I live in a country where every citizen automatically receives a government id at the age of 12. We have to bring that id when we go to vote, but even if I were to lose the card at the worst possible time, there are contingency measures to allow me to still cast my vote. The idea is to get as many people as possible to vote, the id card greatly facilitates this process, but it’s not used as a tool to keep people from voting.
In the usa (and the uk, and maybe other countries as well), citizens are not automatically granted an id card. Instead they have to acquire + maintain some accepted means of identifying themselves if they want to vote. And there some Americans saw a great opportunity: what if they made it so that certain minority groups would have a statistically harder time acquiring and maintaining identification that was deemed acceptable? And what if the state government could arbitrarily purge voter lists based on data mined information? The voter id requirements are used not only for facilitating the voting process, but also for suppressing undesired votes.
I live in a country where every citizen automatically receives a government id at the age of 12. We have to bring that id when we go to vote, but even if I were to lose the card at the worst possible time, there are contingency measures to allow me to still cast my vote. The idea is to get as many people as possible to vote, the id card greatly facilitates this process, but it’s not used as a tool to keep people from voting.
In the usa (and the uk, and maybe other countries as well), citizens are not automatically granted an id card. Instead they have to acquire + maintain some accepted means of identifying themselves if they want to vote. And there some Americans saw a great opportunity: what if they made it so that certain minority groups would have a statistically harder time acquiring and maintaining identification that was deemed acceptable? And what if the state government could arbitrarily purge voter lists based on data mined information? The voter id requirements are used not only for facilitating the voting process, but also for suppressing undesired votes.
If you want some examples of usa voter suppression: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States