Again, I find the outrage over a low impact voting law requiring ID's to be bullshit.




The issue of not having an ID impacts way more than voting.

Outside of an ATM, any sort of banking transaction is gonna require an ID. You need an ID to pick up prescription medicine. You need an ID to open a utility account. Need an id to register a car. Need one to rent an apartment. Need an ID for Social Security services. Need an ID to cash a check. Need an ID for food stamps. You need an ID to enter a federal court.


If these folks are foregoing all these services, I don't think voting is going to be the deal breaker to where they stand up and say "that's too far".

It is a fake republican talking point to pretend people are saying 'ID's of that type are not useful and/or people would not benefit in having them'.


The "outrage" is over the fact that the singular driver for this push by Republicans was that they saw data that simply said 'Dems have this type of ID at a lower percent than GOP voters' and that then lead them to say 'perfect, lets make that a requirement then'.

The "outrage" is over the fact you can see that is the driving factor behind pretty much all GOP pushed changes.

The "outrage" is over that these are very purposeful voter suppression tactics.

We cannot deny overwhelming history on this and the ramp up in current times.

One of the most egregious recent examples I recall being discussed was when (I think it was in G.A or AZ) the local Republicans changed the rules right before an election to require a person have a valid zip code to vote. The rule change was targeted at Indigenous communities who lived on reserve where there often were not Zip codes assigned. Since they did not have time to go court and overturn it before the election, it sent the community scrambling to assign fake roads and get them zip codes otherwise their members would have been turned away at the polls.

Of course disingenuous republicans were then arguing 'people should have zip codes, there are all sorts of services you can get with a zip code. Zip codes are good...etc' while ignoring the clear intent of the law as you are here.

The right is generally against the idea of the govt getting involved/increasing it's footprint these days--even for solving real problems much less non-problems(ie voter impersonation/fraud). So it's probably pretty fair to assume if they're deliberately backing something out of character there's another reason.

There's like zero chance the koch brother types don't have this thing analyzed from every imaginable angle and know the numbers.

A smart poor person is going to look at lefty elites making hay out of this as disingenuous, as the left only care about ID's when it comes to getting them elected. They don't seem to care about how not having an ID negatively impacts living life. You can win some points in the vacuum of voting laws, but it exposes the lefts disregard for poor people in general.

Again, Georgia is one of five states that has a hardship waiver waving cost for an ID in the case of voting, i.e. making it easier to get an ID.

So Chuck Schummer wants the all star game moved to New York
New York does not allow as much early voting as Georgia
New York has a law also making it illegal to give food or water to folks in line
New York requires an excuse to request an absentee ballot

So you move a baseball game were many of the jobs lost will be lost by African Americans

Of course these will be fake Republican talking points

Voting should be easy and require ID

IHIV what you say would only appeal to dumb people.

Smart people understand no one on the left is against ID and people getting things that would improve their lives.

Having a bank account would also 'improve peoples lives' and no one is against that.

Does that mean IF you tie those two things to a right to vote, that is the proper thing to do.

You are repeating a strawman argument with very dishonest framing which is 'if you do not support this disingenuous voter suppression effort, you are against poorer people getting ID's in general'.


The latter simply is not true but yuo might be able to convince dumber people it is.

So again your read of things is 100% wrong.

I mean outside of the old jim crow polltax etc days--this wasn't even really a thing until the Rs started forcing it into agenda in ~recent years afaik. There's probably a decent argument that the immigration situation thru that time has played a role though too if we were trying to find an organic reason for what got it going.

I'm still kinda curious if anyone can actually -register- to vote anywhere w/o any ID involved because I just honestly don't know. It's always been the case for me every time. There's just so much negative history around this specific area that it's pretty easy to see(imo) why people think it's just another version of the same old thing in the same old places for the same old reasons.

Also--it would be kinda wrong to assume I don't think racists exist on the left side of things as well. Because there definitely are.

The US allows States to set their own voters rules generally. That means, by default there will be disparity State to State. You will always have an average and those States below that average and those above.

The outrage you are seeing right now is not that disparity exists. The outrage is prompted when people observe a VERY CLEAR and UNDENYABLE effort to selective target certain groups to supress their votes in certain jurisdictions by REDUCING rights.

The argument against that is not to say 'well its ok we are reducing their rights as another jurisdiction is similarly bad'. It is that these other jurisdiction are purposely going backwards.

If States are moving forward, but on the lower end of that average, that is ok. Progress not regress for suppression reasons is the key.

Understand this. The Republicans (all parties do) have all the Stats on voting patterns and other key demographic data on voters. They are combing these lists and wherever they see a data point that is more skewed to Dem voters they are trying to reverse engineer ways and then logic (a reason) to make that harder.

So even though all of us think ID is a good thing to have when you realize the Republicans ONLY targeted this because they know it impacts Dem voters more you SHOULD be outraged.

It would be like the Liberal gov't of Canada saying 'for election security we are going to limit voting to big urban centres only where we can have in place various election measures'.

They then wrap themselves in all sorts of 'this is about security' lies'.

Everyone else knowns that the Conservatives, having a bigger base in rural voters would be disproportionately impacted. They would see this as a blatant 'work' and rightly so.

No amount of 'but everyone should want improved security' should trick a smart person into believing the obvious lie.

We have to understand Republicans and Democrats are acting in their self-interest. I don't doubt for a minute that Republicans utilize this law to make it easier for their people to get elected. But I also question Democrats leveraging of the issue, especially when they connected it to race, as Biden and the media did.

Voter ID is the prototypical wedge issue.. it's low impact and can be used to paint the opposition. It's essentially a PR fight with no true altruism.

This is why I don't really care about it. But I do care about issues tangently related to ID's, issues that should concern the Democrats, if they really care about the disenfranchised.

Lets be clear MLB and Coca Cola are not doing this at outrage. They are doing it as they think it will benefit them financially.

MLB is not hurting Kemp they are hurting the lower income folks and businesses in Georgia.

I have said this many times the outrage should be for how long you stand in line not for the requirement to have ID .
Reality is you need a piece of ID in society so go get one . You have two years till the next election.

We all know democrats will do what democrats do and the GOP will do what the GOP does. I am sure Stacy Abrams could organize groups to get these folks ID's. You have two years to do it.

I'd be surprised if there are more than ten members in the House and Senate combined, in either party, who actually "care about people" except to the extent that it helps them increase their power and/or help them get re-elected.

National politics tends to dominate everyone's attention more as well it seems. It definitely matters but state/local probably deserve much more attention than they actually get.

you're trying to force government intervention on an issue that isn't broken. republicans doing this are showing that they dont actually believe in anything they preach other than disenfranchising people. no fix is required. there is no voter fraud. more people voting is always a good thing.

republicans are simply deliberately attempting to make it harder for people to vote because they know that their policies and governing style aren't popular.

ID's should absolutely be free regardless of this discussion.

i do love the timeline of IHIV, i know more about poverty than everyone here so my opinion/anecdotal evidence should be treated as fact of a year or so ago, to the LOL YOU NEED AN ID FOR PAYPAL!! EVERYONE HAS PAYPAL! why dont you need one to vote?? tweet linking IHIV of today..

republicans would be significantly better off in the argument coming solely from the you need an ID to buy a firearm path, than the dumb you need an ID for a bank account or to register a car take.

I think republicans would be better off looking deeper into the data. It's been conventional wisdom for a long time that high turnout is good for democrats and any laws that result in less eligible voters being able to vote is good for republicans. But that wasn't the clear takeaway from 2020. Yes turnout was record shattering and democrats easily won the presidency and the House but party demographics are changing and republicans are really losing college educated whites at a fast rate. It's not at all obvious that going hard on voting barriers is good strategy, given much of their restrictions are unpopular on their own and their base is shifting to lower propensity voters.

I'm not defending the ID law brainiac, I'm criticizing the fake outrage.

Democrats have no problem charging uninsured motorist $600 fine if their insurance lapse... Democrats have no problem putting all these fees associated with driving... But they have this big outrage over a voting law, as if they care about liberty, or the well being of poor people.

They only care about this voter ID law because it hurts them from getting elected. The rest of their excuses is b*******.

Lol @ comparing driving to voting.

1) Democrats didn't start complaining about voter ID laws in a vacuum. It is in response to Republicans pushing for it to combat their fake claims of in-person voter fraud and to specifically target non-white people.

2) Though conventional wisdom is that more people voting helps Democrats (and this might not be true), it's still the right position for every American to take that more people should have easy access to voting.

is this one of those dumb you cant complain about X because totally unrelated Y and Z are also bad and you haven't complained about those enough for my liking(I, and many other progressives have tho..) arguments.. or do you have some evidence backing up that dems are raising insurance fines or driving fees intentionally?

there's some truth to that. i also think that some people are blindly saying Covid hurt trump, when im not entirely sure that's the case. it became a huge partisan divide issue that definitely spiked GOP turnout probably as much as dem turnout.

Well said.

Well said. I suspect that if a random person was told that s/he had to give up either driving or voting, that the vast majority would give up voting.

Charles Barkley kind of nails it

i don't think that is clear at all.

Two things can be true at the same time.

Corporations can reflect values that align with consumers and executives and Boards and if those Consumers, Executives and Board members are offended by obvious voting suppression and the threat it poses to democracy then can act in good faith.

They have taken similar stances in the past even when it was more the minority position.





This is the argument used against every strike, every protest, etc.

And while it is, in some respects true, that those at the bottom of the spectrum tend to get impacted more by every strike, every road blockage via Marches, etc, that is NOT reason to not do them.

The political statement they make is very important and it can impact voter choice.


Again two ideas can be held at the same time. And beyond that they don't have to be held equally.

So I can think the long lines are bad too and even worse than the voter ID issue but they are both bad.

The argument 'people benefit from ID anyway' is one that needs to just go away as it does not belong here.

Yes it is true. it is good and beneficial to have ID. But that has nothing to do with why Georgia and other places are demanding it.

They identified Dem's have ID less and thus said 'good, hurdle identified, lets force them to get it knowing a certain percent will not and their votes will be suppressed'.




Of course she will get it done and that is a good thing.

But understand this, Republicans are planning on that too and they are building their NEXT LIST of things that disproportionately Dem voters and to target them next.

People need to be against that in principle, and not just argue 'well those are good things to have, so who cares'.