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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

ID laws aren't really a debate at this point. The overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of showing some sort of ID to vote as long as said ID is free (i.e. being poor isn't a possible impediment to voting). By 'free', that means free or reasonably free of time as well. People working multiple jobs with children simply don't have time to wait down at the DMV for three hours (if you're lucky) to be able to vote.

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But they are up for debate for all the caveats you’ve listed. I have yet to see any plan that resolves the issue of free as in beer and free as in: people can easily obtain said ID with little to no inconvenience.

All of the politicians pushing for ID laws brush away the whole obtaining an ID thing as an already solved problem… except it very much isn’t. Anyone that had to try to visit the DMV in a large city has likely discovered you’re lucky if it’s only a day-long affair.

What matters is that we're all on the same page. Everyone is generally okay with voting ID requirements as long as they're free and everyone is okay with lower costs/lower time investments to get IDs. The fact of the matter is that state budgets are finite and very few politicians are ever going to choose to fund DMVs over schools or public works. As such, we collectively choose to remain in stalemate until such a time when our DMVs function smoother so that we can make IDs free and then require them to vote.

> little to no inconvenience

Since when has this been the standard? Is anything else inconvenient? Strikes me as a little ridiculous.

Well the objective is to get as many people to vote as possible, so it does make sense to make that as easy as possible.

Oh, well, when you put it that way it makes sense. We can just not authenticate the votes at all then. Then anyone can vote.

That is absurd. That's not the goal. Only citizens can vote, and the votes need to be legitimate.

Is it? Whose objective is that?

It's not the objective of the ruling party in the UK, for example. Quite the opposite...just to get the right people to vote.

Exactly. It should be provided by the US Government to anyone with citizenship, free of charge and at max convenience.

It's well beyond time for a universal federal ID card, which could serve numerous purposes such as voting, general identification, more easily getting a passport, travel, government benefits & programs, and so on. You get one at birth and then update the photo every N years or if you need to change pertinent information. When I was born I got a Social Security card, there's no reason that shouldn't have been a multi-purpose national ID card instead.

Yes, and getting identification is anything but free in most of the US. Often time you may have to pay to get some other documents (birth certificate, SSN card, etc) first to prove your identity. The threshold of proof for getting an ID in some states is pretty high, and only getting higher with the pointless REAL ID initiative.

Many people in the rural US (which is a ton of people) are hours away from a place that will issue identification.

> People working multiple jobs with children simply don't have time to wait down at the DMV for three hours (if you're lucky) to be able to vote.

Malarkey. I just got my first RealID in California last month, and I was in the DMV for around 20 minutes. And this wasn't in some bougie city with a special DMV.

Make a reservation, show up, done.

How nice of you to live in a state that wants people to get an ID and vote, it's not like that everywhere...

Older article but wouldn't be surprised if more states are doing similar things today.

"Many ID-issuing offices maintain limited business hours. For example, the office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is open only on the fifth Wednesday of any month. But only four months in 2012 — February, May, August, and October — have five Wednesdays. In other states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas — many part-time ID-issuing offices are in the rural regions with the highest concentrations of people of color and people in poverty"

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/chal...

>I just got my first RealID in California last month

>Make a reservation, show up, done.

California has already done the work in making voting accessible and it isn't califronia politicans arguing for voter ID laws. California isn't a battleground state and is run by people who have pushed to make voting as seamless as possible. Alabama, after passing voter ID laws, then turned around and made it more difficult for people to obtain IDs. [1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-01/alabama-c...

I got mine in April and it involved standing in line for an hour before being let into the DMV to sit in line inside. It cost something like $50, too. I wouldn't call it convenient.

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