Yes we do have government provided ID cards. Your driver’s license (or if you don’t drive there’s a non-driver version that’s just a card). There is no mandate to get one or carry it (except for driving).
We have issues with voter registration because it’s been politicized. Poor people are disproportionately less likely to have ID cards (because it costs money, takes time, and most people get it to drive which is expensive), less likely to have it up to date. It’s disenfranchising to mandate IDs. Whether or not it’s a problem falls down party lines and your favorite statistician’s analysis. But that’s why it’s “an issue”.
South American countries with per capita incomes that sometimes are an order of magnitude smaller than the US managed to have national IDs for free to their entire population, and have required voter IDs for decades.
This is a mind boggling American superstition, it is not reasonable to suppose that the poors in America are so poor that they can’t have access to something the poor in Peru or Paraguay have.
Part of the issue is that you don't need an ID in America for most of your daily life. Most people get it to drive - if you don't have a car (which is actually expensive) then you may not get an ID at all. Yea most people will get an ID, but it's not something people need.
When it comes to the cost of the ID, part of the cost is taking time out of work to sit in a crummy office and fill out paperwork. They require certain proof of identity paperwork that can be hard to get for certain walks of life. Its quite an edge case in society that can't produce a small amount of paperwork to self-identify, of course.
Its a small cohort that truly don't have the resources to get an ID, but there is almost no observed downside to not requiring IDs to vote - American elections are and have been perfectly legitimate (or until 2020, depending on who you ask...). Why would we put up extra barriers to vote when we could just... not?
We have government issues ID cards, but we don’t have free government issued ID cards as far as I know, which is one of the problem with these voter ID laws.
In Austria it is fine to vote without an ID, if the members of the voting committee know you. On the countryside they usually do know their people. It’s mostly minor politicians (from all parties) that are in the voting committee, and they sit there all day to verify the election is not tampered with. And those politicians usually know everybody from their neighborhood.
You need to be on their list though, but you get added automatically by the city to the list. When you move you need to register your new address, so they know that you live there.
In the US the states decide these rules, the federal government just sets limits. So, in my state, I just tell them my address, if I’m registered to vote they’ll have my name in the list, no need to show an ID or anything. They have a list of registered voters, so I guess if multiple people tried to give my name at my address, it would get flagged when the second person showed up. I actually don’t know what the procedure is. I think it almost never happens, at least, I’ve never heard of it happening to anyone.
Individual voter fraud is a silly way to influence an election, you have to get away with it thousands of times to make a dent.
True, but in Europe usually everybody has an ID at some point, because you need it for traveling. And an expired ID also works to prove your identity.
But in theory you could also bring two or more „identity witnesses“ that either have an ID or are known to the people at the voting station, that can vouch for your identity.
Practically it works fine in many areas of the US as well—just, good areas that don’t want to put up hurdles for voters in the first place. But, give an extremism a means to disenfranchise anybody and they’ll go for it
Morally, even if it works out OK, it ought to bug you if you don’t have a cost-free way to vote.
I don't disagree at all to be honest. I don't think voter fraud is an actual concern (if bare mininum measures are taken, like voter registration or even just "checking in" individuals with their adresses), but I think it's weird that it is considered to be such a huge issue in the US when it is actually the norm in most of the world.
Especially since it's usually white people using POCs as almost "noble savages" who can't figure out how to vote, get an ID, or have a drivers license.
I agree and think that some of the “it is just impossible for minorities to get IDs” stuff is, like, uncomfortably low expectations. I think this is sort of condescending and not really helping our case. If you took the average person from a minority community, I happy to believe that they are equally able to get an ID as a person from a majority community.
But in every community there is a range of willingness to deal with bureaucratic annoyances to vote. Adding more hurdles bumps some people from the voter to non-voter bucket. The reason it is a big issue in the US is that we have a well documented history of adding those hurdles selectively in order to suppress votes from particular communities. This is part of a really dark chapter in our history so people have a visceral reaction to it. I mean, since you are Canadian—I guess people would be a little skeptical if someone tried to start a conversation like “Well lots of countries have boarding schools so here’s my plan for education in some underserved communities…,” right?
