The simplest one is just selectively closing polling places, or the related practice of requiring local jurisdictions to fund their own elections, which selectively impacts poorer cities or counties. Next comes voter identification laws which selectively target people who are less likely to have government identification cards (black voters are four times more likely to lack both a drivers license and a US passport compared to white voters). Finally you simply throw ballots from the disfavored precincts directly in the trash. County officials can do this in several ways, by not delivering working machines or official ballots to certain precincts, by forcing precincts to vote on provisional ballots that officials have the authority to ignore, and by subjectively discarding mailed ballots because the signature "doesn't match" according to a non-reproducible process.
How about this: if Republicans were pushing voter ID laws plus a comprehensive plan to get IDs to every American who wishes to vote, I suspect no one would have any problem with such a proposal.
As it stands now, there are large groups of Americans for whom getting a photo ID is a non-trivial task. People without birth records, people who can’t take time off work to go to the DMV, people who don’t know that they go to the DMV to get an ID, people who live hours from the nearest DMV, so on and so forth.
Let’s make sure they all get a chance to vote. Any proposal that aims to do that, I believe, would not have the support of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is uninterested in increasing voter turnout.
Provisional ballots avail a lot more leeway for election officials to legally discard ballots compared to mail-in ballots. Its not legally easier to do so with mail-in ballots
I was making the distinction explicit. Illegally discarding ballots is...dicey - all it takes would be a journalist submitting a FOI request to the USPS and comparing the tally against counted votes
Just to be clear I am in favor of providing free IDs and allowing the use of said ID, a driver's license, passport, etc for voting.
You say that no one would have an issue with such a proposal but then list the argument I have heard from multiple people of why this won't work.
How is someone supposed to get an id without going to the DMV or some other government office? The government doesn't have a picture of everyone so people would be required to go into an office to get one. Some people are unable to go in due to the reasons you list.
