A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

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.

It’s still here. We dress it up as voter ID or something similar.

The biggest thing we need to work is the subtle racism of low expectations.

The implication that acknowledging statistical reality that certain income groups and racial groups have less ID is in it of itself racist is, well, racist. Because then you can use this adject dismissal of reality to apply racist laws and claim they're not racist.

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 that just because a DMV is a mile further away that black people somehow can’t figure out how to get ID.

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.

Movement Advancement Project has some data about the de facto discriminatory effect of voter ID requirements [1] that separately accounts for for low-income people regardless of race [2] and black people in particular [3].

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...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41351632

> Overall, roughly one in eight adults in this country—nearly 30 million people—lack a valid driver’s license, one of the most common forms of ID.

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?

> I don't think anyone is promoting that a drivers license, and only a drivers license is the sole form of appropriate voter ID.

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...

> 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.

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.

> 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...

I have neither the time nor the inclination to dig into Alabama’s situation, but suffice to say finding an example of a state that does it wrong does not mean “we must absolutely never have voter ID because it’s impossible to ever do it correctly”

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.