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Master of publicity
This fucking dingbat. Even if he was just a random citizen, he should know by now that you need to bring ID. And it’s always good to check if you have it when going to your polling station.
Here in the Netherlands, we’re VERY strict on ID. No ID, no vote. I’ve been witness to a fair few elections as a reporter, and it always gets drilled into the people who run the polling stations: even if the King himself walks in, you ask him for his ID and tell him to bugger off if he doesn’t have it. I’ve seen city mayors turned away at polling stations in their own council buildings for failing to produce ID. And they all perfectly understand why those strict controls are necessary.
And they all perfectly understand why those strict controls are necessary.
Coming from a country where no ID is required but everything still goes smoothly, I'm not sure strict ID controls actually are necessary.
Yeah, no need for ID to vote here in Australia. Just rock up at any polling place and give your name and they'll cross your name off.
Don't even need ID to register to vote. Any other person on the electoral roll can vouch for your identity.
The UK never needed ID, there was no evidence of voter fraud happening at polling stations. So voter ID was introduced.
There has been evidence of voter fraud happening via postal votes where no id is required.
The UK doesn't have any government ID, only ID by proxy like drivers license and passport. So poorer people and the elderly are less likely to have photo id. Only one group got an exception - the one that voted conservative.
The previous Scottish conservative leader committed electoral crimes live on TV. There was no consequences. But know people are further disincentivesed to vote, despite very little evidence of people fraudulent casting votes claiming to be someone else.
And they all perfectly understand why those strict controls are necessary
To disenfranchise those without government issued ID
This is only really an issue if it's not free and convenient to get one, as in huge swaths of the US.
And also, the UK
I hear people are being turned away. But whenever I vote, I stroll down the road to a basically empty room, in and out in a couple of minutes. All in all, 20 minutes max. If I forgot ID it would be very little effort to just go get it.
Am I just incredibly lucky to live that close?
Yes, sometimes people have to go to the next town. But, the easier is when you can vote by mail.
I'm in Arizona and have had to wait in line for a couple of hours before. They also purged a bunch of voter registrations before without informing people, so quite a few had to cast provisional ballots and hope they got counted.
Not really, my local polling place I drive straight past on my way home, it probably takes five minutes out of my day at most.
Any functioning democracy should be like this.
I live in a place where ID isn't required. In fact, I can register there without ID. It's really nice, and voter fraud is quite minimal despite this
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Los Angeles California
Needing ID is a brand new idea for british conservative party. Its been in place since last local elections (a year ago?), and yeah it is a stupid idea that solely disenfranchises people
Yes.
You're lucky that you live close enough, or that you're not popping in on your dinner break, or on your way between jobs, and don't have time to nip home to pick up your ID.
Your lucky that you're not elderly or disabled and struggling to get to the polling station at all, never mind having the opportunity to get there and back easily.
What a bellend
Imagine going through the soul crushing hell of being a committed and earnest election worker in a failing 21st century democracy and then the clouds part and in one shining moment you can tell boris you have no idea who he is, but he'll need ID.
Like seriously consider it. Do you say "on your bike son"? Can you resist flipping him off? The joy he gave that one person might be the single act of good in johnson's entire life.
On bike? Flipping off? Boris Johnson?
I wonder how Boris feels about the current crop of carbrained Conservative candidates, given that supporting bikes was one of the few good things he did as mayor.
That’s a big part of the Boris Johnson myth. The “Boris bike” system in London was actually created by his Labour predecessor Ken Livingstone. The system officially opened shortly after Boris became mayor, who then took the credit for it.
The guy does ride a bike, but not as much as other’s coattails.
For sure, but even that is above the extremely low bar that the current conservatives (both the party and conservatives in general) have set.
Not sure if you're serious or not.
He's LITERALLY the reason Tory MP's are both fucking useless, or leaving/quitting in droves. When he gutted the party for not backing his Brexit vote, he got rid of lots of established conservative politicians, replacing many with populists.
The Conservative party doesn't have many actual conservatives in it any more. Many feel that they've been forced out, and even those looking to join feel that they're just a right-wing party on the tails of Reform.
It's one of the reasons I'm so excited for a GE. It'll likely result in a Labour landslide, but it'll also potentially be the biggest decimation of the Tories since Thatcher, probably more so because she was still ultimately a Conservative. If they can't root out the populists, the party is basically dead.
Serious about him being better than the current crop on this very specific issue? Yes. Other than that, he's a piece of trash and a hack of a politician, so I don't disagree with you on that point.
Although frankly I'd be happy if conservatism was buried altogether, and not just "populist" conservatism. Both forms are incredibly harmful to the poor and the disadvantaged in general.
Can we turn him away from the country for you know, forgetting to bring an actual identity ?
The misstep was embarrassing for Johnson because the requirement to bring photo ID is a stipulation of the Elections Act which he introduced in 2022 while still in Downing
It's not the onion, because you can't make this shit up.
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.
Voting ID requirements have not been universally seen as a good thing in the UK, there’s been a lot of opposition to it.
There is no national ID in the UK, instead there is a patchwork of secondary ID systems such as passports, drivers licenses, travel cards etc. In most cases they have a monetary cost or are not universally available.
It’s been seen as an attempt at voter suppression as many poorer British people may not have suitable ID. The rules also reject many forms of ID commonly held by younger voters, while accepting a wider range of ID held be older voters. There is supposed to be a free voting ID available but implantation has been left to local councils and has been criticised as hard to access.
Seriously? They made voting ID a council issue? Northern Ireland has had voting ID for a while and it's dead easy to get one, only thing I needed to pay was postage on a 2nd class stamp. Pretty good as well as it basically makes a free photographic ID available
It's bad in the USA because they have an aversion to all forms of registration.
It's unnecessary in most of Europe because they already have functional registries.
I don't know enough about UK election procedures to figure out why they thought it was necessary. It's probably not, but it's easy points for someone wanting to signal that they're doing something against the fictional illegal immigrants who are supposedly voting en masse whenever the right wing politicians don't get their way..
The US (mostly the trending fascist party) does whatever possible to make sure the least amount of people possible get the opportunity to vote and for the people who do vote, make sure their vote does not count as much as possible. It also varies per state.
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not giving out a national identification card, but then requiring an identification card to vote
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voting districts with crazy borders to make absolute certain that the far right gets the most representatives possible https://www.maproomblog.com/xq/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wapost-gerrymander-1024x687.jpg
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reducing the amount of voting centers every year in areas like major cities that vote more left so that the people would have to travel an hour or more to vote and without a car, it is almost impossible
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Voting is not a public holiday and many states do not allow voting by mail. Combined with the before point removes many poor people's ability to vote at all
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there is a right wing effort to remove as many left leaning votors as possible from registration for minor errors
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Armed party members at elections recently to intimidate voters, especially if they "look like the left demographic"
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the "electoral college" which can just decide to not cast the vote that actually decides elections for the candidates that the citizens voted for
It is really batshit crazy over there. It seems like the right gets away with all of this crazy stuff and then when the left is back in power, almost nothing is done to change it back with regards to voting.
In Europe, people have an ID since they are born. And, you need it to go to your neighboring countries which are never far away. Not having an ID is quite rare. You even have countries delivering it for free.
Also note that passports are valid IDs.
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.
France does this.
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 really brings into perspective. Thank you. This is WILD.
Quick edit; how is voting not work time off for fucking EVERYONE
snort
He's not hurting the people he needs to be
lol