Voter ID laws: Everyone has an ID, right? Nope

[joeydb]

Originally Posted by Riot

Not to bait you at all, but just a question:

Why would the racial background or age matter when analyzing those who did not obtain official ID for themselves?

It's insane that the Justice Department would seek to not enforce laws for ID's - though your graph likely points to their motivation.

Would we do the same for other action/inaction within our society, and then shape the laws accordingly?

For instance, statistics have shown that most drunk drivers are young people in their late teens. But if you are hit by a vehicle driven by a drunk driver, the demographic of the driver is unimportant. So they passed laws where a measurable quantity (blood alcohol level) can be the key evidence of whether a driver is intoxicated. They pull over ANYBODY driving erratically. The stats are irrelevant. As these people grow up, they may still drunk drive, changing the stats, especially if the new young people do not abuse alcohol to the same degree.

It is a shame that in the past, literacy tests have been used as a mechanism for disenfranchisement. That should never have happened. It's absurd, and those people warping that policy should have been prosecuted.

However, there is a legitimate role for tests IF the ability to read and understand the language of the ballot is in question. I don't know Russian for example. I don't even know the whole Cyrillic alphabet, so where the letters differ from our Roman alphabet, I can't read the word, let alone know what it means in Russian. Giving me a ballot in Russian is pointless. If I lived in Russia and it was time to vote I would not be shocked to have to pass a test to see if I can read the ballot (or so they can tell me how to spell Putin in Cyrillic letters)

Giving someone a ballot they cannot read and interpreting the selection as meaningful is an intellectual absurdity. Obviously, places where Spanish is universal and they have the ballot in Spanish this is not an issue. But ballots are printed and therefore need to be read in order to convey the necessary information.