5 ms·

You can get an ID card that works as legal id but isn't a driver's license, but it still requires going to the DMV and burning at LEAST several hours, which isn

You can get an ID card that works as legal id but isn't a driver's license, but it still requires going to the DMV and burning at LEAST several hours, which isn't an option available to everybody.

robotrout 8y ago
I'm sure their friendly neighborhood community organizer will charter a bus for them to get their ID cards. If they're citizens, there will be somebody who wants their vote badly enough to walk them through that process and even buy them a sandwich for their trouble. Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens. Community organizers have proven to be extremely effective at getting voters to the polls. If a preliminary step is for them to get them their card, I'm sure they won't flinch from that duty.
- wtallis 8y ago
  Transportation to a DMV office isn't the main limitation. Having the freedom to miss a day or two of work to spend waiting in line is a bigger problem, especially when those offices don't necessarily process non-driver ID cards on all ordinary business days. > Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens. The proper time to verify citizenship is during the registration process, when there's time to be thorough. You can't do a reasonable job of validating ID or checking that a person is only registered to vote in one place at the polling place.
  - robotrout 8y ago
    I will support any system that insures that all voters have verified citizenship.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      At what cost? Are you interested in ensuring that additional voting restrictions actually prevent more illegal votes than they prevent legitimate votes? What makes you think the base rate of non-citizen voting is even high enough to be a problem that can be addressed without invariably causing more harm than good?
      - dev_dull 8y ago
        Integrity of our system is important. It doesn’t need to be a partisan issue.
        wtallis 8y ago
        Sure, but how is any of that relevant to voter ID? If you really care about integrity of the voting system, then you should also care about prioritizing the problems that are real, easily exploited, and have the greatest potential for harm. Voter ID is largely a solution looking for a problem, with undeniable side effects of voter suppression. It's being made into a partisan issue not by its opponents but by the proponents who are unjustifiably elevating the issue above more important systemic election vulnerabilities.
        robotrout 8y ago
        Nonsense. We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that? You talk about conspiracy theories. This notion that there is this huge population of legal, eligible voters who are functioning in our society without ID is ludicrous. But if you want to implement paper ballots across the board at the same time, or even 1st, than let's make that happen. As you say, any progress is better than none. Since you are obstructing voter id and not obstructing paper ballots (I assume), than by all means, let's do that first.
        wtallis 8y ago
        > We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that? Ignoring for the moment how improper it is for you to take such a personally accusative tone: The voter ID opposition has been thoroughly justified by the lack of evidence that the problems it solves are real enough to need solving, and by the fact that even the slightest awareness of the context surrounding these voter ID proposals makes it clear that they are not good-faith attempts to make our elections more fair. In short: nobody's falling for the lies. They're too transparent.
- cmurf 8y ago
  It's in the realm of tinfoil hat and freakishly paranoid conspiracy theories that there's any meaningful amount of non-citizens voting. Feel free to design a system that meets the John Rawl's "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, such that the burden of obtaining such ID is equal among all. What would that really look like? If Joe Bob has to take 2 hours off work, without pay, to get ID, how do you get a Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos to go without pay for two hours? Charge them $3 million for their ID card? And if you do, is their burden really the same when they still take home $30 million that day, while Joe Bob lost $30 out of his $600 weekly pay, plus the $30 cost of the license or 10% of his weekly take home? And even if you charge ~$17 million for Warren's driver's license, his weekly take home is still $160+ million. So is that the same burden? By the way, the single prosecuted case of voter fraud from 2016 I'm aware of, is a man in Colorado, who voted for his wife after she'd moved out of state. They're both citizens.
  - dev_dull 8y ago
    Obtaining an ID card can be as easy or as painful as our local governments decide it to be. Amazing, it’s the most painful I have ever experience here in California where the DMV borders on insanity. I would think such a progressive state would care more about the burden it places on its citizens than on maintaining tight control over the process but such is California.
    - tstrimple 8y ago
      I was able to schedule my DMV appointment in California and was in and out.
      - dev_dull 8y ago
        Congratulations. Did you wave goodbye to the huge crowds of visibly frustrated people who have been waiting for hours on your way out?
dev_dull 8y ago
This is a crisis created by local governments. The private sector could easily solve this problem, but that would require bureaucrats losing their power.
vonzeppelin 8y ago
You already have to have an ID to get a job. Who can't do this once in their life?
- CocaKoala 8y ago
  and what happens when the id expires or you change your address or you change your name or the id gets lost or destroyed?
thrower123 8y ago
It's slightly insane that we make people go to a physical location and derp around waiting for a piece of ID. You should be able to handle this like you do getting a passport. Fill out the forms, get a proper picture taken, slap it in the mail, get your shiny new documents back in two weeks.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Counterpoint: I filled out the forms to renew my passport and took them to my local post office. The only person staffing the passport desk refused to take my forms because I hadn't filled in the name of my employer. I pointed out that the website explicitly states that that field is optional, and that the website will not even allow you to print a form that doesn't pass its validation. She hallucinated that the field is optional only in the case that you have no employer. So, I had to travel to a passport office. The desk there really wanted me to fill in the name of my employer, but at least they didn't refuse to take my perfectly valid form based on their own personal delusions.
rsynnott 8y ago
Why does it take that long? I had to get a PSC, Ireland’s not-a-national-id-we-promise, to apply for a driving theory test a while back (days afterwards, the requirement to have one for a driving theory test was dropped after public backlash). It took about 20 minutes, and that was only because the civil servant’s computer was being uncooperative.
kaitai 8y ago
And it often costs money, and it's often a lot of hassle, and sometimes the employees charged with making it available give false information on what's required to get it. Some stats on Wisconsin, which is supposed to provide a free voter ID: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html

You can get an ID card that works as legal id but isn't a driver's license, but it still requires going to the DMV and burning at LEAST several hours, which isn't an option available to everybody.

robotrout 8y ago

I'm sure their friendly neighborhood community organizer will charter a bus for them to get their ID cards. If they're citizens, there will be somebody who wants their vote badly enough to walk them through that process and even buy them a sandwich for their trouble. Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens. Community organizers have proven to be extremely effective at getting voters to the polls. If a preliminary step is for them to get them their card, I'm sure they won't flinch from that duty.

wtallis 8y ago
Transportation to a DMV office isn't the main limitation. Having the freedom to miss a day or two of work to spend waiting in line is a bigger problem, especially when those offices don't necessarily process non-driver ID cards on all ordinary business days. > Let's join the rest of the world and make sure that the people voting in our elections are citizens. The proper time to verify citizenship is during the registration process, when there's time to be thorough. You can't do a reasonable job of validating ID or checking that a person is only registered to vote in one place at the polling place.
- robotrout 8y ago
  I will support any system that insures that all voters have verified citizenship.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    At what cost? Are you interested in ensuring that additional voting restrictions actually prevent more illegal votes than they prevent legitimate votes? What makes you think the base rate of non-citizen voting is even high enough to be a problem that can be addressed without invariably causing more harm than good?
    - dev_dull 8y ago
      Integrity of our system is important. It doesn’t need to be a partisan issue.
      - wtallis 8y ago
        Sure, but how is any of that relevant to voter ID? If you really care about integrity of the voting system, then you should also care about prioritizing the problems that are real, easily exploited, and have the greatest potential for harm. Voter ID is largely a solution looking for a problem, with undeniable side effects of voter suppression. It's being made into a partisan issue not by its opponents but by the proponents who are unjustifiably elevating the issue above more important systemic election vulnerabilities.
        robotrout 8y ago
        Nonsense. We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that? You talk about conspiracy theories. This notion that there is this huge population of legal, eligible voters who are functioning in our society without ID is ludicrous. But if you want to implement paper ballots across the board at the same time, or even 1st, than let's make that happen. As you say, any progress is better than none. Since you are obstructing voter id and not obstructing paper ballots (I assume), than by all means, let's do that first.
        wtallis 8y ago
        > We've been asking for voter id for years and you've been opposing it for years. Why is that? Ignoring for the moment how improper it is for you to take such a personally accusative tone: The voter ID opposition has been thoroughly justified by the lack of evidence that the problems it solves are real enough to need solving, and by the fact that even the slightest awareness of the context surrounding these voter ID proposals makes it clear that they are not good-faith attempts to make our elections more fair. In short: nobody's falling for the lies. They're too transparent.
cmurf 8y ago
It's in the realm of tinfoil hat and freakishly paranoid conspiracy theories that there's any meaningful amount of non-citizens voting. Feel free to design a system that meets the John Rawl's "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, such that the burden of obtaining such ID is equal among all. What would that really look like? If Joe Bob has to take 2 hours off work, without pay, to get ID, how do you get a Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos to go without pay for two hours? Charge them $3 million for their ID card? And if you do, is their burden really the same when they still take home $30 million that day, while Joe Bob lost $30 out of his $600 weekly pay, plus the $30 cost of the license or 10% of his weekly take home? And even if you charge ~$17 million for Warren's driver's license, his weekly take home is still $160+ million. So is that the same burden? By the way, the single prosecuted case of voter fraud from 2016 I'm aware of, is a man in Colorado, who voted for his wife after she'd moved out of state. They're both citizens.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  Obtaining an ID card can be as easy or as painful as our local governments decide it to be. Amazing, it’s the most painful I have ever experience here in California where the DMV borders on insanity. I would think such a progressive state would care more about the burden it places on its citizens than on maintaining tight control over the process but such is California.
  - tstrimple 8y ago
    I was able to schedule my DMV appointment in California and was in and out.
    - dev_dull 8y ago
      Congratulations. Did you wave goodbye to the huge crowds of visibly frustrated people who have been waiting for hours on your way out?

dev_dull 8y ago

This is a crisis created by local governments. The private sector could easily solve this problem, but that would require bureaucrats losing their power.

vonzeppelin 8y ago

You already have to have an ID to get a job. Who can't do this once in their life?

CocaKoala 8y ago
and what happens when the id expires or you change your address or you change your name or the id gets lost or destroyed?

thrower123 8y ago

It's slightly insane that we make people go to a physical location and derp around waiting for a piece of ID. You should be able to handle this like you do getting a passport. Fill out the forms, get a proper picture taken, slap it in the mail, get your shiny new documents back in two weeks.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
Counterpoint: I filled out the forms to renew my passport and took them to my local post office. The only person staffing the passport desk refused to take my forms because I hadn't filled in the name of my employer. I pointed out that the website explicitly states that that field is optional, and that the website will not even allow you to print a form that doesn't pass its validation. She hallucinated that the field is optional only in the case that you have no employer. So, I had to travel to a passport office. The desk there really wanted me to fill in the name of my employer, but at least they didn't refuse to take my perfectly valid form based on their own personal delusions.

rsynnott 8y ago

Why does it take that long? I had to get a PSC, Ireland’s not-a-national-id-we-promise, to apply for a driving theory test a while back (days afterwards, the requirement to have one for a driving theory test was dropped after public backlash). It took about 20 minutes, and that was only because the civil servant’s computer was being uncooperative.

kaitai 8y ago

And it often costs money, and it's often a lot of hassle, and sometimes the employees charged with making it available give false information on what's required to get it. Some stats on Wisconsin, which is supposed to provide a free voter ID: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/wisconsin-voters.html