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It’s a fair question so idk why people are downvoting you. But in the US you can’t just walk in and vote (ID or not). Before the election you have to register to vote, and that process verifies that you are a citizen. Then once you go into your polling place to actually cast your vote, they check your name/address to see if you’ve been registered, and if you have, then you are allowed to vote.
So requiring ID to vote introduces a second step to check something that’s already been verified (you can’t register to vote if you aren’t a citizen), and Republicans love it because adding extra hoops to the voting process lowers turnout and historically Republicans do better in low voter turnout elections.
That still doesn't cover the need to verify that you are who you say you are.
If government issued IDs were free for everyone, this wouldn't be an issue. The issue isn't showing an ID to vote, it's that not everyone has one, and those who don't are usually lower income.
Actually checking the name and address against the voting registration record, without an additional ID check, really is enough to validate someone in like 99.999999% of cases. In order for someone to impersonate someone else while voting, they would need to:
-Know their name
-Know their address
-Know their designated polling place and physically visit it to cast a ballot
-And most importantly, they would need to know that the person they’re impersonating is not going to vote in that election. Because otherwise as soon as they do, it’s going to flag a voter fraud alert when one voter appears to be voting twice. Which is a federal crime that is taken very seriously and easy to track down, because it occurs so infrequently and there’s surveillance at every polling location
So an imposter would be risking federal prison time in order to swing an election by one vote. It’s something that happens like a single digit number of times per election.
Compare that to the hundreds or even thousands of times that people work 8+ hour days (since elections in the US are never on holidays), get to their polling place that closes as early as 6pm, and then find that they’ve forgot to bring or lost their ID, and then won’t or can’t vote in the election. The current system works fine, ID laws are 100% just a voter suppression tactic.
I'll copy something I wrote up in another thread.
This is one of those things that needs some context. Lots of nations have ID requirements similar to this, and people from outside the United States are often confused as to why it’s a problem. The issue is that it’s a backdoor to voter disenfranchisement.
Not everyone drives, and therefore, doesn’t need a state-issued ID. But now you need one to vote. So you have to go to the DMV to get an ID that’s not a drivers license but functions the same way for ID purposes. Except the DMV is only open during working hours, has long lines, and the nearest one may not have public transportation going to it.
It’s often minorities who don’t have drivers licenses to begin with, and they tend to vote for Democrats.
In practice, there was never significant voter fraud at all. Not enough to change the outcome of any race. Even on the surface, it’s solving a non-problem.
Also, most voting rights advocates will point to the 24th Amendment, (arguably rightly) claiming that requiring ID that you must pay the state to acquire constitutes a poll tax.
To explain: when black men got the right to vote after the 15th Amendment was passed, lots of states tried lots of ways to make sure they couldn't. One thing that was legal was requiring a fee to be paid in order to vote - this had the knock-on effect of making sure poor white people, who often sympathized with and voted with black people, couldn't vote either. These fees were known as poll taxes, ostensibly to pay the people running the poll and defray the state's cost of administering the election. Normally this was a nominal amount, but if you were a sharecropper or subsistence farmer who was literally counting half-pennies to get by month to month, the quarter that the poll tax required was enormous. Many states kept these poll taxes in one form or another for decades, and they were declared unconstitutional in 1966 by the SCOTUS in Harper v Virginia Board.
If I wanted a Real ID like this executive order required, I would be paying about $80 on the low end, assuming I do not need to pay to acquire any of the several documents I need to prove I am who I am.
i mean there is fraud usually by republicans, and always republican.
It's hard to find the original Daily Show clip, but they show part of it here. It's the most vile fucking double think imaginable, saying "Hey, I'm not racist, I just want to disenfranchise minority and student voters who HAPPEN to be mostly democrats, and by the way, yeah, I'm actually pretty fucking racist." I'm just glad that the Daily Show got to interview a guy who was so lacking in self-awareness that he said it all out loud.
They also check your signature and compare it to what's in your records. Over the course of my young adult years, my signature became more sloppy as I got lazier. I didn't realize it until I went to vote and the person working there scrutinized my signature because of it.
I think that’s a local state or city requirement, I’m not sure I’ve ever had to sign for a ballot.
Elections in the US are run by the state government, even federal elections, so details like that are going to vary between states