Look at the problems in this country
23 instances. 23.
As an analogy, let's say I'm triaging a broken neck, a burn, a gunshot wound, a compound fracture, a stab wound, a broken toe, and a hangnail.
If Voter ID were to be placed somewhere on here, it would be below hangnail.
This is smoke and mirrors nonsense that is using minorities and trans people as a scapegoat and distraction.
How much fucking richer are people getting? Poor people have been convinced by rich people that their problems are the other poor people. It's insane. You can pull this pattern out of every modern fascist government and yet people are lacking on to it like a bunch of suckers. It's embarrassing. We should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.
We're arguing over the color of the bandaid for the hangnail.
That's why I don't give a fuck about voter ID, because the people that give a fuck about voter ID have been fucking duped, and I don't know how to reason with that human, so I just have given up trying and scream into the void.
If somebody will streamline the process and actually fund some DMVs to get this done I'd be all for it - but they won't, because it's not the point, they'll just mandate it as a form of voter suppression without doing anything to fix the infrastructure problem.
deep sigh
Even in your ideal scenario where ID is a hard requirement and nothing should slip through the cracks, you could still introduce doubt somewhere in the chain (e.g. did the poll worker actually check your ID?)
And I don’t believe the whole “the mean republicans won’t let us!” narrative. Democrats controlled the executive branch 12 of the last 16 years and control half the states. If they care about voters rights, why haven’t we tried to fix this?
American exceptionalism is a real thing, unfortunately. And what I've found is that when confronted with a flaw or aspect of their society that could be improved, Americans tend to work backwards from the problem and try to explain away the problem, while inventing ridiculous hypotheticals for why other countries implementations won't work.
See: this thread and voter ID, any kind of firearm laws, gerrymandering, lack of public transport, etc.
Let's take the fact that sales tax isn't baked into the price in the US, a common criticism of the US. I understand the sales tax is different per state. Not having the sales tax baked in is an annoyance, and I believe almost everybody would agree having it baked in would be an improvement.
I don't understand why Americans work backwards to try and explain it away. I've genuinely seen comments such as:
"What if the sales tax changes often? Then they have to reprint all the labels" (does this actually happen that often?)
"They have to print different labels for each state" (Many stores already print different labels for regional pricing, or use e-ink)
"It's not that hard to just compute +X%, just get better at math" (It's not hard but what's wrong with transparency and clarity with the price?)
It's that kind of discussion that my comment is referring to.
Your assumptions about lack of ID = easy fraud is misguided.
> Every other country can do it, why not the US?
Elections are handled by the States themselves and so trying to tackle this on a federal level through the executive or Congress probably wouldn't go over very well considering it'd go against the constitution[1] (although that doesn't seem to be that big of a problem these days)
0: https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-verificat...
1: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S4-C1-2/...
You are saying that the problem would be a non-problem if only we had voter ID was. However the evidence before you (and that includes evidence collected by conservative organizations that generally align with politically motivated voter suppression) is that the problem is effectively already a non-problem, due in part to the many other controls in place around voter registration and vote counting. Meanwhile there is quite a bit of evidence showing that your favorite solution to the non-problem is itself problematic, measurably so in the historical record.
You are of course welcome to continue believing whatever you want to believe. But it's hopefully obvious by now to anyone reading this thread that your beliefs are not aligned with facts.
It's like arguing that Python is bad because it has dynamic types, and if we all just adopted static types in Python then all type errors in Python would go away. Even if that is true, it's a ridiculous position to hold.
If you want voter ID to be a thing, then you need to first establish a nationwide ID system that is equitable in terms of access. Until that exists, voter ID is a bad idea in the USA.
I still maintain that this should be a non-issue. ID’s are issued by the state, and they are the entities responsible for voting and voter registration. You don’t need a national database to fix this.