The GOP’s sweeping new anti-voting bill cleared the U.S. House Wednesday, setting up a high-stakes battle in the Senate.
The House voted 218-213 to pass the SAVE America Act, which experts have said could disenfranchise millions by requiring voters to show documentary proof of citizenship at registration and to provide photo ID when they cast ballots.
Republicans have argued for voter ID broadly, pointing out that there isn’t much to prevent a noncitizen from casting a ballot in a federal election — besides the fact that it’s a felony, easily caught, and would lead to deportation all for the chance to cast one out of hundreds of thousands of votes.
That’s just wild from my perspective. In here pretty much everything works with your SSN and some way you can prove it’s yours. Healthcare, pensions, schools/education in general, taxes, benefits and nearly all publicly funded things require that you can prove you are who you claim to be. Hell, I can’t even get certain type of packages out of the post office without a valid ID.
Sure, there’s some burecrautic annoyance to actually get valid ID card or passport, but compared on what you’re saying it’s walk in the park. Last time I renewed mine it was enough to submit application for it digitally and then visit a police station to actually confirm my identity for that application, but in total with traveling it took 2-3 hours.
And also I can verify my identity online pretty easily either via my bank credentials or with a phone service. For me and a lot of other people it’s really convenient, but obviously in here we also have people who can’t (or won’t learn to) use all the new tech so for them some things have gotten more difficult.
A fun side-note is that today my driving license actually doesn’t qualify as valid identification. On some cases it’s still enough and it used to be as good as actual ID card but with a ton of EU drivers licenses from other countries around it’s not ‘strong’ enough identification anymore.
The United States works a lot more like the EU than any individual country. Each state has its own politics and leadership. Some states try to make things easier, some try to make things harder, and it can all flip from one election to another. It makes it very hard to make any kind of progress. A passport would work as ID just about anywhere, but less than half of Americans have one. I don’t (and I’ve been out of the country a couple times).