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The Center for American Progress reports
As residents of Arizona's eighth congressional district cast ballots in a special election to replace former Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) in Congress, roughly 140,000 of them may be unaware they are eligible to vote because they did not receive the ID card the county is required to send them after they register.
According to the Arizona Republic, Maricopa County officials have not sent all voters the cards they can use to cast a ballot under Arizona's voter ID law because of an issue with the company used to print the materials. The paper reports that just 60,000 ID cards have been mailed to people who recently registered or changed their registration, while about 140,000 have not been sent.
[...] Arizona was one of the first states in the country to enact a non-photo voter ID law when a ballot measure was approved by voters[1] in November 2004. Under the law, the state must take steps to ensure that all eligible voters have an acceptable form of ID. According to the secretary of state's office[PDF], "a county recorder must issue a voter ID card to any new registrant or an existing registrant who updates his or her name, address, or political party preference".
But because of an error by the company used to print the ID cards, they have not been mailed out since December.
Although these citizens could provide other forms of ID at the polls, some voters told the Arizona Republic they're concerned that less informed voters may not realize they are registered without the card.
[...] During the presidential primary in March 2016, some Maricopa County voters waited in line for up to five hours to cast a ballot. The chaos led to an investigation by the Department of Justice and numerous lawsuits, including one filed by the Democratic National Committee.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Arizona was required to pre-clear any changes to its voting law with the DOJ.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 28 2018, @06:18PM (5 children)
> The laws are designed to ensure that people do not vote who are foreign aliens or vote twice
You really believe that? That's just a pretext. It's major overkill for an insignificant to nonexistent problem that was deliberately manufactured and blown way out of proportion to provide the excuse. The way it is implemented is telling. If an item is required to vote, then it should be delivered, free of charge, for everyone. $25 for an ID needed to vote? That's a poll tax! Got to travel to another city because there is no DMV office nearby? Poll tax!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday April 28 2018, @06:53PM (2 children)
Shut. the. fuck. up. with that noise. Requiring a photo ID to vote is not a poll tax. You can't do much of anything without a driver's license (or the ID they issue instead if you can't drive) so asking to see it to vote is not any sort of real burden on a citizen above and beyond the other BS.
Without a government issued ID you can't:
Drive (duh)
Enter most Federal Buildings, including Congress to "petition your government for redress"
Buy an ever growing list of products requiring an age check.
Apply for government benefits, which almost every one of the "poor" the Progs say are being excluded from voting somehow manage to qualify for and get.
Apply for pretty much any job that pays above the minimum wage.
Obtain a passport. (which itself qualifies as "government issued photo ID btw)
Enroll in a college, university or other educational institution.
Participate in most of the "Community Organized" protests against Voter ID. Let that one roll around in yer empty head a moment.
This case is obvious. The Democratic Party is dead set against Voter ID laws because it stops illegals from voting and makes their usual wholesale vote fraud a lot harder to pull off undetected. So in an unimportant special election a Democratic Party local official (and yes I RTFA so I know that) arranged a major cock up in the implementation of a Voter ID law to provide a pretext for the national party to try to get a Federal Judge to cancel them in time for the important mid term elections in the fall.
(Score: 2) by danmars on Monday April 30 2018, @05:49PM (1 child)
Okay, I have a little bit of second-hand experience for you. I know someone, around 50 years old, on social security disability because of various physical problems. Her only ID is a very expired driver's license. She doesn't have a car and has to beg people to bring her places (including the grocery store) and pay them rather significant sums of money considering her subsistence-level income. Who do you suppose is going to bring her to the DMV to get a voter ID? Those are a lot of the people you disenfranchise; people who are physically disabled.
College students. It's not like voting is in the middle of a big school vacation. Voter ID laws often seem specifically tailored to keep college students from voting near their colleges.
Minority groups. A lot of old African-American people do not have proof of their birth because they were not born in hospitals. (I'm stating this based on some podcasts I've listened to, not firsthand knowledge, but I believe it is true.) Proving they are eligible to vote is orders of magnitude more difficult for them.
People who work on weekdays or don't set their own work schedules. I can take some random day off to go to the DMV and the Town/City Hall to update my stuff. I can drive 8 hours to buy a new certified copy of my birth certificate from where I was born because I lost it in one of the times I moved. That's not true for a lot of people.
It starts to look excessively discriminatory that it is really easy for a white working-class adult, who sets their own schedule and can take paid time off to deal with registration, with a valid driver's license and a car, who has a birth certificate they can easily access or replace, who hasn't moved in the last year or four, to vote. We shouldn't be making it 10x as difficult for people outside that group to vote.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday April 30 2018, @07:04PM
So she gets everywhere else, she hypothetically gets to the polls, but getting to the DMV once per decade is too much? Most states don't require you go in every time you know, you can renew online or by mail a time or two before requiring an updated photo. Plus many States have hardship programs which will allow people like her to renew by mail even more times.
Don't believe propaganda, believe common sense. Do you actually think we have a poor person left who isn't suckling one or more government teats? You have to have an ID, even if only the fake ones the illegals all get, to qualify any of it; connect the dots. Every one of those people drove cars at some point, most have owned a car, etc. Most, when younger at least, went to a bar or other venue that "cards" people and they managed to get in. How long have employers been taking a photocopy of their driver's license during their initial paperwork? All of those things require a photo ID / Driver's License.
You are now arguing against driver's licenses, not requiring one to vote, classic subject shifting. But since they can't get or keep a job without an ID... not seeing how demanding they present something they already have to bother getting to vote is an additional burden.
And ultimately, it really is time to ask the bigger question. America was never intended to be a universal franchise Democracy. The only reason our Constitution was considered acceptable was the assurances of the authors that sufficient safeguards against the abomination of Democracy were included. Why are we insisting on endangering the integrity of our elections because of a highly theoretical and unproven risk to some marginal people unlikely to care about anything but more free gibs? Bluntly, a group of voters entirely unlikely to enhance the quality of our society through their votes. I'm a proud member of Students Against a Democratic Society [wordpress.com].
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday April 29 2018, @02:37PM
Its a massive simplification, probably, such that given 50 possible ways to identify, its always possible to find like 25 free ones.
In my state they solved the problem by making ID cards free. For everyone. But, as I previously wrote, its a massive simplification. There's a web site for my state with the detail which are at least two pages printed out, posted at every voting location every time there's a vote, so since there's not much else to do while waiting, I've read it several times and its changed a lot over the last 20 years. In my state you can also use passports, "free" military ID cards including active AND retired IDs (well, they were free when I was in the army a quarter century ago), a certificate of naturalization, various native american tribal documents, higher educational institution ID card (they removed K-12 in the last decades, I used my high school ID the first time I voted a long time ago), "Confidential electors" basically convince a judge to order the muni court clerk to issue permission to vote anonymously and they give you a little form to hand in when you vote. The weirdest restriction is you can use military ID cards to vote, but not federal or state government ID cards to vote.
Abstraction never fixes anything. In that to get a free ID card you need to prove your name and birthday, which takes another states ID card or DL (which probably costs money) or passport (hundred bucks) or birth certificate ($20 in my county). Now to order a copy of your own birth certificate in my county to get that free ID card, you need a government ID (catch 22) or two of: an old fashioned printed out mailed bank statement (micro $), a current signed dated lease, health insurance card (including medicare medicaid or whatever its called), traffic or other muni ticket (some $), a utility bill (not including internet or cell phone), or finally a vehicle registration not including municipal bicycle registrations. So technically its impossible to get a "free" ID card without having at one point in your life having at least minimally participated in society to the level of $5 or so. I don't see that as a serious problem. Note that the card is free in that a copy of your birth certificate is free in perpetuity, my mom ordered a copy of my BC decades ago and I still use it, I think its in my credit union safe deposit box along with other interesting things.
The real problem is the standard left response to increasing voting regulation is it never happens so we should never ever defend against fraudulent votes, which is kind of like saying cute animal species rarely go extinct and nuclear plants rarely melt down so we should actively and aggressively via court orders prevent people from trying to prevent such events solely because they don't happen often. Or take for example, murder by handgun, which as a statistical event is extremely rare, therefore we should do everything in our power to remove all regulation and legal control of it solely because it is a rare event. The left KNOWS the problem is large, therefore intense pressure is put to claim its irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday April 29 2018, @02:50PM
As a side issue "many" (most?, almost all?) states have at least one class A RV that travels the rural areas and for free if available can attend special events for mobile DMV processing. I live like 5 miles from an office and have a car etc so like 95+% of the population its irrelevant to me, but supposedly in extreme rural farm counties where the closest DMV might be 50 miles away there is near continuous mobile DMV presence "somewhere at some times" ranging from county fairs to scheduled stops at the volunteer fire dept parking lot every tuesday at 2pm or whatever. If you want you can cry about the nearest office being 75 miles away but if you'll just wait until the county fair or weekly at the volunteer fire dept on tuesday afternoons then it'll be OK.
Note that as a rhetorical argument nothing short of issuing a warrant to track down everyone without an ID and shooting those who won't accept their ID will solve the problem of taking away the vote from people who insist its possible via infinite effort to express no agency in their lives whatsoever such that they've actively avoided all possible ways to vote. As long as that isn't a capital crime, as it should be, that situation will be used as justification to prevent any sort of voting regulation. Could the unibomber have been forced at gunpoint to register to vote from his hermit cabin, if not, then its restricting voting rights. Can a fleeing felon prison escapee register to vote? no, then that is a voting rights violation. But normal people don't mind.
So it doesn't matter if its easier or harder to vote, its not possible to create a scenario thats 100% and thats all that matters, so frankly trying to appease is a waste of time.