Functioning members of society have ID. That’s not up for debate. And you can get sufficient ID to vote FREE OF CHARGE IF YOU CAN BE ARSED. What sums me up is kicking back against the lefty bollocks that this is all about the Tories gerrymandering elections. If you need ID to buy booze, rent a car, gamble etc you sure as hell should have it for voting.
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Whether or not there is a case for voters to carry ID when voting, it is quite clear that the introduction of the requirements in the recent elections was precisely for the purpose of gerrymandering.
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You must have missed the FREE ID SCHEME for people who cared.
Gerrymandering is altering electoral boundaries to skew the popular vote amongst constituencies. That is nothing to do with having voter ID. Making it difficult for people to register in the first place would come under that category.
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Might be quite clear to you but to some, Everton are clearly the team to support. Doesn’t make them right. Or sane.
Well I used the wrong term then, consider manipulating as the correct phrase please.
That’s completely bullshit. Many people have never travelled overseas, and have no inclination to get alcohol. The only types of ID they have are often not valid.
Oh yes, you mean like how the same IDs are valid if you’re over 60 and not if you’re under 25?
Well it’s not free as it is paid for out of general taxation. However, would you be happy with a “free” national ID card scheme instead?
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No, I don’t mean like anything, I’m not 12.
I mean this
OK, in fairness nothing is free. Us posting on here is literally costing us life. Any government scheme costs tax payers. But the ability to get free ID to vote utterly destroys the criticism of the voter ID.
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It’s a solution in search of a problem. The ‘problem’ of fraudulent voting by individuals is vanishingly small across Western democracies, which generally all face problems with voter apathy (for myriad reasons) and where voting is optional, have seen steady declines in participation rates. Further, the probability of affecting the outcome with a single vote is so incredibly small that political science has been struggling to explain why people vote at all, it is basically irrational to do so.
So then the question is why do some entities wish to introduce some kind of nominal hurdle to voter participation? Characteristically, the answer is fairly ugly.
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Because you only need to have ID to buy booze. This is madness mate, really is.
How can you expect people to supply their national insurance number?
How unreasonable of you.
@Arminius has put it succinctly. Voter fraud is not, and has never been a problem. Yet there are millions of pounds being thrown towards “solving” this “problem”, coincidentally effectively disenfranchising many people, far more than any proven, or even suspected cases of voter fraud.
What else do you need ID to do? I haven’t had any need for ID apart from overseas travel and the very occasional checks of age for buying alcohol.
Even if it’s not technically impossible for one to obtain ID, the number of hurdles being put in place effectively means systematic discrimination against certain demographics, as in the way the system is enforced in practice.
But keep living in your dreamland.
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The criticism of Voter ID is that it is completely unnecessary. Having a costly scheme to do something unnecessary is a waste of public money.
The reason I mentioned having a “free” (i.e. taxpayer funded) ID scheme is because general ID fraud is a growing and costly problem.
The Blair government suggested this and there was huge opposition to it. Partly this was because it would have been a compulsory scheme that individuals were expected to pay for themselves.
I was asked to fill out a questionnaire at the time and my main observation was that there was an ill-conceived business case for it and the data protection associated with it was completely inadequate. Having seen how Germany treats ID, I think the main problem was that the data was to be owned by the government and not the individual.
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Interestingly, one of the groups affected by the voter ID requirement tended to be older people, who were without a passport, had no bus pass and a paper driving licence. Apparently, many turned up with a paper licence which, if they had not moved house since 1998, would still be valid.
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That’s kind of my point as well. I don’t care who gets disenfranchised, or more pertinently for some, what the voting preferences of the disenfranchised are.
I care about democracy, and that’s why it’s so important to me that no one gets disenfranchised.
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I think that those who can’t rise to achieve the status of owning a free ID SHOULD absolutely be disenfranchised.
Donald Trump , and his party , just tried to steal an election by pretending that there was widespread election fraud. They are now using the pretext of ‘election integrity’ to disenfranchise and suppress the vote of those who typically vote Democrat in order to game the next election.
The Tories weren’t asleep while all this was going on.
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Unfortunately, it didn’t start with Trump, and it won’t end there either.