| Showing ID may not be part of a war against voting rights, but it's also basically completely useless in addressing any kinds of voting problems that have been shown to happen. I'm pretty sure that even now after CRTs are mostly gone more people are killed by falling TVs in the USA each year than are charged with voting abuses that would be addressed by showing ID. But thousands of times as many people as that are prevented from voting because they don't have such ID and are not feasibly able to get it. That doesn't even cover the situations such as Alabama and Wisconsin, where they passed laws requiring voter ID, then proceeded to close or severely curtail the hours at DMV offices across the states - particularly in poorer counties. In Alabama, they closed the DMV offices (for budgetary reasons) in 29 of the state's 67 counties a year after the ID requirement went into effect, and I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the closures included every county with a population >75% black and most of the counties that went for Obama and Democrats. Of course, after the news and analysis of this started, the state that can't afford to keep DMV offices open said “We will go to people’s houses to have their picture made if they don’t have a photo ID in the state of Alabama,” or they can go to any probate judge (who? and aren't they busy?) or county register office. Mmhm. In Wisconsin, they closed and cut hours at offices in more Democratic areas while expanding them in areas that tended to vote Republican. The most egregious one (and the one that got national attention on John Oliver's show) is Sauk City, where the office hours were cut back to the fifth Wednesday of any month with 5 Wednesdays - which in 2016 meant 3 times prior to the election, plus November 30. Admittedly, you could go 20 miles to the next closest (open Mondays and Wednesdays), 30 miles to the one open on the first, second and third Wednesdays of each month or just a little further to the state capitol with pretty normal hours. Hope you're not walking or on a bike, or that you're good with doing a 40-mile round trip on a weekday and that you don't forget to bring something they'll accept as proof of residency. Basically, voter ID as it's presented is a solution to a problem that basically doesn't exist, but it's a solution that happens to have some pretty severe side effects. Maybe the folks pushing so hard for it are incompetent and innumerate, or maybe, just maybe, it's those side effects that are really the goal. Edit:
Oh and for the argument that there's massive in-person voting fraud I have a simple question: If you're claiming that are you also therefore arguing that all of the people responsible for monitoring the voting process are utterly incompetent because even when they go looking for it they can't find it? Or are the perpetrators of the fraud simply superhuman and able to get their fraudulent votes counted while leaving no other traces? |