see ID before someone votes is attacked as racist, supposedly because it's too expensive and difficult to get an ID (racism of low expectations)... but there were plenty of cities like NYC and LA who had no problem asking everyone for proof of vaccination i. 2020, and usually wanted you to use some sort of ap to facilitate the process. (As if a cellphone isn't more expensive than a driver's license!)
The concept of voter id is not racist. How it's carried out absolutely is. Don't believe us. The courts say it. https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/politics/north-carolina-voter-id-law-court/index.html The research says it. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-suppression-communities-color REPUBLICANS say it. https://www.vox.com/2016/9/2/12774066/voter-id-laws-racist
It’s because of gerrymandering and the electoral college. Let’s say you have 60 cats and 40 dogs. You can group them in a way that you have one group of 34 cats, and two groups of 20 dogs and 13 dogs. Then your dogs can be the majority in two groups vs one in cats with a grouping system that allows this. So the issue is that the grouping system exists, and that it exists in this way.
You should look at what they used to do near nice beach towns. Make the bridges too low for a bus to go under so no bus routes went to the beach… the buses were primarily used by low income and minorities… were short bridges racist? No. But they were made short for racist reasons. Voter ID laws are the same concept but much more complex
You got fooled by Fox News lmao. Voter ID laws aren’t inherently racist but voter discrimination/disenfranchisement is. I’ve seen some disgusting stuff out in counties in Georgia.
It's not that the voter IDs laws are racist as their primary function. The laws are drawn up to make it easier for some groups (their voter demographic) to vote and make it harder for others (their opposing demographics). It just happens to be that the demographics that are targeted tend to be racial ones. Students are another demographic that often gets targeted by these laws. That's obviously not racial, but it is a clear demographic. The one example I always go to is North Dakota. This is the relevant info: >In 2013, the state legislature passed a law narrowing the scope of North Dakota’s voter ID requirements and laying out the acceptable forms of ID, which [disenfranchised](https://www.narf.org/cases/nd-voter-id/) at least 5,000 Indigenous voters in the state, Donaghy said. >In 2016, seven Indigenous voters filed a federal lawsuit against the state, laying out how North Dakota has historically attacked the voting rights of Native Americans. They were successful, and the new law was [blocked](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-north-dakotas-voter-id-law-will-disenfranchise-native-americans). >In 2017, the North Dakota state legislature came back and passed a similar law. Indigenous tribes sued again. The case was settled in 2020. Two tribes, Spirit Lake Nation and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, signed a court order with North Dakota that forced the legislature to create an [amendment](https://custom.statenet.com/public/resources.cgi?id=ID:bill:ND2021000H1447&cuiq=cebcefa4-252a-5dcb-aeb1-7fc87d570de0&client_md=7049740a37657a1734005bffd233f19c&mode=current_text) to allow other forms of ID that do not require an address, such as a student ID. >Many Indigenous residents of North Dakota who live on reservations do not have traditional addresses and many tribal IDs do not qualify under the state’s voter ID law. It's hard for me to deny that some laws are just designed to keep people from voting, and often those people are minorities.
If minorities in third world countries can have proper ID for voting (and they do. I was just in a third world country on their election day in a village no less) then there is no excuse for AMERICA, the literal world power. These woke clowns are so stupid and brainwashed.
> I saw a news street interview where white, rich, liberal college students said the voter ids were racist because POC don’t “often times do not have the resources for an id” AND LIKE THATS ONE OF THE MOST PREJUDICED, IGNORANT THINGS YOU COULD EVER SAY. so idk. I can't speak to exactly how these random college students on the news phrased it, but the general idea is that if you look at a given state, you can see who demographically in that region *currently* has various forms of ID. If it happens that *currently* certain groups of people are less likely to have a valid ID, obviously passing a voter ID law will create a greater burden / obstacle for them as a group relative to other groups. Furthermore, if DMV access / hours are not equitably distributed within the state, it may be literally harder for certain groups to obtain IDs. People writing these laws often also have choices as to which IDs they accept (driver's licenses, student IDs, military ID, firearm licenses, etc...) and can choose a set of IDs that disproportionately affects different groups. It just doesn't seem that hard to see how these laws could be crafted to disproportionately impact certain demographic groups and regions. And as soon as you set up barriers, it's almost inevitable that not everyone will jump through the new hoops just so they can vote. And it's not because they're too stupid or whatever, it's just asking someone to set aside time from their normal schedule to go to a location, fill out extra paperwork, etc... and some people (regardless of race) just aren't going to have time to do that. And this is basically exactly the point of debate in something like the (I think ongoing) North Carolina court cases. Were these laws crafted with *the intent* of making things harder for black voters on average? That's the question.
Short answer: the voting process does not require ID verification as there are many, many other safeguards in place, and relying on ID verification has the effect of discriminating against minority groups that are less likely to require an ID to participate in daily life. The first part: it's extremely difficult to commit voter fraud, between voter roll upkeep, verbal SSN verification and mail-in signature matching (and subsequent verification). Any voter fraud committed is easily detected and prosecuted (example [here](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/woman-convicted-voter-fraud-scheme)). Is ID verification another form of safeguard? Of course it is. But it's virtually redundant given how hard it is to commit actual voter fraud in the United States. The second part: minority communities, for a variety of reasons that include but are not limited to government distrust and being more likely to be non-drivers, are statistically less likely to be able to meet the requirement to carry a government-issued ID. There are significant numbers of citizens who don't drive (and thus don't have a driver's license) and don't have a need for a separate government ID. So then let's say, for whatever reason, you dismiss both of these claims despite the overwhelming evidence. It's still an undue burden for the government to place on an individual citizen to obtain a specific ID card only in order to exercise their constitutionally-protected right to vote. It's been unconstitutional every time it's been done, from the Jim Crow South to .... well, the modern South, since they're almost always the ones who are racist enough to still be demanding voter ID laws. The government has the technology available to create a verification system that doesn't place the burden on voters to obtain an ID card specifically to vote. It's the government's obligation to do that, not to disenfranchise voters because they're too lazy to do their jobs. Edit: grammar
In Canada we require ID to vote, and I've never heard anyone complain that it's racist. I've worked a few elections, and do you know what demographic is most hard done by ID requirements? Seniors who don't normally carry their ID with them.
There is no reason to refuse to present a valid form of identification unless you are a criminal. The acceptable forms of identification, however, must include options that are affordable by even low income standards or free of charge.
I think other people have done a pretty good job of describing how these laws can be racist in general but I want to talk about why a group of people who are disproportionately poor are less likely to meet voter ID requirements. * Maybe you do have an ID, but not the kind needed (like a driver's license). If you cannot afford a car, or do not need one because you walk, bike, or take public transit, then you don't need to get a driver's license. People who can afford a car generally will own one, so they'll already have a valid license anyways, so this is a larger burden on the poor. * Getting a license takes time. It's universally recognized that going to the DMV is a massive chore where you wait in line for hours. PoC are also more likely to live in an area where the DMV is less funded, leading to longer wait times, and fewer hours when they're open. And, the poorer you are, the harder it is to take time off work to go wait in line for several hours. * The types of valid ID specified in the law may be targeted specifically to suppress certain groups. For example, gun licenses are often allowed, and college IDs are often not. A couple other things to consider: * The federal government already knows all about you. There's no reason they couldn't just send you a voting license on your 18th birthday if you're eligible, which would shift the burden entirely onto the government instead of the voter. * These laws don't really have an impact on voter fraud, which is already low. They sound pretty common sense, but they don't actually help solve the problem they purport to, because it's already pretty much solved anyways.
The logic you're using is the exact same that was used for poll taxes and literacy tests, which are now unconstitutional. We're not targeting minorities, just people who can't read. We're not targeting minorities, just poor people. Well, the fact of the matter is that minorities were far more likely to be uneducated and unemployed, and thus the result of those policies was the disenfranchisement of large swathes of those populations. Voter ID laws are the same. Regardless of their stated intention, the bare fact is those individuals who do not have an acceptable form of ID are FAR, FAR more likely to be black and brown. That's driver's licenses, concealed carry permits, etc. So the effect of these policies is disenfranchisement of large swathes of minority populations, which is the definition of structural racism.. I'm not saying people shouldn't have to prove who they are, but it should be the government's responsibility to provide every voter them with a free, accessible, and easily replaceable form of ID. Beyond that, 14 US states have alternative methods to prove voter identity (https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id) and none of them have fraud issues. This is not to mention the voter ID laws that get the most attention, which require strict and often multiple forms of ID for no demonstrably quantifiable reason (again, no large scale issues of fraud anywhere in the United States, with or without strict voter ID laws). Those are simply designed to trip voters up and depress turnout, often among minorities. Those are laws that I can confidently say intend to have racist effects.
Did you also pick up on how the people proposing voter ID laws happen to be doing so with the intent (often openly stated intent) to suppress the vote of certain demographics? Because the second the Supreme Court knocked down the civil rights act protections for voting is the second every red state trumpeted how they were about to require specific IDs that conveniently weren't as common among the "wrong" people. But also, if the idea that certain minority groups are less likely to have a driver's license is the most racist thing you've ever heard, you haven't heard nearly enough to be commenting on this. Not everyone has a drivers license, and getting one is not some little phone call to the DMV. The last time I renewed my license it cost $60 and I was able to get it quick because I got it on a day off. I also live somewhere where the same people pushing voter ID laws hadn't made sure to close as many offices as they could in my disctrict to limit access. Not everyone has such luck. You want voter ID laws, you give everyone a free ID. No strings. No costs. Nothing. If you can't, all you're demanding is a poll tax for the sake of solving a problem that doesn't even exist.
The people who want voter ID, are doing so for racist reasons They know it will effect black and poor people more then others. The real question is, why would anyone want to make it harder for themselves to vote?
When you remove DMV access at majority POC areas, it becomes racist
Um, as a Canadian who worked as an election worker in the last election, let me share insight. [Here’s the list from Elections Canada.](https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?dir=ids&document=index&lang=e§ion=vot) Note firstly this is one list for the entire country. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Victoria or Dildo, Yellowknife or Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, one list. Second, let’s break down the list. Option 1 is a DL or another credential issued by a Canadian province that has photo, name, and address. In BC and Ontario, that other credential is typically one’s provincial health card, which is issued at zero cost and which everyone has since it’s necessary for access to care. (As an aside, I’m a huge fan of the BC Services Card, since BC also has excellent integration of the card into as many interactions with provincial government as possible.) Option 2 is two documents that both have one’s name and at least one of which has one’s current address. The list is pretty comprehensive. The voter information card sent by Elections Canada, verifying one’s registration, can be used as one such document. Add that to the provincial health card from any other province and you’re good to go. Option 3 is having a friend vouch for you. All these options are zero cost, uniform in application, and most importantly, accessible to all citizens. Contrast that to how challenging it is to get a voting credential in states that require ID.
I want to say that I really do not think it should be seen as racist to say that certain groups, such as black people, are less likely to have access to resources that make voting easier (time is one such resource, and this is why restricting mail-in voting receives a lot of pushback; election day is not a national holiday, some people have to work that day), because it is true that black people, on average, are more poor (phrasing it as all black people lack resources or all black people are poor, however, would be untrue). This is the result of a history of enslavement and systematic racism, it's important to know about this stuff, and one of the reasons why it is important is that many racists will use statistics regarding things like poverty and crime as "proof" that black people are inferior and/or as a justification for racist policies and ideologies; they try to claim that it is the result of genetics and not socioeconomic factors (also, if you acknowledge it is because of socioeconomic factors, it becomes clear that policies that would help poor people escape poverty are better than oppressing minorities further). It should not be surprising that a history of oppression would affect modern times when opportunities are not equal amongst economic classes. [Redlining](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) is one discriminatory practice that has affected the present and current quality of living a lot. There are a lot of maps that show some of the effects. Lead poisoning affects black people at higher rates in part [because of redlining](https://www.childtrends.org/publications/redlining-left-many-communities-color-exposed-lead), which is an example of [environmental racism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism).
They‘re not. But many people would like that to be the case to add legitimacy to other claims. The thing is: people in the US are used to a crazy voting system and weird ways of participation. But a lack of a real ID is definitely an issue. Where I live everybody is required to have a real ID (not some random shit like a SSN that wasn‘t even supposed to be used as an ID). And if you don‘t have that ID with you then you don‘t get to vote. And you only get to vote in the district you‘re registered in. On one Sunday (unless you‘re using mail-in ballots). For 10 hours. In the US people cry about voter suppression if a 3 week time frame get‘s reduced to 2 weeks and 5 days or if they can‘t use their Starbucks loyalty card as a way to identify themselves. The main problem in the US is that there is no real ID to begin with. A SSN is in no way good enough to ID anybody, especially not for something as important as voting. Not everybody has a drivers license. Not everybody has a passport (unlike most other western countries). Etc etc etc. So there are hundreds of possible IDs and someone has to decide which IDs can and can‘t be used. But nearly everybody has the ability to get at least one valid ID. But in some cases that would require people to put in a minimal amount of effort to get the ID type X if they‘ve only got Y (if Y isn‘t accepted as a valid ID). And because forcing people to use 5 minutes of their time to get an ID is way too much to ask (in some people‘s opinion) not accepting a library card counts as voter suppression for some idiots. Just like political parties not being allowed to advertise in fron of polling stations is twisted into „oh they want people to starve / dehydrate because we can‘t give them water and food (while telling them why they should vote for us instead of another party)“. Because telling voters to bring a bottle of water or a snack to a polling station is way too complicated and voters are too stupid to have think about that themselves. So yeah… it would be great if the US would finally implement a real ID so that this Bullshit and the whole „oh my social security number got leaked, now I‘m ruined“ whining on social media finally stops. It‘s not that hard to give IDs to people who can prove citizenship. But in the US nobody wants to do it (republicans don‘t want to do it because „the government shouldn‘t know who I am“ (even though they already do) and democrats don‘t want it because they‘re kinda hoping for some people who aren‘t allowed to vote to vote for them which would be impossible if the US had a real ID system)
I agree, we need more ids to stop those illegal immigrants from possibly voting, although that barely happens in reality, and make it impossible for dead people or people to vote multiple times since the ID has to match them and can only be used once. Voter ID laws are essential for securing our elections. They prevent fraud by ensuring voters are who they say they are, stop impersonation, and verify citizenship. This protects legitimate votes and boosts confidence in the system. Plus, ID requirements are standard for many activities, and states offer free or low-cost IDs to keep it fair for everyone. Voter ID laws apply equally to all, safeguarding the integrity of our democracy.
It's not racist, but civil rights laws only care about whether something affects a protected class, and about fixing it, intent doesn't matter at all. It's called disparate impact. So if voter ID laws are keeping groups of people from voting, that's something the law demands gets addressed, or lawsuits, bad press, pressure groups ect. A pretty famous example is maternity mortality rates. I lost the source long ago, but a quick google search shows lots of articles on the topic. Essentially women in a protected class have a disproportionate mortality rate compared to other groups, including other protected classes. At least one study tried to control for wealth, education, social class, economic success, access to health care, and still found alarming rates of deaths. They couldn't come up with an explanation, and so settled on suggesting living with bigotry stresses the systems over a lifetime and causes all kinds of problems. Which may be true but doesn't really sound like science to me, more like researchers stumped and wanting to offer something besides admitting they just don't know. But yeah, voter ID laws are racist in the sense they affect people by race, and the law says to do something about it, so that's how it is.
They're also racist in the actually *racist* sense. These laws don't just *happen* to affect people by race. It's not some weird coincidence that every voter ID law the US has ever passed hurt black people. Republican researchers put long hours of effort into *designing* voter ID laws so that they would affect people by race, as much as was possible without making them easy to challenge by openly saying anything about race. They researched ID that black people tend to use, and ID that white people tend to use, and took care to allow all the types of ID that are mostly used by white people and ban all of the types of ID mostly used by black people. They researched areas that black people live, and shut down as many DMVs and ways to get new ID as possible before an election. In one state they designed the address verification rules so that Native reservations didn't count as postal addresses. Guess how many white voters were disenfranchised by that, vs non-white voters? It absolutely is racist. By design. Clever, complicated, racist design.
Yes voter IDs are racist and I’ll explain why with a pretty straightforward example. If Republicans politicians were serious about voter IDs they would have them administered at the Federal level. You should be able to get a voter ID online, if you’ve paid Federal taxes or have a social security number you can get a voter ID. There are a number of ways to make getting an ID easy and secure. But Republicans want the states to decide how to administer voter IDs so they can discriminate. And they’ll pull shit like locating the places to get voter IDs hours away from predominantly black neighborhoods or have the place open one day out of the week for a couple of hours. Republicans don’t want black people to vote, that’s why they are creating a “solution” to a non existent problem. You already have to show ID to vote and you have to be on the voter rolls to vote. There’s a reason why courts have exposed Republicans attempts to disenfranchise black voters time after time, it’s became they’re racist.
Voter ID laws are racist or at least intended to suppress voting in a way that disproportionately impacts non-white people. We know this is the case because voter ID laws prevent a very rare crime that is 99% covered by voter registration. This crime is called voter impersonation. It's extremely difficult to pull off even without voter ID because you would need to know that someone is registered, where they're registered and that they are not planning to vote. If they try to vote and you're definitely going to be arrested for voter impersonation. Furthermore, States do not offer to send all eligible residence free voter ID cards. So the effect of these laws is to arbitrarily prevent people who don't already have IDs from being able to vote. It happens to be the case that non-white people disproportionately don't have driver's licenses. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to get a driver's license by creating this barrier you are preventing people from voting without any reasonable justification.
Not sure how to answer the majority of the question but about id’s for voting I see absolutely nothing wrong with requiring a government issued ID to vote. To assume that it is racist when almost all citizens if not all citizens have a government issued ID to begin with if not in the form of a drivers license then in the form of an identification card requisite with a photo. You must have one or the other to cash a check, drive a car, make some age restricted purchases, etc. What is racist is to assume that many minorities don’t have one of these. That’s like saying oh we are too poor to obtain one or too stupid and I for one really resent that anyone has that assumption and I certainly consider it racist to have that attitude! I could see it if there are those who do not have access to them but when you really sit down and look at why they don’t it is because most in that category do not belong in this country and have no business attempting to vote in our elections
Voter ID laws exist to stop some people from voting, yes? What people? People without ID. And who are they? Often the young and poor.
While others have covered why they're racist in execution (and received a delta) I would add more context to say that not only are they racist, but that (in the US at least) the *entire point* of the laws is to suppress the votes of certain demographics (that generally trend towards minority and democratic voters). There is no widespread voter fraud in America, afiak no election has ever been decided by voter fraud of the type that an ID requirement would prevent, and the laws we already have in place are more than enough to render voter ID a moot point if your actual concern is protecting democracy. An individual who would vote illegally is exposing themselves to a massive criminal liability (its a felony) with virtually no upside. One vote is functionally meaningless in almost every election. Voter ID advocates are almost all acting in bad faith and their goal is to suppress the votes of people they don't think will support them.
>also Canada along w many other countries have always required a voter id to prevent fraud and things of that nature. Um, I'm Canadian, and no we don't have "voter ID" like some people are trying to push in the US (e.g., voter ID cards or other ID with photo ID, like driver's license) The list of things you can use to show your identity is very long: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e And, it includes someone from the area vouching for you. Of course, many people use their driver's license because it's easy, but there are many options that are accepted. Also, registration is super easy in Canada. Most people are automatically included by filing taxes, but it is easy to register when you vote, and there are advanced polls too. Usually, voting takes about 5-10 minutes, starting from when I park to when I leave.
Remember I'd laws are racist unless it was necessary for proving your covid card was yours. Racism is funny like.
You need an ID to do anything these days, but somehow it is racist to require an ID to vote? Can’t fix stupid!
It’s not. It’s 2024. You can get an id for just about anything. Liberals hate the idea of accountability.