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Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, I was responding to this:

> Are you a blue-collar minority? Unless you know exactly when and where to go to get a license, then voting is practically impossible.

How else can you interpret this? Blue-collar minorities are less capable of knowing where/when to get a license than blue-collar whites? Or perhaps the "minority" bit is a red-herring altogether and the salient criterion is "blue-collar"?

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Or groups of people live in certain geographic areas and are not served by public transit or near government offices like a DMV. That can have the effect of making it generally harder one one group despite equal competence.

This would be interesting and I’m curious about the extent to which this happens, but this hypothesis doesn’t support the claim that “absent information about getting an ID, it is nearly impossible for blue-collar minorities (but not their white counterparts) to vote”. Also, if you lack access to public transit, I would expect you’re more likely to have an ID, not less so.

Literally there are states where they closed voting locations and DMV locations in predominantly minority areas. They created a requirement for a license and then claimed it would only impact 16 year olds and they would "drive to people's houses" at the same time that they claimed they were "out of money". Nevermind that the whole state has an issue with not enough polling stations.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2015/10/01/alabama-drivers-licen...

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/georgia-county-abandons-pl...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/10/30/midterm-elect...

No. The discriminatory nature of laws like this work on statistics. While something like a drivers license with a street address isn’t discrimanatory per se, when you look at the groups that are adversely effected and how those groups correlate with voting preferences, a pattern emerges.

For instance, the lack of a street address in North Dakota pretty much only effects those living on an Indian reservation https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/native-americans-north-dakot...

Say you need a state issue I’d, but then limit access to those ids in specific areas, as Alabama did in 2015. http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/01/as_it_turns_out_...

In Texas, researchers ran an an analysis of where these laws have the most impact and found that the largest contributing factor to predicting disenfranchisement was race. https://www.wired.com/story/voter-id-law-algorithm/

> Blue-collar minorities are less capable of knowing where/when to get a license than blue-collar whites?

But your comment wasn't suggesting this. You were suggesting that the law was explicitly discriminatory to require minorities alone to need ID and whites could vote without ID.

I think you misread my comment. I was very careful not to suggest that "the law was explicitly discriminatory". I'm merely asking how they accomplish the alleged discrimination.

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