Because You can use this to discriminate charge even $100 for this and it locks out poor and homeless people or you close places where you can register in the areas of where more of your opposition live.
i feel like i accidentally stumbled in to a r talking point. but ill take the bait: the id doesnt do anything to show you irregularities between the demographics and the results
Citizens are not required to have government issued photo ID.
If you make government issued photo ID a requirement to vote, you have violated the constitution and prevented legal citizens from voting.
Voter fraud is not a real problem. Election fraud is, and election fraud is often carried out by removing legal citizens' right to vote, just as you described.
When you see a state making laws about what ID you need to vote, you are watching election fraud in action.
> Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Nothing in here about "shall not be denied or abridged because of lack of photo ID".
As long as acquiring an ID is equally painless for all demographics.
Introduce a fee, limited licensing locations/appointment times, or complex applications, and the indirect result is often selective discrimination by race. That's still unconstitutional.
Do you believe that the list quoted is intended to be restrictive or illustrative? Do you believe that citizens right to vote should be denied or abridged in general, or just in the case of photo ID (which I doubt was a thing at the time the constitution was written)?
You do not need to prove you are a citizen to vote. Voter registration requirements vary state to state. Typically states will request some form of identification, like a social security number, or a birth certificate, or something like that, if you do not have a photo ID, so they can verify who you are and that you did not vote twice. A government issued photo ID, or other proof of citizenship, is not required. That would be unconstitutional.
Edit: California will even allow you to use a utility bill with your name and address as valid ID to vote, for example. No photo ID or citizenship requirement, and no voter fraud happening in California either.
If requiring a government-issued photo ID is, as you claim, unconstitutional, then why is requesting identification of any sort (SSN, birth certificate, utility bill) not also unconstitutional?
>no voter fraud happening in California either
If the current method for identifying people doesn't require a photo ID, by what means are we able to claim that there is no voter fraud in California? How would we know that is the case if legally there is not a mechanism to catch or even detect hypothetical cases of it happening?
> If requiring a government-issued photo ID is, as you claim, unconstitutional, then why is requesting identification of any sort (SSN, birth certificate, utility bill) not also unconstitutional?
because goverment-issued photo ID can be denied or made prohibitively expensive to large numbers of poor people who's interests might not align with the people in power. Other forms of identification are simpler to obtain by the poor.
Most functioning democracies have the means to assess the level of voter fraud without requiring photo IDs. There are a bunch of civil servants who have that exact job; I think the onus should be on people who believe there is systemic voter fraud occurring to provide some evidence before additional restrictions should be put into place.
Also, democracies were also functioning fairly well long before photo IDs were invented.
I'm not in America but I've had to vote in many elections. I don't think I ever presented any ID ever, they just took my word that I'm the one who I said I was. (I think there was once a state election when they posted me a token that I was supposed to return to vote.) Yet the elections here are widely regarded as high quality.
But if your goal is to prevent double voting, you would just use the inks they use in some newer democracies. Then you know John MacIlroy only voted once because you can see it on his fingers. This is probably even more reliable because you won't cut off your finger to hide the ink, but anyone can go get a false id. And no-one is disenfranchised because someone stole their wallet last week and they haven't received their replacements yet.