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The proposals consistently poll very well across both parties and independents. They don't get stopped because rightists oppose them. Most Americans really don't see what's so hard about giving everyone an ID and tell them to bring it to the polls. It's only in recent years that Democratic activists have convinced so many people that it's actually very important that people be able to vote from home without identification.
This is the sticking point. Republican political leaders have not been particularly enthusiastic about the universal ID part of voter ID laws. Only about half of states with photo ID laws provide free IDs, and the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).
The simplest thing to do would be to have a Federal voter database and an associated ID, but that seems to be considered generally unattractive.
A lot of things poll very well across both parties and independents until you start talking specifics.
YesChad.jpg
But, ya know, for an entirely different reason. Nothing to do with voting. Identity theft is awful. I absolutely want anyone who is trying to acquire an ID that is in any way related to any component of my personal information to have to jump through hoops to do so. I know full well that this means that I also have to jump through some hoops at times. E.g., when I moved states right after school, but didn't rent with a traditional lease or utilities that were in my name, I had to figure out how to jump through the right hoops to get appropriate documents. For most people, this is a big headache at most once or twice in their life, but it is an eminently solvable headache. For identity theft mills, this is a cost that scales poorly and significantly hinders their ability to wreck massive headaches for large swathes of people.
I would also note that when I had the aforementioned headache, the easiest document for me to acquire that would then help me unlock many other documents was voter registration. The baseline level of hoops that we require of people for voting is wayyyy easier than literally any other thing. I could see someone thinking that we should just bump up the registration to being a full "voting-only ID", still with an obscenely low level of hoops to jump through. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, but then we really just get down to haggling about price. What specific hoops would you allow for obtaining a "voting-only ID"? If you let there be even one hoop, someone out there will have a story about how, in their highly-specific situation, this one hoop is actually an annoying headache for them. We will never have anything other than tradeoffs, nothing other than both Type I and Type II errors, and nearly everyone is allergic to actually using numbers to analyze these tradeoffs.
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