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Comment by beaglesss | Hacker News Reader

We can't even get photo ID required to vote for federal office, despite the law requiring it for other stuff that is a right ascribed merely to people ( guns ) unlike voting which is expressly protected for citizens ( although non-citizens could vote for local office if law allows it like in American samoa.)

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Exactly. This should be basic stuff.

After landing on the moon we shouldn’t be bickering and arguing who voted and who didn’t, and if there was fraud or not.

IDs should be free and available to every voter. There should be a federal voting holiday, because it’s an important event.

If you had voted before you would already know they ask for your ID at the polls already. There is no problem identifying voters. It’s some made up shit by Republicans so they can come up with yet another form of ID to disqualify people arbitrarily. I don’t want to have to carry even more forms of ID to satisfy some bureaucrat.

Even if they ask for ID at the polls (they don't where I live), you could vote by mail without ID.

That's not the same kind of problem. Photo ID requirements restrict voting access, voting holiday expands it.

I think they are in the general category of issues we as a country like to argue and bicker about before and after elections. The rest of the world is laughing at us basically not knowing how to tie our shoes.

We definitely have enough resources to give everyone free IDs and record if they voted. We can even afford free public transportation for that day. We can afford not working one extra day a year.

The discussion around voter ID laws never actually revolves around expanding access to ID cards. Instead it is about restricting access to legal voters who don’t have ID, under the guise of avoiding voter fraud, a thing that is so rare as to be generally insignificant.

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/policy-initiat...

> The discussion around voter ID laws never actually revolves around expanding access to ID cards.

That’s what the studies linked seem to focus on? About half of them are inconclusive. The first one had data errors.

That’s why issuing free cards should solve the problem. India with a much larger population with more disadvantaged people solved it but here we are still arguing about it.

I agree, it's cheap and easy enough to solve the issue, and if the Republican talking point bothers you so much, it shouldn't be too hard to prove it's not a problem by introducing mandatory free ID for all.

Everytime I go vote, they take my ID and give me a ballot. Pretty sure voting identification is already working. This is a fake issue.

It depends on the state. Here in NC ID is not required to vote, and when they tried to pass a law requiring it, there was a huge backlash.

Sounds like it’s too unpopular for national let alone state policy.

So which is it, a fake issue (ID already required to vote), or ID isn’t actually required, but requiring ID is too unpopular so it shouldn’t be done?

Not sure how you think they are mutually exclusive in any way. It's all three: A) a fake issue that our current ID is not sufficient, because B) a new source of ID isn't actually required as studies show, and C) requiring a new source of ID is too unpopular.

What problem? Not fraud, if there's no statistically significant amount of fraud happening. [1] The only people who want to argue about it are doing it to sow doubt in a remarkably robust system.

The problem they're trying to solve is ballot access by people who won't vote with them. Here in Texas, the AG is suing any organization who's trying to register voters in liberal areas. [2]

[1] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/ with context by https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/06/texas-ken-paxton-tra...

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