The Trump Thread

[SanAndreasX]

Torillian said:

Jimbo1337 said:

Using airport-style identity checks actually perfectly addresses your concern about side effects, because it proves we can have high security without making life harder for the average person.

Think about how the TSA operates today: you walk up, insert your ID into a scanner, a green light flashes, and you walk through. It takes five seconds. The advanced technology does the heavy lifting on the back end, while the experience for the traveler remains seamless and simple.

Bringing that same logic to voting doesn't mean adding long lines or complex paperwork for citizens. It means updating local polling places with modern, automated ID scanners that instantly verify eligibility against state records. High security doesn't have to mean high burden; it just means using smart, fast technology to protect the system automatically.

And if we send such an ID to everyone for free that's a reasonable path, but if you charge people to get an ID and they have to miss out on work to go for the ID then some appreciable number of voters will be disenfranchised and doing that to try to avoid 400 mistaken voters is not worth it. 

Airport-style identity checks are by definition more cumbersome than if you didn't have to have them. We do that because we've determined that it's worth the inconvenience to avoid the unlikely but disastrous outcome of something like 9/11 happening again and because 9/11 showed that our previous security was not sufficient to avoid it. 400 mistaken voters in PA is not of a comparable severity and so I do not think we should have to put up with the same inconvenience to avoid it, and the current security in place has avoided anything of comparable severity so I'd rather just stick with what we have. Honestly I'd love to go back to being able to get a ballot in the mail and dropping it in a box but sadly I don't know that we'll ever get the convenience of the 2020 election again. 

TLDR: I disagree with your premise, Airport security does make life harder, we just deemed it worth it. 

I live in Arizona. We do have that convenience and have had it for decades. It's common in Western states. Part of that is because the big Western states are physically the size of two or three large Eastern or Southern (excepting Texas, which really should have been sectioned into multiple states either at admission or after the Civil War) states. You can fit Georgia and Florida into the same amount of area as Arizona, with enough left over for a Maryland. One of our counties would be the 42nd largest state if it were to become a separate state. Mail-in voting helps those small towners. Conversely, because Phoenix is so huge and hot, even in November,  sitting in long lines to vote isn't really feasible. And one of the tactics Republicans tried to employ in some states was to forbid handing out water bottles. There's no reason not to do mail-in ballots. Conservative crying isn't a reason to take something away from other people, especially when they've been found to be lying about it so much.

In Arizona, half of the population is composed of vast urban islands, but the other half of the population lives in the desert, hours away from those big urban islands.  Other states in the West are the same; 75 percent of the Nevada population lives in Clark (Vegas and suburbs) and Washoe Counties (Reno and Sparks, and Carson City is in this area though it's an independent city and not part of the county), but there are huge stretches of empty land dotted with small towns, and 25 percent of the population of Nevada is still close to a million people. And once you go east of I-5, California and Oregon are also sparsely populated wilderness, but in California, that wilderness still holds more people than South Carolina does. 

Last edited by SanAndreasX - on 06 August 2026