this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Look, I understand why this is happening. It's part of a concerted effort to make voting harder, and challenge the eligibility of certain classes of voters who tend to vote a certain way. But we do have eligibility requirements for voting, and the logical time to check them is when registering.
The real question is whether someone who has no documentation whatsoever should be disenfranchised. Like that homeless guy in the 59th Street subway station. He says he was born in Brooklyn in 1966. If that is true, and he is a citizen, he is eligible to vote whether or not he has a pristine copy of his long-form birth certificate. We need to have a system to accommodate him.
And understand what the end-game of Republicans are. They want to couple this with an aggressive purging of voter rolls. So they maliciously un-register people who they think will vote the wrong way, then impose these paperwork requirements on these people, all with the goal of discouraging them from voting.
So, while it may seem reasonable to demand proof while registering, that reasonable request is part of a larger goal of disenfranchising large groups of people.
Because your right to vote is fundamental, and shouldn't be taken away just because you lost the paperwork.
Plus, non-citizens understand that trying to vote will ruin any chance they may have in the future of getting citizenship. People here illegally also don't want to call attention to their presence here and won't risk trying to vote based on that. Those people are not voting in any meaningful capacity.
The voter suppression thing is real, though . Click that link I left above; in certain states, there is a regular purging of the voter rolls, for frivolous reasons. Some voters don't find out they have been purged until they show up at the polls (after waiting in a long line to boot). Not giving them some way to cast a provisional ballot is the same as disenfranchising them.
... That doesn't even make sense. I'm convinced now that you have no clue what you are talking about.
This is about registration, not absentee ballots. If someone requests an absentee ballot, they are already registered. In many states, absentee ballots need to be requested on an individual basis, and if someone requests a ballot, they are going to take the time to fill it out and return it. In some states they can request a second if they changed their mind (or even go in and vote in person), but all ballots are tracked and only the last one is counted.
Nobody is going to give their absentee ballot away for someone else to fill out. And there are no piles of ballots waiting for ACORN to fill them out using names from the phone book.