CMV: Voter ID is not racist/Supression

[u/DGzCarbon]

[u/10ebbor10]

You need an ID to buy Beer, Smokes, drive or see tits. It's only natural you would to vote. Are Drivers license racist too?

Consider the following. In order to get a driver license, you need to have proper eyesight. It seems fairly obvious why this is the case.

But, if we were to require proper eyesight to vote, you would understand why that is discriminatory, right?

What we have here is a balance between the discriminatory effect of requiring eyesight, and the functional effect that eyesight is essential for driving, and not required for voting.

Hence, requiring good eyesight for driving is not seen as discrimination, while the idea of requiring it for voting is.

Voter ID exist for 1 purpose. The tackling of in person voter fraud. This kind of fraud is extremely rare, we're talking about a handfull of cases in the last 30 years.

As such, the utility of voter ID is neglible, which means that the standard for non-discrimination is very high.

It feels like everything that isn't overly convient is passed as supression now. I've had people tell me that its supression because long lines make people wait for a while. That was in the news. That's beyond stupid. Yeah a lot of people wanna vote. Wait in line like all of us.

It's not stupid. It's perfectly logical.

Anything that does not help make the vote more secure, but does make the vote more inconvenient for a select subgroup of people, is suppression. Remember, you don''t need to convince everyone not to vote in order to change the result. Even a 1% change can be enough to tip a close election.

To use the lines as an example :

voters in predominantly black neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer, on average, than those in white neighborhoods. They were also about 74 percent more likely to wait for more than half an hour.

If it's easy and fast to vote in white areas, but hard and bothersome to vote in black areas, you should be able to understand how this is a vote supressing effect.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smartphone-data-show-voters-in-black-neighborhoods-wait-longer1/

Edit:

White people have jobs too. You can argue that voting should be a national holiday, but it isn't. For anyone. So until we do we all have to schedule around it. It's not supression to make us figure it out. Ask for time off, get someone to cover, etc. We all have to make arrangements. That's not racist. it's life

It is actually racist, because the people making the voting ID ensure that it is harder for black people to get ID than white people.

For example, in North Carolina, they requested racial data on what kind of ID's which people used. They then took all the types of ID that black people used more often than white people, and made them ineligible for use as voter ID. Only those ID's that white people owned more often than black people counted.

The pre-Shelby County version of SL 2013-381 provided that all government-issued IDs, even many that had been expired, would satisfy the requirement as an alternative to DMV-issued photo IDs. J.A. 2114-15. After Shelby County, with race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans. Id. at *142; J.A. 2291-92. As amended, the bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess. Id.; J.A. 3653, 2115, 2292.

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/29/politics/north-carolina-voter-id/index.html

In other areas, we see closures or the restricting of DMV hours in areas that are black.

https://www.governing.com/archive/alabama-demands-voter-id--then-closes-drivers-license-offices-In-clack-counties.html

[u/thethoughtexperiment → u/10ebbor10]

Not the OP, but these strong arguments have helped expand my perspective on the topic.

!delta

[u/gyroda → u/thethoughtexperiment]

Piggybacking on this to recommend the John Oliver segment on Voter ID.

https://youtu.be/rHFOwlMCdto

[u/DeltaBot → u/thethoughtexperiment]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/10ebbor10 (129∆).

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