The 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote ... shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

A passport (or drivers license or other forms of ID usually cited in Voter ID laws) cost money and, as a result, courts have held that only allowing such forms of ID as a valid for voting, is akin to a poll tax and thus unconstitutional. I'm not sure you have the same protection in the UK.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

On the surface I don't disagree, but really there is something of a data mining exercise going on. If you know that vast numbers of certain demographics tick a box, then that can be centered in on as an election strategy.

Let's say that you know that more poor people don't drive or travel abroad. Well then through that fact alone, that demographic are much less likely to have ID. In many states to even gain an ID card you need a birth certificate which also costs money should you not have one, and requires an in person appearance often during working hours. It's enough to put plenty of people off. Human nature.

Sure if someone desperately wants to vote, even if it isn't a formality for them to get one, they can, but then not everyone out voting falls into that category. Making some jump through hoops is designed to shave off a percentage of this demographic, or that demographic and it's reliable was achieving that aim. In person voting fraud is actually very rare and this additional hurdle is selectively designed to suppress the black vote.

From a recent study

"The study found that among households with an annual income below ,000, 21% were deterred from voting while among those above 0,000 only 2.7% were deterred. Broken down by race, 8% of the people deterred were white and 28% were black. If the goal of the law was to prevent poor and/or black people from voting without affecting rich and/or white people too much, it succeeded quite well."

"A study released Monday estimates 16,800 or more people in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred from casting ballots in November because of Wisconsin's voter ID law" Two counties... in a state that Trump won by just 23,000 votes. As a strategy it works, but thats what it is, a voter suppression strategy.

Edited by wordup (26 Sep 2017 11.34pm)

What's wrong with that?

No! It's to stop illegal immigrants from voting, as what happened in the last election. The Democrats were bussing them in. That's why they want open borders – to get voted in and stay in power!

Edited by Penge Eagle (27 Sep 2017 12.53am)

Just $29 in my state of California. It would be weird not to have one anyway!

f*** me, people don't work in Victorian workhouses with no days off.

Again, what is your solution to combat voter fraud?