No Stupid Questions

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 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.

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)

If the government wants to make everyone have an certain ID to vote, it has to be the governments responsibility to actively make sure everyone gets that ID without any cost or hassle. We know that’s not what will happen because the whole point of this is that the Republicans want to disenfranchise certain people.

The knockdown problem is that creating such an ID is a mere half a thought from “vere are your papers?” That’s basically a guaranteed outcome.

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.

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.

We don't have a free national ID, even state IDs cost money. There should be no money involved in the right to vote.

It would only let people with their names matching their birth certificates vote, disenfranchising trans people and married women that have taken their spouse's name.

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.

The problem is primarily that it falsely validates a fascist conspiracy theory which is being weaponized to dismantle western democracy. That's really most of it.