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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. If they can make the creation of these state IDs free and easily done remotely it may tip the balance towards making voter ID laws reasonable. If all major smartphone providers implemented this, smart phone ownership is already 80% and growing among the poor ($<30k / year)in the united states according to a google search.

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>free and easily done remotely

That kinda sounds like a recipe for fraud and the end result the opposite of what you describe.

Never understood the voter id controversy. Even India which has a lot of poor people mandates voter IDs and it's easy to get one. And there are 800 million voter IDs in India. If India can do it then why can't USA?

Its largely a political issue in which the republican party claims fraud is rampant without voter IDs but simultaneously makes it difficult for poor people to get them. In many locations they're not free. In some, like Georgia I think, it is free, but you still need to gather documents and go to a DMV and register, which is, frankly, difficult to do when you're poor and don't have a car.

The effect of requiring voter IDs when they're not free AND easy to acquire is disproportionately preventing the poor from voting vs. stopping fraud.

It’s a manufactured issue designed to get people to squabble with each other on racial lines instead of uniting.

There are zero legitimate reason why a country with the resources of the US can’t accomplish something basic like this. It’s intentional.

If voter ID laws were accompanied by a strong push to make it easy to get the ID, I don’t think there’d be much pushback.

This is analogous to simultaneously outlawing abortion and making it very difficult to get good sex education in school, defunding Planned Parenthood, and underfunding the social safety net for poor mothers.

Pakistani living in US here. As far as I understand, Democratic party has relatively poorer voters. Some of these voters do not want to take off and get their voter Id, because if they do, they will loose their wages for the day. Republican party wants to make IDs mandatory so that these guys won't come and vote.

If you look at percentages, these voters will be less than 1% of the electorate...but important American election results are decided by a single county or a few 1000 votes, so these issues make a lot of headlines. In India, the victory margin is higher, so it doesn't make headlines yet

I mean, India has even more poor people and working hours are much much worse here. Can't you just apply online? Just use the library internet.

You can't just assume that the background is "ID works like it does in India", because it doesn't. (E.g. from my understanding, India has a free central ID system for all citizens, in the US that is something many people fundamentally oppose ever existing. And in reverse, people push for requirements on voter ID on top of just "an ID", which again excludes people and causes opposition to voter ID laws)

Exactly. Even as a New Yorker , I can’t get my ID without an accompany physical document proving who I am. The only document I have that is my Birth Certificate and I’m lucky enough that my parents still had it. If they didn’t I would have to wait 1-2 months to get it. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that an appointment for the DMV is 2 months out as well, so even if I didn’t have the birth certificate there would be waiting either way.

Voter ID laws should never be thing unless people willing to accept a national database and they’re free and given to everybody and can be given in a speedy matter with little to no obstructions.

11%, not 1%.

And 25% of black voters.

https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

The key part of your statement is "and it's easy to get one." Voter ID requirements in some US states is usually accompanied by a very restrictive list of acceptable forms of ID, and the requirements for getting such IDs are often tightened. Making it easy to get an ID is not the goal of such legislation.

For clarity, while India does have a voter ID system distinct from the national Aadhaar ID, the voter ID itself isn't required to vote. IIRC any government issued photo ID (like Aadhaar) is accepted.

Has one political party in India got a long history of using voting qualification mechanisms to exclude large groups of the population from voting at all?

Because the US does: these mechanisms replay the old literacy tests which were used to disenfranchise immigrants and Blacks in the US until the voting rights act was passed.

It is the "easy to get one" part that is often the kicker. There are a lot of examples out there, many of them concerning poor people, but I will use my late grandmother as an example:

In 2011 Wisconsin instituted a Voter ID law that required a valid government ID in order to vote. Being in her 90s at the time my grandmother had stopped driving (at her childrens' wise insistence) a number of years prior. That being her only government ID that was acceptable, she needed to get a renewal of it, but this time as a non-driving ID.

So she was taken to the DMV to renew it, only to be told that they could not renew it (or convert it), because it had expired too long ago. She needed to start the application from scratch, and for that she needed an original birth certificate, with a stamp. The only birth certificate that she had had no stamp (the county she was born in not having had one until much later). So that was going to require her to get a new one of those.

So my aunt called around, finally finding the proper number for the hall of records in the county where my grandmother was born. Unfortunately it is a small county, so the hall of records is only open once or twice a week for part of a day... and the only place they accurately record that is on the door of the building apparently. So just getting in contact was quite a pain (a couple weeks of occasional work).

Then we learned that she would have to present herself in person to get her birth certificate. I remind you that she is in her late 90s at this point, and had never traveled far in her life (the farthest ever was probably to my wedding on the other side of the state), so this was not going to be a minor trip for her (only an hour-and-a-half... but for her...).

This was just too much for her, so she gave up. She grouced about not being able to vote in what wound up being her last major election, but... the hurdles she faced were just too much.

She had voted in pretty much every election she could, but her last one was denied her by the Voter Id Laws.

The answer to your question is that this is entirely an attempt by one political party to make it harder for people to vote, knowing that the people with the largest hurdles are likely the ones who are going to vote against them. It is disgraceful and underhanded, especially from the party that likes to associate itself with religion.

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