Good lord. I did not allege any such thing. I literally read the story and asked a question. I did go to the trouble of reading the appeals court ruling, the information available on the NC state voting website, and the study referenced in the arguments opposing the NC law.
And the question was not asked in the same sense as “I just believe that questions about vaccine safety should be asked…” I asked because I was actually curious. I thought that people here could address the issue objectively, and might have the information at hand, or just a link. Or they could just ignore the question.
Sure, just dump the extra costs on unfunded members of the community who are helping people exercise their rights. That can’t possibly go wrong!
Perhaps it’s far more efficient for those people to fight laws whose documented impact appears to be to make it more difficult for people to legitimately vote?
I have trouble with this and other “folk” remedies because we are playing a game of whack-a-mole with people with a racist agenda (see the court ruling for North Carolina). Unless we can agree that the right to vote is paramount and needs to be protected against restrictions, then whatever remedy we come up will be countered by another law that further restricts things.
I’m not at all certain that you really need photo I.D. for all of these things, but I think there’s another important wrinkle to consider. A lot of the time, when you need your photo I.D., it doesn’t need to be up to date. The address could be wrong because you’ve moved. Lots of people don’t notice or care if it has expired. (I used an expired photo I.D. for years.)
For voting, perhaps one would have to update an ID, which otherwise is quite serviceable. And I think it usually costs just as much to update as it does to get a new one, somewhere in the vicinity of $30.
Let’s flip the quest ion around. Why is a photo ID necessary to exercise your right to vote? I don’t have to show ID to speak, to practice religion, to assemble, to report for the press, to open carry a firearm, to walk the streets, to purchase items with state issued legal tender, et al.
Most State laws require you to update your license (or photo ID)
within 30 days of any changes to the information, ie, changes to
address. This information is always included in the documentation you
sign to obtain the ID.
But in practice, for many situations, the ID is still usable even if one no longer lives at the address listed. This is how one can have an ID usable for at least some of the things on your list, but still not be able to vote with it.
The ink on the finger is used to prevent people from voting more than once. But if you have ink on your finger from another source then you won’t be able to vote at all. This allows a political party to precisely select voters who they expect to vote for their opposition and prevent them from casting their vote.
So that doesn’t address my question at all as to why an ID should be required to vote, but…
What you say is only in regard to existing ID cards. Not everyone has one (I know, this doesn’t make sense to you from your privileged experience where you’ve probably never met someone who doesn’t have one, but they do exist and they are often not white people).
They’re poor and they lack official documentation and unless you’re personally willing to drive around to their rural residences, find documentation or some form of proof of their birth or citizenship, escort them to the nearest DMV (often far away) to get or renew an expired ID card, you’re advocating for discriminating against them.
These people aren’t likely to commit voter fraud. The ones who are inclined to commit voter fraud, if they really want to, are the ones who get elected to official positions in government and purge people from voter registration. And they have all the identification they need or want.
You’re ignoring the costs of your proposed “solution” and also ignoring the fact that voter fraud doesn’t and isn’t likely to happen where you are pretending it will.
If they required Photo IDs, and by some chance those photo IDs were only available from government buildings located in poor areas, with no onsite parking, do you think that would suppress the middle class and affluent white vote?
Even if they were provided for free, wouldn’t a fair amount of white voters decide it wasn’t worth the hassle to vote?
Personal anecdote from a few years back:
I briefly moved to NC for a startup job that failed to happen. When I went to update my ID to NC, my valid ID from another state wasn’t enough for them. Nor valid id plus utility bill, credit card, and my birth certificate. I would have to show valid ID, actual social security card, utility bill, and get a new copy of my birth certificate re-issued, because it wasn’t like the ones they were used to, being old and from a military hospital in another state and filled in with a manual typewriter and possibly fake. The license fee was quite reasonable if you didn’t include the fees of having to replace all my other documentation as well. But it was clear the state had left themselves a whole lot of openings to deny someone an ID, and this was before the supremes decided to nullify the voting rights act. I doubt it improved afterwards.
That reminds me of the third world countries where they obsess over paperwork and bureaucracy, but are completely inefficient in running the basic infrastructure.
No they haven’t. Fraudulent voting has never accounted for a significant % of the voters in any given polity. But Republicans figure they can supress between large numbers of the Democrat voters with ID laws. The laws specifically create burdens to the urban poor and elderly. Usually along with requiring drivers licenses is the shutting down of urban DMVs or ones in significantly minority communities
Texas ID laws were considered so damaging to voter rights and so unjustified even the former political director of the GOP in Texas became an advocate against them.
"Royal Masset, the former political director for the Republican Party of Texas, concisely tied all of these strands together in a 2007 Houston Chronicle article concerning a highly controversial battle over photo identification legislation in Texas. Masset connected the inflated furor over voter fraud to photo identification laws and their expected impact on legitimate voters:
Among Republicans it is an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,”
Masset said. He doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause
enough of a dropoff in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote"
Actually the evidence of voter fraud has been studied for years and the results are far more underwhelming when compared to the accusations.
The entire point of voter ID laws is to keep urban minorities and the elderly from voting Democrat. Added to that is the history of facially innocuous restrictions on voting rights used to deliberately keep blacks from voting. At no point could such laws be considered remotely justifiable or looked at in isolation.
