Voting Check-In

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

I've been enjoying reading everyone's stories of voting. I will be voting on election day, because my polling place is very convenient for me to use, but the early voting locations aren't. I was wondering, though, do any other states allow an alternative, if a voter doesn't have a photo id? In Idaho, we can sign an affidavit as an alternative. From this article, about helping homeless people vote:

Quote

But that begs the question: what if you don't have a valid ID to show? Well, you will be given the option to sign a Personal Identification Affidavit at your polling place, swearing your identity under penalty of perjury.

I don't know how many Idahoans know about it, though. 

[feministxtian]

Early voted in NV last Sunday. God it was so easy. Big tent set up in the parking lot of a shopping center not far from me (no, there is no "designated polling place" here. You walk in, give them your name and DOB. They look it up...you sign that you are who you are, your address is correct (although hubs changed his right there on the spot), don't need ID then you go vote. 

This is why I like living in NV...the state makes so many things SO easy...DMV? Make an appointment, go online, use the kiosk. Voting registration? Can do it at the DMV or the set ups outside most grocery stores. 

It seems the western states are a bit more progressive (except for Arizona) when it comes to stuff like this. 

[K'Z'K]

5 hours ago, WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo? said:

I was wondering, though, do any other states allow an alternative, if a voter doesn't have a photo id?

I've lived in Massachusetts and Illinois. No ID, photo or otherwise, is required in either state, so there is no need for an alternative. You just verbally give your name and address and they match that to their records. Theoretically, one could easily vote under false information, but no one does.

I don't know if I'll vote early or not. Probably will, but I have to research our local ballot question and decide on that first. Voting is by town here, and mine is at Town Hall.

Both states currently make registering easy and will soon have automatic voter registration.

[MarblesMom]

I lived in CA for almost 30 years, voted all elections, never showed an ID. 

Moved to So Dakota and I was shocked when I had to produce one (since the people at the polling place already knew my entire bio, LOL).

The impediments keeping people from voting has got to stop.

 

[onekidanddone]

Eighteen years ago my sister ‘s water broke as she was walking to her car so she could early vote. One would think that having her water break would send my sister right to the hospital. Nope. She stopped on the way to cast her ballot. It was 2000 and she wasn’t going to let a silly little thing like labor get in the way of her voting against GWB.

I texted her today talking about how fortunate it is her second born could vote this year. 

[AnywhereButHere]

No early voting here in NY (as far as I know anyway - certainly have never seen anything), but there is a vote for Library Board of Trustees today.

Normally a library vote wouldn't be on my radar, but during an event for the Republican State senate candidate this past weekend, some crazy lady decided to get in the face of the Library candidate (who was just in the area - no affiliation with state senate candidate) and start screeching about this poor woman's stance on LGBTQ issues and lack of morality and the like.

1. Good for Library candidate. She stands for equality.

2. Crazy Lady, it's an opinion - not a stance. It's a library board position. Really doesn't matter in terms of government and laws.

3. Library candidate just picked up 4 new votes. Even my in-laws (who never vote in library elections) are voting for this woman.

[Cartmann99]

On 10/25/2018 at 1:09 PM, Howl said:

Fortunately, one still has the option to vote a straight Democratic (or Republican) ticket, which I did, but there were a bazillion-ty City Council races, judges, propositions for the City and so forth, so it was a 14-page ballot.  I noticed that the Libertarians had a pretty full slate

You city slickers and your big-ass ballots.  We had all of the same statewide races that you did, but after adding in all of the local stuff, ours was only two pages.

 We were supposed to go vote on Friday, but something came up, so we had to wait until today. All of the candidates had small yard signs out by the road in front of the polling place, except for Ted "Flaming Jackass" Cruz. His people put out a sign for him that was at least four times bigger than anybody else's sign.

Dear Rufus, please let Beto win!

[Jaamillion]

NYC here...we don’t have early voting (as anywherebutbhere already mentioned). My designsated polling place is 5 mins away and they’ve never requested ID, just match my name and address to the log. Im excited about voting this year and am urging everyone I know to use their right and vote too. 

A great resource is votesaveamerica.com,I used it to research who’s running in my local elections. 

[Drala]

NYTimes piece about Native American push-back on North Dakota's voter suppression law

Spoiler

By Maggie Astor

Oct. 30, 2018

FORT YATES, N.D. — Nobody in the squat yellow house serving as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s get-out-the-vote headquarters knew its address.

It was on Red Tail Hawk Avenue; they knew that much. But the number was anyone’s guess. Phyllis Young, a longtime tribal activist leading the voter-outreach effort, said it had fallen off the side of the house at some point. Her own home has a number only because she added one with permanent marker.

This is normal on Native American reservations. Buildings lack numbers; streets lack signs. Even when a house has an address in official records, residents don’t necessarily know what it is.

“We know our communities based off our communities,” said Danielle Ta’Sheena Finn, a Standing Rock spokeswoman and tribal judge. “We know, ‘Hey, that’s so-and-so’s house; you go two houses down and that’s the correct place you need to be.’”

Judith LeBlanc, left, of the Native Organizers Alliance, and OJ Semans of Four Directions arrived at the Standing Rock tribe’s get-out-the-vote headquarters in Fort Yates. Ms. LeBlanc and Mr. Semans are working to get proper IDs for Native Americans so they can vote.

Yet under a law the Supreme Court allowed to take effect this month, North Dakotans cannot vote without a residential address. Post office boxes, which many Native Americans rely on, aren’t enough anymore.

The Republican-controlled state legislature began debating this requirement just a few months after Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, won a Senate seat in 2012 with strong support from Native Americans. That race was decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. Ms. Heitkamp is now seeking re-election in one of the nation’s most aggressively contested elections, and she is trailing her Republican opponent, Representative Kevin Cramer, in the polls. And once again, she is looking to Native Americans for a strong vote: there are at least 30,000 of them in North Dakota.

Supporters of the address requirement say it is needed to prevent voter fraud and has nothing to do with Ms. Heitkamp. Native Americans, noting that state officials have not confirmed any pattern of fraud, see it as an attempt at voter suppression.

But in these final days before the election, their tribal governments are working feverishly to provide the necessary identification, and some Native Americans believe their anger could actually fuel higher turnout.

Winona Fox, left, and Lonna Jackson-Street, the Spirit Lake tribe’s secretary and treasurer, looked at a list of residents who have come to get the addresses they need to vote.CreditKristina Barker for The New York Times

“I’m past the point of being upset over it,” said Lonna Jackson-Street, secretary and treasurer of the Spirit Lake Tribe. “I’m more excited about the outcome, because I think we’re going to bring in numbers that we’ve never seen before.”

If that happens, it will be because of a considerable expenditure of time and resources on the part of the tribes and advocacy groups supporting them.

Tribes have extended their office hours and worked around the clock to find efficient ways to assign addresses and issue identification. They are providing hundreds of free IDs when they would normally charge at least $5 to $10 apiece. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians printed so many IDs that the machine overheated and started melting the cards.

“What people out there don’t understand is how much it costs a tribe to make sure that each and every individual tribal member has that right to vote,” said OJ Semans, co-executive director of Four Directions, a Native American voting rights group working with tribal leaders. “The tribes have invested thousands of dollars, whether it’s equipment, man-hours, meetings. This has not come cheap.”

State officials say it is easy for anyone without a residential address to get one. In a letter to tribal leaders last month — just after the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit let the requirement take effect, in a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court — Secretary of State Al Jaeger’s office wrote that voters could contact their county’s 911 coordinator, describe the location of their home and have an address assigned “in an hour or less.”

In practice, it isn’t always so simple.

Voters’ experiences have varied greatly based on which county they live in. In Rolette County, where the Turtle Mountain Reservation is, they have been able to get addresses from the county and IDs from the tribe without much red tape. But at Standing Rock, in Sioux County, the 911 coordinator is the sheriff, Frank Landeis. That’s a deterrent to people who are afraid to interact with law enforcement, much less tell the sheriff where they live, and Sheriff Landeis is not easy to reach.

When Ms. Finn called him on Oct. 12, three days after the Supreme Court ruling, he was out. On Oct. 15, he said he was transporting prisoners and could not assign addresses that day. He was also unavailable when The New York Times called on Friday.

And in an episode recounted independently by Ms. Finn, Mr. Semans and Ms. Young, a tribal elder, Terry Yellow Fat, got through to Sheriff Landeis only to be assigned the address of a bar near his house. Mr. Semans worried that, in addition to playing into stereotypes about Native Americans and alcohol, this could expose Mr. Yellow Fat to fraud charges if he voted under an address he knew was incorrect.

Senator Heidi Heitkamp at her rally at the Prairie Knights Casino and Resort in Standing Rock. Ms. Heitkamp is trailing her Republican opponent in the polls.

So, with help from Four Directions and others, some tribes are creating addresses themselves — and preparing to do so until the polls close.

Geographic information experts at Claremont Graduate University in California overlaid voting precinct maps on satellite images of the reservations and assigned each precinct one address. Voters can now point to their house on the map and be assigned the precinct address plus a unique identifier: -001, -002, and so on. Tribal officials will be stationed at every reservation polling site on Election Day with a form letter on tribal letterhead, ready to assign an address and issue identification on the spot.

Four Directions informed Secretary Jaeger of this plan in early October and asked him to endorse it. In his response, which his office provided to The Times, Mr. Jaeger declined, saying that whether tribes had the authority to create their own addresses was a question beyond his office’s purview. He added, however, that he could not “dictate the style or format of the identification used by a tribal government if it contains the required voter information,” suggesting that a letter with a handwritten address should be as valid as an ID card.

The pace of working with potential voters has been relentless for the tribes. Ms. Jackson-Street said Spirit Lake had identified and was trying to reach 211 members without residential addresses, in addition to printing ID cards for members who had addresses but no document showing them. Robin Smith, the tribe’s enrollment director, said last Tuesday that she had been too inundated with ID requests to budge from her chair all morning.

Image

Ms. LeBlanc gathered supplies for the get-out-the-vote headquarters, where staff and volunteers will be stationed until Election Day.CreditKristina Barker for The New York Times

Merle White Tail, 50, had no street address, so Ms. Smith assigned one. Grant Cavanaugh, 32, had an address on file but didn’t know what it was, so she looked it up. Darien Spotted Bird, 21, had an ID card that misspelled his address, so she printed a new one.

Then there are more subtle problems. For instance, while Sioux County does not offer early voting, it does — like all North Dakota counties — allow early, no-excuse-needed absentee voting, which is functionally almost identical. But Mr. Semans said that when one woman went to the county auditor’s office and asked to vote early, the auditor, Barbara Hettich, simply told her there was no early voting and didn’t mention the absentee option. (Ms. Hettich did not respond to a request for comment.)

Later, when Ms. Young filled out an absentee ballot, Ms. Hettich told her she had to use blue ink or the ballot would not be counted. But literature on the secretary of state’s website says ballots must be filled out in black ink. Mr. Semans ping-ponged back and forth between Standing Rock and Bismarck, trying to get a guarantee that ballots would not be thrown out because of ink color. On Friday, Lee Ann Oliver in the secretary of state’s office told The Times that both blue and black were acceptable.

The scene at the get-out-the-vote headquarters in Fort Yates last Monday showed how hurriedly the whole effort there had been put together. The room was mostly empty. There was a small table, a couple of armchairs, some old swivel chairs, all delivered the day before. The team was trying to create a voter database from a list of people who bought propane last winter. The phones were not hooked up yet.

But soon, canvassers would be fanning out across the reservation, knocking on doors. This year’s Miss Standing Rock, Wanbli Waunsila Wi Eagle, 18, filmed a public service announcement urging her peers to vote. Ms. Finn asked the principals of the reservation’s three high schools to excuse age-eligible seniors from class to get IDs and vote. On Election Day, eight vans will shuttle people to and from the polls.

“The right to vote can be taken for granted until someone tries to take it away from you, and then it can be the reason you do vote,” said Jodi Gillette, a Standing Rock member who worked for the Interior Department under President Barack Obama. “Essentially, someone is saying, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ And we’re tired of it.”

 

[fraurosena]

10 hours ago, Drala said:

NYTimes piece about Native American push-back on North Dakota's voter suppression law

  Hide contents

By Maggie Astor

Oct. 30, 2018

FORT YATES, N.D. — Nobody in the squat yellow house serving as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s get-out-the-vote headquarters knew its address.

It was on Red Tail Hawk Avenue; they knew that much. But the number was anyone’s guess. Phyllis Young, a longtime tribal activist leading the voter-outreach effort, said it had fallen off the side of the house at some point. Her own home has a number only because she added one with permanent marker.

This is normal on Native American reservations. Buildings lack numbers; streets lack signs. Even when a house has an address in official records, residents don’t necessarily know what it is.

“We know our communities based off our communities,” said Danielle Ta’Sheena Finn, a Standing Rock spokeswoman and tribal judge. “We know, ‘Hey, that’s so-and-so’s house; you go two houses down and that’s the correct place you need to be.’”

Judith LeBlanc, left, of the Native Organizers Alliance, and OJ Semans of Four Directions arrived at the Standing Rock tribe’s get-out-the-vote headquarters in Fort Yates. Ms. LeBlanc and Mr. Semans are working to get proper IDs for Native Americans so they can vote.

Yet under a law the Supreme Court allowed to take effect this month, North Dakotans cannot vote without a residential address. Post office boxes, which many Native Americans rely on, aren’t enough anymore.

The Republican-controlled state legislature began debating this requirement just a few months after Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, won a Senate seat in 2012 with strong support from Native Americans. That race was decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. Ms. Heitkamp is now seeking re-election in one of the nation’s most aggressively contested elections, and she is trailing her Republican opponent, Representative Kevin Cramer, in the polls. And once again, she is looking to Native Americans for a strong vote: there are at least 30,000 of them in North Dakota.

Supporters of the address requirement say it is needed to prevent voter fraud and has nothing to do with Ms. Heitkamp. Native Americans, noting that state officials have not confirmed any pattern of fraud, see it as an attempt at voter suppression.

But in these final days before the election, their tribal governments are working feverishly to provide the necessary identification, and some Native Americans believe their anger could actually fuel higher turnout.

Winona Fox, left, and Lonna Jackson-Street, the Spirit Lake tribe’s secretary and treasurer, looked at a list of residents who have come to get the addresses they need to vote.CreditKristina Barker for The New York Times

“I’m past the point of being upset over it,” said Lonna Jackson-Street, secretary and treasurer of the Spirit Lake Tribe. “I’m more excited about the outcome, because I think we’re going to bring in numbers that we’ve never seen before.”

If that happens, it will be because of a considerable expenditure of time and resources on the part of the tribes and advocacy groups supporting them.

Tribes have extended their office hours and worked around the clock to find efficient ways to assign addresses and issue identification. They are providing hundreds of free IDs when they would normally charge at least $5 to $10 apiece. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians printed so many IDs that the machine overheated and started melting the cards.

“What people out there don’t understand is how much it costs a tribe to make sure that each and every individual tribal member has that right to vote,” said OJ Semans, co-executive director of Four Directions, a Native American voting rights group working with tribal leaders. “The tribes have invested thousands of dollars, whether it’s equipment, man-hours, meetings. This has not come cheap.”

State officials say it is easy for anyone without a residential address to get one. In a letter to tribal leaders last month — just after the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit let the requirement take effect, in a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court — Secretary of State Al Jaeger’s office wrote that voters could contact their county’s 911 coordinator, describe the location of their home and have an address assigned “in an hour or less.”

In practice, it isn’t always so simple.

Voters’ experiences have varied greatly based on which county they live in. In Rolette County, where the Turtle Mountain Reservation is, they have been able to get addresses from the county and IDs from the tribe without much red tape. But at Standing Rock, in Sioux County, the 911 coordinator is the sheriff, Frank Landeis. That’s a deterrent to people who are afraid to interact with law enforcement, much less tell the sheriff where they live, and Sheriff Landeis is not easy to reach.

When Ms. Finn called him on Oct. 12, three days after the Supreme Court ruling, he was out. On Oct. 15, he said he was transporting prisoners and could not assign addresses that day. He was also unavailable when The New York Times called on Friday.

And in an episode recounted independently by Ms. Finn, Mr. Semans and Ms. Young, a tribal elder, Terry Yellow Fat, got through to Sheriff Landeis only to be assigned the address of a bar near his house. Mr. Semans worried that, in addition to playing into stereotypes about Native Americans and alcohol, this could expose Mr. Yellow Fat to fraud charges if he voted under an address he knew was incorrect.

Senator Heidi Heitkamp at her rally at the Prairie Knights Casino and Resort in Standing Rock. Ms. Heitkamp is trailing her Republican opponent in the polls.

So, with help from Four Directions and others, some tribes are creating addresses themselves — and preparing to do so until the polls close.

Geographic information experts at Claremont Graduate University in California overlaid voting precinct maps on satellite images of the reservations and assigned each precinct one address. Voters can now point to their house on the map and be assigned the precinct address plus a unique identifier: -001, -002, and so on. Tribal officials will be stationed at every reservation polling site on Election Day with a form letter on tribal letterhead, ready to assign an address and issue identification on the spot.

Four Directions informed Secretary Jaeger of this plan in early October and asked him to endorse it. In his response, which his office provided to The Times, Mr. Jaeger declined, saying that whether tribes had the authority to create their own addresses was a question beyond his office’s purview. He added, however, that he could not “dictate the style or format of the identification used by a tribal government if it contains the required voter information,” suggesting that a letter with a handwritten address should be as valid as an ID card.

The pace of working with potential voters has been relentless for the tribes. Ms. Jackson-Street said Spirit Lake had identified and was trying to reach 211 members without residential addresses, in addition to printing ID cards for members who had addresses but no document showing them. Robin Smith, the tribe’s enrollment director, said last Tuesday that she had been too inundated with ID requests to budge from her chair all morning.

Image

Ms. LeBlanc gathered supplies for the get-out-the-vote headquarters, where staff and volunteers will be stationed until Election Day.CreditKristina Barker for The New York Times

Merle White Tail, 50, had no street address, so Ms. Smith assigned one. Grant Cavanaugh, 32, had an address on file but didn’t know what it was, so she looked it up. Darien Spotted Bird, 21, had an ID card that misspelled his address, so she printed a new one.

Then there are more subtle problems. For instance, while Sioux County does not offer early voting, it does — like all North Dakota counties — allow early, no-excuse-needed absentee voting, which is functionally almost identical. But Mr. Semans said that when one woman went to the county auditor’s office and asked to vote early, the auditor, Barbara Hettich, simply told her there was no early voting and didn’t mention the absentee option. (Ms. Hettich did not respond to a request for comment.)

Later, when Ms. Young filled out an absentee ballot, Ms. Hettich told her she had to use blue ink or the ballot would not be counted. But literature on the secretary of state’s website says ballots must be filled out in black ink. Mr. Semans ping-ponged back and forth between Standing Rock and Bismarck, trying to get a guarantee that ballots would not be thrown out because of ink color. On Friday, Lee Ann Oliver in the secretary of state’s office told The Times that both blue and black were acceptable.

The scene at the get-out-the-vote headquarters in Fort Yates last Monday showed how hurriedly the whole effort there had been put together. The room was mostly empty. There was a small table, a couple of armchairs, some old swivel chairs, all delivered the day before. The team was trying to create a voter database from a list of people who bought propane last winter. The phones were not hooked up yet.

But soon, canvassers would be fanning out across the reservation, knocking on doors. This year’s Miss Standing Rock, Wanbli Waunsila Wi Eagle, 18, filmed a public service announcement urging her peers to vote. Ms. Finn asked the principals of the reservation’s three high schools to excuse age-eligible seniors from class to get IDs and vote. On Election Day, eight vans will shuttle people to and from the polls.

“The right to vote can be taken for granted until someone tries to take it away from you, and then it can be the reason you do vote,” said Jodi Gillette, a Standing Rock member who worked for the Interior Department under President Barack Obama. “Essentially, someone is saying, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ And we’re tired of it.”

 

I just posted a tweet by Rachel Maddow in the midterms thread that they're now saying that the --- wait for it --- color of the ink the Native American use to vote is disqualifying. 

[Penny]

Early voted last Monday. Got there 2 minutes before they closed and walked right in. Smiled on my way out voting for Beto. 

Made my husband go Sunday. Not many people, but was surprised one of the Republican local candidates greeting people and shaking hands.  Holding my breath for next weeks results

[VixenToast]

22 hours ago, Penny said:

Early voted last Monday. Got there 2 minutes before they closed and walked right in. Smiled on my way out voting for Beto. 

Made my husband go Sunday. Not many people, but was surprised one of the Republican local candidates greeting people and shaking hands.  Holding my breath for next weeks results

Whaaaaaaat? Isn't it illegal to campaign outside a polling place!?!?

[formergothardite]

4 minutes ago, VixenToast said:

Isn't it illegal to campaign outside a polling place!?!?

No, At least here they have to stay so far back from the door but it is usually in the parking lot. 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, VixenToast said:

Whaaaaaaat? Isn't it illegal to campaign outside a polling place!?!?

At my polling place, they have to remain a minimum of 100 feet away from the doors to the building. They are also not permitted to intimidate or block people going in to vote.

[Drala]

The Battle Over Voting Rights In America Is Red-Hot. Here’s What Has Changed Since 2010.  State lawmakers have passed a swath of anti-voter laws in recent years, but voting rights advocates are fighting back.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/voting-rights-2010

[onekidanddone]

I voted all Blue on Wednesday. No big surprise I suppose, except for one wild minute I thought I would vote for Hogan,  As a ReThuglican he is pretty moderate. He didn't go to the convention in '16, he went public about writing in his father's name for president, and he can work across the isle with the solid blue Maryland House.  He supported keeping birth control covered by insurance in the state, and came out as a hard no on arming teachers. All and all he hasn't done much to make me hate him.  

Hell my 94 year old mother voted via absentee ballot for the man. She says we need to keep Republicans like Hogan around. Yea, well sorry NO.  I just couldn't do it, or I couldn't do it and sleep at night. Sadly I don't  Ben Jealous will win. He hasn't been hitting hard against Hogan, and it feels to me as if he is just going through the motions.  

This is how we ended up with Hogan four years ago and how we ended up with Ehrlich. The Democrats running didn't seem to put forth much effort.  Maryland as blue as it is, still elects Republican now and then.

Mr. OneKid says Hogan is a good guy, and defends the fact that Hogan hasn't spoken up against Trump. Mr. says our governor is too busy running a state to grand stand. Yea that is true as I he seems to like to stay out of the spotlight and just focus on what he thinks is right for his state.

Yea, well not this year. At this point I'd vote for an empty box over any Republican.

 

[Alisamer]

On 10/31/2018 at 7:09 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

At my polling place, they have to remain a minimum of 100 feet away from the doors to the building. They are also not permitted to intimidate or block people going in to vote.

This is how it is here - they were very careful not to cross that line, they'd follow you to it trying to hand you their flyers, but stopped right there. 

I voted this afternoon - had to wait about 40 minutes, but spent them talking to two couples who knew me. I don't remember either of them, I think they were people my sisters' age who knew us 20 years ago! Still, it was nice. As usual when I vote, the community center was set up for a wedding reception. The police station is also in that building,  lol!

Ours was a 2-sided ballot you fill in like a scantron sheet. We didn't have to show ID, but that is on the ballot for future elections so I voted against that. I also voted for all the alcohol laws, because restaurants are the easiest way to revitalize small towns. 

I did not end up taking my sister, but I texted her to let her know since she has a handicapped parking tag she wouldn't even have to get out of the car to vote so she needed to go!

i then spent hours playing Pokémon Go with my mom and other sister, and had pollo a la brasa for dinner with them. 

[formergothardite]

11 hours ago, Alisamer said:

We didn't have to show ID, but that is on the ballot for future elections so I voted against that.

Are you in NC or is there another state trying to pass restrictive voter laws? I"m worried people in NC will pass it. 

 

[JermajestyDuggar]

I’m late to this thread. I voted a few weeks ago. I do absentee ballot by mail. I voted blue and my husband most likely will as well. 

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

Are you in NC or is there another state trying to pass restrictive voter laws? I"m worried people in NC will pass it. 

 

I'm in NC. I'm hoping it doesn't pass, but I know there are plenty of people here who just think "well, sure, got to show ID to pay with a credit card some places, why not to vote?" I'm pointing out to them people like my cousin, who can't get a drivers license due to epilepsy, and my aunts friend who is legally blind. They're well enough off to have passports and state issued ID cards, but plenty of poorer people may not have those, and they should get to vote too! So much of the state is suburban and rural, where everyone drives everywhere, that it simply doesn't occur to many people that there are people in the city who don't have or need drivers licenses and get along just fine without them. With the exception of in-town Raleigh (due to the colleges) and most of Charlotte, public transit is near non-existent here. 

There are also two amendments about judges and the powers of the governor that are so confusingly written that I ended up reading multiple articles before deciding which way to vote on those. I hope most people read up on those, since cell phone use isn't allowed in the polling places so no last minute googling can be done. 

[formergothardite]

1 hour ago, Alisamer said:

but I know there are plenty of people here who just think "well, sure, got to show ID to pay with a credit card some places, why not to vote?" I

I hear this a lot too. I think also part of it is that some of these people really don't care if they do something that makes it harder for others to vote. 

1 hour ago, Alisamer said:

There are also two amendments about judges and the powers of the governor that are so confusingly written that I ended up reading multiple articles before deciding which way to vote on those. I hope most people read up on those, since cell phone use isn't allowed in the polling places so no last minute googling can be done.

I swear they write all of them in the most confusing way on purpose. 

I'm super nervous about how all this will go. 

[fraurosena]

The discussion about identifying yourselves at poll stations seemed a little strange to me at first, as in my country showing your ID is mandatory at elections. For that matter, it's actually mandatory for everyone from the age of 14 to have an ID on you at all times. There are three ID's that are acceptable: your drivers license, your passport or your ID-card. These are not incredibly expensive to get (usually around 50 euros for passport or ID-card, a drivers license is about 40 euros). As we do not have the levels of poverty that America has, almost everyone can afford one or more (I have my drivers license and a passport). 

However, I understand that things are rather different in America and even something simple as identification is used as a means to suppress votes. How anyone can even think that it is even remotely democratic to keep citizens from voting, is beyond me.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Same here, you need to show your "tessera elettorale" (your voting card, it's issued for free by your local council, you can even get one last minute as offices stay open with this exclusive purpose during the whole election day) and ID (issued by your local council for 5€) or your driving license.

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Same here, you need to show your "tessera elettorale" (your voting card, it's issued for free by your local council, you can even get one last minute as offices stay open with this exclusive purpose during the whole election day) and ID (issued by your local council for 5€) or your driving license.

Yes, we get our personalized voting cards sent in the post about 4 weeks before the elections, along with a ballot form with all the electable people on it. There are a couple of election websites that can help you choose which party you want to vote for (you answer questions about the most important political and social issues and the results show which parties policies fit best with your answers). Polling places are never far away (mine is literally around the corner) and open from 7.00 am to 9.00 pm. Voting is super easy and never much of a hassle, something I always took for granted before I found out how different things are in America, which always presented itself as a shining light upon the hill. I'm sad to say that image doesn't live up to reality. At all.

[Smash!]

Same here. We get the personal voting card and the ballot by mail and can either vote by mail or at specific places, usually at a school, the courthouse or even at railway stations. No identification needed.
As already posted above I took my right to vote for granted until I read about the voter supression in the States. How this should be called democracy when politicians try to take the most fundamental right away from people is beyond me