[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by Dutch

The USA has required 10.8 million people to show photo ID since Obamacare was passed and nobody said a word.

Except:

1) You're making some awful big assumptions about the socioeconomic status of those 10.8 million people. Many of those folks are going to be people engaged in upward or lateral mobility; maybe they're moving to a position of greater responsibility with another company, or maybe they're changing jobs in a lateral way that satisfies some other requirement, such as perhaps enabling them to work from home, or commute less, or whatever. Many of those jobs are going to be out of reach of the very people who are affected by these voter ID laws. If you lack access to regular transportation, if you're only a high school graduate (or worse), if you live in communities which haven't enjoyed the same economic resurgence as the rest of the country, you're probably not one of those eleven million. And if you're not, voter ID is still a pain in your ass if you want to participate in the Republic.

2) That's also disingenuous as fuck. ACA was signed into law in March of 2010, four years and nine months ago. That means somebody who gained employment - burger flipper, retail wage slave, what-have-you - at the age of 17 could still be in that same job. It's not unreasonable. I worked for Best Buy for nearly 11 years - more than 2x that duration - and I was in a much better place, economically, than the affected. Yeah, I lacked a degree at the time, but I had transportation, I lived with my parents, who are reasonably well-off, and I'd been in a position to have a reason to get my driver's license at 16. I would not have been affected by these laws. That doesn't make them right.

But back to the point I was in the process of making; at 17, you can satisfy the I-9 requirements with a report card and your Social Security card. Neither of those documents are going to be sufficient to register to vote. In Wisconsin, if the voter ID law is ultimately upheld, a prospective registrant seeking to gain an ID so as to be able to vote would need a birth certificate, proof of WI residency (probably an electric bill or somesuch), proof of US citizenship (presumably that pertains to citizens not natural-born) and a Social Security card. So, yeah. It is entirely possible to have entered the workforce at 17, the day after ACA passed, and still never have had to show photo ID for employment purposes.

Of course, that's ignoring the fact that those affected may be unemployed (given the socioeconomic class affected in the first damn place, I'd say that's actually more likely than not) or working under the table.

Once again, and I say this despite the knowledge that you have your ears closed on this issue, Dutch: the voter ID laws passed have been with the explicit intent not of reducing voter fraud, but of suppressing the Democratic voter base. If voter fraud is the sole intent of these bills, there's no need to end same-day registration (those ballots have always been provisional and are not counted unless the registrant's identity is verified), to roll back early voting hours, or any of the other concomitant measures the Republican Party has taken when passing these bills. It is completely and entirely about erecting roadblocks to voting for people who don't vote Republican, and cloaking it in the mantle of "reducing voter fraud" to get the support of their base and independents who go "well, gosh, who wouldn't want to reduce voter fraud?"

Except, functionally speaking, it's a myth. Texas' Governor-elect, Greg Abbott, went hunting for voter fraud in 2005 in Texas. He found about two dozen cases worthy of prosecution. Most of them were not preventable with ID, but were rather cases of people who helped the elderly with mail-in ballots, but did not sign their names on the ballots attesting to that. $1.5 million spent to find an average of 9 cases a year - which, again, ID would not have stopped.

George W. Bush launched a voter fraud investigation following his victory over Al Gore in 2000. By 2007, 86 people had been convicted of voter fraud. Over the 5 year scope of the investigation, that's, what, 19 people per year? Of those 86, 30 or so were convicted in vote-buying schemes for local office, such as sheriff.

That leaves a maximum of 56 convictions in five years for federal-level voter fraud. That includes, offhand, the 121 million ballots cast in 2004 during his re-election campaign against John Kerry.

The sort of election fraud that exists in this country is not, largely, reducible with voter ID laws. The sole purpose of those laws is to make sure the "right" sort of people vote. You know, kind of like literacy tests and poll taxes a century ago.

If it were honestly about concern that massive voter impersonation were taking place, that bill would need two sentences and a table. "An acceptable form of photo or other identification is necessary to cast a ballot for local, state or federal office in _______. Persons who otherwise meet eligibility requirements but lack a proper ID can obtain a free ID for voting purposes from (state agency here)." The table would show the list of acceptable forms of ID, and the requirements necessary to gain the voting-only ID. That would be the end of it, and proponents of voter ID would have a much stronger case that it's about reducing fraud. The more that bill gets packed with riders to do things like end same-day registration, end or reduce early voting, etc, the more manifest it becomes that it's a bill intended to make it harder for likely non-Republican voters to vote.