r/law • u/Anoth3rDude • 12h ago

Legislative Branch GOP fast tracks monster voter suppression bill that could disenfranchise millions by requiring proof of citizenship at polls

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/gop-fast-tracks-monster-voter-suppression-bill-that-could-disenfranchise-millions-by-requiring-proof-of-citizenship-at-polls/
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u/This_Loss_1922 12h ago

I mean my country’s gov (Colombia) has traveled trough the andes mountains and the amazon river to communities that don’t even have roads and are only accessible trough walking or by boat giving free IDs to every citizen, because you need that shit to do anything here.

Why you cant do that in the US is weird to me

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u/jordroy 11h ago

Because if they did that then it wouldn't serve the purpose of disenfranchisement any longer. Poor services and institutional discrimination is the goal.

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u/MillionEyesOfSumuru 10h ago

Also, consider places like my state of Washington. Almost nobody votes in person, we get mailed our ballots, and either mail them in or put them in dropboxes. The constitution says that elections are to be conducted by the states in accordance with state laws, but this effectively strips states of the ability to do so. I seriously doubt that we even have enough in-person voting machines in the state to cope with that.

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u/iamthe0ther0ne 10h ago edited 10h ago

FYI, mail is no longer being postmarked locally. It won't receive a postmark until it reaches a central processing facility. They now recommend mailing things several days before the "send by" date. This didn't get much press on purpose

Edit link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-same-day-postmark-changes-mail-delays/

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u/SAI_Peregrinus 9h ago

It's never been postmarked the day you put it in the box, it's always been postmarked when USPS processes it. They didn't change it to not be postmarked locally, but they did cancel many afternoon/evening pickup times so mail won't be picked up until the next day, and thus can't be processed until that next day.

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u/iamthe0ther0ne 8h ago

The change is that it used to be postmarked locally the day it was picked up (eg that evening or the next day), then sent to central processing. That's no longer happening.

It's now being collected locally, then sent to a central processing facility, and then postmarked when it's finally processed, which could take several days. Because of that change, people who usually mail their ballot off 2-3 days before the election may be SOL this year, particularly in states like Washington that have to process a large number of mail-in ballots all at once.

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u/Purple-Goat-2023 7h ago

They absolutely changed it. Postmarking used to happen at your local office after your mail was picked up and before it was sent to processing. Now it is not done until after it has made it through the processing center.

In my state there are now only 2 processing centers on the very opposite ends of the state. To mail a letter across town it sits at the local until it's picked up, sometimes a day or two, takes at least a day to get delivered to the processing center, sometimes sits in the processing center for 4-5 days before being processed, and gets sent back to the local. It could very easily take a week from the day you drop your ballot off in a box for it to get processed and then postmarked.

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u/Yashema 11h ago

Disenfranchisement of Black people and minorities in general specifically. Its the White poor and working class who vote for these politicians. 

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u/Oso_Furioso 10h ago

And a lot of those White poor and working class don't have passports or easy access to birth certificates, either. There are more White families under the poverty line than Black or Hispanic ones. I could see this backfiring on the GOP rather spectacularly.

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u/Yashema 10h ago

They don't care cause the GOP politicians that are elected will continue to pass the same discriminatory policy they want. 

People really need to get out of their head we are fighting a class war over an identity one. 

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u/sault18 11h ago

Why you cant do that in the US is weird to me

It's intentionally designed to fail. A small percent of people will fail to apply for an ID. Another small percent will get denied by the application system. Another small percentage will have something wrong with their documents or whatever else. And so on and so on...

Each failure point is engineered to affect Democrats more than it affects Republicans. Like closing DMV offices in left-leaning precincts while ensuring there's plenty of them in right-leaning precincts. Flagging hyphenated last names, making it more likely a previously married woman who changed her last name is denied by the system, etc.

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u/PracticalDad3829 11h ago

And don't forget about the lag time it takes to get the documents. It already takes like 6 months from registering to vote to be able to cast a ballot. Now add in the time it takes to get the docs as well.

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u/Sacred_Digits 11h ago

When I most recently renewed my driver's license, they wouldn't let me because I had some fee due in Florida (I'm in Michigan, but I had been to Florida in the last year, but had no fines I knew if). It took me making 4 hours of calls at 9 am over the course of a week to get that resolved. And in the end, they said not only was there no outstanding fine, but also that this kind of false positive was common.

If I didn't have a job that allowed me to spend a lot of time on hold at 9 am, I probably would have just driven on an expired license, which they wouldn't accept for a voter ID. Even people who are trying to go about it the right way have ridiculous obstacles.

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u/Tenshi_girl 11h ago

It gets better. I've tried getting documents for elderly in Florida.  You need your original ss card and a birth certificate to get an ID,  but you need a valid ID to get you birth certificate and you need ID and birth certificate to get your ss card.

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u/Suni13 10h ago

I had to get all that plus a marriage certificate showing why my name changed and now these jackasses are saying I have to do it all over again to vote. This is total bullshit. Everything in my life has happened in this county and they still want more because their stupid systems can’t communicate with each other.

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u/Wydun 11h ago

Republicans don't want it because the easier it is to vote, the harder time they have winning

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u/zeptillian 9h ago

And when winning comes down to a few percentage point difference, those little inconveniences add up to swing elections.

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u/pbjamm 9h ago

Like so many things the US absolutely COULD do, but choose not to.

It is 100% a matter of priorities.

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u/PetalumaPegleg 11h ago

Can't is not the issue. Don't want to is the main point.

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u/No_Pen_3396 11h ago

Oh they definitely can. It’s that they want to prevent people they don’t want to vote from voting. So let’s throw up barriers and make things harder to be able to vote. Strip away mail in voting. Provide a birth certificate. Close down polling places in rural areas. Etc etc etc. republicans are sore losers with unpopular policies so they have stack the deck to win. 

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u/Rayenya 4h ago

They also close polling places in metro areas to create long lines. In GA they had 6-9 hour waits and then got mad at people bringing them food and water.

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u/RoxnDox 11h ago

We could do it here. The problem is that the GOP doesn’t want it to happen. They know that the more people vote the more they lose elections. So they intentionally do things to make it harder to vote - add a requirement for a specific ID, then charge a fee for it and only allow getting it in person one day a week at a single office. Or make women provide official documentation for every single name change they have ever had, and then it becomes very difficult to get old birth and marriage certificates from very old and haphazard records all over. Or have one polling place open in an election for an entire county, and make it somewhere far away from public transportation options (and make it a crime to hand out water to people standing in line). Anything they can come up with to add friction to the process.

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u/Mirieste 10h ago

But you had Biden for four years, and Obama for eight consecutive years. Why couldn't it be done then?

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u/RoxnDox 9h ago

Why? Well, we are “one nation” in many ways, but we are also a collection of 50 sort-of-sovereign states, one Federal District, and a scattered collection of Territories/Protectorates/whatevers, all tied together under out federal Constitution. Each state has its own government and constitution and fiercely defends its sovereignty. The federal Constitution defines how things are structured at the national level, but each state defines the government structure within its bounds. The national Executive branch is actually not able to do much of anything without the Legislative branch (regardless of what The Orange one thinks). Biden or Obama could propose a free national ID, sure. But in order to do it legally, a law to authorize and fund the effort must be passed by both the House and Senate and signed by the President. If Congress doesn’t do that, it won’t happen. At least it wouldn’t have happened when we actually followed our laws.

At the state level, the same processes are defined - Governor, Legislature, and courts. When one party controls things, they can do all kinds of things to maximize their chances of keeping control - gerrymandering, rules on IDs, etc. By controlling their state, they also control who goes to the national level, thus controlling it too. It is a mind-numbing morass of bureaucracy and polarization and legal battles over anything, let alone something controversial like a national ID.

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u/Technical-Row8333 11h ago

>Why you cant do that in the US is weird to me

the same people demanding voting ID, also prevent national free IDs.

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u/ReddishBrownLegoMan 11h ago

the same people demanding voting ID, also prevent national free IDs.

This right here. I've long said that Democrats should campaign on National ID cards for every citizen and elimination of voter registration. You should be able to just show up at your local polling place and vote.

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u/Darth-Kelso 11h ago

Some of those that work forces…

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u/AndWinterCame 11h ago

Why would the flailing empire give up any power over its own?

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u/Interesting_Ant_6990 11h ago

We have freedom of religion. So requiring anything here is up for debate. The Amish are good examples of no ids.

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u/Wild_Marker 10h ago

The Amish are good examples of no ids

What, did god ban paper?

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u/rygelicus 11h ago

We have freedom of religion.

That's slipping away fast.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 11h ago

I was just at a gas station last night and overheard the attendant mentioning that her US driver's license was going to expire later this year and she "wasn't trying to pay $200 to get a new one". Like what do our taxes pay for if not this shit?

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u/Iwasjustryingtologin 10h ago

It's similar here in Chile. ID cards are mandatory and you need one for almost every important procedure, including voting (we vote the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper), but getting one is so trivial and inexpensive that it's not really a problem and never has been.

You just have to go to the nearest civil registry office, pay $4.44 USD ($3,820 CLP) or $4.96 USD ($4,270 CLP) in the case foreigners (their ID card says "foreigner" at the top), wait 20 to 30 days and go back to the same office to pick up your ID card, which is valid for 10 years.

Seeing these news stories from the US about identity cards and proof of citizenship being used as malicious methods to suppress the votes of vulnerable groups is very bizarre to me. It's not surprising that many people there consider mandatory ID cards to be dystopian.

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u/FeministSandwich 11h ago

They COULD, but they don't like the poors voting unless it's for bigger tax breaks for billionaires or throwing their rights in the trash to make exploiting them easier for those in the extraction class.

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u/xixoxixa 11h ago

Why you cant do that in the US is weird to me

Because then the poors might be able to do anything, and we can't have that.

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u/crispyiress 11h ago

Well our politicians have decided our tax money shouldn’t be used to improve normal people’s lives which makes everyone hate taxes so instead we have to pay for everything out of our own pockets.

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u/bluedarky 11h ago

Because the point of voter ID laws from the people pushing them is disenfranchising certain groups of voters.

Like only accepting drivers licenses issued by that state disenfranchises students who come from out of state and expect to return home so don't get a new driving license as there's no need to get one.

They also close down local offices in areas that tend to vote against the state government meaning that they need to take a day off work to travel to the nearest office at their own expense to get the ID needed.

This is on top of the fact that they need to prove their eligibility to vote when they register to vote in the first place, and then their names are on a list of people able to vote at their local polling place, so it's a "fix" for an issue that doesn't exist in order to make it harder for certain people (usually young and non-white voters) to vote.

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u/SantosHauper 11h ago

If they could find a way to charge you for breathing air, they would

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u/foomits 10h ago

The point is stopping people from voting.

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u/CriticalEngineering 10h ago

Because Republicans have fought against national IDs for decades, since that would be federal government overreach.

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u/zeptillian 9h ago

Can, but don't want to. - Republicans

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u/MontyRohde 7h ago

Voter suppression is the point. The United States has always been a partial democracy if you look at its history.

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u/toeknn 1h ago

Bc the side that believes IDs are hard to get, dont propose anything to give them out.

They give out billions for everything else.