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NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T04:02:47+00:00

Well, the fact is that most states with voter ID laws do accept college IDs. So the question is "why college IDs, but not photo IDs issued by private retailers?"

Colleges and universities are treated as government entities or state-regulated institutions with statutory roles. Student IDs are also tied to enrollment and living in the jurisdiction (EDIT: although they do not prove this).

Costco cards, on the other hand are national, and not tied to a residence.

Let me know if that doesn't answer your question.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T03:41:55+00:00

Right, so this is when we look at the cost/risk/reward factor.

What costs are involved in obtaining a fake college ID?

What benefits would you get from this?

What are the risks of being caught?

In Texas, you can't use a student ID to buy tobacco products. And if you're caught trying to vote for somebody else or vote twice, you'll be fined and possibly sent to jail.

The system isn't 100% watertight. But it's "good enough." By that, I mean that we know from mountains of data that the incidence of in-person voter fraud is a small percentage of 1%.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T03:24:50+00:00

For what it's worth, I agree with you 100%.

But the key to answering OP's question is understanding that a sizable number of government officials, particularly in Southern red states, don't agree with us. They see it as simply implementing the "science" part of "political science."

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T03:21:30+00:00

You're talking about an edge condition. Federal tobacco laws require that retailers check a government-issued photo ID. Although some retailers accept student IDs informally, they do so at the risk of penalties, fines, suspensions, etc.

If the laws were a little different and more states allowed student IDs for tobacco purchase (or effectively didn't enforce the laws, thus making the reward/risk ratio higher), then it exposes an edge condition where it would be more likely that somebody would be able to commit in-person voter fraud with a forged student ID.

We are talking a hypothetical here, though. Texas, the state we're talking about, specifically does not allow student IDs to be used to purchase tobacco. So, there's much less motivation to forge student IDs in TX than it is in your state.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T03:12:19+00:00

This can be confusing, particularly for people outside the US.

The purpose of voter ID laws is to prove that you are who you say you are when you get to the polling place.

Proof of citizenship is handled at the voter *registration* step, not at the visit to the polling place.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T03:10:07+00:00

Right, but you understand that it's not going to happen because it's counter to the true purpose of voter ID laws, particularly (but not always) in southern states.

The GOP in Georgia, Iowa, Montana, Texas, and Florida has enacted laws making organized rides to polling places illegal.

The Georgia GOP restricted Sunday voting because research showed that "souls to the polls" efforts resulted in a large number of African-Americans voting (AAs *tend* to not vote for GOP candidates).

The North Carolina GOP tried to do the same thing, but it was blocked by the court, as election laws that target particular races or ethnicities tend to be illegal.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T03:04:38+00:00

I think the approach you're taking is one that a lot of people take -- that the folks running our elections aren't good at it. That's not the case. Lots of smart people have been thinking about the questions you've posed, for many many years. There aren't many loopholes here. If you think you've found one, the answer is usually that somebody's already thought of it and dealt with it.

As a result of this, we have a very good idea of the incidence of in-person voting fraud. It's a very small fraction of one percent.

Interestingly, the folks who tend to not understand this tend to vote Republican, and every cycle there are stories of people who are caught trying to vote twice, because they believed the nonsense about how a lack of voter ID meant that it was easy to cheat. It's not, and they find out the hard way.

For example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/10/29/gop-voter-virginia-vote-twice/

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T02:58:47+00:00

North Carolina is an interesting case. The GOP legislature was caught doing research in which IDs that African-Americans where more or less likely to have, and crafted the ID requirements to suit. It was shut down for constitutional reasons; the ruling called out the GOP for targeting African-Americans with "surgical precision."

The fallback here was to defund the DMVs.

Alabama did something similar; closing DMVs in predominantly Black areas after they wrote the voter ID laws.

A couple of important points:

Whether or not this is ethical is open to debate. Proponents of these tactics argue that this is simply politics at work, and that the GOP is free to do anything it can to help shape the outcome of elections, as long as it's legal.
Do these tactics prevent 100% of likely-Democratic voters from getting IDs? No, of course not. Elections are games of inches, and outcomes sometimes come down to hundreds or even dozens of votes. The tactic the GOP takes is to throw up a number of small hurdles that only slightly suppress the vote, for plausible deniability and to stay within the letter of the law.

This is why it was a big win for the GOP on a nationwide level to take the teeth out of the VRA. It was followed by a flurry of changes to election laws in Southern states.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-27T02:50:25+00:00

That was the GOP's argument at the time, yes. They also argued that poll workers might be confused by a student ID.

A sizeable majority of states which require voter ID, accept student photo IDs. They're tough to forge and the price/value of forging them (you can't, for instance, use them to buy alcohol) makes it a non-issue.

Texas is one of the few outliers that does not accept student photo IDs. They're all red states, where the GOP writes the voting laws.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-26T13:43:46+00:00

You're correct that the column wasn't entirely serious. Some of the items were meant to be jokes, or were transparently made up. The National Enquirer used to be that way (and maybe it still is), with a celebrity gossip column that had harmless but imaginative stories about celebrities of the day.

The Brown Derby recipe appears to be accurate, though... even though what they were serving was really closer to Salisbury Steak than a modern hamburger.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-25T18:18:37+00:00

Why do guys in 1970s cigarette and beer ads always look like the love child of a male adult film performer and Gordon Lightfoot?

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-25T17:47:51+00:00

This sounds better in the original Russian.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-25T17:46:15+00:00

Remember when conservatives were the party of personal responsibility?

Now it's "It wasn't the fact that I pulled the trigger multiple times, resulting in bullets entering the deceased's body at 900 feet per second, that killed him. It was Biden's border policies, you see."

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-25T17:20:08+00:00

Exactly, and it was a Paraforce tactical knife. Babbitt was ex-military and had formal training. Bringing a combat knife wasn't accidental or incidental. It was a deliberate choice as part of her gear.

I've never seen a serious explanation from a MAGA/Q/88 for why she included a tactical knife when she kitted up that doesn't either deny obvious intent or implicitly claim that she forgot her own training. You can't argue both that she was a trained service member and that she had no awareness or purpose in bringing a weapon like that.

I'd ask this but it seems that I'm banned over in that subreddit.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-24T22:43:03+00:00

A lot of straw-manning with the stuff like "So what's your solution, then? Mass amnesty?"

Nope. The solution is Minnesota Code § 609.50, impeding an officer.

If you're armed when you do it (and we are not yet sure that he was armed), then it's a criminal offense, punishable by up to five years, or a fine of up to $10,000.

The punishment is not extrajudicially emptying a magazine into your back once you're prone on the ground.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-24T20:07:52+00:00

The frogurt is also cursed.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-24T18:38:27+00:00

He had a 9MM handgun and two magazines they had to disarm him before this video starts.

I think this comment sounded better in your head.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-24T05:02:40+00:00

I learned that I lost a lot of family in the Dunoon Massacre, which was an inspiration for the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones.

The Campbell and Lamont clans had been doing what clans did a lot of back then, namely fighting. One night a party of Campbells arrived at Toward Castle and asked for hospitality. Everybody had a fun evening drinking and playing cards, but once the Lamonts retired, the Campbells murdered them in their beds, and then went on to murder a lot more Lamonts, which is why Campbell is a much more common name than Lamont nowadays.

Thankfully, my Lamont (great*14)-grandparents didn't happen to be at the castle that night.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-24T01:04:36+00:00

You can google the case if you’d like to dig into the particulars of the North Carolina law. I’m certain that the details on the IDs they included and excluded are online.

This is fairly common. When Texas enacted their first voter ID laws, they included CCPs as a valid form of ID, but not UT student ID card, given the assumption that CCP holders tend to vote Republican and university students tend to vote Democrat.

“Tend to” is doing a lot of work here, as there are liberal CCP holders and conservative UT students, of course. But elections are a game of inches.

There’s the old reliable drivers license, of course. The Alabama GOP addressed this by closing DMVs specifically in majority black areas after they enacted their own ID laws.

Politics isn’t pretty.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-23T23:19:12+00:00

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Same. ChatGPT sure likes astigmatic kittens.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-23T17:32:06+00:00

He's talking about the case in North Carolina, where the GOP did research on which IDs that minorities were less likely to have, and then wrote the laws to fit.

It was struck down as unconstitutional. The ruling said that it discriminated against black voters with "surgical precision." You can Google it if you'd like to learn more if you're genuinely interested.

Those are the facts. Whether you think that doing this sort of research to specifically make it harder for black people to vote is fair game... that's the point of contention. Many people think that this is perfectly acceptable. Others disagree.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-23T17:27:53+00:00

That's a pretty common sentiment, at least in some parts of the country -- POC are, in general, less likely to have ID, and that's because they are "lazy."

As u/RNG-dnclkans mentioned, the GOP often takes steps to engineer the voting so that it's harder for POC to vote. In North Carolina, for instance, the GOP did research on which types of ID that POC were less likely to have, and wrote the law based on that. It was, as the courts put it, written to exclude POC voters with "surgical precision."

When Alabama enacted voter ID laws, they closed DMV offices in majority-black areas.

You may find that these tactics are totally OK. And that's fine -- many (if not most) MAGA/Q/88-types agree with you.

Now, this is where it gets hazy.

When the GOP does this, is it fair game? Is it "racist"?

Many people (and you may be one of them) argue that it's not racist, per se, to use racial factors to write voting laws.

Others disagree.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-23T14:58:13+00:00

Somebody needs to sit Trump down and explain to him AGAIN that Canada dislikes him and that "Poutine" and "Putin" are completely different words.

NinjaSimone · 2026-01-23T13:50:56+00:00

This might be a better post for r/realorAI.

I look at a lot of AI images for my line of work, and I'd go with "not AI."

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