The thing about voter ID is that it isn't inherently a bad idea, as long as you make it really cheap (ideally free) and convenient to get one. If republicans were actually interested in election integrity and civic participation, they wouldn't keep accidentally forgetting that part. But they're not, so in practice it ends up acting as a tool for discrimination and disenfranchisement.
If Democrats agreed to a universal free voterID for all US citizens that people can get at any post office, the Republicans would 100% go for it. All they truly want is a fair and trusted election. Any claim against this is based purely in conjecture and could easily be proven by simply pushing for some form of voter ID that is not discriminatory.
It’s the Democrats that say an ID to vote is racist, while saying an ID is not racist for things like driving, flying, buying alcohol, working, getting a firearm, welfare checks, and so much more.
It’s the Democrats that literally removed the signature requirement on ballots? (PA) What possible reason is there for this, if not to open the door for fraudulent voting, multiple votes per person etc...
Not a rhetorical question. Someone please help me understand the other side of this?
Many more eloquent words have been written on this topic if you want more depth, but here's are some quick highlights:
- Voting is a right, driving/flying/etc are not. Getting a driver's license is more about certifying your ability to drive than your identity.
- Signature requirements are tricky because they are very subjective. You're counting on the unbiased assessment of thousands of volunteers to determine if signatures match. That doesn't make it racist, but it's easy to imagine a poll worker intentionally or unintentionally disenfranchising valid voters. So the key question is, does it actually reduce voter fraud by more than the false negative rate?
Everywhere I've lived, the voter rolls and the voting process are designed in such a way that adding a free voter ID to the process would change very little. It's already very difficult to orchestrate fraud without detection.
In the case of voting it doesn’t matter the identity of the voter. It just matters that they are in fact eligible to vote in that district and are indeed only voting once.
Without some form of ID or some one-time-use voucher that can only be obtained by eligible voters, how could anyone trust the veracity of the system? Honor system? Seems weak.
>The thing about voter ID is that it isn't inherently a bad idea...
This is very true. The same people who often argue loudly for privacy, security, are willing to have a hole in the election system, probably the more important of any of those things.
Up to now, it's been "well, there's very little fraud going on", as if that makes it fine to ignore. Showing ID to vote in our most fundamental democratic process is NOT a stupid or crazy idea. And it has become the rallying cry of the paranoid and conspiracy believers.
Fault the Democrats for letting themselves be accused of voter fraud in the name of not making it hard to vote (solution: give everyone the IDs they need, easily, as suggested), and fault the Republicans for using voter ID as a way to make it harder to vote (solution: stop being underhanded jerks).
And lastly, I have to fault the people who can't get their shit together enough once per 5 or 10 years (ID expiration timescale) for such an important piece of identification and key to so many other things. How do they get through life every day if they can't even do this one thing that infrequently? And sadly, how bad a situation is it that your party has to rely on these people to get you over the majority line?
There really is something seriously fishy with how "Voter ID" is being fought against and dismissed. Here you have a nearly 100% effective method of silencing the complaints of the "not accepting the fair election result" Republicans, and yet no one wants to explore it. Not only that, but it might even serve to promote participation and ease of voting, yet still... we get nebulous and down-right dismissive reasons why it can't be put in place.
