“People of Color Too Lazy”

Yes, I’m sure it’s just that we think People of Color are too stupid or lazy to get an ID. It surely could not be—

• Many people work multiple jobs, or don't own or have access to transportation, or don't live in a county with a DMV to get ID.
• Many people are infirm, or are so old they no longer have the proper ID. Someone in a nursing home may have no reason to renew a driver's license.
• College IDs are not accepted as valid voter IDs, yet college students are otherwise eligible to vote. Yet gun permits (mainly held by white people) are accepted.
• Many voters are disproportionately low-income (cannot afford fees and transportation), racial and ethnic minorities (nationally, up to 25% of African-American citizens of voting age lack government-issued photo ID, compared to only 8% of whites), and people with disabilities, who also cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents and therefore cannot get proper ID.
• Voter ID laws are enforced in a discriminatory manner: A Caltech/MIT study found that minority voters are more frequently questioned about ID than are white voters.
• Voting is a RIGHT in a democratic system: yet 11% of U.S. citizens—or more than 21 million Americans—do not have government-issued photo identification. If we must live under the laws, we must have a say in the laws.

Voter suppression is a discriminatory tactic to make it harder for black people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities to exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot. This includes cuts to early voting, partisan/racial gerrymandering, felon disenfranchisement, inequality in election day resources, closure of DMV offices, “caging” and purges of voter rolls.

In fact, Voter ID is a solution to only one problem: keeping minorities, and people who are likely to vote Democratic, away from the polls—

• Voter ID laws reduce turnout among minority voters. Several studies, including a 2014 GAO study, have found that photo ID laws have a particularly depressive effect on turnout among racial minorities and other vulnerable groups, worsening the participation gap between voters of color and whites.
• In-person fraud is vanishingly rare. A recent study found that, since 2000, there were only 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation—the only type of fraud that photo IDs could prevent—during a period of time in which over 1 billion ballots were cast.
• Identified instances of “fraud” are honest mistakes. So-called cases of in-person impersonation voter “fraud” are almost always the product of an elections worker or a voter making an honest mistake, and that even these mistakes are extremely infrequent.
• Voter ID laws are a waste of taxpayer dollars. States incur sizeable costs when implementing voter ID laws, including the cost of educating the public, training poll workers, and providing IDs to voters.

Check out the study here.

Now who’s racist?

You're welcome.