First things first, I don’t doubt it is a bad thing, considering who supports it and who doesn’t.
But my question is what exactly is the issue and what is the current and proposed voting process when it comes to IDs?
Here in my EU country, you have to show some version of a government ID, be it an ID card, drivers license or passport. And we don’t have to pre-register to vote.
You have to understand the roots of the voting registration rules here to understand it better. The whole point of them was to keep black men and all women from having a vote.
That’s it - that is what they were for. So every permutation since is built on that framework, it’s always "the wrong people might vote’ instead of “we want to make sure everyone votes”.
So voter ID is not a bad idea on its face, you go in to vote the poll workers need to know who you are, right? The lady who sits across from me at work is old, she went to renew her driver’s license in February this year and they said no, your current license (that they issued) is not enough, there are new requirements - we need your birth certificate, your first marriage license, your divorce paperwork, your second marriage license, your divorce decree from that marriage, then we can renew your license.
She just managed to get all this by mid-October, so she did get through in time to vote but what the fuck? She had to reach out to 3 states and getting a birth certificate from like the 1950s is not easy. Why is it not easy to renew? Because the laws were written to prevent voting not to enable it.
mmmm…not exactly.
JFK and his father used the Mob to generate thousands of votes to get him elected in 1960. There was serious fuckery in that election.