This is obviously wrong. People who advocate for ID laws make sure they reduce turnout. That’s the point.

Ooobbbviiously lol

Some of you should set foot outside the US sometimes and actually look around. Example: Spain has national ID and much higher voter turnout than the US.

But does Spain have any poor people?

What's obviously wrong is the anti I'd viewpoint. The US has one of the world's least democratic republican systems. Very low turnout and many subsets of the population excluded from voting or representation on an a priori basis. No constitutional right to vote. The no ID thing doesn't seem to be helping. It forces these dumb registration systems that function as effective ways of excluding voters.

It should be enough to prove meeting some basic criterion, like citizenship or filing tax returns, and ID helps facilitate that.

What is is obviously wrong is the deflection in this topic.

The fact is, FACT, the people pushin voter ID are doing so and admitting that it is to suppress voter turnout not increase it. It is a game where they look and say Hunting licence OKAY but Student ID not ok, and the reason is 'do they vote D or R, as we want to dissuade the ones who vote D from voting'.

We should not get caught up in the red herring of 'is ok good or bad' as that was never the point for those pushing this.

How is ID helping then? Every study, including those done by people pushing IDs shows it lowers turnout.

This isn't some hypothetical. There is data on how voter ID affects turn out in the US. It lowers it. Historically, in the US, when it was legal to just straight up not allow black people to register, there was no need for voter ID because nobody wanted to reduce turnout among registered voters.

The bolded above strongly suggests that you temporarily forgot that you were talking to washoe.

I'll for sure take the "under 25 years." I can't lose, since I will almost certainly be dead in way less than 25 years from now.

addendum: Of course, the wager would have to not be escrowed.

Both the Left and the Right understand that poor people and minorities are too stupid to figure out how to get an ID.

There has never been a national ID in the US. No empirical data there.

I'm not talking about some ID specific to voting. I'm talking about a true, national ID system.

The US constitution contains no right to vote, only the vague guarantee of republican system of governance which the SC has interpreted to mean that if one can vote, all can vote equally (in each state). Particularly with the current SC a state could decide to hold all elections indirectly.

There are a lot of structural problems regarding voting in the US, and very few of them are helped by having no control whatsoever over who votes. Of course in USA#1 there is no vote fraud and never has been, even when disqualifying votes cast for Gore.

National ID isn't the problem.

It lowers turnout when it is not easily obtained and there are structural impediments or disincentives to acquiring it.

When getting it is easy and useful in other contexts, everyone gets it.

Right now it is a pain to register to vote - which is a form of identification - and so lots of folks don't bother.

I believe that every post office in the United States has voter registration forms.

And I believe that almost all public libraries have have them as well.

Not a pain at all.

The US, for various historical, political and ideological reasons, has some allergies to certain types of federal collection and storing of citizen data. And yes, I know its recent surveillance scandals makes this horrifyingly ironic, but let us ignore that for now. The US federal census for example is based on a count, not registering of individuals.

My country, and I suspect your country as well, have no such allergies, because we're descendants from political systems where the peons only had rights if the king felt generous or literally had his head on the chopping block.

Thus for us the state will collect all our precise data without asking for consent, and automatically register us to vote. As a result, all I have to do is to take 10 minutes off work, go to the election locale, fill out a ballot, show my ID and drop the ballot in the box. In the US, these things are more up to the state. In addition, even though federal elections are a result of federal law / constitution, their specifics are mostly regulated by the states.

Now, I do not have an issue with the principle of voter ID. It is a good idea to ensure that the person voting is who he / she says he is. However, the implementation and intent of such laws must be rooted in fairness, not partisanship.

It is easy to make an unfair law sound fair or pervert a good principle. Even the most banal tinpot dictatorships in the world can cough up some impressively fair sounding constitutions if they have to.

Very well said, t_d.

It's even easier to just not have a completely pointless ID mandate.

But since people pushing for voter ID want to lower turnout, they won't make it easy to get. It's again the whole point and why voter ID wasn't a big issue until the voting rights act.

Agreed.

I guess you guys don't want locks on your doors either.

I definitely wouldn't want locks designed specifically to keep certain people who have valid entry into my house out.

You must be a joy in department mwetings

I kinda doubt that you're a joy anywhere.

Keeping people out of your house who want to harm you or steal your things is different than keeping people from voting illegally because one is a real thing and one isn't.

How did USAns get to be so stupid?