The point is to make it harder for “those people” to vote and participate in society. If you came up with a magical, iron-clad, mechanism for everyone to have ID, the conservatives wouldn’t support it because that’s not what they want. They want minorities to suffer.

Let’s flip this around and show evidence that there’s some mass voter fraud with our current system. The only consistent fraud I read about is conservatives voting for dead family members, voting twice, etc.

Let’s also remove the restriction of ex-felons from voting. If you’ e served your jail time, once you get out, you should be able to vote again.

Conservatives don’t act in good faith here. Sure have a system with free voter id and watch as magically inner city locations stop offering the service or some other made up excuse to disenfranchise a certain population of our country.

I’ve been saying for years that we should have an optional National ID card that you can obtain free at the point of service from every post office in the land. We have most of the infrastructure already, the training wouldn’t be onerous and an ID is necessary in the modern world.

That’s just moving the goal posts. These f’ers don’t want anyone to vote or have rights, unless they’re benefiting. They’ll be super fiscally conservative and complain how expensive this would be if Dems start pushing it.

They’re the party of “fuck you, got mine.” That’s it’s there are no other salient principles for them.

obtaining proof of citizenship should be free and simple to obtain from every municipality, state and federal office

If it was, Republicans would just find another way to suppress the vote. This isn’t about citizenship or the integrity of the electoral process. It’s about the GOP knowing that the fewer people vote, the better for their fascist and therefore unpopular party.

whether it’s necessary to have proof of citizenship in order to able to vote. of course you should. everyone should.

That’s already in place, though. When voting, you have to supply your name, address and voter registration.

If no citizen with that name is registered to that address, you don’t get to vote.

It’s a pernicious lie that people in any significant number is able or even attempting to vote without indirectly proving their citizenship and even requiring “free and simple” (which it probably won’t be to some people anyway) direct proof will suppress the vote whether that’s your attention or not.

we spend so much political bandwidth on a loser of an issue, year in, year out, for decades

Because currently there’s no consequences for Republican politicians and their media echo chamber willfully misleading the people with their lies. In fact, the corrupt system encourages it.

Ceding ground to their demagoguery doesn’t make it go away. They’ll just have that more power to suppress the vote in additional ways.

something we should be pushing for too.

Nope. See above.

the poll tax argument no longer holds weight

It VERY much does. Any unnecessary obstacle to voting is undemocratic in the same way as a poll tax is and requiring direct proof of something you’re already indirectly proven is unnecessary.

no matter how much you whine about the smallest percentage of the smallest percentage of people who find themselves disenfranchised by the requirement

You VASTLY underestimate the number of people for whom voting is already unnecessarily difficult and who will be at a greater risk of not being able to justify the cost of voting the more obstacles are thrown in their way.

Especially when you consider that in person voter fraud is so rare as to be statistically nonexistent and is never non eligible people trying to vote.

That you display your ignorance in a supremely condescending way doesn’t help either.

the amount of support republicans get from this, as in issue that makes logical sense, doesn’t add up.

It does when you consider how effective lying their ass off is in the current system.

They aren’t right about any of this. They just have the money and media echo chamber to get their point repeated so much that impressionable people such as yourself are fooled into thinking that they are.

Nobody cares. If we could make it free and easy enough it would stop being useful at suppressing the vote and Republicans would lose all interest and Democrats already don’t care.

Anything which requires action in all 50 states and the government giving up a source of revenue and overhauling complicated systems couldn’t be completed this century. While we are at it though I would like a hardware security key handed out with your ID as a second form of ID and required for any sort of large purchase like a car, or opening a line of credit.

This. I’m not actually opposed to the requirement for needing ID or proof of citizenship to vote. What I am opposed to is anything creating a barrier to voting that’s more substantial than an extremely mild inconvenience like registering.

Imo we need a national ID system anyway, so we can stop using SSN data for that purpose because it’s stupidly insecure. In the modern digital age it would be trivial to just assign a “user is licensed to drive x” flag in a digital database in your home state to your ID. Pair it with some kind of 2FA and switch government services to digital.

Easy, cheap to administer, make it free, and auto register people to vote when they turn 18. Have highschools participate in the ID issuing process, since that covers the vast majority of people.

But they know it’s not easy. If it were, they’d just pick a different pet issue to mislabel their deliberate mass disenfranchisement as.