>Still, requiring IDs to vote just seems to make prima facie sense. Of course you want to (visibly) make sure that people are voting legally! That's a pretty important part of democracy. I understand that in practice, few cases of voter fraud are detected, and that in practice there are all sorts of mechanisms in place to make sure people aren't taking advantage.
In a vacuum absolutely. But in this country we have a rich history of voter suppression. And requiring IDs is a way to do that in practice (as you mention). So it becomes a matter of balancing what would be the ideal (everyone has an id easily, and we can thus require it for voting) to the reality (requiring it will lead to a magnitude more people wrongly disenfranchised than fraud prevented).
Yep. And before ID requirements, it was the poll taxes. Like robbing a bank, the penalties for fraudulently voting are so extreme (52 USC 20511) that no sane person should dare to entertain it. As such, it's simpler and encourages exercising of voting rights to lower bureaucratic barriers now to figure out paperwork and credentials later.
Yeah. That's why a technical solution makes sense - like a ten year plan to get everyone a valid id that they will be able to use in the future, or something like that.
In a vacuum absolutely. But in this country we have a rich history of voter suppression. And requiring IDs is a way to do that in practice (as you mention). So it becomes a matter of balancing what would be the ideal (everyone has an id easily, and we can thus require it for voting) to the reality (requiring it will lead to a magnitude more people wrongly disenfranchised than fraud prevented).