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Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

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Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#41

Post by goodSteveramos »

amluto wrote: post #37

> A national database linking all driver’s licenses would effectively impose something alien to our system of civil liberties: a national ID card. This whole premise is a bit bizarre. We have national databases. We have the IRS’s tax database, social security, and Medicare. We have the selective service database. We have whatever database CBP uses to track anyone who has ever been known to cross a border. We also hav…

if we tied the creation of a national database to the abolishment of the private ones congress would abandon the national one immediately

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#42

Post by kelseyfrog »

chrisco255 wrote: post #34
nerdbert wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about suppressing votes of marginalized citizens who have limited access to government bureaucratic procedures due to time, location, language, or other constraints, many of which have been constructed deliberately or with knowing negligence.

This is a neat narrative, but there are tens of thousands of DMV locations all over the country. Appointments can be booked ahead of time to minimize time impact. It only needs to be done once every few years. Documentation is available in English and Spanish. That being said, to participate in civics in the U.S. you need to know some English. It's part of the citizenship test, and the laws are written in English.

The reality is that ID card holding rates correlate with race, income, and age[1][2][3] in a way that those advocating for ID requirements benefit from. When the consequences of such a system result in race, age, and income disparities, the purpose of such a system is, functionally, to disenfranchise on race, age, and income.

The fact is that there are millions[4] more, black, brown, hispanic, young, and poor people without than there are white, old, and rich people. Claiming that people can get IDs is a far step from realizing the logistical implications of such a claim. And why would someone? The point is that they won't, that in elections where tens or hundreds of thousands of votes decide the outcome, millions of people won't be able to vote and their inability will be individualized and trivialized into, "If it was important for them to vote, then they would have gotten IDs," while disavowing the discussion we're having right now - the one where the consequences of such system-building is being laid out.

It sounds like what you want to say is that you think it's more fair that people with IDs should play a greater role in elections than those who don't because they have more skin in the game, they've done more things right, and they contribute more to society, but you know that isn't exactly ok to say.

1. https://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERI...

2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X18810012

3. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...

4. in raw numbers as well as disproportionatly

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#43

Post by subharmonicon »

chrisco255 wrote: post #34
nerdbert wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about suppressing votes of marginalized citizens who have limited access to government bureaucratic procedures due to time, location, language, or other constraints, many of which have been constructed deliberately or with knowing negligence.

This is a neat narrative, but there are tens of thousands of DMV locations all over the country. Appointments can be booked ahead of time to minimize time impact. It only needs to be done once every few years. Documentation is available in English and Spanish. That being said, to participate in civics in the U.S. you need to know some English. It's part of the citizenship test, and the laws are written in English.

You don't seem to be considering a variety of important factors here:

- Unhoused individuals who have the right to vote are unable to afford to pay for ID

- Contrary to what you're saying, in some places it's multiple hours drive to find a DMV that's open on a weekend (which might be required for someone working a 9-5 job)

- Even if you can go on a weekday, in some places you have to go across multiple counties to get to a DMV. If you don't have a car and need to take a bus, that can mean spending most of the day on the bus to get to the DMV, which may mean you cannot get back home the same day. This is a reality for some people, and those people won't necessarily be able to rely on a friend to drive them (see the above about people working 9-5), and don't have money to spend on a Taxi/Uber/Lyft.

- Some people lack documentation required to get a state ID or driver's license. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but previous homelessness is one. It can be expensive and time consuming to fix that issue in some cases.

Thus far I've not seen any politician pushing for strict voter ID laws also willing to fund ensuring that everyone who is entitled to vote is provided with a proper ID if needed, and until that changes you're going to see people pushing back on those laws.

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#44

Post by prmph »

km3r wrote: post #40
prmph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false a equivalence. Immigrants do not not use private resources that belong personally to citizens. They consume public resources, paid for by taxes. So long as they also pay taxes, they are entitled to the use of those resources.

So I can walk into your house as long as I start chipping in for rent and buy some of the groceries myself?

Your house belongs to you. The earth, or portions thereof, does not exclusively belong to a group of people just because they happened to live there currently.

In any case, in many of these countries ( including the US) where people are rabidly advocating for curbs on movement, the majority of the population brutally displaced people who had lived there for thousands of years. By your own logic they have been breaking the law for a long time.

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#45

Post by lern_too_spel »

chunk_waffle wrote: post #21
uberman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I understand your pain. I once worked on a team building a product for a multi billion silicon valley company only to have to project cancelled on the very evening before launch. It sucked and I felt cheated. It took a long time for me to realize that I had been paid to do what I did and they choose to throw the work away, but it was theirs to discard. With respect to Real ID, it is a stupid program and should…

> It is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to stick a scarlet letter on immigrants. I completely disagree, otherwise I wouldn't have worked on the program at all. > every legal immigrant and likely many illegal immigrants already have documents like green cards and passports they can use rather to fly. This is true, legal immigrants can still fly. It does add more friction to some illegal immigrants and I don'…

> I don't think the requirements for obtaining a REAL ID are overwhelming for legal citizens and immigrants.

Maybe the computer systems are well-thought out and efficient, but what you're missing is that DMVs are terribly time-wasting, and nobody wants to go to one until it's absolutely necessary. Until the federal government makes it a priority to clean up customer-facing bureaucracies at all levels of government they interact with, these sorts of migrations will remain quagmires.

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#46

Post by rolenthedeep »

adamrezich wrote: post #20
rolenthedeep wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I had just assumed it was a voter suppression measure

what is wrong with "suppressing" votes of non-citizens?

It's not about non-citizens, as they generally don't have the right to vote in federal elections simply because they are not citizens.

It's about disenfranchising poor and non-white people. In the Jim Crow era they used reading tests or guessing the number of buttons in a jar, now they're implementing strict ID requirements that are expensive or time consuming to meet.

I'm no expert on this topic, but the general gist is that poor people generally have a harder time getting free time off work when the county clerk is open, transport is often difficult because there are only so many locations, and the documents themselves can be expensive. If you don't have all the supporting documentation they require, you can't get the ID card even if you have other legal identification.

The goal is to make it much more difficult to vote so that people trapped in poverty can't afford the time or cost to get the papers required to vote.

Making it harder to vote causes overall voter numbers to drop. Less-polarized people will tend to be apathetic and think voting isn't worth the extra effort, while polarized fox News nuts will do anything they can to vote out the other guy.

Which is all to say our electoral system is broken, first past the post voting is objectively bad, and we desperately need broad voting reform to eliminate the two party system. I doubt it'll happen in my lifetime though.

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#47

Post by scotty79 »

goodSteveramos wrote: post #41
amluto wrote: post #37

> A national database linking all driver’s licenses would effectively impose something alien to our system of civil liberties: a national ID card. This whole premise is a bit bizarre. We have national databases. We have the IRS’s tax database, social security, and Medicare. We have the selective service database. We have whatever database CBP uses to track anyone who has ever been known to cross a border. We also hav…

if we tied the creation of a national database to the abolishment of the private ones congress would abandon the national one immediately

Isn't it what happening right now? USA unlike any other first world (or even second world) country doesn't have national ID.

When USA differs in any aspect from the rest of the civilized world there's usually money involved. Heaps of it.

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#48

Post by goodSteveramos »

scotty79 wrote: post #47
goodSteveramos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we tied the creation of a national database to the abolishment of the private ones congress would abandon the national one immediately

Isn't it what happening right now? USA unlike any other first world (or even second world) country doesn't have national ID. When USA differs in any aspect from the rest of the civilized world there's usually money involved. Heaps of it.

Absolutely not. The National ID system is not replacing Experian and other privately owned and highly invasive databases on Americans.

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#49

Post by [deleted] »

_-david-_ wrote: post #31
rhaway84773 wrote: post #10

> “The day would not be far off,” wrote cybersecurity and surveillance expert Jim Harper, a former congressional committee counsel and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, “when a national ID is required for picking up prescriptions, purchasing guns and ammunition, paying by credit card, booking air travel, and reserving hotel stays, to name just a few types of transactions the federal government might regulate.” Aga…

>The argument appears to be that an ID issues by a state government is ok, but if it’s issued by the federal government that’s somehow, philosophically an overreach of power. That is easy. The federal government is only allowed to do what is granted to it in the Constitution (enumerated powers). IDs are never mentioned so the federal government doesn't have the authority.

[deleted]

Re: Real ID was a real mistake and Congress should scrap it at last

#50

Post by adamrezich »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #42
chrisco255 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a neat narrative, but there are tens of thousands of DMV locations all over the country. Appointments can be booked ahead of time to minimize time impact. It only needs to be done once every few years. Documentation is available in English and Spanish. That being said, to participate in civics in the U.S. you need to know some English. It's part of the citizenship test, and the laws are written in English.

The reality is that ID card holding rates correlate with race, income, and age[1][2][3] in a way that those advocating for ID requirements benefit from. When the consequences of such a system result in race, age, and income disparities, the purpose of such a system is, functionally, to disenfranchise on race, age, and income. The fact is that there are millions[4] more, black, brown, hispanic, young, and poor people…

why is it that, in discussions like these, nobody ever wants to try to solve any able-to-get-ID disparities that may or may not exist, instead choosing to always assume it's an inherent, intractable issue?
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