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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

Because 10% of US citizens (legitimate voters) do not have the forms of ID required in these proposed laws, and it can be expensive and time-consuming to get those forms of ID which are not otherwise required for their lives (QED), and they might not do so strictly for voting.

Some people think disenfranchisement is bad. Others see it as useful.

Specifically, PartyB thinks those people with inadequate ID skew toward PartyA voters. This has been the accepted wisdom for decades. So they are incentivized to make it harder for them to vote.

Interestingly though, PartyB might be wrong about the current population. PartyA, and those against disenfranchisement and imaginary crises in general (I count myself in this third group), do not want to blow up centuries of precedent especially if the consequences are likely to be undemocratic and unfair.

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> Interestingly though, PartyB might be wrong about the current population

Luckily, this problem is wholly solved via selective enforcement.

This is revealed as a fraudulent premise in many states, though. For instance, Illinois doesn't require ID to vote, yet requires an FOID to bear a firearm.

How is it that you don't need an ID to exercise the rights of voting 'citizens', but you need one to exercise the right of 'people'? Consider that virtually all 'citizens' are also 'people', and even if you argue they are not, the portion of voting citizens that aren't 'people' is inconsequential compared to the supposed "10%" that can't muster an ID.

It's almost as if both sides of the argument are just using logically inconsistent arguments that just aligns with whatever gets the voting demographics they like. In fact, Vermont is the only state I know of that gives both full rights of citizens and full rights of people to those without ID in a manner consistent with the anti-ID argument usually presented.

Fewer people want guns than want to vote.

Consequences of errors with guns are higher than with voting, because elections are audited and mistakes and fraud are found and reversed.

You cannot helpfully audit misuse of guns, after the fact.

I reject your premise that the outcome of voting is less dangerous than dropping FOID requirements in places with no ID required to vote, and reject that it is actually reversible (can't undo all the dead school girls in Iran).

But lets accept your premise as true.

You're proposing something like rank-stacking the risk of various rights of citizens and people and if they're high enough on the stack it's OK to to ID and if they're lower maybe it's not OK. That seems to move the goalpost quite a bit from your prior argument.

Voting errors and fraud are reversible. Instances of errors are reversed in every election. Instances of fraud are very very rare, but also reversed.

This happens before the winners are certified, and before they're given the ability to drop bombs.

I don't understand your confusion.

In the US, ACH transactions are reversible and trusted throughout the nation. Bitcoin transactions are not, and are not. This seems parallel to me.

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