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.

First thing is that it is up to states to administer elections and make their own rules and laws. Given the record of the current president, many people and states are not very interested in giving up power over that to the federal government, who keeps trying to claim and take control of state-run elections anyway.

In the US, people are not automatically given IDs or driver licenses. They require a fair amount of time, other paperwork, and fees to procure. Therefore having one is automatically more likely for people with more time (retired, better job, etc), money, organized lives and physical ability since you must show up in person.

By organized lives, I mean people of higher economic status are more likely to live in stable situations where they have social security cards, passports and birth certificates easily accessible. If you don’t have those documents - perhaps they were lost in a move, never given by parents, never applied for - it costs a fair bit to get them. A replacement SS card is free. A duplicate birth certificate can be $20-30. The average charge for an ID/DL is about $40. A copy of a marriage or divorce certificate is typically $10-40. A replacing naturalization certificate is almost $1,400.

Getting these documents could take weeks and an amount of money that’s trivial to higher income people and significant to lower income people. Like voting, if you have a white collar job, it’s fairly easy to take time out to do it. If you have an hourly job with little flexibility and/or lack a vehicle, it’s much more difficult to go to government offices to obtain this paperwork. Some might ask, why would someone not have at least a driver’s license or ID? Perhaps it expired, was lost, they moved and never got the paperwork, or couldn’t afford the fees and time. Younger people and non-white people are known to be less likely to have the documents that would be required. It also creates barriers for armed service members.

Another aspect is the bill says women must prove their citizenship with documents that match their original, non-married name. So if you have a birth certificate that says Jane Doe but all your other documents say Jane Smith, since it was changed after marriage, that won’t work. The requirements would also make it harder for trans people to register.

Next, there’s the changes to registration process. Currently 42 states allow you to register online or by mail. That would be nixed. Voters would have to show up at an office in person to register. Currently signing under penalty of perjury that you are a U.S. citizen is considered adequate, along with proof of residency and documents like an ID (which required the aforementioned birth certificate etc to get in the first place). Under the proposed law, a drivers license would not be adequate in 90% of states. In some areas, voters must travel over 200 miles to get to an election office in person.

Another question is why this would be necessary. While Republicans have been claiming that non-citizens voting in federal elections is a major problem, there is no actual evidence of that. In fact, data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says 0.04% of voters might be ineligible, and that’s considered likely an overcount. When states have tried similar laws in the past, it ended up disenfranchising far, far more legitimate voters than the number of illegitimate voters thwarted.

So what’s the actual effect of this? Mainly, to make it harder for poor people and women to vote, two groups who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

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.

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.

The US has about 3.8 million valid citizens with no official records, and about another 21 million that would need to jump through very difficult hoops in order to obtain their documentation. It’s called the Burned Counties phenomenon, because records were kept at the county level, that had a court house burned down. Or flooded, or destroyed by unrest. We like variety in our destruction.

As will come to no surprise, the majority of those affected, are minorities who vote for Democrats. So the laws being proposed are designed around blocking them from voting, not getting them documented to vote.

I will give you an example I overheard for five whole minutes while at the early voting place in my state:

We present our ID and it has to match with the record. You have to confirm your name and address by saying them out loud to the poll worker. Easy, right? Not for this one guy. I’m not sure what the specific issue was, but he could not follow the instructions. The poll worker asked for his name, which went ok. Then she asked for his address. He could not give the address. She asked again. He gave his name. She asked again. He couldn’t answer. She tried all variations of “where do you live?” She was willing to settle for him writing it down. She got to the point where she asked if he could read it off the ID card and he couldn’t. I have no idea what it took, but he was eventually given a ballot about the time I left.

There are many reasons he may not have been able to understand what to do or verbalize (some kind of disability, maybe a language barrier), and it was a bullshit step that depended entirely on who was behind the table and their level of patience. It could have easily disenfranchised him despite having an ID.

It’s a whole can of worms. For the golden standards of what counts as an ID, getting a State ID, Driver’s License, or Passport can be hard. My first time getting a passport was an over 6 month long journey and was hell, getting my Driver’s License was a long journey and cost me like $30, and then what counts as a good form of ID?

Back when I lived in Texas, my license for Concealed Carry worked as a valid form of ID but my Student ID when I was attending Uni there wasn’t. So why is a CCL a valid form of ID but a student ID isn’t?

My opposition to Voter ID is because of this, it would be handled on a state level and not the federal level. This would disenfranchise a lot of people who might not be able to get a valid form of ID.

DMVs are slow and in many areas hard to get to. I know people who live like 100 miles away from any and that is where you get your either State ID or Driver’s License. How are they supposed to prove who they are?

I would support a Voter ID law if and only if we had a free and easily accesible way to get a form of identification.

Related question: why not put the threshold in the future? Like starting in 2036 you will need an ID to vote, you have 10 years to get one.

Short answer: The USA has no national ID.

Long answer: instead we have a patchwork of more than 50 different regional IDs (between states, territories, etc.), alongside a half-dozen ill-suited federal IDs, and numerous public and private institutional IDs (like university IDs or Costco cards).

For the most part, all of these cost money. Due to inconsistent systems and sometimes unclear requirements, the people who are most likely to be disenfranchised are also the most vulnerable. Most state IDs require proof of residence like a utility bill, which can be impossible if you are homeless or off-grid. If you are disabled, you may not qualify for a driver’s license (the most common state ID). If you are trans (or a married woman), you may have paperwork with conflicting legal names.

If you are reasonably well-off, on the other hand, you can afford to pay a private company to facilitate your passport application. The US passport is basically the gold standard of national ID, but fewer than half of Americans have one. It requires a certain amount of wealth to even need one, and the expense (money, time, etc) is not trivial.

Here’s a perspective. Some years ago a nonprofit (aclu maybe?) offered a large sum of money for an example of voter fraud that would have been prevented by an ID, they never had to pay out, iirc. If IDs don’t prevent voter fraud, why require the extra burden?

What really gets to me is that even if, even if there were a few dozen or even a few hundred scattered votes that shouldn’t count…no presidential election is decided by a such a small number of invalid votes. There’s so much effort by the GOP to suggest fraud will cost them the election when its just not true. The amount of effort someone would have to go through just to get a 2nd vote is monumental, and for what 1 extra vote among 10s of thousands… And the risk of getting g caught is high and penalties are severe. Vote fraud is not worth the risk.

What it comes down to is the whole “presenting proof of identity” idea isn’t terrible in itself for the most part, it’s a) what counts as proof, b) how is that ID issued and what obstacles are they adding to get it, and what will it cost you, b) how is it checked and otherwise used to track you.

The hard part to understand for those of us in civilized countries is, you have to figure all this out in a country where no one can trust anything from anyone ever. Governments, people, churches companies, charities, not even yourself. You can’t ever trust anyone in the US, because almost everyone is lying about something, and there’s never any consequences for it. Their real motto should be “Caveat Emptor.”

Can you explain how it works in the EU?

Does the EU specify the rules for how voting works in EU countries?

What “voter ID law?” It would be unconstitutional to legislate that at a federal level and while I don’t doubt Republicans would love to try it, I’ve not heard about that.

As with most laws in America, voting related laws are passed at the state level. There have been probably hundreds of bills like this over the past 20 years so you’d need to be more specific for anyone to address the “law” singular as you put it.

There’s no issue, we just like to argue over stupidity.

Of course you should have to use ID, like everywhere else on Earth. But we don’t, because really it doesn’t matter. It’s not as if the elected candidates are all that different in USA. It’s not like you can vote pro-labor or anything.

Amazon gets what it wants and the election is to decide… will the candidate pretend to care but not care, or not care enough to even pretend?