What I'd like to see from the Democrat camp is making mail voter registration easier, making government IDs mandatory, and also improving voter identification. Maybe also moving all voting to Sundays, so most people have time.
Better voter identification IMHO is a reasonable ask from Republicans that's always shot down by Democrats. They say it excludes people that don't have ID.
To me it seems reasonable to make having ID mandatory. And also making your ID mandatory for voting, like in every other developed nation I know. Make it free to get a state ID in the same legislation.
This would take away the main argument Republicans have for saying there's potential fraud. Having ID is also good for people, because it eases interaction with the state in other things.
Voter ID would be reasonable if everyone had them, or had free and very easy access to get them. Most countries have some kind of unified government ID, in Germany for example it's mandatory to own one of two kinds of government ID. Sadly this is not the case in the US, where many disparate state IDs exist, and many people never have any government ID for their whole life.
Now, Republicans could take away this argument by instituting a government ID like you're suggesting. It would have to be well thought through - the structure of US society puts many roadblocks in front of those least likely to have IDs, like:
- often large distances to government offices, which can be expensive to travel if you don't own a car
- many people basically can't take time off work, sometimes from multiple jobs, or they risk losing their health insurance
- usually you need some kind of documentation to get a new government ID, and many people don't have this available for a number of reasons - according to this source[0] at least 1.5%
Any solution would have to work around these issues, but it's definitely not impossible. And once this is implemented, the Democrats' concerns would be taken care off - why don't Republicans seem to ever work on this? If you started requiring voter ID without doing this, you'd de-facto be banning people from voting - often times those who are already marginalized. Yet I haven't seen Republicans running on implementing such IDs. Why do you think that is?
I would agree with you that the Democrats should bring this up too, if there were evidence for voter fraud beyond the usual margins (that also exist in elections in other countries). But I haven't seen such evidence, and all attempts by Republicans to find evidence in investigations has completely failed. So why should Democrats compromise with them on this point? Why can't Republicans alleviate their concerns before implementing voter ID?
This reminds me a lot of the attempts during Trumps presidency to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Somehow they always tried to repeal it first, and never presented their better replacement. Four years ago, they promised that their plan is two weeks away, yet it's still nowhere to be found. But they are still running on repealing the ACA. I wonder why? Why does this pattern keep coming up?
Better voter identification IMHO is a reasonable ask from Republicans that's always shot down by Democrats. They say it excludes people that don't have ID.
To me it seems reasonable to make having ID mandatory. And also making your ID mandatory for voting, like in every other developed nation I know. Make it free to get a state ID in the same legislation.
This would take away the main argument Republicans have for saying there's potential fraud. Having ID is also good for people, because it eases interaction with the state in other things.