The misstep was embarrassing for Johnson because the requirement to bring photo ID is a stipulation of the Elections Act which he introduced in 2022 while still in Downing
It’s not the onion, because you can’t make this shit up.
As a person with no horse in the grinder, why is requiring ID a good thing in England/EU a good thing, but bad in the USA?
I’m very confused.
As someone who comes from a country where we do require photo ID for voting, not requiring one feels absurd, so I asked the same question. Apparently in the US, there is a part of the population that doesn’t normally get photo ID and that part is mostly poor people and minorities and photo ID laws are used as means of disenfranchisement, similar to having the voting days during business days (when many people can’t come to vote) or having voting stations far away in an area with limited public transport options.
Where I live in Finland, the police will actually grant you a temporary photo ID only for voting if you don’t have one, although most people have passports. There are early voting stations in basically every post office for a week and the main voting day is always on a Sunday. No excuse to miss voting.
I’ve only missed one voting during my life, at a time when I was living in another country and there was no consulate in the part of the country I was in. Nowadays there’s also the option of mail-in voting when outside the country, I don’t know if it wasn’t a thing back then or I just didn’t know.
That’s not to say I didn’t want some improvements in our system: I’d like to see ranked choice voting or something similar here, there are some smaller parties I’ve been voting and it seems they seldom have a chance.
The US (mostly the trending fascist party) does whatever possible to make sure the least amount of people possible get the opportunity to vote and for the people who do vote, make sure their vote does not count as much as possible. It also varies per state.
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not giving out a national identification card, but then requiring an identification card to vote
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voting districts with crazy borders to make absolute certain that the far right gets the most representatives possible https://lemmy.kya.moe/imgproxy?src=www.maproomblog.com%2fxq/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wapost-gerrymander-1024x687.jpg
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reducing the amount of voting centers every year in areas like major cities that vote more left so that the people would have to travel an hour or more to vote and without a car, it is almost impossible
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Voting is not a public holiday and many states do not allow voting by mail. Combined with the before point removes many poor people’s ability to vote at all
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there is a right wing effort to remove as many left leaning votors as possible from registration for minor errors
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Armed party members at elections recently to intimidate voters, especially if they “look like the left demographic”
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the “electoral college” which can just decide to not cast the vote that actually decides elections for the candidates that the citizens voted for
It is really batshit crazy over there. It seems like the right gets away with all of this crazy stuff and then when the left is back in power, almost nothing is done to change it back with regards to voting.
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Imagine going through the soul crushing hell of being a committed and earnest election worker in a failing 21st century democracy and then the clouds part and in one shining moment you can tell boris you have no idea who he is, but he’ll need ID.
Like seriously consider it. Do you say “on your bike son”? Can you resist flipping him off? The joy he gave that one person might be the single act of good in johnson’s entire life.
On bike? Flipping off? Boris Johnson?
I wonder how Boris feels about the current crop of carbrained Conservative candidates, given that supporting bikes was one of the few good things he did as mayor.
Not sure if you’re serious or not.
He’s LITERALLY the reason Tory MP’s are both fucking useless, or leaving/quitting in droves. When he gutted the party for not backing his Brexit vote, he got rid of lots of established conservative politicians, replacing many with populists.
The Conservative party doesn’t have many actual conservatives in it any more. Many feel that they’ve been forced out, and even those looking to join feel that they’re just a right-wing party on the tails of Reform.
It’s one of the reasons I’m so excited for a GE. It’ll likely result in a Labour landslide, but it’ll also potentially be the biggest decimation of the Tories since Thatcher, probably more so because she was still ultimately a Conservative. If they can’t root out the populists, the party is basically dead.
Serious about him being better than the current crop on this very specific issue? Yes. Other than that, he’s a piece of trash and a hack of a politician, so I don’t disagree with you on that point.
Although frankly I’d be happy if conservatism was buried altogether, and not just “populist” conservatism. Both forms are incredibly harmful to the poor and the disadvantaged in general.
That’s a big part of the Boris Johnson myth. The “Boris bike” system in London was actually created by his Labour predecessor Ken Livingstone. The system officially opened shortly after Boris became mayor, who then took the credit for it.
The guy does ride a bike, but not as much as other’s coattails.
I’ve seen Boris “expansion of the london cycling network” up close and personal the few times I’ve decided to go for really long cycles away from London zones 1, 2 and 3 - the cycling “network” out there is basically made up of tiny blue signs with a white stylized cyclist symbol every half a mile or so along the side of the road and nothing else (not even paint on the road, just near invisible signs), but that was enough for him to claim he had added a huge number of miles to the London cycling network.
Boris “achivements” are invariably just traditional posh-boy lying: in a very strict sense not a lie, but using words (“cycling network”) that leads others to understand one thing (actually usuable, properly marked “cycling lanes” that make it safer to cycle) which is completelly different from the reality (little signs on the side of the road that do not add up to a cycling lane or are even easilly spotted by drivers).
This fucking dingbat. Even if he was just a random citizen, he should know by now that you need to bring ID. And it’s always good to check if you have it when going to your polling station.
Here in the Netherlands, we’re VERY strict on ID. No ID, no vote. I’ve been witness to a fair few elections as a reporter, and it always gets drilled into the people who run the polling stations: even if the King himself walks in, you ask him for his ID and tell him to bugger off if he doesn’t have it. I’ve seen city mayors turned away at polling stations in their own council buildings for failing to produce ID. And they all perfectly understand why those strict controls are necessary.
And they all perfectly understand why those strict controls are necessary
To disenfranchise those without government issued ID
This is only really an issue if it’s not free and convenient to get one, as in huge swaths of the US.
And also, the UK
