| > I don't think anyone is promoting that a drivers license, and only a drivers license is the sole form of appropriate voter ID. Even so [1]: > More than one in ten (11%) U.S. adult citizens—or nearly 26 million people— lack any form of government-issued photo identification. There are also people without birth certificates. Obtaining some IDs can be difficult without having other IDs. For example, depending on where you live, getting a driver's license is difficult without a birth certificate. (Ctrl-F for "Lack of birth certificate" on [2], though apparently South Carolina lets you get a voter registration card before you get a valid voter ID.) The larger issue is that valid forms of ID for voting differ between states, and (beyond the topic of voting) the difficulty of getting what most people think of as common IDs differs between states. There might well be 100 thousand citizens across the US who would fall through the cracks if every state that didn't already require voter ID were to pass laws naively requiring voter ID for the 2028 election. Voting is a right for citizens, so state governments should go out of their way to make obtaining stable IDs convenient for citizens who lack them (accounting for, among other things, transportation difficulties and time spent on in-person verification that takes away from job time). If the federal government has no authority to unify ID requirements, then states should cooperate to standardize their requirements toward convenience. I would also like if every state (and I do mean every state) allowed payment statements and utility bills as valid identification for voting, because getting stable IDs such as driver's licenses or passports takes months. > Arizona has 4,109,270 registered voters, so the margin was 0.2%, or 2 votes out of every thousand registered voters. Georgia has 7,004,034 registered voters so the margin was 1.8 out of every thousand registered voters as well. > That seems like a very small margin of votes is deciding elections. If the margin were something like 100 votes in a state, I wouldn't know what to do about it, but I would still be dissatisfied if a new voter ID requirement in the state blocked 10000 citizens from voting. When I wrote this before: > Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting. What I meant to communicate was that any states passing new voter ID laws should near-simultaneously pass laws that making getting government-issued, voting-eligible IDs easier, especially for people who lack multiple forms of ID. And for sure, states should not be carelessly closing DMVs the way Alabama did in 2015 [3]. [1] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/MAP-Identity-Documents-repo... [2] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id#toggle... [3] https://www.snopes.com/news/2015/10/01/alabama-drivers-licen... |
That seems like a reasonable idea and one that many voter ID proponents support.
> the way Alabama did in 2015
Your own article says that Secretary of State will be providing IDs to ensure the DMV closures don’t affect ability to vote.