You mostly see situations like that in minority majority communities. There's a pattern of budget cuts resulting in DMVs having to close, then by (supposedly) pure coincidence, all the selected DMVs are in minority-heavy areas.
Only that area, which makes it a good way to target by geography. Who can't get a different form of ID through other means. Eg, wealthier people are more likely to be able to get drivers licenses.
Yes it does, but people with more money are more likely to have better jobs, and better jobs means you have a better ability to take time off of work to take care of things like that. If you're working worse jobs, it's harder to get time off at all, and even if you could get time off, you might literally not be able to afford to pay bills or buy enough food for you and your family by taking several hours off work.
Keep in mind it also isn't about leaving your group completely unharmed and the other destroyed. It can be about inflicted just a little more damage on the other guy's voters than yours.
Like say you can do some of the things described in this thread. You may disenfranchise 2% or your voters, but if you do the same to 7% of the other side then you come out way ahead on the deal.
Imagine you are the political party in control of the state government, and you know that if certain kinds of folks (Black voters being the big one, but some other demographics apply too) vote in large numbers, they will vote for the opposing party. And you know what areas those folks live in, and you can decide where to cut funding to force the DMV to cut their hours down. Now imagine your state also has a legacy of Jim Crow and you miss those days. You see where this is going.
Oh and also imagine that women are starting to lean more heavily against your party and also are much more likely to have changed their names recently. Maybe shave a few women from Dem-leaning areas off the polls.
Imagine that other people have said this already. Imagine you looked at those comments before responding. Imagine if the original guy just said, "They're shutting down DMV's in areas that minorities live in".
That specific DMV is one of the designated DMVs to hand out free IDs. Not all DMVs have the ability to do that. So, presumably, there are other DMVs available, that are closer to these people, but they would need to pay for their photo ID like everybody else.
You don't necessarily need an ID for things like phones. You can buy a pay as you go phone, or have it gifted to you, or buy it from a pawn shop and just sign up for a data plan online, none of which requires an ID. I think that's very different from other countries; when I lived in Japan, I needed identification for all the things you mentioned, but it's a lot less strict here in the US. All I need to bill for utilities is just my address and some basic census data, no identification required, for example.
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u/ToLiveInIt Dec 13 '17
Or, and this happens, it's only open the fifth Wednesday of the month. So, four days a year.