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Comment by nobodyCloak | Hacker News Reader

I don’t support all of those proposed changes, but I’m legitimately curious as to why, if the election process is so important and sacred, it is also too much to ask for some sort of proof that the person voting absentee is actually allowed to vote.

I don’t like the witness signature requirement for absentees, but saying that people of a certain race can’t provide a driver’s license or some other state id because they have a certain skin color seems a little racist (?). That might just be me though.

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It’s basically a consequence of us not having any national ID card.

Many people don’t have driver’s licenses (whose requirements vary by state), most people don’t have valid passports, etc.

If we had an ID card that every citizen would be reasonably expected to have and there was a nationally standardized way of getting it, then of course it would make sense to require that ID to vote.

> saying that people of a certain race can’t provide a driver’s license or some other state id because they have a certain skin color seems a little racist (?)

Maybe easier to understand if we recall that "race" is sociological, not biological, and that skin color is a course-grained encoding society uses for mapping individuals to social identities?

From that perspective, what we're really saying is "our society has historically split people up into various sub groups, and some of those sub groups we've made it more difficult to access resources, and many common identifying documents are tied to access to these resources, so groups with less access are also less likely to have the accompanying documents."

Requiring documents that we know some groups of Americans, on average, are less likely to have, for something ALL Americans are entitled to, is problematic, no?

Voting is a right as an American citizen. ID's are not a right, and there's hundreds of years of precedent that government cannot require you to have a specific ID to uphold your basic rights. They only have to be able to reasonably determine who you are, so, name and address.

Governments get around this by having things like drivers licenses that most people then elect into because it's required to drive.

But governments could simply not issue you their specific ID, and therefore youre voided of your rights. It always comes back to government power vs individual rights.

Acquiring an ID is typically a very lengthy and tedious process in most states, which entails:

1) knowing enough about the process to find all the documents required to get an ID (usually includes birth certificate and SSN card if you don’t already have an ID, which not everyone is able to keep track of)

2) taking a day (or multiple days) off work to go to the DMV, depending on wait times and if you’ve brought enough documentation

3) paying $40+

4) waiting days or weeks for the ID to come

All for what? If you don’t have a car, and you don’t really interact with the government or banks in any meaningful way (you would be SHOCKED how many people are in this position) you basically don’t need an ID at all to function. So if the ONLY reason to get an ID is because it’s required to vote, this ends up being a MASSIVE hurdle. All that effort just to vote? And you need to do it many weeks before the election? Of course that will suppress turnout from populations who don’t already have IDs!

This isn’t even considering populations who have pretty deep-seated (and reasonable!) wariness of giving too much information to government institutions, when historically that information (especially demographic) has been used to oppress/discriminate in things like housing policy, policing policy, etc.

If America issued a federal government ID at birth for free that auto-renewed, maybe these laws wouldn’t be as insidious. But that almost certainly will never happen.

If we can justify expecting an impoverished single mother with a million other things demanding her time to jump through those same hoops to own a Glock in Massachusetts then we can expect her counterpart to do it to vote in Georgia. (Don't get me started on the judicial process series of amendments, they're ignored by the state(s) to an even worse extent.)

Frankly I think that level of restriction if bullcrap when applied to what is a plainly written right but this level of restriction is applied piecemeal to various rights by various states both at present and in the recent past. Legislatures does not see things as plainly as you or I do. They deal in these kinds of mental gymnastics as a routine part of their business. Just because something's obviously incompatible with the constitution doesn't mean it can't be the law of the land (especially at a state level) for a generation or three.

As an aside, an ID is typically required for all sorts of things that poor people do a hell of a lot more than rich people (change jobs, use a check cashing service, sell scrap metal, sign a lease on a new apartment, register a car, apply for .gov assistance, interact with the government in general, etc.) so they do tend to treat acquiring/renewing IDs with more urgency than the HN crowd because not doing so will cause them problems in shorter order.

I hear what you're saying, but I would push back a bit that the gun purchase vs. voting analogy needs a bit more nuance. There's ALSO a long tradition that individual rights enumerated in the Constitution+Amendments are not absolute, but are limited insofar as they infringe on others' individual rights and public safety.

The threshold where "public safety" is considered with respect to limiting individual rights is certainly up for debate in various cases - including gun ownership. That said, I think there are pretty clear differences between the public safety risk surface of "voting" and "owning a firearm", so I think it's not reasonable to assume that they should require the same standard of restriction (i.e. in the form of tracking/ID requirement).

This is the least controversial proposal, and some of the others leave little doubt as to the true intention here.

It's about the process, which is roughly

"find property X that produces the maximum separation between the groups we care about but would arouse the least suspicion"

and then making X a requirement.

"You must be X rich to vote" seems like the low hanging fruit.

Except that arouses too much suspicion. Though in fairness that is what used to be the divider.

"Must be a net tax payer" is the modern equivalent that gets thrown around. Obviously nobody on the left throws the idea around but I can't help but wonder if it would actually help them considering how many 16yos have jobs but are net tax payers because they have no dependents.

If people reporting business losses in any given year couldn't vote... I'm not so sure I'd be opposed!

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