It is strange that showing ID to vote is controversial in the US and that providing basic ID to citizens for free to allow them to vote is a problem that seems difficult to solve (or want to solve).
My anecdote: I am an EU citizen living in another EU country. As such, I am permitted to vote in local and European elections. When I moved to my current village I registered with the local town hall online. I sent a scan of my national ID card (for my home country) and they registered me to vote for the elections I’m eligible to vote for. Ahead of the elections, they post me a physical election card telling me where to vote (always the same place in the village), and on the day I take my card and ID and vote.
It’s basically frictionless. It’s no problem to register online with a foreign ID document, and it’s no problem to present a foreign ID card alongside my election card on the day when I vote.
If I turned up to vote without my election card or my ID, I would be refused the chance to vote. That makes sense to me and showing ID to vote is not questioned by anyone.
Showing ID to vote wouldn't be controversial in the US if states made it easy to obtain a valid ID for the purpose. But states routinely use it as a backdoor mechanism to prevent people from voting.
There's an excellent documentary by Channel 5 (formerly All Gas No Brakes) where he tries to work with a group of homeless people in Las Vegas to get them papers and the process is extremely difficult. Like bordering on impossible.
>where he tries to work with a group of homeless people in Las Vegas to get them papers and the process is extremely difficult. Like bordering on impossible.
That seems like the worst case scenario though? I don't think homeless people should be disenfranchised, but at the same time it's unfair to pretend the typical experience of getting a voter id resembles whatever the TV show is depicting either.
"But these marginalized group of people isn't something we need to worry about right?"
But even setting aside homeless, US states have a very documented, very public history of disenfranchising African American voters.
* 1890-1960 you've got "literacy tests" that would routinely fail black voters but allow white voters through
* 1800-1960 you've got poll taxes which was used strategically in places to harm black & sometimes even poor white voters, mostly to suppress black voters. This by the way is where a lot of the sensitivity comes up around driver's licenses and ID cards - it's frequently referred to as a modern day poll tax.
* "Grandfather" clauses where if you grandfather could vote before the Civil War then you could bypass literacy tests & poll taxes.
Let's fast forward lest you think this is an "old" problem.
* In the 1960s you've got racial gerrymandering which starts to become popular as previous mechanisms are disallowed (this by the way still happens today & the GOP will frequently try to whitewash it as a political move and it just so happens that the Democratic party is predominantly black & the current SCOTUS has allowed that kind of fig leaf).
* Voter roll purges frequently seem to target black communities.
* Felon disenfranchisement laws seem "equal access" until you realize that African Americans are jailed in a 2:1 ratio to white people.
* North Carolina in 2013 cut early voting and same-day registration specifically targeting Black voters (as ruled on by the 4th circuit). Alabama in 2015 closed DMVs and polling places making it hard to get an ID AND to vote (closures centered in majority-Black counties). Wisconsin in 2016 had DMV clerks caught on tape intentionally giving incorrect information to deter voters from getting ID. Georgia in 2018 closed a huge amount of polling places centered in black majority districts. Texas as well (these counties had been protected by the VRA).
Sure, the most impacted tend to be poor people, but regardless of income, it's almost always got a racial bent by most of these power centers. Pretending like racism is a solved problem in America is being willfully blind.
> but at the same time it's unfair to pretend the typical experience of getting a voter id resembles whatever the TV show is depicting either.
"Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it typical in your socioeconomic class? No probably not. Is it typical in terms of many millions of people experience this problem every election cycle? Yes.
> when I specifically acknowledged that homeless not being able to get id is a real issue.
In one breadth you acknowledge it and then say "but is it really that big a deal?" in the next. That's minimization.
>"Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it typical in your socioeconomic class? No probably not. Is it typical in terms of many millions of people experience this problem every election cycle? Yes.
Do you honestly think the median person who can't vote because of voter ID laws is experiencing the same level of difficulty as a homeless person trying to get an ID? If not, then maybe you shouldn't accuse other people of ""Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here".
It can be incredibly difficult and time consuming to get a birth certificate if you have lost yours. If you work full time, you'd have to take off for an unknown time period (typically multiple hours) to stand in line at a court or other facility that provides them. In some cases, people just don't have the option to take that time off and/or lack vehicle access to get there. Then there's a fee to get a copy, lots of forms you and your relatives have to sign & get notarized. Finally, if you're successful, then you get the opportunity to make an appointment to wait at line at a DMV location. In Texas, they have severely limited hours since COVID.
I think it's become significantly worse since COVID & REAL ID requirements, but it's always been a Kafkaesque nightmare to try & get the proof of who you legally are. And, not to mention, it's a paper form that you can't just pull up digitally, so if you don't take precautions, it's easy to misplace.
Oh man the birth certificate thing is ridiculous. I had to get a new Id from scratch recently and it was the most painful process
The state I was born in decided to outsource the handling of birth certificates to some shit tier consulting firm.
In order to get my birth certificate shipped to me, I would have to wait over six months simply to process my request (ostensibly due to Covid, but this was 2023). It would have been quicker for me to walk hundreds of miles and get it in person. Thankfully I lucked out and found an old one.
Just a reminder that this is the shit politicians mean when they talk about privatizing government services.
For non-US contrast, when I needed a birth certificate recently, I filled an online form and the next day I received a digitally signed pdf by email. It was free.
Not just a slow turn-around time, but as I recall, it also cost me $90 to get my copy. That's not much for most of us, but to someone living paycheck to paycheck, it may be insurmountable or nearly so.
Having each section of our government and it's services privatized it's a whole other issue as well. We're watching the same thing that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and all the Warsaw pact states) happen here in the U.S. right now: the organs of the state being shut down & sold to the highest bidder to create a loyal oligarch class.
Slowly but sure, the USPS, the NWS, and public broadcasting is being destroyed so private entities can scoop up the leftovers or take over in their stead.
To add to this, there’s friction from the citizen side of things with a relatively high level of distrust in government that’s been present for decades. If you go out deep enough into the boonies for instance you can probably find people who still don’t have government ID of any type despite being native born and prefer to keep it that way.
In my state I bring two forms of ID and a couple of bills to the DMV and I’m issued a same-day license?
How does that compare to a notoriously unfriendly nation like Germany?
In any case, my understanding is virtually any nation in Central and South America requires identification to vote. If the third-world poverty stricken nations make it work there is no reason the rich United States cannot.
You can't use your driving license under the proposed SAVE act, as it's not proof of citizenship. Only a few states offer "extended" driving licenses, which do, but also need to be requested separately in most (or all?) states that offer them IIRC. For every other state: you will have to use a passport, birth certificate, or a separate state ID card.
> Only a few states offer "extended" driving licenses, which do [prove your citizenship]
If anyone is wondering, an enhanced drivers license is not the same as a "REAL ID". A "REAL ID" does not indicate citizenship status, which the SAVE act requires.
OK now we just need to find out how well it works for thousands of other people from different states, social classes, and skin colors and then we'll have some real data.
assuming that you're talking about a driver's license, you're leaving out the important steps of passing driving tests and, more importantly, having a car.
In GA, to pick on the state I was living in when they started instituting these rules, they cut DMV locations at the same time as they started adding the ID requirements (or trying to, I moved and don't know the current status of their rules). Yes, the state ID was free, but their actions at the same time, intended or not, made it harder for people to get the free ID.
Which, to reinforce the point, is the actual situation here in America.
All the support systems that help ID cards be fairly distributed to citizens are under-documented for the populace and under-supported by the administration.
It's ripe for the authoritarian takeover that is currently underway here.
> It is strange that showing ID to vote is controversial in the US and that providing basic ID to citizens for free to allow them to vote is a problem that seems difficult to solve (or want to solve).
One of the blockers to a national ID system in the US, that would result in voter ID no longer posing any substantive obstacle to voting, has been anti-government paranoia; but another, if you're not aware, has been fundamentalist Christianity and its eschatology -- fundamentalist Christians may associate the idea of a national ID with the "mark of the beast".
The amusing thing here of course is that while Trump's attempt to unilaterally impose ID rules is illegal, if it were successful, it would likely be an own goal. Formerly, the sort of person who is likely to not have any sort of ID -- someone disconnected from any systems that would require it -- was more likely to vote Democratic than Republican, but in recent years, this has reversed. While I can't cheer for breaking election laws (or for a court ruling that this is in fact legal, because it shouldn't be considered so), it would at least be amusing if this backfired.
> associate the idea of a national ID with the "mark of the beast"
This was absolutely true during the 2000s.
The huge irony is that having a national ID (central authenticator issuing globally unique identifiers) is the only way to protect PII, at the field level, at rest.
Per the Translucent Database strategy. Which I won't repeat here. Unless the peanut gallery develops a genuine interest.
In other words, not having Real ID (or equiv) enables our panoptic surveillance capitalistic dystopia.
There was plenty of it in the lead-up to 2000, too. I had a family member who in the late 90s got swept up in some of the religious internet mania surrounding the mark that was tying it to the Y2K bug and all sorts of other things. It remains some of the most bonkers stuff I’ve ever seen, even in the modern era of heightened internet craziness.
The kind of actual voter fraud that ID requirements would prevent is extremely rare. There are better ways to rig elections than hiring thousands of people to physically show up at different polling centers and vote several times under different names. Even disregarding the fact that voter ID laws are (and historically have been) widely abused to disenfranchise specific groups in the USA, what do you actually gain by requiring ID?
Preventing non-citizens from voting. Some counties in the US have almost half of the population who are non-citizens. It's great that we have so many people wanting to come to the states, but they can't vote until they become citizens. This is not a controversial issue anywhere except in the US.
> There is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas are voting in significant numbers, despite some claims that “millions” of noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. In fact, audits by election officials and numerous studies reflect that voter fraud by noncitizens is extremely rare.
It’s great that those organizations say it’s uncommon. But this shouldn’t even be an issue. It doesn’t take many votes to tip a close election. Requiring ID like every other country is the common sense thing to do. And it helps build confidence in the election process without the need for organizations to try and demonstrate that the election was legitimate after the fact.
As an analogy, let's say I'm triaging a broken neck, a burn, a gunshot wound, a compound fracture, a stab wound, a broken toe, and a hangnail.
If Voter ID were to be placed somewhere on here, it would be below hangnail.
This is smoke and mirrors nonsense that is using minorities and trans people as a scapegoat and distraction.
How much fucking richer are people getting? Poor people have been convinced by rich people that their problems are the other poor people. It's insane. You can pull this pattern out of every modern fascist government and yet people are lacking on to it like a bunch of suckers. It's embarrassing. We should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.
That's a specious argument because the voter ID problem requires basically zero resources. Just mandate voter ID, problem solved. Practically every other first-world country does, including progressive European countries.
Back to the triage analogy, there is a person with a compound fracture that is losing blood. The gsw needs care. We need pressure on that artery.
We're arguing over the color of the bandaid for the hangnail.
That's why I don't give a fuck about voter ID, because the people that give a fuck about voter ID have been fucking duped, and I don't know how to reason with that human, so I just have given up trying and scream into the void.
If somebody will streamline the process and actually fund some DMVs to get this done I'd be all for it - but they won't, because it's not the point, they'll just mandate it as a form of voter suppression without doing anything to fix the infrastructure problem.
Common sense isn't saying "oh there's no ID required at the polls? Illegals must be tipping elections", it's recognizing that there are armies of people auditing these elections each cycle. Irregularities are caught and people challenge results in court all the time. In practice, if you tried to commit voter fraud, I think you'd find it very hard to accomplish (especially if you're trying to change the outcome)
Even in your ideal scenario where ID is a hard requirement and nothing should slip through the cracks, you could still introduce doubt somewhere in the chain (e.g. did the poll worker actually check your ID?)
If ID is required, then your whole “Illegals must be tipping elections" argument just goes away. People keep making this debate in the US of “we need ID to prevent election fraud” vs “we can’t have ID required because ID can be hard to obtain”. It’s just silly. If you take a step back and make it easier to get an ID than the whole things resolves itself. The pro-ID people are happy Because only registered voters can vote and the non-ID people are happy because voting is accessible. The real question is, why are they not doing that? Every other country can do it, why not the US? Why do we have to be stuck in this silly debate forever?
And I don’t believe the whole “the mean republicans won’t let us!” narrative. Democrats controlled the executive branch 12 of the last 16 years and control half the states. If they care about voters rights, why haven’t we tried to fix this?
I'm not sure if you've ever voted, but States without ID requirements (about 15 of them total) don't just let you walk in and cast a ballot anonymously. If you were trying to commit fraud, you'd need to know a combination of things about the person you're pretending to be and sign the poll book or an affidavit[0]. Now try scaling that process up enough to change the outcome... you can't.
Your assumptions about lack of ID = easy fraud is misguided.
> Every other country can do it, why not the US?
Elections are handled by the States themselves and so trying to tackle this on a federal level through the executive or Congress probably wouldn't go over very well considering it'd go against the constitution[1] (although that doesn't seem to be that big of a problem these days)
You basically just disregarded the comment you replied to and doubled down on your original idea.
You are saying that the problem would be a non-problem if only we had voter ID was. However the evidence before you (and that includes evidence collected by conservative organizations that generally align with politically motivated voter suppression) is that the problem is effectively already a non-problem, due in part to the many other controls in place around voter registration and vote counting. Meanwhile there is quite a bit of evidence showing that your favorite solution to the non-problem is itself problematic, measurably so in the historical record.
You are of course welcome to continue believing whatever you want to believe. But it's hopefully obvious by now to anyone reading this thread that your beliefs are not aligned with facts.
It's like arguing that Python is bad because it has dynamic types, and if we all just adopted static types in Python then all type errors in Python would go away. Even if that is true, it's a ridiculous position to hold.
If you want voter ID to be a thing, then you need to first establish a nationwide ID system that is equitable in terms of access. Until that exists, voter ID is a bad idea in the USA.
I think I have been convinced by this thread that risks of no-ID voting is fairly low. Certainly not nearly as big of an issue as I thought when I first posted.
I still maintain that this should be a non-issue. ID’s are issued by the state, and they are the entities responsible for voting and voter registration. You don’t need a national database to fix this.
The lawmakers that demand ID for voting also work to reduce access to ID. The most obvious way is just closing facilities that issue IDs, but also through fees and documentation requirements.
American exceptionalism is a real thing, unfortunately. And what I've found is that when confronted with a flaw or aspect of their society that could be improved, Americans tend to work backwards from the problem and try to explain away the problem, while inventing ridiculous hypotheticals for why other countries implementations won't work.
See: this thread and voter ID, any kind of firearm laws, gerrymandering, lack of public transport, etc.
Apart from the fact that you are basically disregarding all of the detail explanations on why the US is in fact different when it comes to voter ID, all of the things you mentioned are primarily decided by states, with relatively federal authority beyond the ability to withhold funding conditional on states adopting certain policies, which is a very crude instrument that is only used in a handful of circumstances like establishing a nationwide minimum drinking age. And what you will find is that there is a tremendous amount of heterogeneity across states in all of those categories.
I don't disagree. My comment has little to do with that.
Let's take the fact that sales tax isn't baked into the price in the US, a common criticism of the US. I understand the sales tax is different per state. Not having the sales tax baked in is an annoyance, and I believe almost everybody would agree having it baked in would be an improvement.
I don't understand why Americans work backwards to try and explain it away. I've genuinely seen comments such as:
"What if the sales tax changes often? Then they have to reprint all the labels" (does this actually happen that often?)
"They have to print different labels for each state" (Many stores already print different labels for regional pricing, or use e-ink)
"It's not that hard to just compute +X%, just get better at math" (It's not hard but what's wrong with transparency and clarity with the price?)
It's that kind of discussion that my comment is referring to.
I don't want to depress people, but try to zoom out a bit.
1. This is just one part of the slope from which the republic has been sliding down from anocracy towards autocracy.
2. You, reading and trying to process this, are an exception. Now imagine that the vast majority of the public does not have any overview and is not aware, being smothered in us-vs-them vibes.
3. You, being a normal human being, trying to make sense of it, trying to see if you can interpret this as normal. When we see something alarming but don't get an `ACK` from our social system, we shut off the internal alarm. This is the original sin of the media rooms, as their role in democracy is to see the big picture; they should ACK, they should sound the alarm loud and clear.
One misread of the situation by the GOP: now their own voters would be just as negatively impacted by the sorts of changes they want to make. They have as many rural voters that rarely vote, may not have ID, may not be able to navigate election bureaucracy, etc as the Dems.
Like I bet the electoral make-up of "people with passports" skews rather left
I'm really not sure how we've normalized corrupt behavior at the highest levels of government. Penalizing law firms for supporting things that Trump doesn't like is insane. Doubly so when they enter agreements to provide free legal services for things he does approve of so that they can "get the monkey off their back" so to speak.
All I can hope for is that we punish this behavior in the future when grifting and violating civil rights isn't the normal thing to do.
Decades and decades of the slow but methodical dismantling of the public education system & it's standards. Then, propagandizing the public with right wing news that tells the populace what's happening is perfectly normal and thinking otherwise is unAmerican/unpatriotic are two things that come to mind immediately.
There's still vast policy changes each side believes in and would choose if the shoe was on the other foot. We're seeing the entire dismantling of basic public health policies, vaccines, protection of our food supply & etc right now as just one example.
Meanwhile look what's happening in Texas: another gerrymander attempt, since even some Republicans are sick of Trump's authoritarian dumpster fires and the kowtowing Republicans in Congress. And, sensing the impending Midterms bloodbath, the GOP is picking its voters instead of letting the voters pick their representatives.
True, Democrats and others have gerrymandered too. But I sense that most people don't want the gerrymander to be possible. Yet we can't get it changed because we're beholden to some dead guys who laid down rules hundreds of years ago, which none of us agreed to or had any input on; and we don't really have representatives in Congress to change things according to law the way we want them to, because they self-deal (looking at you, Rick Scott) and because Citizens United cemented the power of those who really get representation —those with money, and corporations. The People will revolt if things don't change fast.
Honestly, kinda hope they did require a passport to vote.
It'll be great to see what a shitshow it is when 70% of people in Arkansas [1] can't vote. It seems to be pretty evenly split amongst being the administration and their primary opposition although I guess devil might be in the details [2].
The PDF in [1] has an interesting stat. (from the Notes section)
>> Note: According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 79% of women in opposite-sex marriages have changed their surname to their spouse’s while 5% hyphenated their surname,
meaning that 84% of women who are currently or have been in opposite-sex marriages have changed their legal name and therefore do not posess a birth certificate that could prove their
identity and by extension citizenship status under the SAVE Act.
Am I reading correct that this would disqualify them from voting?
65 million "Estimated number of female citizens whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change only)"
69 million "Estimated number of female citizens (15 years and older) whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change or hyphenation)"
Guess they are working on the undermining females part of project 1525 now
For completeness:
>> Additionally, Pew reported that approximately 5% of men who marry also change their surname - nationwide this would account for approximately 4 million men.
It wouldn't disqualify them outright, but they have to bring more documentation to prove their identity. This is one reason my wife didn't change her name when we got married.
> A recent Economist/YouGov poll doesn’t show any party gap on this question, as Democrats (41%) and Republicans (38%) are equally likely to hold and not hold valid passports
Sorry, how is a 3% difference "no gap"? Am I misunderstanding those metrics? If a Democrat is 3% more likely to hold a passport, that seems like a potentially huge impact to elections.
It would be worse than the nationwide average. Battleground swing states would swing way right. The Republican voters in the suburbs have passports at a much higher rate than the Democrat voters in the poor neighborhoods.
Devil in the details is literally how you gerrymander. If there are say overwhelming democrat passport holders in say NY then you just lose that one state and win the rest.
That said, I'm just more interested in seeing the sheer number of people being told their voter registration is invalid and if that would backfire as individuals who supporter the administration are kinda overwhelmingly targeted (top of that passport list isn't the south).
It use to be, but sometime in the early 2000's land/sea crossings to Canada and Mexico required a passport for re-entry. I remember reading most Americans that travel outside the US go to Mexico or Canada; changing to require a passport caused a large jump in applications
That's actually no longer true, due to changes in voting demographics for both parties:
>The best evidence seems to be that the impact of restrictive laws is minimal. An analysis published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of 1.6bn voting records from every state in America found that strict voter ID rules, on average, neither significantly suppressed votes nor prevented fraud. Nor do ID laws hurt Democrats any longer, according to research by Jeffrey Harden and Alejandra Campos. Whereas in 2010 voter ID laws reduced Democratic vote share by 3%, by 2020 they increased it slightly. Because of the changes in party voting coalitions, the overall effect of the next phase of even tighter voting rules could now “easily be a wash” when it comes to benefiting one party or the other, says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who studies elections at Harvard University.
How did MAGA win in 2024 if Dems had illegals voting for them? I see right wingers regularly push the narrative that they're the underdog fighting against people rigging the election and that evil Dems are stealing it from them... yet they still go out and vote?
Please enlighten us with elections where illegals voted and changed the outcome.
If you can't even prove you're an American by providing basic identification, you shouldn't be allowed vote. Democracy requires a system of voting that is trustworthy. Allowing people to vote based on who they say they are is not conducive to a trustworthy election.
But it works fine. There have been extensive efforts to find people voting illegally and it turns up a small handful across the entire country, and many of those are things like returning a recently dead persons mail in ballot that voter ID wouldn't even help with. The fact is that all the evidence says an incredibly small number of people vote who are not legally eligible to do so, and only a small proportion of those are non-citizen immigrants.
It doesn't work if a large portion of the country believes that this issue is causing voter fraud. It doesn't have to be really happening, it just has to be possible and perceived to be happening. We can easily fix that.
That doesn't make any sense to me. If a lot of people believe a lie you don't start acting like the lie is true, you teach them the truth. If one of my neighbors becomes worried tigers are going to attack and eat him I'm not going to help him build a giant tiger proof fence around his house.
No, it doesn’t actually need to be possible for it to be perceived as happening when you have an organized campaign dedicated to convince people it’s happening.
1. Right-wing think tanks spend a bunch of time workshopping ways to gain a few extra % points in elections. Turns out that poor voters without ID vote Democrat more often than not.
2. Those think tanks then disseminate FUD to Fox news and similar outlets that there's widespread voter fraud, illegals voting, etc.!!!
3. Some people get spooked and start losing faith in elections.
4. Voter ID laws pass. Swaths of poor people (majority Democrats) lose the ability to vote and aren't able to spend hours getting IDs. Meanwhile, entrenched powers reduce funding and opening times for offices that can assist with this.
5. Single-party rule gets a bit more entrenched in this country.
The way to address lies and propaganda isn't to just give in to those lies. Any voter ID law must come with a precondition that *everyone* who wants an ID can easily get one, preferably by mail and with about 15 minutes of effort. (Plus accommodations for people who are homeless, lack a birth certificate, etc.) Without such a precondition, the true purpose of these efforts is obvious.
So why aren't all these voter ID bills accompanied by lots of funding for photo ID offices? Election security is important. You can get perfectly secure elections by assuming no one is a citizen and denying everyone. But no one wants that. So do it right.
Fine. First hand out IDs to every single person, for free and without forcing them to spend hours on obscure bureaucratic processes, then mandate voter ID when there's close to 100% coverage. It's the only way to be fair. Otherwise, the only thing you're doing is disenfranchising the most vulnerable while changing almost nothing about election security in practice. (Studies have repeatedly found that voter fraud is practically nonexistent.)
The thing is, if you think about this for even two seconds you realize how hard it is to actually commit voting fraud. That's why most of the known fraud occurs not by individuals but by intermediaries 'losing' votes.
If I say I'm John Doe at James Lane then you can trivially verify this in multiple ways. You can check the prior voting records, you can check the death records, you can check property information. If another person comes by and says they're John Doe at James Lane then you can send mail to said address asking them to verify their identity / vote.
It doesn't matter if you commit voting fraud. It matters that people are aware of the fact that voter identity is not verified. It undermines peoples' trust in the election process, and in democracy overall.
There are people pushing for non-citizens to vote in non-federal elections. One example is New York City where they literally passed a law to allow it. It was struck down because it violated New York's constitution though...
It's not exactly unprecedented and also orthogonal to voter id laws. Scotland, for example, allows foreigners to vote in local elections [1] and makes photo id mandatory [2].
I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm saying the person I was responding to was wrong. He said it is fox news propaganda to suggest people want non-citizens to vote illegally. People in NYC did just that.
Except studies have repeatedly shown that there is practically no voter fraud, because it's pretty easy to detect and people generally don't want to commit felonies for zero personal gain. *You* show me the proof of widespread voter fraud.
I don't trust any "study" on this topic because of how highly politicised it is. Is there anything stopping a person from going to a polling station, writing a fake name, and walking out with zero risk? No? Then you must assume there is some amount of fraud.
Is it? Walk us through your "write a fake name" technique. How does it work?
Does <non citizen> walk into a polling location and say they're <registered voter>? What happens if <actual registered voter> has already voted? Or <actual registered voter> shows up later? The poll workers will say "But you already voted". That should immediately result in a criminal investigation. If it doesn't, why the hell not? If it does, there should be numbers so what are they? This is a serious crime.
Or is the claim that a non-citizen fraudulently gets on the voter roll as a citizen? If so, how? Forged birth certificate? Passport? All of them had perfect forgeries? No one got caught? It's a bit far-fetched. Again, where are the numbers?
And finally, what's the point? What's the incentive for a non-citizen to commit such a serious crime? Our elected representatives rarely do anything we think is useful. Spreading the idea that voter fraud is easy or widespread, without evidence, is corrosive to democracy.
By all means require id to vote. It's a great idea. But also ensure that everyone who is eligible to vote can easily get id.
Do you think when you write a fake name they just thumbs up it and don't bother validating anything? Like I'm curious: Can you explain the process as it happens when you go to vote all the way through tallying your vote?
My anecdote: I am an EU citizen living in another EU country. As such, I am permitted to vote in local and European elections. When I moved to my current village I registered with the local town hall online. I sent a scan of my national ID card (for my home country) and they registered me to vote for the elections I’m eligible to vote for. Ahead of the elections, they post me a physical election card telling me where to vote (always the same place in the village), and on the day I take my card and ID and vote.
It’s basically frictionless. It’s no problem to register online with a foreign ID document, and it’s no problem to present a foreign ID card alongside my election card on the day when I vote.
If I turned up to vote without my election card or my ID, I would be refused the chance to vote. That makes sense to me and showing ID to vote is not questioned by anyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRGrKJofDaw
That seems like the worst case scenario though? I don't think homeless people should be disenfranchised, but at the same time it's unfair to pretend the typical experience of getting a voter id resembles whatever the TV show is depicting either.
But even setting aside homeless, US states have a very documented, very public history of disenfranchising African American voters.
* 1890-1960 you've got "literacy tests" that would routinely fail black voters but allow white voters through
* 1800-1960 you've got poll taxes which was used strategically in places to harm black & sometimes even poor white voters, mostly to suppress black voters. This by the way is where a lot of the sensitivity comes up around driver's licenses and ID cards - it's frequently referred to as a modern day poll tax.
* "Grandfather" clauses where if you grandfather could vote before the Civil War then you could bypass literacy tests & poll taxes.
Let's fast forward lest you think this is an "old" problem.
* In the 1960s you've got racial gerrymandering which starts to become popular as previous mechanisms are disallowed (this by the way still happens today & the GOP will frequently try to whitewash it as a political move and it just so happens that the Democratic party is predominantly black & the current SCOTUS has allowed that kind of fig leaf).
* Voter roll purges frequently seem to target black communities.
* Felon disenfranchisement laws seem "equal access" until you realize that African Americans are jailed in a 2:1 ratio to white people.
* North Carolina in 2013 cut early voting and same-day registration specifically targeting Black voters (as ruled on by the 4th circuit). Alabama in 2015 closed DMVs and polling places making it hard to get an ID AND to vote (closures centered in majority-Black counties). Wisconsin in 2016 had DMV clerks caught on tape intentionally giving incorrect information to deter voters from getting ID. Georgia in 2018 closed a huge amount of polling places centered in black majority districts. Texas as well (these counties had been protected by the VRA).
Sure, the most impacted tend to be poor people, but regardless of income, it's almost always got a racial bent by most of these power centers. Pretending like racism is a solved problem in America is being willfully blind.
Im not sure how you got that impression when I specifically acknowledged that homeless not being able to get id is a real issue.
> but at the same time it's unfair to pretend the typical experience of getting a voter id resembles whatever the TV show is depicting either.
"Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Is it typical in your socioeconomic class? No probably not. Is it typical in terms of many millions of people experience this problem every election cycle? Yes.
> when I specifically acknowledged that homeless not being able to get id is a real issue.
In one breadth you acknowledge it and then say "but is it really that big a deal?" in the next. That's minimization.
Do you honestly think the median person who can't vote because of voter ID laws is experiencing the same level of difficulty as a homeless person trying to get an ID? If not, then maybe you shouldn't accuse other people of ""Typical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here".
I think it's become significantly worse since COVID & REAL ID requirements, but it's always been a Kafkaesque nightmare to try & get the proof of who you legally are. And, not to mention, it's a paper form that you can't just pull up digitally, so if you don't take precautions, it's easy to misplace.
The state I was born in decided to outsource the handling of birth certificates to some shit tier consulting firm.
In order to get my birth certificate shipped to me, I would have to wait over six months simply to process my request (ostensibly due to Covid, but this was 2023). It would have been quicker for me to walk hundreds of miles and get it in person. Thankfully I lucked out and found an old one.
Just a reminder that this is the shit politicians mean when they talk about privatizing government services.
Slowly but sure, the USPS, the NWS, and public broadcasting is being destroyed so private entities can scoop up the leftovers or take over in their stead.
How does that compare to a notoriously unfriendly nation like Germany?
In any case, my understanding is virtually any nation in Central and South America requires identification to vote. If the third-world poverty stricken nations make it work there is no reason the rich United States cannot.
If anyone is wondering, an enhanced drivers license is not the same as a "REAL ID". A "REAL ID" does not indicate citizenship status, which the SAVE act requires.
https://campaignlegal.org/sites/default/files/2025-01/CLC%20...
https://www.sos.mn.gov/media/zzia53yr/033125-secretaries-of-...
https://www.dhs.gov/enhanced-drivers-licenses-what-are-they
You're assuming the theoretical US system would be the same and not be made arbitrarily complex by Republicans.
All the support systems that help ID cards be fairly distributed to citizens are under-documented for the populace and under-supported by the administration.
It's ripe for the authoritarian takeover that is currently underway here.
One of the blockers to a national ID system in the US, that would result in voter ID no longer posing any substantive obstacle to voting, has been anti-government paranoia; but another, if you're not aware, has been fundamentalist Christianity and its eschatology -- fundamentalist Christians may associate the idea of a national ID with the "mark of the beast".
The amusing thing here of course is that while Trump's attempt to unilaterally impose ID rules is illegal, if it were successful, it would likely be an own goal. Formerly, the sort of person who is likely to not have any sort of ID -- someone disconnected from any systems that would require it -- was more likely to vote Democratic than Republican, but in recent years, this has reversed. While I can't cheer for breaking election laws (or for a court ruling that this is in fact legal, because it shouldn't be considered so), it would at least be amusing if this backfired.
This was absolutely true during the 2000s.
The huge irony is that having a national ID (central authenticator issuing globally unique identifiers) is the only way to protect PII, at the field level, at rest.
Per the Translucent Database strategy. Which I won't repeat here. Unless the peanut gallery develops a genuine interest.
In other words, not having Real ID (or equiv) enables our panoptic surveillance capitalistic dystopia.
There was plenty of it in the lead-up to 2000, too. I had a family member who in the late 90s got swept up in some of the religious internet mania surrounding the mark that was tying it to the Y2K bug and all sorts of other things. It remains some of the most bonkers stuff I’ve ever seen, even in the modern era of heightened internet craziness.
Preventing non-citizens from voting. Some counties in the US have almost half of the population who are non-citizens. It's great that we have so many people wanting to come to the states, but they can't vote until they become citizens. This is not a controversial issue anywhere except in the US.
> There is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas are voting in significant numbers, despite some claims that “millions” of noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. In fact, audits by election officials and numerous studies reflect that voter fraud by noncitizens is extremely rare.
> A [Heritage Foundation database](https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search?combine=citizenshi...) of election fraud cases identified just 23 instances of noncitizen voting between 2003 and 2022.
Look at the problems in this country
23 instances. 23.
As an analogy, let's say I'm triaging a broken neck, a burn, a gunshot wound, a compound fracture, a stab wound, a broken toe, and a hangnail.
If Voter ID were to be placed somewhere on here, it would be below hangnail.
This is smoke and mirrors nonsense that is using minorities and trans people as a scapegoat and distraction.
How much fucking richer are people getting? Poor people have been convinced by rich people that their problems are the other poor people. It's insane. You can pull this pattern out of every modern fascist government and yet people are lacking on to it like a bunch of suckers. It's embarrassing. We should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.
We're arguing over the color of the bandaid for the hangnail.
That's why I don't give a fuck about voter ID, because the people that give a fuck about voter ID have been fucking duped, and I don't know how to reason with that human, so I just have given up trying and scream into the void.
If somebody will streamline the process and actually fund some DMVs to get this done I'd be all for it - but they won't, because it's not the point, they'll just mandate it as a form of voter suppression without doing anything to fix the infrastructure problem.
deep sigh
Even in your ideal scenario where ID is a hard requirement and nothing should slip through the cracks, you could still introduce doubt somewhere in the chain (e.g. did the poll worker actually check your ID?)
And I don’t believe the whole “the mean republicans won’t let us!” narrative. Democrats controlled the executive branch 12 of the last 16 years and control half the states. If they care about voters rights, why haven’t we tried to fix this?
Your assumptions about lack of ID = easy fraud is misguided.
> Every other country can do it, why not the US?
Elections are handled by the States themselves and so trying to tackle this on a federal level through the executive or Congress probably wouldn't go over very well considering it'd go against the constitution[1] (although that doesn't seem to be that big of a problem these days)
0: https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-verificat...
1: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S4-C1-2/...
You are saying that the problem would be a non-problem if only we had voter ID was. However the evidence before you (and that includes evidence collected by conservative organizations that generally align with politically motivated voter suppression) is that the problem is effectively already a non-problem, due in part to the many other controls in place around voter registration and vote counting. Meanwhile there is quite a bit of evidence showing that your favorite solution to the non-problem is itself problematic, measurably so in the historical record.
You are of course welcome to continue believing whatever you want to believe. But it's hopefully obvious by now to anyone reading this thread that your beliefs are not aligned with facts.
It's like arguing that Python is bad because it has dynamic types, and if we all just adopted static types in Python then all type errors in Python would go away. Even if that is true, it's a ridiculous position to hold.
If you want voter ID to be a thing, then you need to first establish a nationwide ID system that is equitable in terms of access. Until that exists, voter ID is a bad idea in the USA.
I still maintain that this should be a non-issue. ID’s are issued by the state, and they are the entities responsible for voting and voter registration. You don’t need a national database to fix this.
American exceptionalism is a real thing, unfortunately. And what I've found is that when confronted with a flaw or aspect of their society that could be improved, Americans tend to work backwards from the problem and try to explain away the problem, while inventing ridiculous hypotheticals for why other countries implementations won't work.
See: this thread and voter ID, any kind of firearm laws, gerrymandering, lack of public transport, etc.
Let's take the fact that sales tax isn't baked into the price in the US, a common criticism of the US. I understand the sales tax is different per state. Not having the sales tax baked in is an annoyance, and I believe almost everybody would agree having it baked in would be an improvement.
I don't understand why Americans work backwards to try and explain it away. I've genuinely seen comments such as:
"What if the sales tax changes often? Then they have to reprint all the labels" (does this actually happen that often?)
"They have to print different labels for each state" (Many stores already print different labels for regional pricing, or use e-ink)
"It's not that hard to just compute +X%, just get better at math" (It's not hard but what's wrong with transparency and clarity with the price?)
It's that kind of discussion that my comment is referring to.
There's also the rest of the world: "China Turns to A.I. in Information Warfare" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/us/politics/china-artific...
Like I bet the electoral make-up of "people with passports" skews rather left
All I can hope for is that we punish this behavior in the future when grifting and violating civil rights isn't the normal thing to do.
True, Democrats and others have gerrymandered too. But I sense that most people don't want the gerrymander to be possible. Yet we can't get it changed because we're beholden to some dead guys who laid down rules hundreds of years ago, which none of us agreed to or had any input on; and we don't really have representatives in Congress to change things according to law the way we want them to, because they self-deal (looking at you, Rick Scott) and because Citizens United cemented the power of those who really get representation —those with money, and corporations. The People will revolt if things don't change fast.
It'll be great to see what a shitshow it is when 70% of people in Arkansas [1] can't vote. It seems to be pretty evenly split amongst being the administration and their primary opposition although I guess devil might be in the details [2].
[1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/...
[2]: https://today.yougov.com/travel/articles/35414-only-one-thir...
>> Note: According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 79% of women in opposite-sex marriages have changed their surname to their spouse’s while 5% hyphenated their surname, meaning that 84% of women who are currently or have been in opposite-sex marriages have changed their legal name and therefore do not posess a birth certificate that could prove their identity and by extension citizenship status under the SAVE Act.
Am I reading correct that this would disqualify them from voting?
65 million "Estimated number of female citizens whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change only)"
69 million "Estimated number of female citizens (15 years and older) whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change or hyphenation)"
Guess they are working on the undermining females part of project 1525 now
For completeness:
>> Additionally, Pew reported that approximately 5% of men who marry also change their surname - nationwide this would account for approximately 4 million men.
Devil in the details is literally how you gerrymander. If there are say overwhelming democrat passport holders in say NY then you just lose that one state and win the rest.
That said, I'm just more interested in seeing the sheer number of people being told their voter registration is invalid and if that would backfire as individuals who supporter the administration are kinda overwhelmingly targeted (top of that passport list isn't the south).
>The best evidence seems to be that the impact of restrictive laws is minimal. An analysis published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of 1.6bn voting records from every state in America found that strict voter ID rules, on average, neither significantly suppressed votes nor prevented fraud. Nor do ID laws hurt Democrats any longer, according to research by Jeffrey Harden and Alejandra Campos. Whereas in 2010 voter ID laws reduced Democratic vote share by 3%, by 2020 they increased it slightly. Because of the changes in party voting coalitions, the overall effect of the next phase of even tighter voting rules could now “easily be a wash” when it comes to benefiting one party or the other, says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who studies elections at Harvard University.
https://archive.is/iPSiY
Please enlighten us with elections where illegals voted and changed the outcome.
> democrats don't want voter ID so more non-citizens can vote democrat
If that was true, why would they allow themselves to lose another election?
1. Right-wing think tanks spend a bunch of time workshopping ways to gain a few extra % points in elections. Turns out that poor voters without ID vote Democrat more often than not.
2. Those think tanks then disseminate FUD to Fox news and similar outlets that there's widespread voter fraud, illegals voting, etc.!!!
3. Some people get spooked and start losing faith in elections.
4. Voter ID laws pass. Swaths of poor people (majority Democrats) lose the ability to vote and aren't able to spend hours getting IDs. Meanwhile, entrenched powers reduce funding and opening times for offices that can assist with this.
5. Single-party rule gets a bit more entrenched in this country.
The way to address lies and propaganda isn't to just give in to those lies. Any voter ID law must come with a precondition that *everyone* who wants an ID can easily get one, preferably by mail and with about 15 minutes of effort. (Plus accommodations for people who are homeless, lack a birth certificate, etc.) Without such a precondition, the true purpose of these efforts is obvious.
If I say I'm John Doe at James Lane then you can trivially verify this in multiple ways. You can check the prior voting records, you can check the death records, you can check property information. If another person comes by and says they're John Doe at James Lane then you can send mail to said address asking them to verify their identity / vote.
1. https://www.mygov.scot/voting-in-elections-in-scotland
2. https://www.mygov.scot/voting-in-elections-in-scotland/how-t...
It's not obvious at all. People mostly hate voting. Nearly half the people who are eligible to vote don't vote at all.
Does <non citizen> walk into a polling location and say they're <registered voter>? What happens if <actual registered voter> has already voted? Or <actual registered voter> shows up later? The poll workers will say "But you already voted". That should immediately result in a criminal investigation. If it doesn't, why the hell not? If it does, there should be numbers so what are they? This is a serious crime.
Or is the claim that a non-citizen fraudulently gets on the voter roll as a citizen? If so, how? Forged birth certificate? Passport? All of them had perfect forgeries? No one got caught? It's a bit far-fetched. Again, where are the numbers?
And finally, what's the point? What's the incentive for a non-citizen to commit such a serious crime? Our elected representatives rarely do anything we think is useful. Spreading the idea that voter fraud is easy or widespread, without evidence, is corrosive to democracy.
By all means require id to vote. It's a great idea. But also ensure that everyone who is eligible to vote can easily get id.
If you can't trust "any study," then you're going 100% by feels (and whatever Fox news is frothing about).