The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades.
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In the naivest, most shallow analysis Voter ID is not racist because black Americans are just as capable of receiving ID. The logic is fine, but purposefully ignorant.
The barrier to ID IS NOT just "do you have the physical/mental ability to get ID". The barriers are economic and geographic. When you don't put DMVs in black areas that becomes a barrier. When IDs cost money that becomes a barrier. When a motor vehicle is required that becomes a barrier.
The subtle racism is ignoring poor rural whites that face the same “challenges” of distance (even more so!) but are somehow ignored.
The subtle racism is making the claim over and over again without actually presenting any data.
Here's something I wrote on the voter ID topic before [4] (disregard the citation numbers in the quote):
> A question that isn't for you in particular to answer is, in the current day and age, would the number of fraudulent ballots prevented by a new strict voter ID requirement be greater than the number of valid votes prevented by such a requirement? The current legal framework of obtaining government-issued IDs makes strict voter ID laws de facto voter suppression. 30 million people lacked a driver's license as of 2022 [2], and I'd be willing to bet that at least 1 million of them are US citizens of voting age. Let's assume that 25% of them would vote if they had the option to do so from their homes (a arbitrary but conservative hypothetical percentage in light of actual voter turnout percentages [5]). There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots. Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.
[1] https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report
[2] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-low-income-communit...
[3] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-Black-communities.p...
That's a strawman. I don't think anyone is promoting that a drivers license, and only a drivers license is the sole form of appropriate voter ID.
> There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots.
In 2020 "In Arizona, Biden won by 10,457 votes, and in Georgia, he won by 12,670 votes"
Arizona has 4,109,270 registered voters, so the margin was 0.2%, or 2 votes out of every thousand registered voters. Georgia has 7,004,034 registered voters so the margin was 1.8 out of every thousand registered voters as well.
That seems like a very small margin of votes is deciding elections.
Seems like even a small amount of voter fraud could have an effect?
Even so [1]:
> More than one in ten (11%) U.S. adult citizens—or nearly 26 million people— lack any form of government-issued photo identification.
There are also people without birth certificates. Obtaining some IDs can be difficult without having other IDs. For example, depending on where you live, getting a driver's license is difficult without a birth certificate. (Ctrl-F for "Lack of birth certificate" on [2], though apparently South Carolina lets you get a voter registration card before you get a valid voter ID.)
The larger issue is that valid forms of ID for voting differ between states, and (beyond the topic of voting) the difficulty of getting what most people think of as common IDs differs between states. There might well be 100 thousand citizens across the US who would fall through the cracks if every state that didn't already require voter ID were to pass laws naively requiring voter ID for the 2028 election. Voting is a right for citizens, so state governments should go out of their way to make obtaining stable IDs convenient for citizens who lack them (accounting for, among other things, transportation difficulties and time spent on in-person verification that takes away from job time). If the federal government has no authority to unify ID requirements, then states should cooperate to standardize their requirements toward convenience. I would also like if every state (and I do mean every state) allowed payment statements and utility bills as valid identification for voting, because getting stable IDs such as driver's licenses or passports takes months.
> Arizona has 4,109,270 registered voters, so the margin was 0.2%, or 2 votes out of every thousand registered voters. Georgia has 7,004,034 registered voters so the margin was 1.8 out of every thousand registered voters as well.
> That seems like a very small margin of votes is deciding elections.
If the margin were something like 100 votes in a state, I wouldn't know what to do about it, but I would still be dissatisfied if a new voter ID requirement in the state blocked 10000 citizens from voting. When I wrote this before:
> Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.
What I meant to communicate was that any states passing new voter ID laws should near-simultaneously pass laws that making getting government-issued, voting-eligible IDs easier, especially for people who lack multiple forms of ID. And for sure, states should not be carelessly closing DMVs the way Alabama did in 2015 [3].
[1] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/MAP-Identity-Documents-repo...
[2] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id#toggle...
[3] https://www.snopes.com/news/2015/10/01/alabama-drivers-licen...
It's factual that black Americans are more likely to not have ID, and therefore a law requiring photo ID would disproportionately affect them. That's not up for debate.
In addition, Voting ID laws have historically been a method of disenfranchisement. I certainly don't trust conservatives to not disenfranchise voters, particularly when the method they're proposing was originally designed specially to exclude black Americans from voting.
In the naivest, most shallow view, voting ID doesn't seem bad. But when you look at WHO is proposing it, the history of voting ID, the distribution of ID in the US, etc. (the broader context), it seems clear that the intention of those types of laws is not pure.
In addition to this, we have virtually zero evidence that voter fraud is a widespread problem. The topic of voter fraud is largely just "made up" following the insurrection on Jan 6th. To me, it seems suspicious that we're proposing and pushing laws to restrict voting when we haven't even been able to verify the problem exists in the first place.
That seems like a reasonable idea and one that many voter ID proponents support.
> the way Alabama did in 2015
Your own article says that Secretary of State will be providing IDs to ensure the DMV closures don’t affect ability to vote.
That was just Secretary of State John Merrill's claim, and I'm saying that it was a careless one. "There are still places to get voter ID, just 31 fewer places out of about 100" is not the same as "anyone who wants an ID can still get one". The burden of proof was on the Merrill to demonstrate that the Board of Registrar's offices and the mobile ID van (which in 2014 officially appeared 2 out of 25 times on weekends and 23 out of 25 times on weekdays usually during 9-5 hours [1][2]) would compensate for the lack of possibly closer-by DMVs.
Consider the context of the voter ID laws themselves [3]:
> Under the new law, which only went into effect in 2014, only a handful of forms of ID, including driver’s licenses, meet the requirements.
> Civil rights groups vehemently opposed the legislation, noting that these IDs are harder to obtain for minorities, who among other things are more reliant on public transportation. A state analysis showed that 500,000 registered voters lacked a driver’s licenses around the time the law was being put into effect.
What ended up happening after the 31 DMVs were closed was [4]:
> However, since the photo ID voting law went into effect in 2014, only a small portion of the estimated 250,000 Alabamans who do not already have the accepted IDs have obtained the free version. In 2014, an election year, only 5,294 of those IDs were issued, state officials told TPM.
> The number of IDs issued this year is even smaller. As of September 28, 1,442 IDs had been issued since January 2, 2015.
...
> However, as of last Monday, only 29 IDs were issued from the mobile units this year and four from the state capitol, according to the secretary of state’s office.
...
> Civil rights activists point to several reasons for why, they say, the free ID program has been ineffective. For one, many of the black residents affected by the DMV closures live miles from the county offices that issue IDs and African-Americans are more likely to be dependent on public transport.
And then consider what Merrill said about the DMV closures [3]:
> The way Merrill sees it, the closures will cause “a real inconvenience” for those seeking driver’s license, but have no bearing on Alabamans’ ability to vote, since the 67 boards of registrars remain open.
...
> The [state] ID is one of them,” Merrill said. “I don’t know why people don’t have driver’s licenses, except that they don’t drive. Maybe some of them can’t drive, but I don’t know.”
In the best light, Merrill didn't understand the burden of needing to rely on public transportation to travel possibly farther than you would have needed to if the DMV that used to be available stopped being available.
Tangentially, I feel as if Merrill, along with other Alabama officials, was being gaslit [5]:
> Collier reported that Mason proposed closing multiple driver's license offices throughout the State and asked ALEA to put together a plan. It was Collier's understanding that Mason intended the plan to be rolled out in a way that had limited impact on Governor Bentley's political allies. Collier claims he reported this to the Attorney General' s office because he was concerned about a Voting Rights Act violation.
...
> Ultimately, the decision to close the offices was reversed, in part, after the state litigated the issue with the U.S. Department of Transportation, which had claimed that the closures had a disproportionate impact on minority communities.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141102180855/http://www.alabam...
[2] https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=2014
[3] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-voter-id-dmv
[4] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/alabama-free-voter-id...
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20170408201133/http://bentleyinv...
Almost all of Europe has effective voter ID laws or at least processes by which eligibility to vote is verified.
People love to call out how the US needs to adopt processes from Europe because it’s done in a better way. Voter ID sounds like a great place to start.
I never said such a thing, and I even ended my second to previous reply saying the opposite. It's completely possible to require voter ID "correctly", but my impression is that lawmakers would rather do it quickly, by passing voter ID laws without even thinking about the millions of citizens who lack ID.
I dug into the Alabama example to support my claim that Alabama carelessly closed 31 DMVs in 2015 (and to suggest that you shouldn't take then Secretary of State Merrill's arguments at face value).
What you're not realizing is the intention of these laws is to be racist and cause disenfranchisement. Therefore, that being the result is not a "failure" - that's what the laws were intended to do.
> Voter ID sounds like a great place to start
I don't understand why. Why are people so caught up on Voter ID that they're willing to push it even if the risk of disenfranchising people is there?
I think I can guess the reason why, but I don't want to be presumptuous.
We really don't have any problems with widespread election fraud due to identity theft. It's just not even a real problem. We don't have any evidence to support that. So, I don't know what these laws are intending to accomplish. Well, I do know, but for the hypothetical person who is not focused on disenfranchising people - what are they hoping to accomplish with this law? Do you know?
The funny part is that you’re taking the opposite sides arguments at face value.
“Oh, some random person claimed closing the DMVs makes it harder to get ID, so it must be true”
We haven’t even established that voters don’t have IDs in the first place.
You can’t rent a home or get electricity without ID in the US. Yet the claim is that swaths of minorities somehow have made it to adulthood without ever having an ID?
I have no proof, only evidence. How about this? [1]
> Alabama's chief election official, Secretary of State Jim Bennett, said Monday that registrars' offices in every county will be offering the free IDs, starting this week. The offices are open during regular courthouse hours, he said.
...
> The secretary of state's office reports that a check of voting records with the state Department of Public Safety shows 20 percent of Alabama's registered voters, or about 500,000 adults, lack a driver's license or non-driver ID issued by the Department of Public Safety. Bennett estimated half of that group has one of the other acceptable forms of photo IDs.
The byline is "By The Associated Press". There is no link for the 500,000 claim. (Should I consider the possibility that the Associated Press got the numbers wrong on accident? made up the numbers on purpose? or that Bennett himself replied to a response for comment?)
> You can’t rent a home or get electricity without ID in the US.
Could you post a link with evidence suggesting that? Maybe temporary documents (which convince landowners of identity but might be insufficient for official government ID checks) or affidavits let people barely rent an apartment.
> Yet the claim is that swaths of minorities somehow have made it to adulthood without ever having an ID?
The claim is that swaths of people in Alabama lacked ID in 2014 and 2015, and that minorities were overrepresented in that group. Even if you don't believe the second part, what would convince you about the first part? At the very least I find it believable that Alabama had at least a few thousands of people who lost their IDs (due to situations including but not limited to homelessness [2]) or didn't renew their IDs in time. In regards to registered voters who got an ID valid for the 2014 voter ID law by 2015, I don't know how such people would manage to live, but based on the articles I found during this conversation I am inclined to believe that there are such people.
[1] https://www.al.com/wire/2014/03/new_photo_voter_ids_to_be_av...
I would have hoped a more logical place like HN would understand taking extremely risky measures, which have a history of disenfranchising people, isn't worth it when the problem they're attempting to solve cannot even be identified.
The reason people are so hesitant to implement Voter ID is that the people advocating Voter ID aren't very honest. They refuse to admit the racist history, they refuse to admit the disparities between demographics, and they refuse to acknowledge their own lack of evidence.
That's very concerning. It makes one wonder what their intentions are. If they are truly not attempting to disenfranchise people, then why not admit to the previous history and then explain how that will be avoided? That would ease everyone's concerns. A win-win. But they don't do it.
Do you not find that suspicious?
> Could you post a link with evidence suggesting that? Maybe temporary documents (which convince landowners of identity but might be insufficient for official government ID checks) or affidavits let people barely rent an apartment.
You can't get a hotel room or rent an apartment, you can't open a bank account, you can't get a job, you can't get on a flight or a train, and probably most of all - you can't apply for government assistance without a form of ID.