[dard12]

The voting rights point is interesting. My understanding is that one side wants more verification of eligibility, but the other side is worried that if the approach to verification is too onerous that voter turnout will decrease.

There's seemingly a parallel to the gun control discussion, where again one side wants more verification of eligibility, but the other side is worried that the verification--if applied over-zealously--will be too restrictive.

The two sides are swapped on the two issues, but each time they disagree not necessarily because their fundamental opinions are different, but because they do not trust the other side to be reasonable.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Neither side is really arguing in good faith - they both just want more votes for their party.

I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with voter ID laws. Many democracies in Europe have them. In America they might be unnecessary overkill, but if they increase faith in the electoral process, that's awesome.

The actual issue is that we don't have federal ID cards, and there are a ton of citizens without any form of government-issued photo ID at all. If you're very poor, the idea of paying for a driver's license might seem ridiculous because you have neither a car nor a bank account.

Any good-faith proposal to enforce voter IDs would have to pair it with making IDs simple and free to get for every registered voter, otherwise it can be justly criticized as antidemocratic.

[hopesthoughts]

As far as I know state IDs are free. Well at least here they are anyway. They aren't drivers licenses though, you definitely can't drive with one. You did have to go wait at the DMV, that was before Covid. I would hope they would've modernized the process now.

[josephcsible]

Is "verification of eligibility" really what the gun-control people want? Aren't they trying to argue that even people who can 100% prove that their record is squeaky-clean still shouldn't be allowed to own guns?

[true_religion]

Well it’s because historically in the US, voting laws have been used to make sure the “wrong sorts” of people didn’t get a chance to vote.