Big Idea #2: "Who Are You?"
Big Idea #2: "Who Are You?"
Voter suppression seems bad! But are rules like requiring formal voter identification really that unfair?
I just voted, exactly two weeks before Election Day '22. So I “early”-voted. And I’m particularly proud of myself because this was the very first day I could vote early!
Well. I could have gone downtown to the Howard Office Building to early-vote as of last Wednesday, but…fine, today was the first day I could vote early somewhere close to my house.
I got my flu shot while I was out, too. It took 34 minutes from the time I pulled away till the time I parked back at the house—to get jabbed and to vote. Easy breezy sleezey beezy.
The Big Idea: I want as many Americans to vote as possible. No matter who they are. If they’re Americans, they get to vote gol’ dangit!
Although…I feel some trepidation over people currently serving time in prison being allowed to vote. My guy Bernie Sanders thinks they should be able to. But that feels a bit too liberal for me. If they’re serving a few weeks for something that’s barely a felony, for instance, maybe they should still be allowed to cast a ballot. But if they’re serving a life sentence for murdering somebody? Man, I don’t know, Bern.
This also got me to thinking: can people with psychosis vote? Or older folks with dementia? Or learning-disabled folks? The answers are yes, yes, and pretty much yes. It varies by state, but usually an official determination by a judge or some other authority must be made that an individual cannot differentiate between voting options before anyone with any disability can be denied their right to vote. Just FYI.
In general, though, we should be making it easier to vote for everyday average Americans, not harder.
Shouldn’t we?
Most of those in the modern-day Republican leadership appear to disagree. I know of about three things, in particular, that the GOP has been doing to limit the voting rights of citizens they don’t think should qualify to vote (and believe it or not, these are citizens who don’t usually vote Republican):
Making people provide a photo ID to vote at polling places;
Gerrymandering the bejeezus out of every district they have control over (that is, redrawing the maps to Republicanize districts that traditionally lean Democrat);
Making it harder to vote absentee or by mail.
The big one that always kind of confounded me was the voter ID requirement. As in, why is asking for a photo ID an issue?
Shouldn’t you have to show your ID when you show up to vote? If somebody doesn’t have any form of ID that’s official and convincing, then maybe they shouldn’t get to vote, right? Just taking their word for it that they are who they say they are seems woefully insufficient.
As it turns out, though, that’s some of my swammy-ness seeping into my thinking (“swammy” meaning “SWAM-like”; “SWAM” meaning “straight white American male”). My personal life experience suggests that, Hey, everybody has some form of photo ID, don’t they? I mean, I’ve had a driver’s license since the day I turned 16, just like everybody else in America.
That’s what I always assumed, at least. But then I also never met a Jew or had a meaningful conversation with a Black person until college, so, my thoughts on life circumstances that are not my own tend to be a little (or a lot) on the wavery side.
Truth is, people of color, the elderly, and low-income folks are often the ones who find it hard to obtain photo identification:
The video above is a little snarky for my tastes, but Francesca’s info is the same as the info I found most everywhere else I looked: if you don’t want millions of otherwise eligible Americans to be kept from voting, difficulties in obtaining photo IDs have to at least be taken into account.
That said, according to a summer 2022 Gallup poll, most Americans favor photo ID requirements, including 77% of people of color and 80% of white adults. That kind of broad majority tells me it might not be as difficult to get a photo ID as some opponents of voter ID laws think. And apparently many states, including even voter-suppressy Texas, have programs that help get free photo IDs to its citizens.
As the video above also (cheekily) suggests, though, it’s just dang hard for some folks—and especially those who are elderly and/or low-income and/or non-white—to get the forms around, secure the transportation, and even just to take the time to get these IDs.
Now I have to admit…that notion—they can’t take the time??—briefly swung my thinking back to the more callous side of, “Well if you’re not going to take voting seriously enough to take the time to get a free photo ID, then I guess you didn’t want to vote that badly anyways!”
But as with most of the stuff that tends to fascinate me about voting, and politics, and social issues…it’s so much more complicated than people being unmotivated. Yes, there are a ton of people who are just too lazy to vote. They would only do it if they could just sign up online with an email address and go to a website to cast their e-ballot and be done with it. There are still many people, though, who genuinely want to vote, but just can’t quite manage all those extra steps to make it happen. Those extra steps, for them, are a legitimate burden.
Another question to ask—and perhaps the most telling question we need to answer—is: how much does requiring photo IDs at the ballot box actually cut down on fraud? Especially since the only thing it accomplishes is to keep people from impersonating someone else in order to illegally vote.
How many numbnuts are out there risking their asses to vote twice? Let alone a third, tenth, or hundredth time? How is that worth it for anybody? Voter fraud is rare overall, but when it does occur, it happens with mail-in or absentee ballots, not in person at your local YMCA polling place.
So, BOTTOM LINE: How many good-faith voters are hurt by voter ID laws? And how many bad-faith cheaters are thwarted by those laws?
When you make that comparison, even conservative think tanks like the Federalist Society tend to see the more strict voter ID laws, at least, as hurting far more people than they’re helping. Their video below pits Professor Derek Muller of Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law against Professor Daniel P. Tokaji of THE Ohio State University’s Michael E. Moritz College of Law in a debate. Muller is ‘for’ voter ID laws, albeit tepidly so; he admits legal findings have been “mixed” and that voter ID restrictions really have “negligible, if any impact on elections” since voter fraud is so rare.
So why prioritize these restrictions if they’re hurting more people than they’re helping?
I guess one solution might be, sure, require a photo ID, but also bust ass making sure those who don’t have one can very easily get one with minimal effort. I’m talkin’ like, every community should get some state and/or Federal help in initiating a campaign to get everyone a photo ID who needs one. I’m sure it wouldn’t just help with voting—it would probably come in handy in any number of other situations that could be helped along by more Americans having a photo ID.
The other two of the three actions I mentioned above sure seem to be real issues as well. I don’t know as much about the suppression of absentee and mail-in voting, but I did experience the effects of gerrymandering just today.
I just voted for a guy who could not possibly win my district’s U.S. House seat, because the majority of the voters in my newly-drawn-up district live far east of Nashville, in conservative locales. Upon Nashville’s “dismembering,” as outgoing Rep. Jim Cooper called it in his statement announcing his retirement from Congress (precisely because of the new unfavorable maps), the districting in Tennessee now favors Republicans 8 to 1.
One of the things I want this newsletter to do in its minuscule way is to help people brainstorm on how we can bring unlike-minded people together enough to be able to stomach aligning for the greater good. It’s a fact of life that urban-dwellers usually vote pretty differently than rural folks. So maybe Republicans dicing up cities to be sprinkled in amongst the bigger rural districts of their red states will force left-leaners to mingle more with right-leaners. Maybe progressive-minded politicians from the city will just have to find ways to appeal to the hearts and minds of their majority-conservative constituents.
And maybe once folks with differing ideologies can’t help but start listening to one another, and learning about one another, and understanding that their Pursuits of Happiness kinda resemble the Pursuits of Happiness of the “other side”…maybe then some of the extreme tribalism and polarization that feels so unbudgeable at this rather bleak time in our nation’s history will start to break.
I’d love for things to backfire like that on all the gerrymanderers who have gotten so out of hand on both sides of the political aisle (although it’s much more rampant on the Republican side, it seems).
That kind of coming together is an unlikelihood, perhaps. But I am choosing to believe that it’s not an impossibility! Stranger things…..
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. - COMING THURSDAY:
Somethin’s Happenin’ Here: Let’s talk about student debt cancellation—”I don’t have any student loan debt, so why should I have to pay for other people’s college??”
The Music Box: The Best ‘80s Band Only Known for Their One Hit Ballad Is…(HINT: they’re really a ‘90s band).