Black people are measurably less likely to own a car or have a bank account. You do not need an ID to rent a house or buy large goods. People are perfectly free to sell/rent to you without them. So your claim here is totally false.

It's also totally irrelevant because none of those are Constitutionally-defined rights of citizens. Of course states have the ability to make up arbitrarily-defined rules that "just happen" to cut however they want - like "failure to pass poll test" (black), "failure to pay poll tax" (black), banning felons (7-10 times more likely to be black), "unable to provide ID" (4 times more likely to be black), etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...

http://www.dailywire.com/news/7441/7-statistics-you-need-kno...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/10/09/r...

You can see the racist history there. Every single time poll restrictions have been proposed it's been for racist causes.

So yes, if you're pushing for voter ID laws and not pushing for a uniform, Federally-administered form of identification that is freely and easily available at no cost to the individual, and universally accepted, you're pushing for racist ends. You yourself may not be a hooded member of the KKK, but you are pushing for the same things, and that's all that matters. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That's why "disparate impact" type laws are so important.

In 2010, North Carolina literally reviewed racial maps to help their attempt maximize the disenfranchisement of black people. Shocker here: the South didn't suddenly become Not Racist in the past 5 years, it's a continual fight against those same states that has been repeated over and over again every couple years over a 200 year timeframe.

http://www.wral.com/federal-judges-racially-tainted-general-...

You can see the voting bloc for yourself right here, Lee Atwater's Solid South, or the "Dixiecrats" as they used to be known before they defected to the Republican party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South

Ask yourself: do you want someone who is eligible to be denied their vote? Do you actually want to discriminate on racial grounds? Do you want other people to be discriminated against on racial grounds because they happen to live in other states? Because you know that there are states that are pushing for the latest refresh that they think will juuuuust pass Supreme Court review right now, just like they did 5 years ago. That's why Disparate Impact-type laws are so important.

If you answered "no" to those questions then at the end of the day we're on the same page here. I don't think there's anything wrong with having to show an ID to vote. I think everyone should be able to have one in case they want to drive or get a bank account too. But a huge number of people don't have those IDs, and face huge barriers that are deliberately elected to keep them from getting them. And that's where the Constitutional foot comes down, because there's no enumerated right to get a bank account or drive a car.

The only way that such justice has been delivered, historically, is when the Federal government puts its boot down on the throat of certain states and forces them to recognize the rights of their citizens. And golly those states that keep trying these things also just happen to be the same states that seceded to protect their right to own black people, were forced to recognize their citizens as people when Sherman burned them to the ground, and have been trying to kill and disenfranchise black people ever since. A shocking and doubtlessly entirely unrelated coincidence, I should think /s.

If you want an example of how "observers" play out in practice, you can just look at the (still-extant) consent decree forbidding the Republican Party to send any more "observers" after they were hiring off-duty cops in armbands to intimidate voters in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the 1981 election.

If you support armbanded thugs with state-granted police powers going around and intimidating legitimate black/hispanic voters living in minority-heavy areas? Yeah, you're racist. That's a thing that happened not too long ago, easily within memory of someone who might be reading and posting here right now, in fact. That's what "observers" means and has always meant. Back in the day it was the White Citizens' Councils who handled those duties. Farther back, it was just the Klan and they'd just lynch any black person who tried to vote. Maybe you get your ballot in, maybe you don't (usually "not" thanks to poll tests/poll taxes), but either way they get you on the way out, and you're not coming back to cast any other votes. Electoral integrity assured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Councils

"Neutral" observers are fine. But by "neutral" I mean like from the EU or some other allied-but-disinterested party, not someone who stands to win or lose in (or even simply gain or lose from) the election. And again, that's not how the issue has ever played out in practice. "Poll watching" and "integrity assurance" have always meant "suppressing minority votes". Remember in Florida 2000 when the Republicans ""erroneously"" purged hundreds of thousands of black people from the voter rolls to ""protect the integrity of the vote"", but it turned out that less than 5% of those people were actually invalid voters? Golly, oops!!! (and by the way: we win, no do-overs.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File

The reality is that voter fraud is an utterly insignificant problem that's not really worth considering - until it happens to benefit one of the parties to mount a voter-suppression effort. If you wanted to rig the election you would do it at the level of voting machines or tally systems, not the voters.

Paper trails are all well and good, but a backup system is worthless if you don't actually know if it can be successfully recovered back to production. Most places can't even handle county-level recounts, let alone multiple states that were won within a 0.1% margin. We need a certain percent of counties (say 25%) to be randomly selected after the fact for a recount with Federal oversight (or even better: here's where we can pull in those international observers!), so that every county is ready for it. Can't do it before the deadline? A vote count for any candidate exceeds a 0.1% error margin? Your whole state gets recounted because you're obviously either too incompetent to run an election or trying to pull something.