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Comment by aplusbi | Hacker News Reader

I doubt I'm going to change your mind on this, but I think you are under-estimating the difficulty of getting ID in certain parts of the country, for certain people. For example, people living on reservations often have difficulty getting ID because the DMV/other agencies are hundreds of miles away, many lack transportation, many lack the necessary documentation required to get the IDs, some states have put legal hurdles in the way (many homes on reservations don't have legal addresses, for example).

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No doubt there are some specific people who will have difficulties obtaining identification for no justifiable reason. Such barriers to access should be rectified.

However, we are speaking in general rather than specific contrived what-ifs. The vast majority of people have the opportunity to obtain multiple forms of governmental identification that are accessible and affordable.

> No doubt there are some specific people who will have difficulties obtaining identification for no justifiable reason. Such barriers to access should be rectified.

They should be, yet somehow that is never part of the plan in bills that require these IDs. And isn't it curious that the areas where these difficulties are found are almost always correlated with minority demographics? Weird.

Such barriers should be rectified before making ID mandatory. If the response to that is "well then we'll never be able to implement this!" then one should have a period of deep reflection on why that is and its implications.

When it comes to creating systems whose consequences infringe on rights things like "the vast majority" aren't valid escape hatches. This is doubly true when the folks making the rules have political motivation for disenfranchising the very same group who doesn't have IDs in this case. In fact, when such discrepancies are pointed out and then are instituted anyways, such biases functionally become the point of the institution and increases culpability rather than decreases it.

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