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.
Before you can vote, you have to “register” to vote. When you do this, you need to prove you’re a U.S. citizen. Usually providing a birth certificate, or passport, military id, idk everything.
My understanding was that the name you were registering to vote with had to match the document you were using. But if you got married then often times the women would have a different last name and now it doesn’t match your birth certificate. Normally you’d just have to prove you got married too but this new law would say no, you have to have the exact name or you can’t vote.
Since women typically take the man’s last name, it would effectively mean any married women registering to vote would not be allowed. And since the bill is worded confusingly on purpose, many women would not even realize this until they went to register to vote, and told they couldn’t because of their new last name.
Additionally, minorities and underprivileged folks don’t often have the means to get drivers licenses. How do you take the exam if you don’t have a car to practice? Or can’t get the time off work to go to the DMV for a government ID? It might not be the stated intent of the law, but the few places it’s been implemented have seen drastic reductions in the incident rate of black and Latino voters.
It’s not effectively any woman, it’s a women who is using their birth certificate for ID. Which is effectively 1/3 of the options so it’s significant but not “effectively mean any married woman can’t vote.”
They can use a passport, state issued ID such as Drivers license or ID card or a birth certificate. The new drivers licenses and IDs that are “real IDs” which is required now are also proof of citizenship.
That’s fair, I should’ve been more exact with my words. If someone is poor and living in a large metro area they might not even have a drivers license so birth certificate would be their best option. And large metro areas typically swing democrat so it would disproportionately hurts dems more than cons.
Not an llm but wanted to acknowledge good criticism.