First things first, I don’t doubt it is a bad thing, considering who supports it and who doesn’t.
But my question is what exactly is the issue and what is the current and proposed voting process when it comes to IDs?
Here in my EU country, you have to show some version of a government ID, be it an ID card, drivers license or passport. And we don’t have to pre-register to vote.
Interesting. So while signing up for the selective service that I assume you are referring to, does not have anything to do with registering to vote. Some states do automatically register you when you get your drivers license. My state did not, so I didn’t know some did. That said, when you register or even automatically get registered by the dmv. They attach your signature to the registration. And in states that don’t require id, they require you to sign the poll book. And they compare that to the registration.
So if you live in an auto registration state, you still can’t vote for your friend unless you can also forge thier signature.
Huh, I done googled it, and it appears we were lied to, but my high school told us all that was the case. I guess I just forgot that I must have separately registered to vote? Or maybe I live in one of those states, idk, it was decades ago to be fair, but we were for sure told that in order to vote we had to register for the draft. Glad to learn it isn’t true, thanks!
I guess you’re right then, he had to have registered at some point (or we live in one of the auto states). Also probably why you shouldn’t make your signature some squiggles though…
And odd that they haven’t called me on the fact that my actual signature has changed since then, since I worked on it at one point out of boredom.
I have had my ballot denied because my sig didn’t match. It was a while ago. But I had to redo my signature for the file, and I took a picture of it so I would know how I signed it. I did get my ballot counted though eventually. We are a vote by mail state. It’s been a while since I was at the dmv, we get 10 years out of one license. But when I was last there they asked me if I wanted to register to vote as well. So I think that is how a lot of people do it. But with online options for changing address and such, not sure if the website will do the same.
The (well, my state’s) website doesn’t ask about registering to vote with online address changes, I know that for sure because I’ve done that fairly recently.
But interesting, I’ve never been denied for a signature not matching and now I wonder why.
Here is where I agree in some way with your original statement. They must have had to relax the matching standard to account for the fact that people rarely sign their name anymore. Soon it won’t be a reasonable way to verify. So they will need something new. But it needs to be super low barrier. Whatever it ends up as, it will cause significant issues if they don’t grandfather existing voters to allow them to use signatures.