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Comment by lucifirius | Hacker News Reader

Most countries require a form of voter ID.

Most countries automatically and freely issue said ID, the voter ID attempts in the US disenfranchise poor people and people who, for whatever reason, cannot attain the ID required.

Source? In the US I need a valid ID to cash a check, pick up a benefit check, apply for government benefits, buy cold medication, board an airplane, open a bank account, etc. This is a short list off of the top of my head. Are all of these activities disenfranchising me?

Yes, when ID is hard to get.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/how-vot...

IDs are not a problem in principle. But there is barely any voter fraud at all (see Trumps commission), thus no real reason to enact law. Why do politicians non the less spend their political capital doing so? Often their new rules just so happen to help the people voting for them and hinder their opponents. North Carolina [0] was one of the more egregious cases.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/us/politics/voter-id-laws...

why should I need to be able to drive to vote? Or go through the rigamarole of getting a passport?

ID in the us is a huge pita. There no reason to require it for voting anyway, fraud isn't a real problem. it's just a good way to prevent poor people from voting.

Exactly. We need a free national ID card - like the vast majority of countries in the world.

https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2017/07/national-ids-aroun...

You're not the one being disenfranchised.

> cash a check

You can sign it over to someone else and have them cash it. Also many employers (especially in poor areas) offer paychecks on a prepaid card. No check necessary.

> apply for government benefits

You can often do this with lesser IDs such as a birth certificate or school ID, which are often not accepted at the polls.

> buy cold medication

Poor people don't buy much cold medication.

> board an airplane

Poor people don't board many airplanes.

> open a bank account

Poor people are notoriously underbanked, and often don't trust banks anyway (especially since banks have a bad habit of targeting the poorest customers with the highest fees).

Most countries register their citizens to vote too, and have national ID. If you were already registered to vote in the entire union automatically, and you had an ID-card (like the SSN, but actually good for identification with any security built into it) that would work everywhere in the US I wouldn't have a problem with requiring voters to ID themselves.

Why the US refuses to do either of those things, instead putting a lot of hassle on the population when election participation is so low it jeopardizes the fundamentals of democracy, that people feel like the government actually represents them, I have no idea.

If you don't require voter ID in the US, how do you prevent duplicate votes?

there's little or no evidence that duplicate votes are a problem in US elections

At the polling place they have a list of registered voters and mark them off when they vote.

If people were voting under other people's names in significant numbers, it'd be obvious when the real voters came in and found out they were already marked. That very seldom happens.

The reason people don't do it is probably that an extra vote or two is unlikely to make any difference, so the risk/reward is poor. It's hard enough getting people to take the time to vote in the first place, much less risk a felony conviction to vote more than once.

It's not clear how requiring an ID would intrinsically stop duplicate votes?

IIRC a number of countries use an indelible ink pad that voters have to place a finger on.

You don't.

"BUT ITS NOT A HUGE PROBLEM"

it still happens, which is a problem none-the-less.

There's two problems. One is duplicate votes, which may be an insignificant problem. The second is public perception of the fairness and security of elections. The first is a problem; how big a one I don't know. The second is a problem, and a big one.

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