“If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID”

Trump: “If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID”

You can see how he is truly a man of the people!

Trump even manages to screw up positions that I agree with. How does he even come up with this stuff? I, like Trump, don’t use any alcohol, and therefore have never been asked for a picture ID at a grocery store (or anywhere else, for that matter, unless verifying for a stranger that I am the person whose name is on a credit card).

18 thoughts on ““If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID”

  1. Granted, it’s been a few years since I had a student ID. But none of those ID’s (even the one from this century) were what I would call “secure.” When I was in college back in the last century, they stopped putting ages on college IDs because it was too easy to fake them and use them to buy alcohol (I started college just after the age to buy alcohol went to 21 in NY).

    The idea isn’t to make getting an acceptable ID burdensome, it’s too make it burdensome to vote illegally.

  2. Ok, Voter ID laws are fine. But how easy is it get ID and what forms of ID are acceptable?

    Where is the nearest government office and what are its hours? Does your voting district even have an office at all?

    What forms of ID are acceptable? Of 14 states with strict voting ID laws, 5 of those do not allow student ID’s and some of the remainder have some restrictions on what can be used.

    Its not just about a voter ID requirement. Its sometimes followed up by additional burdens intended to getting that ID.

  3. The disingenuousness of the people making the racist claim that they’re fighting voter ID laws on behalf of minorities because they’re somehow too poor or stupid to obtain a free ID (a 2012 Washington Post poll found that 2/3s of non-whites and 3/4th of people earning less than $50,000 per household favor voter ID laws) can be illustrated by the fact that even as the Obama DOJ was fighting voter ID laws in the states, they required all visitors to show a photo ID to come inside the DOJ building.

    1. So tell me, Creeder443, what is more important: being allowed to vote, or being allowed inside the DOJ building?

      But hey, good GOP talking point! Nice accusation that “liberals” are treating minorities like they’re stupid! Bonus point for using Obama’s name! You get a cookie!

      1. Voting is very important and the right to vote should be protected. But part of that protection is making sure that your vote is not diluted by ineligible or fraudulent votes. Voter ID laws PROTECT the right to vote.

        People have a Constitutional right to travel yet it’s ok to require photo ID at the airport.

        People have a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms and not even the NRA would argue that it is improper to require an ID to buy a gun. At least I hope they wouldn’t…

        People have a Constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances but you are going to need an ID to get into most if not all legislative chambers and offices.

        Oh and as for whether it is more important to be allowed to vote or to enter the DOJ building, that I suppose depends on why you want to enter the building. Under certain circumstances a person might find it more important to enter the building. But you are asking the wrong question. These are all important rights. The question is not which rights are more important. The question is how burdensome on that right is the photo ID requirement and the Supreme Court has ruled it’s not overly burdensome, given the importance of electoral security.

  4. I support voter ID laws because I want to deter voter fraud, not because I want to deter eligible voters. I can’t speak for others, but every republican I ever discussed voter ID laws seemed to genuinely want to deter fraud. I believe that most of us actually believe voter fraud exists.

    The argument against is that there is no evidence of “widespread voter fraud.” Leave aside that elections are sometimes decided by very few votes, so even isolated voter fraud can be a problem. Assume for a second that voter fraud isn’t isolated. How exactly would we obtain evidence of it? You can’t interrogate voters at a polling place because that would be seen as attempted voter intimidation. You can’t ask prospective voters for photo ID in states that haven’t passed such laws yet. You could possibly photograph everyone who votes and later try to match the faces to the voter rolls. But that would again be seen as voter intimidation.

    The fact is that in states like NY that don’t have voter ID laws you have to be really dumb to get caught. Who gets caught? People that are registered to vote in multiple locations under their own name who actually vote more than once. Perhaps ineligible voters (non-citizens or felons) that register and vote anyway? I don’t know if anyone has attempted to do a study in states that pass voter ID laws that look at people who stopped voting after the law was passed and then reaching out to them or their families to find out if they were actually voting before the law was passed. I reject the argument that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud unless you can show me affirmative efforts to look for that evidence. I’m agnostic and don’t actually believe in life after death. So I am pretty certain it wasn’t my dad that voted after he died.

    By the way, to the best of my knowledge, even in states with voter ID laws, if you lack ID or if your registration was mistakenly deleted when voting rolls were pruned of people who die or move away, you can still vote with a provisional ballot and your vote will be counted when provide proof of identity or eligibility.

  5. Just to remind folks … the only * PROSECUTED * cases of voter fraud in the last 10 years were by … Republicans.

    Additionally, in several states, Photo ID must be issued by the DMV. Wasn’t it a nice coincidence that after those requirements passed, a large-ish (70%+ was reported in AL) of rural DMV offices closed.

  6. As many of you have agreed on, there is no rampant voter fraud. So other than another red-herring issue for the “pubs” to use to distract their base, why else would the prez and the GOP even care about this issue? Because, as other commenters have dismissed, it may, in fact, dissuade poor/minority voters from actually voting. Which for the current party in power, is a good thing. They are, of course, putting off the inevitable. the GOP base is dying off at an alarming rate, and the Democratic base is multiplying like flies. So sooner or later if the GOP don’t start appealing to the so-called minorities, they’re going to lose. Until then they’ll bring down democracy in an effort to cling to power.

  7. I am not going to argue with Uncle Scoopy, because in principle he is right. I will simply point out that vote fraud by people voting as people they are not is not a real problem, and never was. The Republicans decided to pretend it was a problem for the specific purpose of excluding largely poor, and therefore non-Republican, voters. A number of Republican politicians were indiscreet (i.e., dumb) enough to say so when they began agitating for such laws.

  8. I have a fine idea… you have to register to vote… when you do you are issued a voter ID card. Just add a fucking picture to it and be done.

  9. Wow.
    You could make the same argument you all make in favor of a voter ID law in favor of a poll tax.

    There are plenty of 80 year old American citizens, especially the poor, that do not have a picture ID, that should be allowed to vote.

    Especially in light of the fact that there is zero evidence of in person voting fraud ever happening at any kind of scale since the pinkertons were a thing.

    Especially in light of the fact that even when it’s “free”, the burden on the very poor to take unpaid time off work to go get a picture ID, including time off work, not getting fired, transportation to a DMV, all amounts to a poll tax.

    The right to buy wine in a grocery store at 80 years old without ID is not a fundamental principle of our democracy.

    Equal access to the polls is.

    1. There is only one requirement that I would insist on. If you are going to cast a vote as Registered Voter X, you have to prove you ARE Registered Voter X.

      I don’t really care how that is accomplished. if you can come up with an alternative to presenting a picture ID, knock yourself out. Just make sure it fulfills my requirement.

      1. I have no problem with that. The problem is that the 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments of the Constitution make voting a Constitutional Right (most courts have upheld that convicted felons can have this right taken away permanently.) As such, requiring anything that costs money is essentially a poll tax and should be regarded as Unconstitutional, and I believe various courts have generally ruled this way.)

        I have no problem with requiring voter I.D as long as the taxpayers through the government pick up the full price so as to avoid a poll tax situation. While it is true that many states provide the voter I.D itself without cost, for valid reasons, many state governments limit who can provide these photographs. They can’t just be taken on an ‘Obama cell phone’ and have a voter I.D sent in return. Often these photographs cost a large amount of money for a person who can barely scrape by.

  10. I don’t know how “rampant” voter fraud is. I do know that my father voted more than 10 months after he died. I know this, because when I went to vote, I saw someone had already signed his name. I reported this to the poll workers but to the best of my knowledge nothing ever came from it. My mother had to hound the Board of Elections to delete my father from the voting rolls, but it still was several years before they removed his name. I chalk that up to incompetence, not fraud. But if you don’t stay on top of things like registered voters dying, you INVITE voter fraud.

    Many conservatives have this image of “community organizers” bringing groups of ineligible voters to polling places to vote illegally, then bringing the group to additional polling places to vote several more times. That has happened in the past, but I have no idea how common things like that are. I know that GOP campaign strategists talk about having to overcome what they call the “margin of fraud” to win some elections. Is that all just an excuse they use to explain lost elections? Maybe. But then you see a Senate election be won by a Democrat after a poll worker remembers a bunch of ballots they had forgotten to take out of their trunk.

    Democrats objection to voter ID laws reminds me a bit of the way some people reacted when the federal government required people on public assistance be fingerprinted, yelling that they were being stigmatized as criminals. You could also argue they were being stigmatized as lawyers and public school teachers because I was fingerprinted before I could be licensed as either. Fingerprinting is a way to confirm identity, just like a photo ID. If I recall a significant number of people dropped off the welfare rolls when that requirement was instituted. Was that because deserving recipients objected to being stigmatized? Or people who were accessing benefits fraudulently were stopped? I tend to think it was the latter.

    There is one other point to consider. A person who lacks a photo ID is prevented from fully participating in society. Sure there are the obvious things like buying alcohol or flying. But you can be barred from entering any number of buildings, public and private, without a photo ID to get a visitor’s pass. One thing most of these Voter ID laws have in common are that they offer free or low cost government photo IDs so that eligible people are not prevented from voting. Getting that ID may allow a prospective voter to participate more fully in society.

  11. Liberals try to create a narrative that is a form of voter suppression because it is a form a voter suppression. Legislators in southern states used to admit that right out loud in public, before they found that tended to get their thinly disguised voter-suppression laws thrown out in court.

    There IS corrupt voting, but it takes the form of people being bribed to vote for a particular candidate, just as it always has, NOT people pretending to be someone they are not, which has never been a significant thing.

    1. The law requiring voter ID is a good and proper law and should be part of any legitimate democracy. That is totally obvious and impossible to rebut, as I see it.

      If it happens to disproportionately affect one segment of society in a negative way, it is the responsibility of that segment to get up to speed. If they need help, the government and/or sympathetic community forces should help them.

      The liberal argument against voter ID laws is tantamount to saying this: the laws against violence tend to result in more black people being imprisoned than white, therefore we should have no laws against violence.

      In both cases, the law itself is quite proper. We SHOULD have laws against violence and we should have a process to determine that each vote is cast by an eligible voter.

      I realize that some bigots manipulate the law or want the law for nefarious reasons, but the legitimacy of the process should always be the starting point.

  12. Trump’s usual out-of-touch stupidity, however, masks an important point. I suppose just about everyone in America who wants to buy alcohol from a supermarket or gas station needs a picture ID. I have seen 80-year-old ladies ID’d at my local supermarket, because the store policy is to ID everyone, thus avoiding accusations of discrimination. Given that a picture ID is needed to buy a friggin’ Bud Light Lime, it seems that it is not unreasonable to require a picture ID to cast a ballot for the nation’s most important jobs.

    I know that liberals try to create a narrative that this is a form of voter suppression because it disproportionately affects minorities, but I reject that narrative because it is self-serving. What they are really saying is “the requirement hurts us more than it hurts them,” and they are using minority rights disingenuously, as a form of human shield.

    The conservative narrative is that there is rampant voter fraud. I reject that narrative as well. It is rare, and on balance doesn’t seem to lean in either direction. But I also reject the liberal spin that we don’t have to deal with it because it rarely happens.

    Casting aside all that phony-baloney spin, there is no good argument against requiring a picture ID to vote, and there are good arguments in favor of it. Yes, I actually support the conservative position on this issue, even though the net impact may produce the opposite result from the one I’d prefer.

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