John Oliver on states' voter ID laws

Yes, which I use. But you still have to get it at the DMV, it’s just a driver’s license marked ‘non-driver’. People sometimes think they’re fake, or react as if it were a leper’s license (less often now, since they look more like a normal driver license instead of being a different color). I had one bank refuse to allow me to open an account because of it; two managerial levels up couldn’t explain why, just say “I think it’s probably a policy”. My point though, was just that most of its uses have nothing to do with driving. And then I ranted a little. Sorry, that may have been off-topic.

Oops. I forgot the sarcasm tag on that one. I suppose I thought it would be contextual from the bit about registration data being leaked. (Thinking of December’s voter data breach and the caucus/primary shame-mails about when your nearby neighbors voted, with names and addresses etc.)

Businesses have been dealing with data at the national or international level for several hundred years. We’ve had mail, telegraph, and telephone far more than 20 years. I can see that there could be some difficulty separating the ‘who is voting’ from the ‘who are they voting for’, since both pieces of data would presumably need to be sent together. Possibly the ballot could be sent in an anonymous envelope inside the envelope that tells who is voting and what district they’re participating on behalf of, and they could be processed separately. Not sure if that’s how they do it, but at least 3 states have mail voting and many have figured out some way to do absentee voting. So it doesn’t really seem to be a technical limitation on where you can vote from.

Rather seems like every aspect has negatives:

  • public record - harassment/threats/harm
  • registration - bureaucracy and data breaches (possible harassment/threats/harm)
  • identification requirements - expense, bureaucracy, and disenfranchisement (possible harassment/threats/harm)
  • anonymity - possibility for people to vote more than once

I tend to lean toward allowing people to vote anonymously anywhere. We just need some way to make it difficult to do more than once. Maybe have voting at the DMV. There’s no way you’d get through the line there more than once on a single election day. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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