Every one of the excuses about how (and the need) to obtain ID are the red herring of this conversation, intended to distract from the fact that states have been verifying identities and holding their elections for 250 years and that Republicans are involved in the election process at every single level that are apparently complicit in these supposed “massive frauds”. They would have people believe the issue is ID and illegal voting, rather than the fact this is an attempt to take control of elections and influence them. They have already started doing shady things, like demanding access to the actual votes despite the entire system being run electronically and re-verified locally under bi-partisan oversight, and that those same states who had US cyber intelligence to assist them in securing their elections prior to Trump reducing that access in order to further his election fraud claims. It doesn’t look good when your own agencies assisted on securing the very thing they are claiming is a fraud.
This is exactly what every despot who nationalized election security did right before their Party magically started winning in every election by “overwhelming popular demand”. What a shock that they are trying to use the same playbook.
It is the responsibility of the state to enact THEIR OWN elections, as was made clear in our constitution. States oversee their elections, primarily away from federal influence. Republicans passed their own laws that they are now using to say requires them to interfere in the state election process; they created the excuse they are using and have, to date, failed to show a single shred of evidence of any real systemic issue outside of a potentially 0.001% who MIGHT have voted illegally (based on the few cases they tried to use, often paperwork errors). If fact, the most obvious acts of election interference have been consistently Republicans. They are the ones who put out fake ballot boxes in states. They were the ones caught trying to tamper in order to “prove there was fraud”. They have been inside the house the whole time, so to speak.
Claiming this is a need to identify voters, which literally every state does, is just the BS people try to use to ignore the truth; that there is nothing wrong with the elections they are trying to steal. All of the ways people claim that can be used to get an ID … are LITERALLY the ways states verify voters when they don’t have an ID…
Republicans just haven’t understood yet that his claims mean THEY are complicit and have been supporting fraud — an accusation I think they would probably take issue with if they understood the real claim. Instead, they listen to news from organizations that literally argue that their news is “entertainment” and therefore not intended to be “truthful”. The party has become a disgraced shell of itself, co-opted by the Tea Party-incarnate MAGA who for years have left Conservative values behind in their attempt to remake the constitution in their own view in order to exclude dissenting voices.