I’m Swedish. Don’t know if someone can vouch for me. Never tried. Pretty sure I need an ID.
Everyone (18+) get a voting card in their mail sent to their adress. You bring the voting card and ID, like passport or drivers license. Someone ticks your name off a list and you can vote. (No registrering to vote or anything)
ID isn’t free, but a passport costs like $40-50.
You can also get a national ID card. But that’s even more expensive and I still don’t quite understand why you would want one rather than just getting a passport.
I’m Estonian, we also have ID requirements, and an ID card is cheap. Passports aren’t expensive either, but ID cards are more useful in day to day life.
The US is fucked. There’s no standardized photo ID that everyone has to have. People only get passports for travel and the country is literally so huge and diverse you can travel more than most people have money to and see many different environments without leaving it. I reckon you could spend a year in NYC alone and not see everything there is to see. In 2006, 20% of Americans had passports, in 2011 it was 37%.
The most common form of photo ID to have is the driver’s license. But some people don’t get one. People also have social security cards, almost everyone has one, but that’s not a photo ID.
Luckily they now have something called a passport card (pretty much just an ID card but allows travel to like Canada and Mexico I think?), that only costs 30 bucks to get. The actual book form of passport is 130 for application, and if you’re an adult and it’s your first passport, there’s a 35 dollar acceptance fee, which all together is actually too much for some people.
There’s just a lot of bureaucratic inefficiency in the whole ID system in the US. It’s fucked. If you’re poor and can’t get time off work to get a cheap form of ID, you might be fucked. If you don’t have transport, you might be fucked.
Really, they should fix all this first and THEN mandate photo ID for voting. Right now it disproportionately affects people who have a hard time getting a photo ID, i.e poor people. Then there’s the whole single voting day for in-person voting. It also disproportionately affects the working class - people who might have a hard time getting time off work. Wait, why is this an issue, your employer is legally mandated to give you time off to vote? Because in red states, in areas that vote blue, they only put one voting station for a whooooole bunch of people so you’d have to drive a long distance AND wait a long time in line. AND it’s only 1-4 hours depending on state AND not all states have these laws.
The whole country is rigged to not let poor people to vote as easily as the wealthy, unfortunately.
I’m Swedish. Don’t know if someone can vouch for me. Never tried. Pretty sure I need an ID.
Everyone (18+) get a voting card in their mail sent to their adress. You bring the voting card and ID, like passport or drivers license. Someone ticks your name off a list and you can vote. (No registrering to vote or anything)
ID isn’t free, but a passport costs like $40-50.
You can also get a national ID card. But that’s even more expensive and I still don’t quite understand why you would want one rather than just getting a passport.
I’m Estonian, we also have ID requirements, and an ID card is cheap. Passports aren’t expensive either, but ID cards are more useful in day to day life.
The US is fucked. There’s no standardized photo ID that everyone has to have. People only get passports for travel and the country is literally so huge and diverse you can travel more than most people have money to and see many different environments without leaving it. I reckon you could spend a year in NYC alone and not see everything there is to see. In 2006, 20% of Americans had passports, in 2011 it was 37%.
The most common form of photo ID to have is the driver’s license. But some people don’t get one. People also have social security cards, almost everyone has one, but that’s not a photo ID.
Luckily they now have something called a passport card (pretty much just an ID card but allows travel to like Canada and Mexico I think?), that only costs 30 bucks to get. The actual book form of passport is 130 for application, and if you’re an adult and it’s your first passport, there’s a 35 dollar acceptance fee, which all together is actually too much for some people.
They also have free voter ID cards which are nowhere close to free.
There’s just a lot of bureaucratic inefficiency in the whole ID system in the US. It’s fucked. If you’re poor and can’t get time off work to get a cheap form of ID, you might be fucked. If you don’t have transport, you might be fucked.
Really, they should fix all this first and THEN mandate photo ID for voting. Right now it disproportionately affects people who have a hard time getting a photo ID, i.e poor people. Then there’s the whole single voting day for in-person voting. It also disproportionately affects the working class - people who might have a hard time getting time off work. Wait, why is this an issue, your employer is legally mandated to give you time off to vote? Because in red states, in areas that vote blue, they only put one voting station for a whooooole bunch of people so you’d have to drive a long distance AND wait a long time in line. AND it’s only 1-4 hours depending on state AND not all states have these laws.
The whole country is rigged to not let poor people to vote as easily as the wealthy, unfortunately.