First things first, I don't doubt it is a bad thing, considering who supports it and who doesn't.

But my question is what exactly is the issue and what is the current and proposed voting process when it comes to IDs?

Here in my EU country, you have to show some version of a government ID, be it an ID card, drivers license or passport. And we don't have to pre-register to vote.

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[–] 43 points 1 week ago (12 children)

The US has about 3.8 million valid citizens with no official records, and about another 21 million that would need to jump through very difficult hoops in order to obtain their documentation. It's called the Burned Counties phenomenon, because records were kept at the county level, that had a court house burned down. Or flooded, or destroyed by unrest. We like variety in our destruction.

As will come to no surprise, the majority of those affected, are minorities who vote for Democrats. So the laws being proposed are designed around blocking them from voting, not getting them documented to vote.

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 1 week ago (8 children)

    That's crazy! It's like 7% of the population! I feel that complicates life way beyond voting rights.

    Meanwhile, I have friends who received EU citizenship based in ancestry and literary contacted the relevant municipalities here and got birth records from their great grand parents. Of course, I am sure going that far back, many records were also lost.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    There's a postulate that a lot of the areas around the world with "oldest alive humans" are actually just places with bad/lost records. Especially if it lets you claim retirement benefits early.

    https://jheor.org/post/2682-ig-nobel-prize-winning-research-longevity-claims-may-reflect-lousy-birth-and-death-recordkeeping-more-than-accurate-human-lifespans

    I say this as response to show that there are a lot of places with bad records.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago

    Japan has a large percentage of the oldest people in the world. The country has been digging into this to understand what is special about Japan. The biggest reason people in Japan live so long is because their children lie about them still being alive.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Closer to 1%, but still surprising. I'm not sure how one functions without identification.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Legally, as long as you have a social security number, as in you know the number, there's no problem. Driving can be hard but most of these people have lived and worked within 5 miles of where they were born for hundreds of years now. But besides that you don't need your ID for much.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (1 child)

    I would love to throw some source material in people's faces, can you link where you got your numbers from?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago

    Brennan Center has done multiple rounds of polling on it, there is no single source, just a wide group of agreement in data from voting rights and legal groups like the SLPC.

    The problem is that when it comes up in documented cases like when Connecticut rolled back their voter ID law due to disruptions in municipal votes, it's a small sample that doesn't reflect the entire state, just that local area. When it comes to larger data sets, you run into voter privacy protection laws that no one wants to risk violating on either side. So you can't even collect information. Which is why we have exit polling and similar sampling methods.

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