Great article Milan. This plus thoughtful moderation on trans issues (probably just restrictions on sports participation) and immigration (close asylum loophole) would do a ton of repair to the damaged Democratic brand.
But I’ll put it this way: It’s OK to use as a bargaining chip. But the value is primarily in its “propaganda of the deed” — that is, the public needs to see loudly and clearly that this HAS been done, and NEVER needs to be done again.
Reagan’s immigration amnesty is an extremely instructive example. The restrictionist right has used the “stabbed in the back” narrative on border enforcement for 40 years since then. If we are not careful with voter ID, the hard right will use it as another big excuse to claim perfidy/betrayal by their establishment elites.
What Milan’s analysis doesn’t take into account is just how compelling these false narratives are to voters. So whatever we do, we absolutely MUST take care not to feed them.
and this is exactly why I think it would be a bad idea. going in on voter ID laws would only be feeding the narrative that trump and republicans have created.
I would not object to some sort of voter ID implementation as part of a deal that also got something for Democrats.
But I think the idea that a voter ID law would restore trust in elections is mostly wishful thinking. "Give Republicans some of what they want and they will back off" is just disastrous, beause it relies on expecting the Republican Party to behave in good faith?
Their base would probably never be appeased, but more loosely-attached voters would accept it as settled. As it stands, I think that the democrats' opposition to what sounds intuitively like a normal rule without historical context may lead some to suspect we're hiding something.
That is, I can easily imagine a median voter who didn't previously buy into the claims that democrats are doing voting fraud reasoning that given that non-citizens aren't supposed to vote anyway, requiring proof of citizenship shouldn't be a problem, unless democrats really were banking on non-citizens slipping through the cracks in enough numbers to make a difference. If we collaborated on a common-sense voting law free of poison pills, this hypothetical voter would be satisfied that the rules are being followed.
Voter ID is for independents. It is a a not so important sacred cow that can be abandoned for Democrats to show they are serious about returning to the median voter.
I don’t really understand what the paperwork issue is that so many people are without Id and we’ve been having this fight for a long time and I’m unclear why we can’t get all poor people identification. It doesn’t seem like this should be unsolvable but I never even hear plans to fix it.
Right, I agree. To the extent that the issue is that we don't have a standard national ID card that says "citizen" or "lawful permanent resident" on it, that seems like an easy fix.
Bureaucratic friction has a long history in the USA as a suppressor of full civic participation by those who can least afford the time and money to go through the hoops. Not only for voting but for every interaction of the citizen and the state. A national ID as you propose and many other countries have would reduce friction. When it has been proposed in the US (not recently) it was shouted down from the right as the first step towards a police state. Not surprising in friction is the mail goal.
Right, but that assumes the SAVE act is actually about voter ID and not about vote suppression. Trump has been very open in saying that he wants it passed to ensure good midterm for the Republicans. Even if it's not very well targeted and wouldn't necessarily have that result, it's intention is vote suppression.
If you're interested in one example, please see my post below re Alaska's non-road connected rural villages and lack of government offices. This is why Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican (or RINO, dep who you ask), openly opposes this bill and voter ID laws.
When they introduced this in NC, the biggest concern was older people in rural areas who never received a birth certificate. Home births were the norm.
Democrats did a lot of work to get as many people voter ID as possible, but it will always be a little friction. The voter shows up to the polls and forgot their ID? They go home. They do not come back.
"There’s a traditional story where Republicans seek to make it harder to vote so that the electorate skews to the highly educated. But that dynamic is odd in a world where Democrats have become the party of the highly educated."
This assumes a "symmetrically" implemented voter ID policy with a disincentive effect that affects Dem and GOP voters equally, which feels like a massive and unwarranted leap of faith given the current stae of the GOP.
The main problem with the voter ID requirement is just that currently getting the ID is costly, in time and/or money. We should invest in making it trivially easy (and free) for qualified people to get the relevant ID. Otherwise the ID requirement is effectively an unconstitutional poll tax.
I think this article undersells the downside risk of a bad voter ID bill, which I’m scared could make trust in the electoral process much worse. If a significant number of people who expected and intended to vote are unable to vote because of bureaucratic nonsense like not having a passport (seriously?! Even rich people who don’t travel internationally let their passports expire! I’ve seen it! I’ve come close to doing it! And the name change by marriage thing sounds even worse!) that seems utterly poisonous to the legitimacy of our democracy. Like, sure, just write a good bill instead. But it had really better be good.
This article did sway my thoughts to thinking that *some* sort of voter ID requirement could be okay but it would really depend on the details. I'd be interested to hear more about that.
Good article. I am like you, I have come around to thinking that ID is not such a bad thing to require. After all, most of the documented true cases of voter fraud are coming from Republicans.
However, I do think one reason to be wary is that ANY regulation is going to add an additional chokepoint that can allow a politically-motivated official to invalidate votes. In some jurisdictions, voters have been turned away because their Drivers license address didn't match the voter rolls (simply because the voter had moved and updated one and not the other)
But to your point, we should embrace ID as an idea, and enact rules on our terms that ensure fairness and reduce the chance of fraud or disenfranchisement.
Doesn't this argument presuppose a world in which Republicans are actually interested in election security instead of just trying to win? It's possible to imagine a world where Republicans get voter ID and Democrats compromise by getting freely issued national or state ID's, but that isn't the world we live in.
Ok, sure. I care about voter fraud, too. Where is the evidence that voter fraud is a large scale problem? Kash Patel could not even give a number of how many voter fraud cases the FBI is investigating, seemingly because the number is close to 0. If Republicans care about voter fraud, why is there not money for local boards of elections to improve technology, hire more staff, and provide better training?
So, uh, what about states that do 100% vote by mail? Seems like kind of a big issue to leave out. In WA we've done 100% mail in voting for 15 years, and have higher turnout to show for it along with high levels of popular support. What we don't have is an in-person voting system that could be easily modified for early voting with voter ID. Seven of the states that do all mail in voting (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington) lean somewhat or heavily Democratic. That's a good reason that Democrats would continue to oppose voter ID.
I haven't voted in person in two decades, as most of WA went all mail-in during the aughts. I love mail voting, but that's not my point. My point is that WA & other all-mail states don't have polling places, poll workers, etc. It's a big and expensive lift to completely re-tool a voting system, and an infuriating one for residents of states that have been feeling the benefits of all mail voting for more than a decade. That's a political reality that needs to get weighed into the equation.
Here's why I've never found the case for voter ID to be all that compelling.
I have lived in Massachusetts - a state that does not require voter ID - for most of my adult life. I spent about 10 years as an adult in other states (Missouri and California) from abot 1994 to 2004, and cannot remember what the voter ID regime was in those states at that time.
I vote in every election. In MA, that mans showing up to your polling location, giving your name, getting checked off on the voter roll, being given a ballot, casting the ballot, and leaving. Not a single time in over 20 years of every-election voting have I walked in, given my name, and been denied a ballot because the poll worker claimed I had already voted. Not one single time of voting in every primary, general, local, and special election.
So I've served as a poll worker in MA in 2020 and 2021. What would be nice about a voter ID law is that it would make my job slightly easier. When a voter gives their name and address, sometimes you don't hear them right the first time, or you have to ask them about spelling. Making showing ID mandatory would've made my job marginally easier by saving me 5-10 seconds per voter, which adds up over a 10 to 12-hour day.
The other problem we're trying to fix, as I wrote in the piece, is trust in the process. You trust the election process. But a lot of people don't! They think it's strange that we don't require showing an ID that proves citizenship at the polls, because it seems so obvious that we should do it just to be safe.
I'm skeptical of your time savings if you still need to check the ID and physically cross a voter off the rolls as is current practice. If IDs could be scanned and the process could be automated I could see it going faster. But I;ve never been a poll worker.
But I am even more skeptical that voter ID would restore trust in the process. I wouldn't oppose a reasonable ID law, but I think the concerns about elections are wholly the product of fearmongering, the belief on the right that some people should not be allowed to vote regardless of status, and the belief on the right that any time they lose an election,it must have been fraud.
Right now they have moved beyond ID to pushing for on the spot proof-of-citizendhip (not just proof-of-citizenship to get on the rolls), so they would probably oppose a reasonable voter ID bill as an inadequate measure that allowed migrants t vote.
Counterpoint - when I showed up for the Bar Exam I had to hand the guy at the desk my ID. He looked at my written name and spent two minutes trying to find me before declaring I was not registered. It took another few minutes to sort our that despite looking at my name spelled out on my ID he was looking under "Mc" rather than "Mac."
“In 2015, Texas enacted a voter ID law that allowed concealed-carry permits as proof of citizenship but not student ID cards — making the intent to engage in differential vote suppression about as clear as it gets.”
Texas required that you provide proof you were a citizen or legal permanent resident to get a concealed carry permit. (Past tense because a permit is no longer required to concealed carry in Texas if you meet a few criteria.). It also required other background checks.
Student ids do not require that you be a citizen or legal permanent resident.
That does not sound like evidence that it was intended for voter suppression. Voter suppression may have been intended by the overall law, but allowing concealed carry permits as id, while not allowing student ids, isn’t evidence of it.
I am guessing you don’t have friends who have gotten concealed carry permits.
Then you have to know that getting one requires a background check, providing fingerprints, providing documents to prove your identity, in Texas it required proof of citizenship or permanent residency, and it has a waiting period so things can be checked.
Getting a student id requires tuition and a pulse. Being a student does not require proving ”legal presence” or a background check or fingerprints.
Again, I’m not claiming good intent for the id law, but a concealed carry permit is objectively much better proof of identity for the stated purpose than a student id. A student id does not meet the claimed (note word choice) goal of the law.
I get that. But I think you’re misunderstanding how voter ID laws work. When you register to vote you need to show proof of citizenship. When you show up to vote on Election Day, you just need to show that you are who you say you are. At the polling place they have a list of voters registered to vote in the precincts served, and what they do is check your name against that list. So all you need to do is confirm your identity, because your citizenship was already validated when you registered. For that purpose a student ID works fine.
You’re right - I was thinking of establishing initial proof of identity.
I do think that misperception might be driving a lot of the response. Maybe there is a potential for Democrats to make that distinction clearer in the broader political discussion?
Lisa, I have tried for 5 years to explain this distinction of registrstion and day-of requirements to my Republican friends/family. And they still don’t get it. They honestly will never get it, because their information ecosystem makes them very skeptical of evidence like this.
Dems have explained this probably thousands times in the public discourse. It doesn’t break through, because it’s just complicated enough, and just discordant enough with widely and long-head misbeliefs.
Urban dwellers have more concealed carry permits than rural. A concealed carry permit does not apply to long guns.
Concealed carry permits require fingerprints and background checks, plus the id required allows determination and presumably recording of citizenship, so it could be matched by the state against voter records.
Outside of a passport or birth certificate, almost all id is available to non citizens.
The argument that I heard against a voter id law is that there are a significant portion of Jim Crow affected people who don’t have birth certificates and effectively can’t get ID. Church records are all they have but even these were affected by church burnings. Now these people are aging out but someone from the 1940s would be in their 80s now and able to vote.
I think voter ID is great But becomes a problem when the burden of acquiring a voter ID lands heavily on certain voters. I would like to see a voter ID bill that commits the government to spending all the time and money necessary to ensure that any citizen who wants a voter ID can get one with no cost in money and negligible cost in time. Certainly there should be no processing fee associated with getting one and I would go farther and say that the costs of acquiring necessary documentation such as birth certificates should be covered by the government as well. Also, if in person visits are required as part of the ID process, the office where they happen should be open 16 hours a day to accommodate the schedules of anyone who needs to visit. And nobody should have to travel more than 10 miles to reach such an in-person location.
Weird but true: when I show up to vote and hand my drivers license so they can get my name and address right, the poll workers seem shocked and offended, and they make me put it back in my pocket.
What state, if you don't mind me asking? I am an election moderator in CT and you're required to provide something with two of the following three identifiers on the same document: name, address, signature. Can be anything from social security card to electric bill to bank statement but good old fashioned photo ID is by far most common.
Sounds like Connecticut does the same thing, from your description, except it’s matching signatures on other documents, rather than the current signature.
Good point, but we don't do any signature verification on site at the polling station. 95% of voters just have voter ID, nearly all the rest use something like a bank statement or utility bill. I have maybe seen name and signature (on a credit card) once.
There are probably legitimate merits to a voter ID law, but I think it requires some pretty magical thinking to believe that a voter ID law will restore trust in the voting process. Trust wasn't broken because you don't need to show ID to vote, it was broken because one party launched a concerted campaign to sow distrust.
Voter ID might poll well, but that doesn't mean it will restore trust, when one of the two political parties keeps telling people not to trust vote counts. A voter ID law will not fix that problem. It will not stop Trump from casting doubt on elections that don't go his way and his complaints will be all that some people hear. Passing voter ID law now, might even serve to retroactively justify his complaints.
Passing voter ID comes with a secondary problem, I think there are also many people who will (correctly) realize that voter ID laws were sold by Republicans as explicit attempts to disenfranchise some voters. This end up creating more distrust in voting among these voters.
So, because Republican lunatics and bad-faith actors invented and invested themselves in a nonexistent problem, thereby eroding their own base's faith in democracy, we have to assuage them by assenting to unnecessary solutions that add burdens on Democratic voters. Go Dems!
Great article Milan. This plus thoughtful moderation on trans issues (probably just restrictions on sports participation) and immigration (close asylum loophole) would do a ton of repair to the damaged Democratic brand.
I’m not 100% sold.
But I’ll put it this way: It’s OK to use as a bargaining chip. But the value is primarily in its “propaganda of the deed” — that is, the public needs to see loudly and clearly that this HAS been done, and NEVER needs to be done again.
Reagan’s immigration amnesty is an extremely instructive example. The restrictionist right has used the “stabbed in the back” narrative on border enforcement for 40 years since then. If we are not careful with voter ID, the hard right will use it as another big excuse to claim perfidy/betrayal by their establishment elites.
What Milan’s analysis doesn’t take into account is just how compelling these false narratives are to voters. So whatever we do, we absolutely MUST take care not to feed them.
We'll adopt voter ID, if you allow early voting everywhere, I think is a good trade off, and would be very popular with voters.
and this is exactly why I think it would be a bad idea. going in on voter ID laws would only be feeding the narrative that trump and republicans have created.
How do you close the asylum loophole? Also, what is the asylum “loophole”?
I would not object to some sort of voter ID implementation as part of a deal that also got something for Democrats.
But I think the idea that a voter ID law would restore trust in elections is mostly wishful thinking. "Give Republicans some of what they want and they will back off" is just disastrous, beause it relies on expecting the Republican Party to behave in good faith?
Their base would probably never be appeased, but more loosely-attached voters would accept it as settled. As it stands, I think that the democrats' opposition to what sounds intuitively like a normal rule without historical context may lead some to suspect we're hiding something.
That is, I can easily imagine a median voter who didn't previously buy into the claims that democrats are doing voting fraud reasoning that given that non-citizens aren't supposed to vote anyway, requiring proof of citizenship shouldn't be a problem, unless democrats really were banking on non-citizens slipping through the cracks in enough numbers to make a difference. If we collaborated on a common-sense voting law free of poison pills, this hypothetical voter would be satisfied that the rules are being followed.
The thing democrats would get is to not be seen as opposing ID.
Not taking unpopular positions is a great thing. You don't need to get anything else
Voter ID is for independents. It is a a not so important sacred cow that can be abandoned for Democrats to show they are serious about returning to the median voter.
I don’t really understand what the paperwork issue is that so many people are without Id and we’ve been having this fight for a long time and I’m unclear why we can’t get all poor people identification. It doesn’t seem like this should be unsolvable but I never even hear plans to fix it.
Right, I agree. To the extent that the issue is that we don't have a standard national ID card that says "citizen" or "lawful permanent resident" on it, that seems like an easy fix.
Bureaucratic friction has a long history in the USA as a suppressor of full civic participation by those who can least afford the time and money to go through the hoops. Not only for voting but for every interaction of the citizen and the state. A national ID as you propose and many other countries have would reduce friction. When it has been proposed in the US (not recently) it was shouted down from the right as the first step towards a police state. Not surprising in friction is the mail goal.
It’s shouted down from the left as well, at least the fraction of the left that is interested in privacy protection.
It seems odd this would not be an integral component of the SAVE Act.
Easy, free "voter ID cards" for all.
Right, but that assumes the SAVE act is actually about voter ID and not about vote suppression. Trump has been very open in saying that he wants it passed to ensure good midterm for the Republicans. Even if it's not very well targeted and wouldn't necessarily have that result, it's intention is vote suppression.
Right, I was wondering in good faith, following the logic in the previous two comments.
But, good point. There is nothing "good faith" about this specific bill.
Probably as simple as that.
Yeah, I think this specific bill is bad. But the principle of voter ID isn't.
If you're interested in one example, please see my post below re Alaska's non-road connected rural villages and lack of government offices. This is why Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican (or RINO, dep who you ask), openly opposes this bill and voter ID laws.
When they introduced this in NC, the biggest concern was older people in rural areas who never received a birth certificate. Home births were the norm.
Democrats did a lot of work to get as many people voter ID as possible, but it will always be a little friction. The voter shows up to the polls and forgot their ID? They go home. They do not come back.
"There’s a traditional story where Republicans seek to make it harder to vote so that the electorate skews to the highly educated. But that dynamic is odd in a world where Democrats have become the party of the highly educated."
This assumes a "symmetrically" implemented voter ID policy with a disincentive effect that affects Dem and GOP voters equally, which feels like a massive and unwarranted leap of faith given the current stae of the GOP.
What I am saying is that *as written* the SAVE America Act would probably net votes for Democrats. "People who own a passport" are a cohort that (probably) voted for Harris. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/35414-only-one-third-americans-have-valid-us-passport
Might be true "as written," but what matters is "in practice."
The main problem with the voter ID requirement is just that currently getting the ID is costly, in time and/or money. We should invest in making it trivially easy (and free) for qualified people to get the relevant ID. Otherwise the ID requirement is effectively an unconstitutional poll tax.
Agree
I think this article undersells the downside risk of a bad voter ID bill, which I’m scared could make trust in the electoral process much worse. If a significant number of people who expected and intended to vote are unable to vote because of bureaucratic nonsense like not having a passport (seriously?! Even rich people who don’t travel internationally let their passports expire! I’ve seen it! I’ve come close to doing it! And the name change by marriage thing sounds even worse!) that seems utterly poisonous to the legitimacy of our democracy. Like, sure, just write a good bill instead. But it had really better be good.
My understanding of the bill is that you only need to have that to.Register the vote.
Once you register any regular, ID will work the vote
This article did sway my thoughts to thinking that *some* sort of voter ID requirement could be okay but it would really depend on the details. I'd be interested to hear more about that.
Good article. I am like you, I have come around to thinking that ID is not such a bad thing to require. After all, most of the documented true cases of voter fraud are coming from Republicans.
However, I do think one reason to be wary is that ANY regulation is going to add an additional chokepoint that can allow a politically-motivated official to invalidate votes. In some jurisdictions, voters have been turned away because their Drivers license address didn't match the voter rolls (simply because the voter had moved and updated one and not the other)
But to your point, we should embrace ID as an idea, and enact rules on our terms that ensure fairness and reduce the chance of fraud or disenfranchisement.
Doesn't this argument presuppose a world in which Republicans are actually interested in election security instead of just trying to win? It's possible to imagine a world where Republicans get voter ID and Democrats compromise by getting freely issued national or state ID's, but that isn't the world we live in.
I think this article presupposes ID is just a good idea on its own, regardless of what Republicans think.
While i'm sure there is a small segment of republicans that are interested in trying to cheat.
The vast majority just don't want voter fraud
Ok, sure. I care about voter fraud, too. Where is the evidence that voter fraud is a large scale problem? Kash Patel could not even give a number of how many voter fraud cases the FBI is investigating, seemingly because the number is close to 0. If Republicans care about voter fraud, why is there not money for local boards of elections to improve technology, hire more staff, and provide better training?
I'm not saying that there are concerns about massive voter fraud are valid.
But they have those concerns anyway
And given how important faith is in elections and democracy
I'm willing to make reasonable compromises
Requiring voter, ID seems like a no brainer to
So, uh, what about states that do 100% vote by mail? Seems like kind of a big issue to leave out. In WA we've done 100% mail in voting for 15 years, and have higher turnout to show for it along with high levels of popular support. What we don't have is an in-person voting system that could be easily modified for early voting with voter ID. Seven of the states that do all mail in voting (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington) lean somewhat or heavily Democratic. That's a good reason that Democrats would continue to oppose voter ID.
I live in oregon. Vote by mail is nice and convenient, and I don't worry that much about fraud.
But when I lived in california, I always voted in person. Also not that big of a deal.
If getting rid of vote by mail with what was needed to restore faith in the election and democracy I would take that trade off any day
I haven't voted in person in two decades, as most of WA went all mail-in during the aughts. I love mail voting, but that's not my point. My point is that WA & other all-mail states don't have polling places, poll workers, etc. It's a big and expensive lift to completely re-tool a voting system, and an infuriating one for residents of states that have been feeling the benefits of all mail voting for more than a decade. That's a political reality that needs to get weighed into the equation.
Here's why I've never found the case for voter ID to be all that compelling.
I have lived in Massachusetts - a state that does not require voter ID - for most of my adult life. I spent about 10 years as an adult in other states (Missouri and California) from abot 1994 to 2004, and cannot remember what the voter ID regime was in those states at that time.
I vote in every election. In MA, that mans showing up to your polling location, giving your name, getting checked off on the voter roll, being given a ballot, casting the ballot, and leaving. Not a single time in over 20 years of every-election voting have I walked in, given my name, and been denied a ballot because the poll worker claimed I had already voted. Not one single time of voting in every primary, general, local, and special election.
So what problem are we trying to fix?
So I've served as a poll worker in MA in 2020 and 2021. What would be nice about a voter ID law is that it would make my job slightly easier. When a voter gives their name and address, sometimes you don't hear them right the first time, or you have to ask them about spelling. Making showing ID mandatory would've made my job marginally easier by saving me 5-10 seconds per voter, which adds up over a 10 to 12-hour day.
The other problem we're trying to fix, as I wrote in the piece, is trust in the process. You trust the election process. But a lot of people don't! They think it's strange that we don't require showing an ID that proves citizenship at the polls, because it seems so obvious that we should do it just to be safe.
I'm skeptical of your time savings if you still need to check the ID and physically cross a voter off the rolls as is current practice. If IDs could be scanned and the process could be automated I could see it going faster. But I;ve never been a poll worker.
But I am even more skeptical that voter ID would restore trust in the process. I wouldn't oppose a reasonable ID law, but I think the concerns about elections are wholly the product of fearmongering, the belief on the right that some people should not be allowed to vote regardless of status, and the belief on the right that any time they lose an election,it must have been fraud.
Right now they have moved beyond ID to pushing for on the spot proof-of-citizendhip (not just proof-of-citizenship to get on the rolls), so they would probably oppose a reasonable voter ID bill as an inadequate measure that allowed migrants t vote.
Counterpoint - when I showed up for the Bar Exam I had to hand the guy at the desk my ID. He looked at my written name and spent two minutes trying to find me before declaring I was not registered. It took another few minutes to sort our that despite looking at my name spelled out on my ID he was looking under "Mc" rather than "Mac."
“In 2015, Texas enacted a voter ID law that allowed concealed-carry permits as proof of citizenship but not student ID cards — making the intent to engage in differential vote suppression about as clear as it gets.”
Texas required that you provide proof you were a citizen or legal permanent resident to get a concealed carry permit. (Past tense because a permit is no longer required to concealed carry in Texas if you meet a few criteria.). It also required other background checks.
Student ids do not require that you be a citizen or legal permanent resident.
That does not sound like evidence that it was intended for voter suppression. Voter suppression may have been intended by the overall law, but allowing concealed carry permits as id, while not allowing student ids, isn’t evidence of it.
I am guessing you don’t have friends who have gotten concealed carry permits.
You’re guessing wrong. My best friend since the 5th grade has one.
Then you have to know that getting one requires a background check, providing fingerprints, providing documents to prove your identity, in Texas it required proof of citizenship or permanent residency, and it has a waiting period so things can be checked.
Getting a student id requires tuition and a pulse. Being a student does not require proving ”legal presence” or a background check or fingerprints.
Again, I’m not claiming good intent for the id law, but a concealed carry permit is objectively much better proof of identity for the stated purpose than a student id. A student id does not meet the claimed (note word choice) goal of the law.
I get that. But I think you’re misunderstanding how voter ID laws work. When you register to vote you need to show proof of citizenship. When you show up to vote on Election Day, you just need to show that you are who you say you are. At the polling place they have a list of voters registered to vote in the precincts served, and what they do is check your name against that list. So all you need to do is confirm your identity, because your citizenship was already validated when you registered. For that purpose a student ID works fine.
You’re right - I was thinking of establishing initial proof of identity.
I do think that misperception might be driving a lot of the response. Maybe there is a potential for Democrats to make that distinction clearer in the broader political discussion?
Lisa, I have tried for 5 years to explain this distinction of registrstion and day-of requirements to my Republican friends/family. And they still don’t get it. They honestly will never get it, because their information ecosystem makes them very skeptical of evidence like this.
Dems have explained this probably thousands times in the public discourse. It doesn’t break through, because it’s just complicated enough, and just discordant enough with widely and long-head misbeliefs.
That’s a shame.
This is a great point that I've never heard articulate!
Why does it help to require an ID that non-citizens can get? The only reason is because a lot of old rural white people have concealed carry permits.
Urban dwellers have more concealed carry permits than rural. A concealed carry permit does not apply to long guns.
Concealed carry permits require fingerprints and background checks, plus the id required allows determination and presumably recording of citizenship, so it could be matched by the state against voter records.
Outside of a passport or birth certificate, almost all id is available to non citizens.
The argument that I heard against a voter id law is that there are a significant portion of Jim Crow affected people who don’t have birth certificates and effectively can’t get ID. Church records are all they have but even these were affected by church burnings. Now these people are aging out but someone from the 1940s would be in their 80s now and able to vote.
I think voter ID is great But becomes a problem when the burden of acquiring a voter ID lands heavily on certain voters. I would like to see a voter ID bill that commits the government to spending all the time and money necessary to ensure that any citizen who wants a voter ID can get one with no cost in money and negligible cost in time. Certainly there should be no processing fee associated with getting one and I would go farther and say that the costs of acquiring necessary documentation such as birth certificates should be covered by the government as well. Also, if in person visits are required as part of the ID process, the office where they happen should be open 16 hours a day to accommodate the schedules of anyone who needs to visit. And nobody should have to travel more than 10 miles to reach such an in-person location.
Agree
Weird but true: when I show up to vote and hand my drivers license so they can get my name and address right, the poll workers seem shocked and offended, and they make me put it back in my pocket.
What state, if you don't mind me asking? I am an election moderator in CT and you're required to provide something with two of the following three identifiers on the same document: name, address, signature. Can be anything from social security card to electric bill to bank statement but good old fashioned photo ID is by far most common.
New York.
For us they want you to state your name and address, then they find your record and you sign to match your signature.
Woof. Signature matching is such a busted way to do things.
I agreed my signature does not match from one day to the next.
Sounds like Connecticut does the same thing, from your description, except it’s matching signatures on other documents, rather than the current signature.
Good point, but we don't do any signature verification on site at the polling station. 95% of voters just have voter ID, nearly all the rest use something like a bank statement or utility bill. I have maybe seen name and signature (on a credit card) once.
There are probably legitimate merits to a voter ID law, but I think it requires some pretty magical thinking to believe that a voter ID law will restore trust in the voting process. Trust wasn't broken because you don't need to show ID to vote, it was broken because one party launched a concerted campaign to sow distrust.
Voter ID might poll well, but that doesn't mean it will restore trust, when one of the two political parties keeps telling people not to trust vote counts. A voter ID law will not fix that problem. It will not stop Trump from casting doubt on elections that don't go his way and his complaints will be all that some people hear. Passing voter ID law now, might even serve to retroactively justify his complaints.
Passing voter ID comes with a secondary problem, I think there are also many people who will (correctly) realize that voter ID laws were sold by Republicans as explicit attempts to disenfranchise some voters. This end up creating more distrust in voting among these voters.
So, because Republican lunatics and bad-faith actors invented and invested themselves in a nonexistent problem, thereby eroding their own base's faith in democracy, we have to assuage them by assenting to unnecessary solutions that add burdens on Democratic voters. Go Dems!