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Comment by _-david-_ | Hacker News Reader

A CCL requires a background check. A student ID does not.

There is, of course, no bias in the types of people who are comfortable with and can easily pass a background check, and those who are not or cannot.

In a free and fair election, the right to vote is not be based on your detailed personal history, or whether you have done something that looks off and might cause you trouble with authorities.

Even if it's just fear of imagined trouble that puts people off feeling safe to obtain the necessary approvals to vote, that's enough to prevent a free and fair election.

I am not suggesting you should need a background check to vote.

All I am saying is we have a good idea that the person with a CCL is that person and they are not a felon (in some states felons cannot vote).

Anybody can go to a community college including a noncitizen. There is no background check and no real verification the person is who they say they are. You just show up and have your picture taken.

If you are going to trust one of these forms of IDs it is clear that it should be the CCL.

Non-citizens can get CCLs too.

Only if they’re legal US persons. Ie they have a green card.

Undocumented, student visas, etc are banned from buying guns

I did not mean to imply a noncitizen could not get a CCL.

What I meant is we know the person is who they say they are when they have a CCL. This means if a noncitizen has a CCL they would be unable to use this as proof they are a citizen.

If a noncitizen goes to a university they could claim they are somebody other than who they are and could use the fake ID as proof to vote. Since there are no background checks to get a university ID it isn't really proof of anything.

Even if you feel the verification that goes into a student ID is not strict enough, that could have been remedied in the very bill that was just signed into law. Why didn’t they, I wonder?

But I think student IDs do undergo a pretty significant verification. They are going to at least need transcripts and some other ID card like a driver’s license to prove your id. They do background checks as a matter of course for funding. Community colleges do verify residency to determine which tuition rate you pay. 99% of the students most community colleges are state residents anyway. They could have just made a requirement that state funded schools must display residency information and an expiration date in the card, and there would be no problem.

My university did no checks on address or anything like that. I went to a private university so that could be why. It is possible that public colleges do more verification.

Honestly I think the best solution is to just give a free ID to everyone. As far as I know every state that requires an ID for voting has free IDs. We should make it easier and more convenient instead of allowing a bunch of alternative forms of ID. Driver's license, voter ID license, generic state ID or federal ID (passport) should be sufficient.

Indeed, public institutions of learning have different tuition rates depending on a student's residency status. Rates for out of county/state individuals can be 50% more (or even higher) than local residents, so there aren't too many instances of non-residents attending community college; there aren't really any benefits to graduating from one CC versus another, so why pay more to get a degree that is indistinguishable from a cheaper one? They're all the same as far as any employers or society are concerned, there's no prestige or social status associated with graduating from CC, so there isn't much of an incentive for fraud. You maybe could argue that it is a viable vector for election fraud if they could be used as IDs, but I think the rise in non-resident enrollment around elections would be evidence of this, yet this phenomenon isn't observed. And even if that were an issue, Republican-controlled legislatures that just passed sweeping election reforms could have corrected it, but they chose not to.

Private institutions have a flat tuition rate (although if you are an international student they will verify that you have the financial capability to pay full tuition, since as a non-resident you wouldn't qualify for federal aid, and their tuition rates are set anticipating that you will qualify for federal aid). When there is actual money involved, you can be damn sure that processes are in place to verify you are paying the correct rate. As always when real dollars are at stake, the process is vetted, inspected, and verified at multiple levels. The proof of residence for my local community college was not dissimilar from the DMV. People want to get paid what they're owed.

But again, if there are any concerns about the stringency of this process, they could have been resolved via recently enacted legislation. But they weren't, and that may have been an intentional omission.

Look, I'll agree that student IDs are not up to par with other forms of IDs in terms of the information printed on the actual card, and that maybe some of the processes should be standardized across the state. Just because my local CC is good with these things and has sensible protocols doesn't mean all CCs strive to achieve that standard. There are a lot of CC and state schools out there. But the fact that an entire party has made securing the vote their raison d'être, yet steadfastly refuses to consider students valid voting constituents is strikingly indicative of a bad faith effort.

>There is, of course, no bias in the types of people who are comfortable with and can easily pass a background check, and those who are not or cannot.

You're correct, there's no bias on the system for background checks. Anyone of any race, color, or creed can get a background check to verify their eligibility to exercise their right to own/carry firearms and vote.

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