That's a good compromise. The reason why I used the term "common sense" abut carrying ID is that.....forget voting...possessing identification can mean the difference between getting detained or not. Some of the organizations that are protesting police profiling and brutality need to first stress to people the importance of being able to establish your identity to law enforcement.
To be 100% honest though, knowing the history of "poll taxes" and other garbage that was used to keep Blacks from voting in the past, hard for me to believe that person who is inclined to vote wouldn't go through the basic step of obtaining govt. ID at least during an election year.
Call me paranoid, by I expect shenanigans. In the NYT link, it's mentioned that in Alabama that in some rural Black areas, driver license agencies(dmv) were closed down....and only after protests was there a compromise reached where they would keep them open at least once a week.
I'm wary of the term "States Rights" exactly because of these types of things.
I'm not so sure what the federal courts did in North Carolina and other states is a good compromise, nor am I certain that the reporting given by the New York Times is accurate. I saw this in National Review but not anywhere else:
In 2013, North Carolina passed a law requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID, ending same-day registration and shortening the length of early voting from 17 to ten days. The Left rent its garments — Hillary Clinton called it an “assault on voting rights” — and foretold mass disenfranchisement. It never happened. In 2010, before North Carolina’s law, 40.3 percent of blacks in North Carolina voted in the year’s midterms; in 2014, with the law in effect, it was 42.2 percent. Nonetheless, last week the Fourth Circuit — perhaps inspired by recent decisions against similar laws in Texas and Wisconsin — swatted down North Carolina’s law.
If that editorial from National Review is accurate (and I'm not claiming that it is or not, just putting it out there), then the decision was political and not a matter of justice. There should be laws against voter fraud, and showing ID should be a no-brainer. Only the Democratic Party and the American Far Left claim that showing ID is racist, which is crazy considering that it's done all over the world. The Democratic Party has a long history of committing voter fraud. It's usual response is "there's been very few prosecutions of voter fraud, so it's not a problem." That's a stupid response since it's really saying that prosecutors aren't doing their jobs, and likely many are Democrats who have a personal interest in not prosecuting. If anything, it's evidence of corruption.
On the states' rights issue we have to tread a fine line. There is a real Constitutional issue of states' rights that refers to federalism and is in the 10th amendment. In the Old South, Southern Democrats used the phrase to defend racial discrimination. Today, many Republicans who use the phrase are semi-libertarians and mean it in its original non-racist sense. So to equate the two is an equivocation fallacy, using a word with more than one meaning as if it only as one. So those Republicans may not mean it in the way the old Southern Democrats did. However, since it is the South, maybe some do mean it the same way, but it would be wrong to generalize. I don't know the names of all the individuals involved, but as an example Ronald Reagan used the term "states' rights" in a libertarian/originalist sense, as does Rand Paul today. Even President Obama has used the phrase in this way.
What about limiting the time for voting? The Democratic Party ideal is to have as much voting as possible. Why? There are more Democrats than Republicans, and more opportunities for mischief. It creates more opportunities for illegal voting by illegal immigrants, felons, and dead people. Since this is rarely prosecuted it results in more Democrat wins. This is what happened during the days of Tammany Hall in New York, Al Capone and Mayor Daley in Chicago, Loretta Sanchez in California, and Al Franken in Minnesota. So Republicans, if they had their way, would probably trim down the voting period to one day with no mail voting or motor voting. This may or may not favor Republicans (it may not since Democrats still have higher numbers), but it would, without a doubt, decrease opportunities for corruption.
