Voter ID generally isn't supposed to be proof of residence, its proof of identity; it exists to prove that the voter is the person registered, not that the registered person is authorized to vote.
Most IDs acceptable for voting do not prove authorization (or even “authorization but for the potential of disqualification by felony”), so not accepting college ID because it doesn't prove authorization to vote is...not well justified, even in the public logic of voter ID.
Of course, voter ID proponents have let out the private partisan internal logic lots of times when they thought only people aligned with their faction were listening, so we don't need to speculate why the rules are inconsistent with the public logic.
That's not true, at least in Michigan. A driver's license or state ID card is acceptable ID, and it does not provide proof of citizenship. A passport is also acceptable, and it does not provide proof of residency. Voter ID simply establishes identity. Eligibility is established at the time of voter registration.
> to establish a residency for tax purposes. Otherwise, you can get dinged for taxes from multiple states.
These are all significant factors in a tax residency analysis but not the only ones.
If you find yourself facing a question over tax residency, factors like where you spent your time, where you have residences, where your job is located, where your service providers (doctors, lawyers, etc.) are all
For example, if you rent an apartment, have a driver's license and are registered to vote in Nevada, but you own a large house in California, spend most of the year there, and your most substantial professional and personal dealings are in California, good luck defending your Nevada tax residency claim if the FTB comes knocking.
> Voter ID generally isn't supposed to be proof of residence, its proof of identity
Super convenient if you would like to vote a few dozen times in different places, I'm sure, but that's not what it's "supposed to be" at all. I want people voting exactly once, and _only_ where they are residents, and _only_ if they are US citizens. That's the law.
I'd be less concerned about people double voting and very concerned about large institutions pulling strings to have polling places locally enough
It's not hard to imagine how a rural university or large manufacturing facility could sway things in state level elections if a ton of people went across the street to vote on lunch break rather then went home and voted at home after work/school thereby changing what district they vote in.
What keeps these hypothetical people from just fraudulently getting a second state's driving license while they're already fraudulently registering to vote?
There are shared databases of drivers licenses across states, so you're going to have a hard time getting a new license without handing in your old one from your previous state.
You have to prove residency (electric bill or something) and they invalidate your former driver’s license so you can’t do something like just hop across the border and get a new license because you lost your last one for whatever reason.
Who is they? Because drivers licenses are issues by the State, not by a federal entity. Also, I didn't prove my address with an electric bill or anything when I got my license. They asked me where I lived, I told them. I could have easily lied, and still gotten my license.
How would you? You register separately and during that process they check your residency. If you aren't registered to vote in another district then when you show up to vote you won't be on the rolls.
When you show up to vote in a non-voter-id state, you only have to give your name. Any one could have shown up in my place and voted in my name, because no ID was allowed to be show. This was made more apparent when I reached for my wallet instinctively as I gave my name, and they gestured with hands out that "we don't check for ID".
Sure. But this is completely independent of the discussion above, which is about voting in multiple locations despite showing proof of identity. What the poster wants is to provide both proof of identity and proof of residency at the polling place.
People sign when they vote and signatures can be matched against registrations. When we examine this, we don't find a large number of people performing voter impersonation.
I don't know why a ID requirement would change that, as you don't update IDs every year. If I managed to get registered in multiple locations then voting with a freaking passport wouldn't stop me from voting at both locations.
But since voting records are public, this would be trivially detectable.
A driver's license isn't proof of residence, as you might have moved since you got it. When you register to vote you need to prove you have the right to. When you show up at the polls, you need to prove you're the person who registered. ID is one way. Another is by signature, does your signature match the one you used when you registered. A third is that the poll workers know you by sight, which used to be common in small towns.
People voting multiple times isn't really a risk, because it's incredibly stupid. It's a felony, so if you get caught, you go to jail. But if you get away with it, you've flipped one vote, and even a very close election isn't going to be settled by a couple of votes.
There were a very small handful of people who got caught voting twice in the 2020 election, or casting someone else's ballot: two or three in Georgia and in Pennsylvania. Most voted twice for Trump.
> A driver's license isn't proof of residence, as you might have moved since you got it.
Slightly tangential, but you are required by law to get a new license when you move to a new state. And the DMV will take your old license when they give you the new one. You can move around within a state and have a stale address on your license pretty easily, though.
You can retain an old, out of state drivers license just as easily under an old in-state one in oractice, and legally you are usually required to change your address on your in-state license at least as soon after a change in in-state residential address as you are required to get an in-state license when establishing residency.
Of course, voter ID opponents have let out the private partisan internal logic lots of times when they thought only people aligned with their faction were listening, so we don't need to speculate why the rules are inconsistent with the public logic.
> Of course, voter ID proponents have let out the private partisan internal logic lots of times when they thought only people aligned with their faction were listening
etc etc, this is just what immediately came up in the last year. Among "the right sorts" they'll occasionally get complacent admit it's all about partisan advantage and not actually about fraud at all.
Without looking at the transcript, I would assume that the context of the discussion at the Supreme Court was standing. At best his point only lays bare the intrinsic unseemliness of quasi-institutionalized party politics. I could easily see Democrats make the same point in other cases, and I'm sure they have.
The Chairman of the Arizona's Gov't and Elections Committee is simply expressing what has been a common conservative sentiment for ages--that voting is a responsibility, not just a privilege, and one that shouldn't be exercised lightly. Rand Paul, at least if we're being charitable, is making the same argument.
None of those sentiments are inherently discriminatory, neither conceptually nor in practice, which is fundamentally what matters. The belief that the government should actively "Get Out the Vote" is a policy preference, not a constitutional imperative--at least not in the U.S., which lacks mandatory voting laws. "Get Out the Vote" is just a pithy statement of one's preferred policy.
Though, without rigorous oversight it's quite easy--almost trivial, even--to apply those sentiments in a discriminatory manner. AFAIU, Thomas Hofeller, the infamous Republican strategist and redistricting consultant whose personal papers were revealed by his daughter after his death, approached voter ID laws this way--drafting them in ways that were inherently, knowingly, deliberately discriminatory, supported by reams of empirical data, though I'm not sure if racially or otherwise illegally discriminatory on their face. Some of his gerrymandering proposals, by contrast, were explicitly racially discriminatory. ("Hofeller's hard drive also retained a map of North Carolina’s 2017 state judicial gerrymander, with an overlay of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that these maps—which are currently at the center of a protracted legal battle—might also be a racial gerrymander.", https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-files-of...)
If you do not currently have residence, your registration to vote is no longer valid. That is why an ID which proves residence at the time of voting is considered important by proponents.
You're talking past the parent. They are literally saying the purpose of the ID is not to prove residence, it's to prove identity. Residence would be proven during registration, not at the time of voting. If you want same day voter registration, that's a completely different story, but people shouldn't have to prove residence twice to vote.
How does an ID help with that? People can move without updating their ID right away. And, heck, I don't remember there being much, if any, that I had to do to prove my address when I got my (non-RealID) license.
Really all the address proves is that I was able to get mail at this address when I got my license.
That probably does make things tricky. Personally I think that we should accept all IDs but vary their impact based on what they provide. For instance, a voter ID verifies residence, so you can vote in elections. If you have no residence, maybe that's a broader state or federal ID but you can't vote in local elections.
A bit of an aside, when I moved to California I wasn't able to vote in the primaries because I refused to pledge loyalty to the Democratic party, though registering to vote was rather easy. In Texas registering was rather easy and I could vote in primaries.
> If you have no residence, maybe that's a broader state or federal ID but you can't vote in local elections.
That would be sad, because local governments are the ones that pass ordinances criminalizing homelessness (e.g. sleeping and urinating outside). I think it would be unconscionable to prevent people from having a voice in their governance based on their landownership status, but I guess we can hardly call such an idea out of line with America’s founding values.
If you could guarantee that a homeless person were to stay in that city then it'd make sense. I doubt that's feasible though. The benefit a state ID allowing you to vote in state elections could potentially allow someone to do is vote for candidates that would have a state-wide policy on homelessness, rather than just local.
When I came to California it was kind of funny that I was able to vote in local elections immediately. I hardly knew anything about the area, what could I possibly vote for?
But other citizens don't have to prove they will be in a city in the future to prove residency; it's sufficient to prove they've been in a city in the past to fulfill residency requirements. I can move to a town, register to vote after the residency requirement is fulfilled, move away the very same day, and still vote in that city until I have residency elsewhere. Why should it work any differently for a homeless person?
> A bit of an aside, when I moved to California I wasn't able to vote in the primaries because I refused to pledge loyalty to the Democratic party, though registering to vote was rather easy.
I still don't get why people think they are entitled to participate in party-internal candidate selection elections without even claiming membership (with absolutely zero commitment ot pledge of loyalty of any kind) in the party.
(There are primary elections that serve different functions than selecting party nominees, often simultaneously with party primaries, and you've always been able to vote in them in California without identifying with a party; California has extended the scope of them and gotten rid of most party primaries, though the Presidential primary is still a closed party primary.)
Personally speaking, I despise both of our parties, and their worst constituents. That said, as an independent I have to deal with both of the parties. If I know I'm going to vote a certain way in an election then I'd like to have a voice in who the devil-that-I-choose is without affirming that I'm okay with the party. Maybe that makes better sense.
Primaries for state and national offices except president were non partisan the whole time.[1] The Democratic Party allowed unaffiliated voters to vote in their presidential primary. Unlike the Republican Party.[2] And stating a preference isn't a loyalty oath.
I do remember not being able to vote in the primary, but I chalked it up to another weird California thing. I'm not sure how I don't count as unaffiliated but, regardless, the practice of not running an open primary is very strange to me coming from Texas.
Denying the right to vote, a fundamental aspect of democracy, because someone has found themselves homeless (which in some ways represents a greater failure of our own society to provide a safety net for all citizens) is unbelievable.
But it's okay, because they just need to "fix their own problems first" as you put it in such a blasé fashion.
We’re not denying them the right to vote. We’re saying that preserving the privilege of citizenship and ensuring election integrity are more important. If you can prove residency then you should be allowed to vote.
What exactly is the privilege of citizenship? You are talking about stripping a fellow citizen of their rights just because you have decided they are not wealthy enough to deserve them. What if some people got together and decided they didn’t appreciate something about your living situation, and that if you didn’t correct it then you would be stripped of the your rights? Do you feel like you are immune from becoming homeless? What gives you that security? I just seriously doubt you would hold such opinions if you’ve ever been homeless or knew anyone who has been homeless.
Not all people without an address are "incapable of functioning minimally in society", even ignoring the profoundly undemocratic implications of what you're saying.
When I was working as an archaeologist, I often lacked a residential address. I had a stable job, supported local communities, and generally met residency requirements, but establishing that in the normal ways was impossible. I've also had at least one ballot rejected as a result of similar clerical issues.
It's often helpful to be a bit more open-minded about how different other people's lives can be to your own.
> If you are not capable of functioning minimally in society
Homelessness is a state, not a capability. The majority of homeless people exist in this state only temporarily (eg, victims of domestic violence who flee their abusers)
Voter ID generally isn't supposed to be proof of residence, its proof of identity; it exists to prove that the voter is the person registered, not that the registered person is authorized to vote.
Most IDs acceptable for voting do not prove authorization (or even “authorization but for the potential of disqualification by felony”), so not accepting college ID because it doesn't prove authorization to vote is...not well justified, even in the public logic of voter ID.
Of course, voter ID proponents have let out the private partisan internal logic lots of times when they thought only people aligned with their faction were listening, so we don't need to speculate why the rules are inconsistent with the public logic.