In Reply to: Re: Why has voting never been a problem until Trump? posted by russsmith on February 15, 2026 at 10:07:25
I've been saying this for years: If you want to implement a voter ID law, you *have to* make it a requirement that the federal government also provides a natural ID card system that unambiguously establishes a person as a citizen and provide that to every American, free of charge. Once that card is provided, at least to every legally eligible voter, then and only then, you can morally institute voter ID requirements, perhaps even nationally, not state by state.
Any attempts to do so without also providing the remedy, free of charge, is a voter suppression tactic.
End of story.
(This also applies to ICE stops. If the issue is to establish a person's citizenship, you need to make sure that there is a way in which people can show unambiguously that they are citizens. Forms of identification we have readily available do not show citizenship. Anything short of a passport book/card fails in that regard. When you demand to see an id that you have not made available in the first place, that's really a fundamentally immoral proposition.)
(Also this reliance on SSN is absolutely ridiculous. Having to track down your birth certificate from some city officials directly just to establish your citizenship is a f*cking farce in the 21st century.)
So yeah .... what we need to talk about instead of all this bullsh*t is the need to institute a national ID card that we can make available to every citizen, free of charge. We're moving towards a system where we need to constantly prove we are who we say we are, and we have next to 0 infrastructure to meet that demand, with the demand growing every goddamn day.