The Voter ID mongers seem to have won the longer narrative war when Joe Manchin tees it up as a federal compromise for voting rights reform and Democrats treat it as something worthwhile if feds can set the standards.

I don’t think we appreciate how deeply and broadly that Voter ID has been mainstreamed since 9/11, and how opponents have not done a good job countering the demand for it or rebutting the arguments of pro-Voter ID advocates, despite the pro-Republican bias of most advocates. Even the ACLU has done a terrible job countering the Voter ID narrative.
It has been successful in arguments such as “Mexico and Canada have identification, why don’t we?” and “Democrats assume minorities are too stupid to get ID” and “Democrats register dead people and ‘illegals’ to vote”. Now it has progressed to “Black people are in favor of Voter ID according to polls”.

It has been a long and sustained campaign. But for the first time since the 2nd Bush admin, we’re now talking about federally tightening and streamlining laws on voter ID to mollify “both sides”, even though at least 14 states have never adopted (or have ditched) ID requirements at polling places (most recently Virginia).

And maybe the Voter ID supporters are right something that numerous other countries with varying levels of political freedom require at the polling place, including Mexico and Canada. Maybe those 14 states are backwards-facing in terms of election administration.

But the United States, as a whole, is uniquely obstinate, stubborn and backwards-facing in terms of voter registration. And even HR1 gets it wrong by not including one thing that could move voter registration forward: a federal voter roll.

But we never developed a rebuttal to the argument that “maybe you think minorities are too stupid to get ID”.

Something about that argument sends me up the fucking wall. Maybe that was the intent.

The logic is that minorities should prove their intelligence by obtaining “free” ID because white conservatives are inconvenienced by having to use ID to buy a gun, buy a beer or go through TSA. And if “welfare is slavery” and the Democratic Party is a “plantation”, then Black people are “slaves” who are not really intelligent and who need to prove our ability to cast the “right” vote, so we must prove our intellectual worth by jumping through the “simple”, “free” exercise of obtaining an ID.

This is weird. For so many Dems, Voter ID is a costly, anti-working-class poll tax. For Republicans, it’s a literacy test of intelligence, a shibboleth, and a necessity.