[aisofteng]

I've never understood this sort of reasoning. Requiring an ID has nothing to do with race. It turns out that the percentage of people that have an ID varies by race - and this makes requiring an ID a form of racial disenfranchisement?

Requiring IDs and then denying IDs to a particular race would be racial disenfranchisement. Simply requiring an ID isn't.

And in the end, I think it makes a lot of sense for an ID to be required in order to place a vote.

[dashundchen]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...

Because there are barriers, and expensive fees for many, intentional or not. The article above gives a couple stories of the issues people face trying to get ID for voting.

Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting, these are new versions of poll taxes.

[Mindless2112]

> Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting

And yet, no politician campaigns for that because it would actually resolve the issue.

[eropple]

Free, universal, automatic ID would totally be the technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct answer. Which is to say, it's wrong, because the issue is not "voter fraud", the issue is "voters who aren't conservative," because when one erects barriers to voting, conservatives (who tend to be white and more affluent, as a rule, in the areas where these shenanigans are going on) will turn out and everybody else won't.

A politician who campaigns for that will be beset upon by the right wing as it heaves into a fit over they're spying on us, they're trying to track us. Because in actually solving the nonexistent problem, they threaten the true reason for the problem being posed.

[Mindless2112]

No, the issue is that there are people who need an government-issued ID but the barrier to getting one is too high.

But you decided to take only the slice of the problem that fit your talking point, and that is the real problem.

[eropple]

Lowering the barrier to entry causes screams from that same contingent, just the same as "here's an ID, for free, right now". I know this, because I have been (peripherally) involved with folks trying to push such systems and the pushback from the drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub crew is real and it is strong.

My "talking point", such as it is, is that one political party is actively disinterested in democracy (while the other is more or less ambivalent), and that nobody in that actively-disinterested party is going to let the ambivalent party make this happen. Because it empowers them for it to not happen. It's not rocket science.

[0xcde4c3db]

> Requiring an ID has nothing to do with race. It turns out that the percentage of people that have an ID varies by race - and this makes requiring an ID a form of racial disenfranchisement?

Yes. The argument is pretty straightforward: explicitly mentioning race would be blatantly illegal, so legislators are targeting a variable that correlates with race and using that as a proxy instead. Old-school disenfranchisement laws did much the same thing, using the voting eligibility of one's grandfather as the condition for exemption from poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on (whence we get the term "grandfather clause").

[jccalhoun]

so if requiring an id has nothing to do with race then what does it have to do with? cases of voter fraud where someone impersonates someone else are very rare. Are there more people out there would want to vote so badly that they will impersonate someone else (but not make up a fake id to do so) or are there more eligible voters without ids?