No Stupid Questions

You have to understand the roots of the voting registration rules here to understand it better. The whole point of them was to keep black men and all women from having a vote.

That's it - that is what they were for. So every permutation since is built on that framework, it's always "the wrong people might vote' instead of "we want to make sure everyone votes".

So voter ID is not a bad idea on its face, you go in to vote the poll workers need to know who you are, right? The lady who sits across from me at work is old, she went to renew her driver's license in February this year and they said no, your current license (that they issued) is not enough, there are new requirements - we need your birth certificate, your first marriage license, your divorce paperwork, your second marriage license, your divorce decree from that marriage, then we can renew your license.

She just managed to get all this by mid-October, so she did get through in time to vote but what the fuck? She had to reach out to 3 states and getting a birth certificate from like the 1950s is not easy. Why is it not easy to renew? Because the laws were written to prevent voting not to enable it.

You LITERALLY cannot register to vote without already being a fucking citizen.

The ID thing is a complete non issue bullshit smoke screen to disenfranchise voters.

Not yelling at you at all, but this issue makes my blood boil.

Before you can vote, you have to "register" to vote. When you do this, you need to prove you're a U.S. citizen. Usually providing a birth certificate, or passport, military id, idk everything.

My understanding was that the name you were registering to vote with had to match the document you were using. But if you got married then often times the women would have a different last name and now it doesn't match your birth certificate. Normally you'd just have to prove you got married too but this new law would say no, you have to have the exact name or you can't vote.

Since women typically take the man's last name, it would effectively mean any married women registering to vote would not be allowed. And since the bill is worded confusingly on purpose, many women would not even realize this until they went to register to vote, and told they couldn't because of their new last name.

Here's my perspective from other countries (I've lived and voted in two). The America right will go absolutely apeshit if you criticize them from the point of view of a other country by saying "you have voter ID laws, you just want the USA to fail by allowing illegals to vote"

The thing is, for example Canada or the UK (both where I never once needed to show ID to vote) have voter ID laws in case you need to produce ID, but you probably don't. Because for most people you are registered to vote, you pay taxes, the government knows where you live and who lives there.

I turn up at a polling place with my name and address and they hand me my ballot. If another me showed up earlier, or later it'd be immediately apparent there was a problem when I tried to vote again.

If you aren't in this position, that's where vote ID comes in. What the right wingers in America never say is that almost any kind of ID at all that has your name on it is acceptable. There are hundreds of acceptable forms of ID and it's as broad as possible.

Also if all that fails and you literally have nothing to show for it, you can literally ask someone who is registered to just vouch for you. Yep, that's bill, he's a citizen as far as I know. Now bill gets a ballot.

We're allowed to have voter ID laws because we're using them to make sure absolutely everyone is able to vote while still ensuring secure elections. We're not using them to purge voter rolls and make sure you need an obscure specific government ID card in order to have the "privilege" (you see cause it's not a privilege, it's a right)

in other countries its feasible and easy to have a national iD, in the states you have to go through a huge process to get one. also having more people votes hurts the estasblishment politicians in general.