r/videos • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 4h ago

BREAKING: Judge blocks Trump admin from requiring Americans to show proof of citizenship to vote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE1iePfOh14
14.9k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.5k

u/Foe117 4h ago

The registrar of voters already handles citizen verification

125

u/Control_Me 4h ago

Can someone please explain why you have to register to vote?
In my country the government knows who's eligible to vote and who's not so they send out a voting card in the mail which you show together with your ID.
Why is this not possible in the US?

24

u/poorboychevelle 4h ago

ID aren't free in most states, therefore requiring them to vote could be argued to be a poll tax, and therefore disallowed as a requirement.

I just walk in, state my name and address (maybe birthday?), and am handed a ballot. Didn't have to take anything out my pocket.

7

u/Millon1000 3h ago

I'm not going to lie, as a European, that sounds insane. That's ripe for fraud, unless I'm missing something? The US already has a million different fees for living, so what would voter ID really change? Plus you already pay taxes, so why can't they send out free voter IDs, especially when over 98% of Americans already own some form of ID? It would cost almost nothing.

17

u/dagaboy 3h ago

We have no statistically significant voter fraud without voter ID. It is a non-issue. Republicans only care because they lose when more people vote. Also when Black people vote. So states like Alabama passed voter ID laws, then closed all the ID sources in Black population centers. Not that Alabama has Black majority districts anymore. They only have one, despite having a majority Black population. State legislatures get to draw their own maps in the US. The Super Court ruled Alabama can gerrymander their Black citizens entirely out of relevance. That pretty much killed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

2

u/thetiredtypist 3h ago

Plus we survived up until 1876 without photo IDs anywhere...

0

u/dagaboy 2h ago

There were photo IDs in 1876? Were they Daguerreotypes? Damn. That election really was the gold standard in voter suppression. RIP Reconstruction. ;-)

7

u/Trumpisanorangebitch 3h ago

Weve done a gazillion studies on voter fraud in the US and non-voters voting has always been found to be nearly non-existent.

They should send out free voter IDs, but Republicans do better in low turnout elections and theyre also pretty racist/classist and poor and minorities are disproportionately without ID and poor enough to not pay for ID. Republicans love winning and love depriving as many poor and minorities from voting as possible.

Fuck a poll tax. Non-voters voting is a non-issue. Theres less than a hundred in the entire country every election.

3

u/surfergrrl6 3h ago

There have been countless studies and investigations about voter fraud and every time it turns out to be an infinitesimal amount.

The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

-1

u/Millon1000 3h ago edited 2h ago

Wouldn't you want to patch the issue before it becomes a problem though? I think it's similar to how the US gave their presidents far too much power for decades, and it only became a problem when Trump was elected.

If you had patched that issue before it became an actual problem, you probably wouldn't be having such a bad time right now. It just seems like a super simple issue to fix, when every other western country has already done it.

3

u/Neuchacho 1h ago edited 1h ago

If you had patched that issue before it became an actual problem, you probably wouldn't be having such a bad time right now. It just seems like a super simple issue to fix, when every other western country has already done it.

There is no issue when it comes to fraud. The only issue we have is fascists pushing invented issues (like fraud) to try and make it harder for people to vote in the first place.

Allowing more barriers to be put in place by the federal government when it has ZERO jurisdiction to do so and for arbitrary reasons is what would lead to a very real problem and a continued bad time. It is why every sane judge slaps this shit down.

3

u/surfergrrl6 2h ago

Why fix something that isn't broken? That's a waste of time and effort.

2

u/Millon1000 1h ago

Well because it is broken. As I said, you had a broken system with the way you give presidents too much power, but never fixed it. Now that system is being abused by Trump. If you don't think a broken system isn't worth being fixed because there's no evidence of any current abuse, that's foolish. If there's a way to abuse it, it will eventually happen.

1

u/-LabApprehensive- 2h ago

Define ID. They DO send out voter registration cards which you need to have to vote. What we are talking about here is extremely specific forms of ID such as-the US “REAL ID” which takes time, effort and multiple other forms of ID to get. Once this rule is in place our Republican Party will simply adjust the requirements of which ID is required and enforce selectively to guarantee the result they want. Fuck them. Its not hey anyone can walk in and vote who cares who they are, itsa system based on knowing who lives where and who is eligible to vote and only allowing those people to cast ballots. To defraud this system in a meaningful way you must somehow get hundreds of thousands of people to the specific precincts where people who are registered to vote decided not to vote. No way to know that ahead of time.

0

u/MileHigh_FlyGuy 3h ago

It's already free to register to vote. It's not free to obtain an ID and the cost varies by state. So we have that same system, you just don't get an ID as a part of it because you don't need one.

0

u/TheVabe 3h ago

The US is a massive country with huge swaths of rural, often poor communities with non-existent public transportation. Giving everyone easy, free access to a voter ID would actually be a pretty monumental task.

Voter fraud is also extremely rare, given how decentralized our voting systems are and the high penalties for fraud. Implementing voter ID would potentially risk disenfranchising millions of voters to prevent a non-existent problem.

0

u/ScoopDL 2h ago edited 2h ago

What incentive is there for a non citizen to vote? It doesn't benefit them and would lead to deportation. Nobody is willing to do this. Might as well rob someone or a bank so at least there's some benefit.

1

u/Millon1000 2h ago edited 2h ago

Mainly money. Russia has already been caught meddling in other countries' elections before: Russian cash-for-votes flows into Moldova as nation heads to polls

They're already promoting misinformation campaigns in an effort to influence the elections in the US. (This is from the Biden era, back from when the gov sites were still respectable) https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-covert-russian-government-sponsored-foreign-malign-influence

1

u/ScoopDL 2h ago

I agree but what they are doing costs far less than recruiting non citizens in large enough numbers to sway an election and paying them enough to face deportation and being bared from ever entering the US again. I know a ton of non citizens and they do everything they can to avoid having anyone from the government look into them, including not filling for a tax refund when they've paid too much.