> Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly

Why would that discourage anyone? In slovenia, you are required by law to carry an ID when you turn 18/get voting rights. So there's really no excuse for anyone to not have an id (or driver's licence).

An example: In Texas, a student ID is not good enough to count as a voter ID -- but an NRA member card is. I kid you not. The Simpsons could not have come up with something more absurd.

Minorities in the US are way less likely to carry photo ID. I could go on and on. In short, the situation is different than in Slovenia.

Also, there's a loaded history, too. Blacks were disenfranchised post-Civil War through a whole host of measures, of which IDs was just one of them. Requiring IDs or literacy for voters brings back thoughts of Jim Crow laws. These issues are steeped in history that Slovenia just doesn't have.

It's the same here. Well, similar, you're not legally required to carry it with you; most people do so anyway for convenience. But some countries don't have a national id, including but not limited to the US.

The UK briefly introduced and then scrapped a national ID system, bowing to public pressure. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006 -- a key phrase being "Many of the concerns focused on the databases underlying the identity cards rather than the cards themselves."

It's not something you can easily compare across borders and it's extremely loaded with all sorts of issues in the US, as far as I understand.

If you live in a place that requires you to carry identification papers at all times, I can understand your shock.

The US does not have national ID, and doesn't even require you to show identification to the police when asked.

Though it does require an ID to buy alcohol.

So I guess we're talking about people under 21 who (a) don't drive, (b) have never needed an ID for any other purpose, and (c) can vote but for whatever reason, are too poor/disadvantaged/etc. to get an ID.

And those people get a provisional ballot anyway.

I guess I don't see the problem with requiring ID; we require for far less important things already.

Don't forget people over 21 who don't drink, e.g. muslims. I can well imagine that poor muslims who don't own a car constitute a significant constituency, and with a significant Democratic preference; it seems plausible that keeping them from voting would lead to a noticeable shift in the overall result.

In a lot of countries, ID is not mandatory, and government-endorsed photo IDs are expensive and time-consuming to acquire. As such, people with a high income will be more likely to have them.

That applies doubly so for a passport or driving license -- people with more money are more likely to have a car or travel overseas, so more likely to have those types of ID.

So very much this. Voting systems and elections in the US are heavily gamed, mostly legally but always unethically. The reason why the US does not have smooth voting is because the incentive for elected officials isn't in getting people voting, but enabling voting for those with interests aligned with their own. When it comes to actual voters, some of them see nothing wrong with policies that are highly discriminatory, and that includes how elections and voting is conducted.

The "gamed" bit is the essence of the problem. The USA has a winner-take-all two party system and not a parliamentary setup. This simultaneously makes the victory margins razor thin (because the two parties naturally align at about 50% support) and the stakes of the outcome very high.

Where in most of Europe people can just go vote their favorite party and let the legislators figure out the details later, everything in the US is determined on one day.

So the incentives to game the system are immense, which is exactly why you see this kind of "Voter ID" laws to target unwanted demographics, and elaborate GoTV efforts with buses shuttling people around town, etc...

But even in the US, it doesn't have to be that way. Several states (mine among them) have moved to a 100% mail-in ballot system and eliminated in-person polling places.

> You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines.

Well, that's not strictly true. I recall waiting about half an hour on the election day for one of the elections I voted in in Ontario.

Several hours' wait during early voting seems a little bush league though.