Hacker News Reader

Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

Who exactly are they intended to disenfranchise, I know the common trope is that black people are unable or unwilling to get an ID, but that in and of itself is a pretty racist implication. Any US citizen can go to their local DMV and get a state issued ID.

What it does do, is restore just a small amount of confidence in the election process, something that is woefully lacking, people are so disillusioned with how far the divide in the US is, that half of them believe the Russians planted the current president via election fraud, and the other half believed that the current president's loss in the recent elections is invalid due to fraud.

Lack of confidence in elections, eventually leads to revolutions, voter ID is a small token of a way to restore some of that confidence and to assume people are too poor or uneducated to get a state issued ID, is "White mans burden" under a different guise.

View on HN

Many people live hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest DMV. Other people live in jurisdictions with millions of people and only one DMV office, because the DMV is a state, not municipal agency. Others lack the documentation necessary to obtain an ID by modern standards, because at the time of their birth their state or county didn’t bother documenting births of people of their race.

Voter ID laws may not be inherently racist, but they are designed by racist people to disproportionately impact black Americans.

Ummm.... I hate to point this out, but Trump's base is rural America. "Many people live hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest DMV" describes the Republican base perfectly.

I mean, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with some of the big-picture conclusions, but the logic along the way is a long bit... off.

Trump's base is too large to be rural. That's the thing about the country: nobody lives there. If they can disenfranchise millions of urban people then they will happily accept also disenfranchising a handful of rural people.

From an argument perspective, consider the contradiction between "Many people live hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest DMV" in your first comment and "That's the thing about the country: nobody lives there. If they can disenfranchise millions of urban people then they will happily accept also disenfranchising a handful of rural people."

When you have that kind of obvious cognitive dissonance, it should be an obvious sign you believe something false.

On a mile-high level, two things to consider:

1) Your base are your core, key supporters. They're the people who are 100% committed to voting for you, go to rallies, make small donations money, volunteer, and man phone lines. You can't run an effective campaign without a base.

Trump's base is rural America and displaced predominantly white workers in decaying manufacturing cities. Fox News swings between playing clips of democratic elites calling them "privileged whites" and "racist redneck trash."

2) On a national level, in turns of number of votes, it doesn't matter much how many people live in smaller states. Whether it's one person or a half-million people, they get three electoral votes. Appealing to that base is a good tactic.

I believe you're sincere, so I'll address each of your points in turn.

> half of them believe the Russians planted the current president via election fraud

> the other half believed that the current president's loss in the recent elections is invalid due to fraud.

The first half believe there was malign Russian interference on social media and direct collusion with the campaign. The second half believes mail-in votes were fraudulent. Voter ID would not allay either of these concerns. But let's not get bogged down in details, because I understand the wider points you're trying to make.

> the common trope is that black people are unable or unwilling to get an ID, but that in and of itself is a pretty racist implication

Not black specifically, but urban, working poor and the homeless. And it's not racist, it's rooted in facts.

> Any US citizen can go to their local DMV and get a state issued ID.

This costs time and money. At my local DMV in California, any interaction takes 2 hours of standing in line. That's not counting the time it takes to get there and go back to work. For a person without state ID means taking the bus or riding a bike or walking.

Working poor people are hourly workers, and DMVs are not open outside of normal working hours. So a working poor person must sacrifice half a day's wages to apply for an ID. And that's if all their documentation is in order the first time (don't scoff; I've had to go back multiple times because I was missing something or the official made a mistake).

Compared to that, an office worker can easily take a half day off with no loss in wages. Is this not a regressive tax in order to exercise a fundamental right?

> What it does do, is restore just a small amount of confidence in the election process

That's the stated reason for voter ID laws. However, good, fair, voter ID laws would also make provisions to ensure that the poor are not disproportionately affected by this new requirement. They'd keep DMVs open for longer or on weekends (in fact some states did the opposite after passing voter ID laws - by closing DMVs or reducing hours). They'd waive fees for low-income people. They'd automatically register graduating high schoolers - do it the same day as yearbook pictures. They'd let volunteers supervised by government employees run voter ID registration stations at grocery stores, churches, and community centers on weekends and evenings. Collecting documents and taking pictures isn't particularly hard - you could get some Boy or Girl Scouts to take ID pictures for merit badges.

Given the hyper-partisan nature of American politics, a good voter ID law has a very small chance of being passed anywhere. The point of voter ID laws, as they are written today, is to suppress the urban poor vote. So the side proposing the laws has no incentive to help the urban poor get voter ID. And the side opposing voter ID laws takes umbrage to anything that adds friction to getting voters in the booths on election day, fearing (rightfully) the intentions of such efforts.

How do you solve all this?

To me it does not seem all too hard of a problem to solve. I don't know about other state but in FL you can get your driver licence, tags, and most other FL DOT related functions at the local tax collector's office.

There is no doubt that their are inefficiencies in the process but, it is after all government services, their is no incentive for them to perform better or to provide a decent customer experience because they hold regulation and a monopoly on the process. I get it, I mean in FL they won't take your old licence (if it is expired) as proof that you are you, even though they issued it and can verify that while it is expired, it is an official id that they issued. I know because I had to deal with it, as well as deal with the fact that at some point they stopped recognizing hospital issued birth certificates, that did not have the state encoding strips on them. That being said, inefficiency of government does not invalidate the need to restore faith in the election process on several levels. Rather it means we look at ways to make it more efficient and change the incentive process to do so.

I don't disagree that these items could be distributed to other trusted entities. I mean I would be all for the poll watchers being able to take the documentation and issue the ID right there on the spot at no charge.

And I don't disagree that there are a lot of agendas at play, but I honestly don't know how people come to the conclusion that the average minority /poor will be disenfranchised by this. I cannot speak to whether it would disenfranchise the homeless as I would hazard to guess that not many among it's community actually vote. I know where I live (The Florida Keys) we have a very high homeless, working poor and transient population. Most of those that actually work, posses some form of state ID, but I could not say for the homeless that panhandle.

I am all for making it as frictionless as possible and I agree on fees for the poor, but I just don't see the racist implication which is generally what I have heard bandied about in the dogma. I personally see it as a valuable step towards election integrity and that is my primary concern. No one is letting off the gas, and given how insulated we have been in the US to political strife, I don't think the majority of both sides sees how close we are too the edge of the cliff, but everyone just wants to keep the pedal down. We will not go on long with lack of faith in our representatives being duly elected and the less faith people have the more prone they are to wild conspiracies of Russian hookers peeing on candidates, and pizza parlor pedo houses. We truly are at that level of crazy, and that level of crazy makes people easy targets for manipulation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com