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Boris Johnson turned away from polling station after forgetting to bring photo ID
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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As a person with no horse in the grinder, why is requiring ID a good thing in England/EU a good thing, but bad in the USA?
I’m very confused.
As someone who comes from a country where we do require photo ID for voting, not requiring one feels absurd, so I asked the same question. Apparently in the US, there is a part of the population that doesn't normally get photo ID and that part is mostly poor people and minorities and photo ID laws are used as means of disenfranchisement, similar to having the voting days during business days (when many people can't come to vote) or having voting stations far away in an area with limited public transport options.
Where I live in Finland, the police will actually grant you a temporary photo ID only for voting if you don't have one, although most people have passports. There are early voting stations in basically every post office for a week and the main voting day is always on a Sunday. No excuse to miss voting.
I've only missed one voting during my life, at a time when I was living in another country and there was no consulate in the part of the country I was in. Nowadays there's also the option of mail-in voting when outside the country, I don't know if it wasn't a thing back then or I just didn't know.
That's not to say I didn't want some improvements in our system: I'd like to see ranked choice voting or something similar here, there are some smaller parties I've been voting and it seems they seldom have a chance.
We've never really needed to use photo ID in England and never had problems with fraud. You can only visit one polling station one time, the system worked fine. The Tories changed it to deliberately disenfranchise the poor who are less likely to have these types of ID, and they did this because they're scum.
I feel like there's a simple solution: Government issues free photo IDs to everyone, you need to pay for it if you destroy/lose it while it's still valid.
There was an ID card system in the works in the UK a few years ago, but it was scrapped. There was a lot of opposition to it ok the grounds of civil liberties and privacy.
There’s a lot of wariness about a “paper’s please” society in the country, there hasn’t been a national ID system since just after WW2. Driver’s licenses and passports are used a sort of substitute, but even the UK drivers license doesn’t have to be carried to actually drive.
The proposed ID card system was also attached to an identity database system that was considered to have a lot of features creep and be too invasive.
A free, simple ID card system would probably make a lot of sense (the existing drivers license system could be repurposed/expanded for it), but there’s just a lot of uneasiness about it among the British for better or worse.
That's where you guys draw the line? With automated facial recognition vans, CCTV everywhere, among other things, the UK is certainly not a country that comes to mind when I think "civil liberties and privacy".
To be fair when they say recently they mean about 20 years ago. It was the Blair government that were looking to do this when I was at school in the early 2000s.
France does this.