Summary
A GOP-led procedural vote in the House failed after nine Republicans joined Democrats, halting legislative action for the week.
The vote’s collapse blocked Republican efforts to pass the No Rogue Rulings Act, aimed at limiting federal judges’ power, and the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote.
The failed rule also sought to derail a bipartisan resolution allowing proxy voting for new parents, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
With the rule defeated, Speaker Mike Johnson canceled all remaining votes until Monday evening, stalling key GOP priorities.
That still doesn’t cover the need to verify that you are who you say you are.
If government issued IDs were free for everyone, this wouldn’t be an issue. The issue isn’t showing an ID to vote, it’s that not everyone has one, and those who don’t are usually lower income.
Actually checking the name and address against the voting registration record, without an additional ID check, really is enough to validate someone in like 99.999999% of cases. In order for someone to impersonate someone else while voting, they would need to:
-Know their name
-Know their address
-Know their designated polling place and physically visit it to cast a ballot
-And most importantly, they would need to know that the person they’re impersonating is not going to vote in that election. Because otherwise as soon as they do, it’s going to flag a voter fraud alert when one voter appears to be voting twice. Which is a federal crime that is taken very seriously and easy to track down, because it occurs so infrequently and there’s surveillance at every polling location
So an imposter would be risking federal prison time in order to swing an election by one vote. It’s something that happens like a single digit number of times per election.
Compare that to the hundreds or even thousands of times that people work 8+ hour days (since elections in the US are never on holidays), get to their polling place that closes as early as 6pm, and then find that they’ve forgot to bring or lost their ID, and then won’t or can’t vote in the election. The current system works fine, ID laws are 100% just a voter suppression tactic.
I’ll copy something I wrote up in another thread.
This is one of those things that needs some context. Lots of nations have ID requirements similar to this, and people from outside the United States are often confused as to why it’s a problem. The issue is that it’s a backdoor to voter disenfranchisement.
Not everyone drives, and therefore, doesn’t need a state-issued ID. But now you need one to vote. So you have to go to the DMV to get an ID that’s not a drivers license but functions the same way for ID purposes. Except the DMV is only open during working hours, has long lines, and the nearest one may not have public transportation going to it.
It’s often minorities who don’t have drivers licenses to begin with, and they tend to vote for Democrats.
In practice, there was never significant voter fraud at all. Not enough to change the outcome of any race. Even on the surface, it’s solving a non-problem.
Also, most voting rights advocates will point to the 24th Amendment, (arguably rightly) claiming that requiring ID that you must pay the state to acquire constitutes a poll tax.
To explain: when black men got the right to vote after the 15th Amendment was passed, lots of states tried lots of ways to make sure they couldn’t. One thing that was legal was requiring a fee to be paid in order to vote - this had the knock-on effect of making sure poor white people, who often sympathized with and voted with black people, couldn’t vote either. These fees were known as poll taxes, ostensibly to pay the people running the poll and defray the state’s cost of administering the election. Normally this was a nominal amount, but if you were a sharecropper or subsistence farmer who was literally counting half-pennies to get by month to month, the quarter that the poll tax required was enormous. Many states kept these poll taxes in one form or another for decades, and they were declared unconstitutional in 1966 by the SCOTUS in Harper v Virginia Board.
If I wanted a Real ID like this executive order required, I would be paying about $80 on the low end, assuming I do not need to pay to acquire any of the several documents I need to prove I am who I am.