New Hampshire Republicans Try to Require Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote
New Hampshire Republicans Try to Require Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote
The bill, part of a nationwide wave of conservative proposals fueled by Donald Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud, risks disenfranchising many eligible voters.
Look, I understand why this is happening. It's part of a concerted effort to make voting harder, and challenge the eligibility of certain classes of voters who tend to vote a certain way. But we do have eligibility requirements for voting, and the logical time to check them is when registering.
The real question is whether someone who has no documentation whatsoever should be disenfranchised. Like that homeless guy in the 59th Street subway station. He says he was born in Brooklyn in 1966. If that is true, and he is a citizen, he is eligible to vote whether or not he has a pristine copy of his long-form birth certificate. We need to have a system to accommodate him.
And understand what the end-game of Republicans are. They want to couple this with an aggressive purging of voter rolls. So they maliciously un-register people who they think will vote the wrong way, then impose these paperwork requirements on these people, all with the goal of discouraging them from voting.
So, while it may seem reasonable to demand proof while registering, that reasonable request is part of a larger goal of disenfranchising large groups of people.
Yeah, doesn't seem that the proposed bill offers meaningful improvements. The article says
Under current New Hampshire law, voters are asked to provide proof of identity and age (usually a driver’s license), proof that they live where they want to vote, and proof of citizenship (either a birth certificate or a passport) in order to be able to register and vote.
It's only if a person doesn't have a proof of citizenship, they can sign a sworn affidavit to register or vote, which will be checked by attorney general office after elections.
This looks to me as a solid system already. One cannot vote by impersonating someone else, one cannot vote if you are not living in the district, one can only lie about citizenship with a significant risk of that lie to be exposed after elections with all legal consequences.
Unless you belive that damn liberals moving buses of illegals with forged IDs to steal the elections, there is nothing much to be worried about.
Not true at all, Republicans just want to make sure it's actually Americans that are voting, and not illegals. You have to have a DL to drive, get a hotel room, and pretty much everything else you do. Why shouldn't you have to have one to vote? The argument of trying to disenfranchise large groups of people is ridiculous. You can't have fair elections free from foreign interference if just anybody can fill out a ballot and claim they're a US citizen on it
Because your right to vote is fundamental, and shouldn't be taken away just because you lost the paperwork.
Plus, non-citizens understand that trying to vote will ruin any chance they may have in the future of getting citizenship. People here illegally also don't want to call attention to their presence here and won't risk trying to vote based on that. Those people are not voting in any meaningful capacity.
The voter suppression thing is real, though . Click that link I left above; in certain states, there is a regular purging of the voter rolls, for frivolous reasons. Some voters don't find out they have been purged until they show up at the polls (after waiting in a long line to boot). Not giving them some way to cast a provisional ballot is the same as disenfranchising them.
the anti-democracy party strikes again
if you could provide republicans with a 100% secure method that also encouraged the entire voting population to do so they would tell you to get fucked.
they do not want to govern. they do not want democracy.
It makes sense to show a state id in order to vote for a a few reasons. It insures that you're a citizen of this country, that you are who you say you are, and it also stops people from being able to fill out absentee/mail-in ballots in other peoples names and then dropping them off at ballot box locations which is something that we know is happening similar to this case. https://ctmirror.org/2024/06/11/bridgeport-wanda-geter-pataky-arrested-absentee-ballot/. Granted, that was a local election and not national, but it can obviously happen either way and it's very easy to get away with. In this particular case, the video that caught them dropping the ballots in the ballot boxes were set to be deleted in 30 days after it was captured. They got lucky that a fire station across the street noticed the same woman dropping off tons of ballots at the ballot box across the street from them and they gave the video to one of the campaigns and that's what got them reviewing other ballot boxes around town in which they found more evidence of the same thing happening at those.
I read through that link, and an ID requirement simply wouldn't have helped. A bunch of Democratic political operatives convinced locals (who were already registered to vote) to apply for absentee ballots, then individually harvested them and delivered them, in violation of several existing laws. Throw the book at those folks, but the answer is not to make it harder to vote.
But at the same time, why is that even illegal? I filled out the ballot, it doesn't really matter who drops it off at Town Hall.