Oregon does voting better than everyone, of course they went with auto-registration. I miss living there so much :( Vote-by-mail is the only fair way to run an election imo.
Here in Michigan, they just took away our ability to vote straight ticket. It looks to me like a way to make voting more time consuming. Places like Detroit, where lines tend to be longer as is, are most likely to vote straight ticket Democratic
And it's not just party breakdown at stake. New York City lawmakers are worried that Gov. Andrew Cuomo's automatic voter registration plan will skew voter rolls in favor of the suburbs and rural areas - where residents are more likely to go to the DMV for a driver's license.
...uh. Have these people forgotten about the non-driver ID? (My dad likes to call it his walking license.) Or are we going down the rabbit hole of the difficulty of obtaining legit ID for the poor?
Frankly I never understood the ID problem. Why not make it mandatory to have an ID (not to have it on you at all times, just to possess one), and make sure it's easy to get one from an early age? Wouldn't that be the end of a very tedious discussion?
Not sure how things work in other EU countries, but in Germany even children have their own ID. Doesn't every citizen in the US have a social security number? Where does one get it? Couldn't that be the place to hand out IDs as well?
I agree. Parents usually apply for social security numbers for their newborn babies before they go home from the hospital. They could be pre-registered to vote at the same time.
In a nutshell, the ID can take awhile to get (lines at the DMV), it can take awhile to get to the location (my co-worker spent 45 minutes each way on a bus for a 5 mile trip; in some areas the bus ride would be well over an hour each way); some DMVs are only open 9-4 M-F which is a problem if you work 9-5 M-F and only get paid if you are there. I live in a fairly urban area that has good public transit and a fairly high density of DMVs. I know of areas that have 1 in a county (if that) and it may not be on a transit line.
For me to renew my license, I plan to take 2 hours off of work but I get leave so I can do that without losing money.
In my country you also have to take time off to go to the citizens' service office in order to hand in the documents for the application of your ID, and I think you also have to pick it up yourself, they don't send it to you when it's ready
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...uh. Have these people forgotten about the non-driver ID? (My dad likes to call it his walking license.) Or are we going down the rabbit hole of the difficulty of obtaining legit ID for the poor?
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Not sure how things work in other EU countries, but in Germany even children have their own ID.
Doesn't every citizen in the US have a social security number? Where does one get it? Couldn't that be the place to hand out IDs as well?
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For me to renew my license, I plan to take 2 hours off of work but I get leave so I can do that without losing money.
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