3 ms·

People who aren't here legally aren't part of the electorate though.

• kevingadd 6y ago
  The parent post reads as an 'and' of two separate purposes. Shaping the electorate is partially achieved here by eliminating citizens who can't prove their citizenship to a bar set by the federal government and historically in the US politicians set the bar very high for their own purposes. Many people either don't have a birth certificate (records were lost in a government building fire, etc) or don't have access to their certificate (getting a copy requires driving 4 hours to city hall and paying money, that sort of thing). They may already have a state ID which is enough to drive and get to work and vote, but any new system requires them to go through all the expensive hassle the previous ID took, plus potentially more. If you dig around you can find many stories of people who are provably citizens but had to jump through dozens of hoops to get legal ID, or failed to get it entirely because the system is rigged against them. We saw this impact with the rollout of voter ID laws and their uneven requirements, in some cases people simply could not acquire "acceptable" ID for voting purposes even though they were legally entitled to vote.
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    Those people who have trouble producing acceptable documentation to the state, but are citizens, generally aren't being deported though. And citizens who can't prove their identity to vote certainly aren't having their non-existent drivers license shared by states. So what part of the events described in the article are about "shaping the electorate"?
    • davmar 6y ago
      how pedantic. are you trying to misunderstand? one policy serves two functions.