This usually places undue burden on women, poor and generally anybody not a white dude.
Say you are a woman, okay you’ve got your certified copy of your birth certificate $10-but wait the name doesn’t match because you got married.
Now you need a marriage certificate, thats another $10 and the trouble of contacting another municipal office.
Oh were you married twice? Thats tracking down another 2 municipal offices, another $10 marriage cert and now a certified judgement of divorce which will cost-ooh was your children’s custody agreement a part of that? $40. Did you not remember your divorce file number from 30 years ago? It’ll be an additional $5 per name per every 2 years searched.
I’ve seen women spend like $200 just on certified copies to get a realID driver’s license. Has a chilling effect on registering, to solve a problem of voter fraud that doesn’t really exist.
If the intention was to actually fight current or future voter fraud then they should really have an easy way of submitting that documentary proof. I don’t know what form that would take in the US and how expensive it would get, considering you’d want some stipulation that it shouldn’t have much cost to acquiring such documents, shouldn’t be too difficult and whatnot. Assuming you’d want to do that right. Not that I think that’s their genuine intention.
Where I live in Finland we don’t have voter registering. We do check IDs when you vote, that part just seems sensible, but there isn’t an actual ID requirement. You just need to be identified without a doubt, but the form isn’t set. In specific circumstances it could even be that the officials there know you and guarantee who you are. But if you don’t have a passport (rare not to have it here), you don’t have driver’s license or ID card, you can get a temporary ID for free from the police station just for voting. But then you need to be also somehow identified there, so sorta the same problem again, but at least you have more time there than in the voting place.
In the US, it isn’t about identification or fraud, its about hoops. The more hoops you have to jump through, the less likely “undesirables” (POC, poors, etc) are yo get it done. Like most things here, its a relic of Jim Crow and related policies. It flies so well even today because it all seems menial to somebody well off (you see it in these comments “Its only $10 what’s the problem”)
Here, the Department of Motor Vehicles tends to be your central point of anything ID related driver or not. My city’s used to be on the bus line, but they moved it to the county far from any public transit. So if you don’t drive, that $10 is now $10 + $20 taxi/uber there + $20 ride home and depending on what you’re doing/getting you may need to go back which is another $40. So really you’re looking at $50-100 to get whatever it is.
In my state at one time (I do think its changed here but assume its probably the same in other states) to get a birth certificate you had to go to the state capital (4 hour drive for me one way.) If you dont drive, sucks to suck. Pay someone to take you or hope you have greyhound where you live.
I could go on, but you get the point.
The intention is to make it hard to register to vote. Imagine if you are going through a hard time in your life and you forget to check your mail or forget to register, then you just can’t vote.
It’s hard for me to believe that there are a lot of illegal voters. If you illegally voted you will not be granted a citizenship so anyone with the intention to be a citizen will not vote illegally.
The solution is to auto-enroll citizens. The government can easily check my citizenship if they wanted to. They can send a ID letter stating take this to the voting booth if you don’t have an ID, but this bill is not going to get passed because the main intent is not to prevent fraud.
According to the article the sort of voter fraud this would prevent isn’t much of an issue at all.
The solution is to auto-enroll citizens. The government can easily check my citizenship if they wanted to. They can send a ID letter stating take this to the voting booth if you don’t have an ID, but this bill is not going to get passed because the main intent is not to prevent fraud.
I wonder if that would cause concern over how secure the mail is. I guess you could put in some additional safeguards on this, where you fill out a web form if you want to get such temporary ID so it’d be a lot harder to use those mailed IDs to cause widespread issues since not every needs it and they’d already know how many have ordered them and so on. But like said, lot of effort to solve, at least of now, a barely existing issue.
