| It's not about non-citizens, as they generally don't have the right to vote in federal elections simply because they are not citizens. It's about disenfranchising poor and non-white people. In the Jim Crow era they used reading tests or guessing the number of buttons in a jar, now they're implementing strict ID requirements that are expensive or time consuming to meet. I'm no expert on this topic, but the general gist is that poor people generally have a harder time getting free time off work when the county clerk is open, transport is often difficult because there are only so many locations, and the documents themselves can be expensive. If you don't have all the supporting documentation they require, you can't get the ID card even if you have other legal identification. The goal is to make it much more difficult to vote so that people trapped in poverty can't afford the time or cost to get the papers required to vote. Making it harder to vote causes overall voter numbers to drop. Less-polarized people will tend to be apathetic and think voting isn't worth the extra effort, while polarized fox News nuts will do anything they can to vote out the other guy. Which is all to say our electoral system is broken, first past the post voting is objectively bad, and we desperately need broad voting reform to eliminate the two party system. I doubt it'll happen in my lifetime though. |