There's also the rest of the world: "China Turns to A.I. in Information Warfare" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/us/politics/china-artific...
My anecdote: I am an EU citizen living in another EU country. As such, I am permitted to vote in local and European elections. When I moved to my current village I registered with the local town hall online. I sent a scan of my national ID card (for my home country) and they registered me to vote for the elections I’m eligible to vote for. Ahead of the elections, they post me a physical election card telling me where to vote (always the same place in the village), and on the day I take my card and ID and vote.
It’s basically frictionless. It’s no problem to register online with a foreign ID document, and it’s no problem to present a foreign ID card alongside my election card on the day when I vote.
If I turned up to vote without my election card or my ID, I would be refused the chance to vote. That makes sense to me and showing ID to vote is not questioned by anyone.
How does that compare to a notoriously unfriendly nation like Germany?
In any case, my understanding is virtually any nation in Central and South America requires identification to vote. If the third-world poverty stricken nations make it work there is no reason the rich United States cannot.
That seems like the worst case scenario though? I don't think homeless people should be disenfranchised, but at the same time it's unfair to pretend the typical experience of getting a voter id resembles whatever the TV show is depicting either.
You're assuming the theoretical US system would be the same and not be made arbitrarily complex by Republicans.
All the support systems that help ID cards be fairly distributed to citizens are under-documented for the populace and under-supported by the administration.
It's ripe for the authoritarian takeover that is currently underway here.
One of the blockers to a national ID system in the US, that would result in voter ID no longer posing any substantive obstacle to voting, has been anti-government paranoia; but another, if you're not aware, has been fundamentalist Christianity and its eschatology -- fundamentalist Christians may associate the idea of a national ID with the "mark of the beast".
The amusing thing here of course is that while Trump's attempt to unilaterally impose ID rules is illegal, if it were successful, it would likely be an own goal. Formerly, the sort of person who is likely to not have any sort of ID -- someone disconnected from any systems that would require it -- was more likely to vote Democratic than Republican, but in recent years, this has reversed. While I can't cheer for breaking election laws (or for a court ruling that this is in fact legal, because it shouldn't be considered so), it would at least be amusing if this backfired.
This was absolutely true during the 2000s.
The huge irony is that having a national ID (central authenticator issuing globally unique identifiers) is the only way to protect PII, at the field level, at rest.
Per the Translucent Database strategy. Which I won't repeat here. Unless the peanut gallery develops a genuine interest.
In other words, not having Real ID (or equiv) enables our panoptic surveillance capitalistic dystopia.
Preventing non-citizens from voting. Some counties in the US have almost half of the population who are non-citizens. It's great that we have so many people wanting to come to the states, but they can't vote until they become citizens. This is not a controversial issue anywhere except in the US.
The main reason democrats push back against voter ID is so that republicans can't disenfranchise them even further.
If I say I'm John Doe at James Lane then you can trivially verify this in multiple ways. You can check the prior voting records, you can check the death records, you can check property information. If another person comes by and says they're John Doe at James Lane then you can send mail to said address asking them to verify their identity / vote.
If you can't trust "any study," then you're going 100% by feels (and whatever Fox news is frothing about).
Please enlighten us with elections where illegals voted and changed the outcome.
>The best evidence seems to be that the impact of restrictive laws is minimal. An analysis published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of 1.6bn voting records from every state in America found that strict voter ID rules, on average, neither significantly suppressed votes nor prevented fraud. Nor do ID laws hurt Democrats any longer, according to research by Jeffrey Harden and Alejandra Campos. Whereas in 2010 voter ID laws reduced Democratic vote share by 3%, by 2020 they increased it slightly. Because of the changes in party voting coalitions, the overall effect of the next phase of even tighter voting rules could now “easily be a wash” when it comes to benefiting one party or the other, says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who studies elections at Harvard University.
All I can hope for is that we punish this behavior in the future when grifting and violating civil rights isn't the normal thing to do.
True, Democrats and others have gerrymandered too. But I sense that most people don't want the gerrymander to be possible. Yet we can't get it changed because we're beholden to some dead guys who laid down rules hundreds of years ago, which none of us agreed to or had any input on; and we don't really have representatives in Congress to change things according to law the way we want them to, because they self-deal (looking at you, Rick Scott) and because Citizens United cemented the power of those who really get representation —those with money, and corporations. The People will revolt if things don't change fast.
Like I bet the electoral make-up of "people with passports" skews rather left
1. This is just one part of the slope from which the republic has been sliding down from anocracy towards autocracy.
2. You, reading and trying to process this, are an exception. Now imagine that the vast majority of the public does not have any overview and is not aware, being smothered in us-vs-them vibes.
3. You, being a normal human being, trying to make sense of it, trying to see if you can interpret this as normal. When we see something alarming but don't get an `ACK` from our social system, we shut off the internal alarm. This is the original sin of the media rooms, as their role in democracy is to see the big picture; they should ACK, they should sound the alarm loud and clear.
lesuorac•1h ago
It'll be great to see what a shitshow it is when 70% of people in Arkansas [1] can't vote. It seems to be pretty evenly split amongst being the administration and their primary opposition although I guess devil might be in the details [2].
[1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/...
[2]: https://today.yougov.com/travel/articles/35414-only-one-thir...
jimbo808•1h ago
TimorousBestie•1h ago
BrandonM•1h ago
lesuorac•1h ago
Devil in the details is literally how you gerrymander. If there are say overwhelming democrat passport holders in say NY then you just lose that one state and win the rest.
That said, I'm just more interested in seeing the sheer number of people being told their voter registration is invalid and if that would backfire as individuals who supporter the administration are kinda overwhelmingly targeted (top of that passport list isn't the south).
xracy•1h ago
tromp•1h ago
favorited•1h ago
mythrwy•1h ago
1659447091•58m ago
Modified3019•55m ago
1659447091•1h ago
>> Note: According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 79% of women in opposite-sex marriages have changed their surname to their spouse’s while 5% hyphenated their surname, meaning that 84% of women who are currently or have been in opposite-sex marriages have changed their legal name and therefore do not posess a birth certificate that could prove their identity and by extension citizenship status under the SAVE Act.
Am I reading correct that this would disqualify them from voting?
65 million "Estimated number of female citizens whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change only)"
69 million "Estimated number of female citizens (15 years and older) whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change or hyphenation)"
Guess they are working on the undermining females part of project 1525 now
For completeness:
>> Additionally, Pew reported that approximately 5% of men who marry also change their surname - nationwide this would account for approximately 4 million men.
Jtsummers•1h ago