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The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
Other nations have far more recent and far worse histories of this sorts of behavior, and yet manage to pass reform just fine.
The blunt truth is voter ID laws in this day and age are going to disenfranchise almost exclusively elderly rural people who managed to get along without an ID their entire life. The hypothetical poor urban dweller that blue tribers wave around is virtually guaranteed to be on some sort of public assistance which requires ID to collect. Or is not actually eligible to vote, possibly to their surprise but not to the ballot harvesters who knock on their doors.
I live in a very blue city, and my very blue friends are expressing increasing frustration and skepticism with our local elections, because there are absolutely shennanigans going on, to the point that one went on an hour long rant about ballot harvesting the homeless community she works with, because many of the homeless are being paid for their ballots and its causing overdoses. No, i have no personal evidence for this claim, and yes its illegal as fuck, but i have no reason to doubt my friend and it jives with the genral politics of the city. Voter ID truly has become a universal issue, which is why i have nothing but contempt for GOP failures to do something about it.
Can you give examples?
You'll forgive me if I don't take this seriously - "shenanigans are happening, I just know it" is not credible. Not only is this sort of belief more often an expression of fatuous cynicism than actual knowledge, it's also just a frequent loser's cope. "Those establishment politicians with their organizations and social networks and actual funding are doing something shifty, I'm certain of it." (To be fair, they often are, but it's far more likely to be in the category of ethically dubious transactional politics with interests groups than buying ballots from bums).
How do you know this? Your skepticism about election fraud being without proof seems to rest on your intuition here.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If your theory predicts a phenomenon and the phenomenon is not observed, that strongly suggests the theory is wrong. In this case, there's a lot of incentive for election security enthusiasts to find voter fraud and they've made considerable effort to do so. The fact that have failed to do strongly suggests their theory doesn't hold water*. In this case, concealing the shenanigans requires counting on the discretion of numerous homeless drug addicts.
By contrast, there are tons and tons of instances of politicians being caught in awkward financial arrangements or grifting off their supporters. In many cases they don't have to bother hiding them because it isn't even illegal.
What are you talking about? The provenance of mail-in-ballots is basically unverifiable, and chain of custody was long-since destroyed, in some cases while ballots were being counted. You cannot prove a negative, and the unverfiability of election results is what has been concluded by everyone who has actually studied the problem.
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This is mind-boggling to me. How do those people live? They live in a rural area but don't have a driver's license- do they ride horses to get around? Or just live with a family member who drives them everywhere? Or is it such a closed community that they know everyone so they're able to buy a car and drive it without ever getting a license?
I think this is a small number of mostly very old- like makes congress look young- people who don’t maintain picture ID because they lost their driver’s license from age related legal blindness or something and didn’t bother to keep track of it. I suspect they’re all living in nursing homes or with family.
Most people who can’t come up with a picture ID on reasonable notice are dysfunctional underclass types who just drive illegally and do everything in cash.
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