You said "No one is against voter ID laws, as long as people can have reasonable access to ID.", and I challenged your assertion. Why you would think I challenged it because I had no idea what you were talking about, rather than because you offered no evidence, is a mystery. The claim is implausible on its face, and even if it's against all odds true, it's not clear how you could possibly know it's true.
Implausible?? Note the conditional--reasonable access to ID. It's not met, thus the fact that people oppose such laws proves nothing.
I noted the conditional. Did you note who was making an assertion and who was asking for evidence? You're reversing burden-of-proof.
Not clear what your point is. JH didn't make a claim about who has reasonable access to ID; he made a claim about the minds of the sixty-odd million Americans currently against voter ID laws. He's de facto claiming they'd all stop objecting if the reasonable access problem were taken care of. That's an extraordinary claim; it requires extraordinary evidence. There isn't that level of uniformity of opinion about anything. If the reasonable access problem were taken care of, some percentage of that sixty million would change their minds and some percentage wouldn't, same as with any other issue.
But you have no indication of the percentage that would change their mind. There's always going to be a few opposed to anything, the question is whether large numbers would. As it stands there is a very big issue with access so we don't know how people would feel if that were solved.
No, it's JH who has no indication. All he can know is
he wouldn't object if reasonable access were taken care of. I have two indications of the percentage.
First, in politics, as I said, there isn't that level of uniformity of opinion about
anything. Whatever is the most lopsided distribution of political opinion you can find on any issue, that's pretty much going to be a lower bound on the percentage that will continue to disagree with the majority -- why the heck would
this be the least controversial topic in politics? So if for definiteness's sake we take JH's hyperbolic "No one" as meaning, say, at least 90% of the opposition would melt away, that would require 98% of the public to agree with voter ID and no more than 2% to continue to oppose it. Show me any political issue with a 98%-2% opinion split.
And second, lack of reasonable access to photo ID is a big problem, not just for voting but for all manner of interactions in ordinary life. A few weeks ago I couldn't get a medical test done without showing my driver's license. If twenty million Americans can't prove who they are,
that's something we really ought to do something about! That being the case, it's kind of anomalous that in voter ID debates, the anti- side almost always treats the whole lack of reasonable access issue as
background data, as though it were a law of nature or the result of nefarious forces beyond our control. Their arguments hardly ever contain proposals to
do anything about lack of reasonable access. Except not require photo ID. For voting. Apparently it's okay with them to keep requiring it for medical tests. That anomaly in the arguments is an indication that for an awful lot of them, the whole lack of reasonable access issue is probably a rationalization for a political position they hold for other reasons. If we fixed the access issue I'd be surprised if even half the current opponents of voter ID stopped objecting to it.