{"id":315133,"date":"2026-08-06T12:18:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/315133\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T12:18:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:18:47","slug":"just-give-everyone-a-secure-voter-id","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/315133\/","title":{"rendered":"Just\u00a0give\u00a0everyone\u00a0a secure voter\u00a0ID"},"content":{"rendered":"

President\u00a0Trump\u00a0used a primetime address<\/a> last month to tell the country, once again, that our elections are riddled with fraud and that the SAVE America Act \u2014 a bill requiring every American to prove citizenship, in person, to register \u2014 is the cure.<\/p>\n

We have been having some version of this argument for a decade, and everyone is exhausted.\u00a0So let\u2019s do the thing no\u00a0one\u00a0in Washington has been willing to do: End it.<\/p>\n

Give every eligible citizen a free, secure ID and put the burden on the government to deliver it.\u00a0Then\u00a0stop\u00a0making Americans register to vote at all.<\/p>\n

This is not a concession to the president. Most Americans already support showing identification to vote, and most states already require it.\u00a0The problem has never been the\u00a0ID: It is who gets\u00a0one.<\/p>\n

For decades, voter ID has been engineered to keep specific people out: people of color, women who took a spouse\u2019s name, renters, and anyone whose papers are missing.<\/p>\n

Instead, the federal government should give every eligible citizen a voter ID, free of charge. Showing it at the polls would become as ordinary as showing it at the bar.\u00a0Then, much of today\u2019s fight simply disappears.<\/p>\n

The conservative Heritage Foundation\u2019s\u00a0own database<\/a> documents a mere 100 cases of noncitizen\u00a0voting\u00a0over 40 years among 1.3 billion ballots. Yet those cases have been the pretext for lawsuits in 20 states; ballots seizures in Georgia; and record demands in Wayne County, Mich.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s recent speech was that same argument and now with the full weight of the federal government.<\/p>\n

Registration is the barrier where partisan officials do their worst work. Between 2022 and 2024, 21 million voters were purged from the rolls, often for partisan gain dressed as housekeeping.<\/p>\n

Most democracies do not require\u00a0voter\u00a0registration. In the U.S., young people can order dinner, hail a ride and file taxes from a phone, but to vote must navigate rules that vary by state and can close a month before Election Day.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s frustrating is the capacity to end\u00a0voter\u00a0registration already exists. The government knows its citizens through Social Security, tax records and naturalization files.<\/p>\n

Beginning this December, the Selective Service System will automatically enroll every eligible young American man in the military draft using current databases with no form and no deadline.<\/p>\n

If the federal government can enroll you for a war, it can do the same to register you to vote.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0president\u2019s Justice Department is demanding\u00a0voter\u00a0rolls from states, and state officials are right to refuse to stave off unfair elections.<\/p>\n

With automatic registration, states would still run their elections, as they always have done remarkably well. We are talking about who is on the rolls, not who runs the polls.<\/p>\n

In this system in which every eligible citizen is registered to vote, it no longer becomes a weapon:\u00a0voting\u00a0is easy, the default and then we\u2019ve taken big steps toward universal\u00a0voting, which would be the real prize.<\/p>\n

Because until\u00a0everyone\u00a0votes, we do not yet have a true democracy.<\/p>\n

We can keep swinging at the same argument about fraud and no-fraud,\u00a0ID\u00a0and no-ID, on a loop with no end \u2014 or we can\u00a0give\u00a0every citizen the proof of eligibility and in exchange, let the antiquated registration process fall away.<\/p>\n

The most important duty a citizen has is to cast a vote. It is long past time that we build a system that treats it that way.<\/p>\n

Kurz is the founder and president of iVote<\/a>, a leading national voting rights group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President\u00a0Trump\u00a0used a primetime address last month to tell the country, once again, that our elections are riddled with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63,299],"class_list":["post-315133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}