Voting is a right in America.
Much like you have the right to free speech and the right to a firearm, you also have
the right to vote.
Though it used to be viewed more as a privilege and we still kind of think of it that way.
If you try to introduce any kind of rule that maybe curtails a few people from voting, aside
from those few people affected, most other people don’t seem to care.
They might even be in favor of those rules.
The only way to stop these rules from taking effect is to vote.
So please, vote… assuming you still can.
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When America was founded, or rather, a few years later when the Constitution went into
effect, only white male protestants over the age of 21, who owned a not insignificant amount
of land were allowed to vote.
When George Washington was elected in 1789, only 6% of the US population had the right
to vote.
Much like the definition of a citizen, the right to vote was both expanded and restricted
over the years.
By the 1840s, the property ownership requirement had disappeared.
Then in 1870, after the bloodiest war in American history, the white requirement was removed
by the 15th Amendment, allowing black males the right to vote.
We had some issues with letting Asians and Native Americans vote, but that was cleared
up later.
In 1920, the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote federally, certain states
had allowed it previously.
And lastly, in 1971, the 26th Amendment was passed, lowering the voting age to 18.
So that’s it, as long as you’re a US citizen over the age of eighteen, you’re allowed
to vote, and now, you know better…
… wait.
Yeah, if only it were that simple.
States decide who gets to vote, so aside from those few amendments I mentioned, we don’t
have any uniform federal rules.
So every time the federal government extended the right to vote to a group, new state rules
were put in place to limit how many people in that group could actually vote.
Like after the Mexican-American War.
When we annexed all that new territory with all those new people, America had a problem,
because at the time, Mexican people were still classified as white.
So English literacy became a requirement.
And it remained a requirement that was rather famously used to deny black people the right
to vote for another hundred years under Jim Crow.
Along with poll taxes, which meant you had to pay a fee every time you voted, which were
eliminated by the 24th Amendment It’s a common misconception that felony
disenfranchisement was started during Reconstruction or Jim Crow in order to suppress the African-American
vote.
Felony disenfranchisement means that you lose the ability to vote if you’ve committed
a certain level of crime.
The idea is that you broke the social contract, so you shouldn’t be able to participate
in decisions that help shape that society or its rules.
And you could argue that that makes sense for a little while… but forever?
Forever-ever?
We’ve actually had these rules since basically the beginning.
Kentucky was the first state to enact criminal disenfranchisement in 1792, followed by Vermont
in 1793, then Ohio, and Louisiana.
By the time the Civil War came around, most states, in the North and South, had some form
of felony disenfranchisement.
In fact, during Reconstruction, only one state expanded felony disenfranchisement in order
to stop black people from voting.
Can you guess which one?
It’s Alabama, I mean c’mon.
Their constitution still has a rather long list of people disqualified from voting, including:
All idiots and insane persons – that’s off to a great start.
It should be noted that idiot was a medical term back then, man that has not aged well.
But here’s the list of crimes that disqualify you.
Those who shall be convicted of treason, murder, arson, embezzlement, malfeasance in office,
larceny, receiving stolen property, obtaining property or money under false pretenses, perjury,
subornation of perjury, robbery, assault with intent to rob, burglary, forgery, bribery,
assault and battery on the wife, bigamy, living in adultery, sodomy, incest, rape, miscegenation-
If you needed anymore proof that this was racially motivated, here you go.
Miscegenation is marrying outside of your race, if a black man married a white woman,
neither of them were allowed to vote.
That section of the constitution wraps up with a blanket statement.
Or any crime punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary, or of any infamous crime
or crime involving moral turpitude.
An “infamous crime” is usually defined as a felony.
Many of the crimes on that list were retracted over time, but the felony part has not.
But felony disenfranchisement on the whole is starting to disappear in the country as
people start to realize that punishing someone for life, well after their sentence, was a
bit much.
In Maine and Vermont, there is no disenfranchisement, people are allowed to vote while in prison.
These states allow you to vote once you’re out of prison and these states after probation
or parole.
These states allow you to vote after your sentence, but only for first-time offenders
or non-violent crimes, it varies by state.
But in these four states, no felon of any kind ever gets to vote, ever.
Forever ever?
Yes.
Well, unless the governor personally restores your rights… and then the next governor
doesn’t immediately reverse that decision.
Florida has the chance to change their color on that map in the election on Tuesday.
But as felony disenfranchisement has been disappearing, a new form of voter suppression
seems to be emerging.
When you register to vote, you have to prove who you are and where you live, but some states
are now requiring a separate ID when you actually vote.
Voter ID laws are one of those things that just feels like it makes sense, but the facts
don’t seem to line up with those feelings.
Another example of this would be drug testing people on welfare, it costs way more than
it saves.
A common argument for Voter ID is that you need one for all sorts of other things, you
can barely get by without one, so it makes sense that you should have to prove who you
are before you go vote.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable, which is probably why a majority of Americans support
the idea.
Except you don’t really need an ID for all sorts of other things…
unless you’re a teenager.
I couldn’t tell you the last time I had to show anyone my ID.
Not to get into an R-rated movie, or buy spray paint, or even alcohol.
If I lived in a city that had decent public transportation, I wouldn’t need an ID at
all.
Well, you need one to work, right?
No, not really, no.
When you got hired, your HR person gave you this list – and you probably just handed
over your driver’s license and social security card.
But there’s about a dozen other options available.
And here’s the kicker, those dozen other options, depending on the state, aren’t
valid Voter IDs. 11% of American citizens do not have a valid Voter ID.
I have an ID and if you thought that me saying that I don’t remember the last time I had
to show it to anyone is far-fetched, 35 million Americans don’t have an ID and seem to get
along just fine.
Except when it comes to this new rule about voting.
If you lost your driver’s license, it would be a pain, you’d have to take a few hours
off of work, go to the DMV, sit there for a few hours, pay a fee, and then wait six
to eight weeks for it to arrive in the mail, it would be a whole thing.
But you can justify it because you need it to drive.
But if you take the bus to work every day and everything is fine, but now you find out
you have to do all of that stuff in order to go vote, when you didn’t two years ago…
You’re probably just not going to vote.
Voter ID laws vary by state, but there are currently seventeen states with rather strict
Voter ID laws.
The usual reasoning behind these laws is to stop voter fraud and we’ve been told a lot
in the last few years that voter fraud is a big problem.
And the integrity of our ballot box is paramount.
I’m not going to address the claim that millions of illegal immigrants are voting
because, no they aren’t, that’s ridiculous.
But in most of the states that either have passed or are trying to pass Voter ID laws,
someone will claim that hundreds of dead people are voting.
An analysis of recent elections in the state, ready for this, shows that 953 dead people
voted.
After the investigation was complete, they found that only five ballots couldn’t be
accounted for of the 1.3 million votes that were cast.
But using that pretense, South Carolina still passed Voter ID laws.
Voter ID laws really only stop voter impersonation, that is, you showing up at the polls and claiming
to be someone you’re not and casting a vote.
Between 2000 to 2014, there have only been 31 cases of that happening in the entire United
States.
Again, using voter fraud as a pretense, Texas passed one of the strictest Voter ID laws
in the country, disenfranchising over 600,000 people.
Between 2002 and 2014, two people were convicted of voter fraud in Texas.
Imagine for a moment, that over the course of 12 years, two people committed a crime
with an AR15, and as a result, the state decided to take away 600,000 AR15s from people who
did nothing wrong.
Not permanently, don’t worry, you can get it back.
You just need to take time off work, go to the state ID office, wait for a few hours,
pay a small fee, and wait a few weeks for it to come in the mail.
This isn’t that much of a stretch, voting is a right, just as much as owning a firearm.
Texas has one of the most interesting and strictest Voter ID laws in the country.
The issue isn’t that you need and ID, it’s which IDs count.
Most people have some form of ID, to work or go to school or whatever, but those don’t
count in Texas.
Wisconsin allows school IDs, which makes sense, it’s a state-run government institution.
But Texas doesn’t, you know what does count?
A Concealed Carry Permit.
I can’t imagine any difference between people who carry CCLs and people who carry school
IDs… huh.
And here’s where we get to talk about discrimination.
Voter ID laws are often described as useless, since it solves a problem that isn’t really
a problem, but also racist, which usually makes people defensive and use some of the
arguments that I’ve already mentioned.
Again, the problem isn’t that you need an ID, it’s which IDs count as valid Voter
IDs.
As I said before, 11% of all Americans do not have a valid Voter ID, only 8% of white
Americans don’t have one, while 25% of African-Americans don’t have one.
These laws disproportionately affect poor people, who also tend to be minorities.
Anyone has the legal ability to go get a state-issued ID, provided they have the necessary paperwork
like their original birth certificate or proof of name change.
But not everyone has the financial ability to do so.
Even if the ID itself was free, if you have to take off work for several hours to get
an ID, when you didn’t need one to get to work or anything else, that’s a cost that
you might not be willing to pay in order to go vote.
Which is why some people claim that it’s effectively a new form of a poll tax.
It’s an unnecessary barrier to voting that didn’t exist before and doesn’t really
solve any problem.
Using a fake ID to vote will be just as easy as using one to buy alcohol, it won’t stop
the small amount of voter fraud that exists.
But it does stop minorities from voting.
Let’s take a look at North Carolina, you’ll notice that it doesn’t currently have any
Voter ID laws, because it was struck down by the courts.
Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision,
they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose
cures for problems that don’t exist.
The North Carolina legislature pulled racial voting data and crafted the law around that
to purposefully disenfranchise African American voters with… what did they call it?
Surgical precision.
With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative
photo IDs used by African Americans.
As amended, the bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more
likely to possess.
If you needed anymore proof that Voter ID is discriminatory, that should do it, it’s
not that you need an ID, it’s which ones count.
Why do you think Texas allows CCLs but not school IDs?
But that’s not all they did, they discovered that a lot of African American voters used
same-day registration, so they got rid of that.
They also cut early voting from seventeen days down to just ten, because that racial
data indicated that a lot of African American voters tended to vote early during the first
seven days.
Which eliminated a “Souls to the Polls” day, when churches would bus people to go
vote, do I need to tell you who used that?
Likewise, in every state that has Voter ID laws, you only need to present an ID if you
vote in person, not if you do a mail-in or absentee ballot.
Guess who that favors…
there’s a trend here.
When you register to vote, you have to identify yourself and show some sort of proof-of-residence
to establish your address.
Usually a utility bill or a lease, seems simple enough.
But when North Dakota passed a law requiring every registered voter to have a valid street
address, they effectively disenfranchised Native Americans who live on reservations.
Because the Post Office still hasn’t gotten around to giving them physical addresses.
Even if you have an address, you’re registered to vote, and you have a valid driver’s license
or state-issued ID, you may go to the polls and find out that you’ve been purged.
Which is exactly what happened in Georgia just a few weeks ago.
Brian Kemp, who is running for governor and also happens to be the current Secretary of
State, purged almost a half a million people from the voter rolls.
70% of which were African American.
One of the justifications was that they didn’t pass an “exact match” which requires all
state documents to have the exact same spelling and spacing of your full name and address.
They used computers for this of course, nobody is going to go through all those documents
by hand.
And they could have learned how to program those computers by going to skl.sh/knowingbetter3.
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He did this after the voter registration deadline, so you won’t be able to fix this before
Election Day.
People were also purged for not voting in previous elections.
Most states have something like this, known as use it or lose it, you’re removed from
the voter rolls for not voting in the previous general, midterm, or sometimes even off-year
elections.
Yes, there are off-year elections, there is an election literally every November.
Many of these laws have good sounding intentions on their surface, but background negative
consequences.
They may not always have nefarious intent, but they will have nefarious effect.
It is your duty as an informed citizen to think about these intents and consequences,
especially if it effects people who may not have the right to vote like you, because now,
you know better.
Go vote, if you heard nothing else during this video, please, vote.
I’d like to give a shout out to my newest legendary patron, Darren, if you’d also
like your name to fly across the screen too fast for anyone to read it, head on over to
patreon.com/knowingbetter.
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