I've been voting in Michigan for 20 years and I have always had to show ID which is then matched up to the little card I filled out beforehand and checked against a list of registered voters in a binder. If I just walked into a different precinct and said, "Um yeah, I don't have my ID with me but I'm (insert name) and I need to vote." I would not be allowed to vote as far as I know. Do other states actually allow this?
the question is not "why wouldn't you be required to identify yourself?", the question is "why is it that a concealed weapons permit is a more valid form of ID than a state issued school ID or passport?"
i don't know of any state where you are not required to prove you live in the precinct you're voting in, at least as far as registering to vote goes. once you are registered, it's incredibly difficult to impersonate someone else and vote as them. the vast majority of the ID laws that have been passed are designed by nature to suppress the votes of minorities and students for the sole purpose of preventing democratic-leaning voters from reaching the polls. from Pennsylvania, to North Carolina, to Georgia, to Texas and Wisconsin, a republican has made a statement to the effect that these laws are going to deliver votes to allow republican candidates to win, or that the law is going to keep "the wrong people" from voting (i.e. typically blacks and students). the idea that there is some sort of fraud to be prevented is a farce to give the law a neutral cover that allows republicans to conceal the true agenda of suppressing the democratic vote.
You still have not explained how blacks and students are disproportionately affected by the laws, unless one presumes criminality on their parts. This is the typical leftist argument for all sorts of things. People want to outlaw a justifiably illegal activity or actually enforce the laws that make it illegal, and liberals run around shrieking that it's racist because blacks violate that law in disproportionate numbers. Yes, but is the activity wrong or harmful to society? Liberals scream to the heavens about the evils of guns, the correlation between guns and crime and the necessity of "getting guns off the streets" and when a policy is put in place to search people for guns in high crime areas, they flip out because the people being searched are black. Drugs are supposed to be bad, and when a worse drug is given higher penalties, that is in accordance with the mindset by which they are criminalized in the first place...until it turns out that more blacks use the worse drug, and suddenly drug laws are racist, because stiffer punishments are given to the drug of choice for blacks.
I have not seen any serious arguments that, or explanations how, voter ID laws are going to fall more heavily on blacks than on whites. You might contend that such laws are being applied in places where there are more black voters, but those also tend to be higher crime areas, and also tend to feature suspiciously one-sided bloc voting. I am not aware of any societal trends or stereotypes by which blacks would be less likely to have valid identification or greater tendencies to engage in attempted voter fraud. Aside from unsubstantiated leftwing conspiracy theories about voting machines, the majority of known election fraud has long been a Democratic pastime, from Tammany Hall to Richard Daley & LBJ, to Al Gore's recount tactics.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
- 06/11/2014 03:14:02 PM
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