It’s election time, which means the Left is out in full force trying to tell us people are too stupid or lazy to figure out how to vote.
Some people may be too lazy, but Americans are not stupid, and can figure out how to follow the law in order to vote. But here comes Vice attempting to prove Voter ID laws disenfranchise voters, but the report’s author makes it clear he wanted to vote without following simple state laws.
Tennessee law requires someone wanting to vote to provide either state or federally issued photo identification. And by state, I mean “state of Tennessee,” in case that wasn’t clear, because it apparently wasn’t clear to Davis Winkie, who claimed recently in Vice that despite having a “valid driver’s license” a student ID card, a voter registration card, his birth certificate, utility bills, and a copy of his lease, he wasn’t allowed to vote.
Again, Tennessee requires a state or federally issued photo ID to vote. None of that other stuff matters, and these laws were passed in 2013 (a year before Winkie and his wife moved to the state) and are advertised heavily.
The state also lists what counts as valid ID: an up-to-date or even expired state driver’s license, a U.S. passport, or a military ID. Tennessee also provides a free Department of Safety and Homeland Security-issued photo ID at state DMVs.
Winkie had none of those things. He had a Georgia driver’s license and refused to change that or his residency to Tennessee until a month before the 2016 election. He wrote about his problem with voting back in 2016 as well, and at the time said he and his wife “planned to maintain our voter registration and residency at my parents’ home, our permanent address in Georgia, so I kept my Georgia driver’s license when moving to Tennessee. … we also continued to pay Georgia state income tax.”
So, he didn’t want to vote in Tennessee or even be a real resident until a month before the election. He and his wife only decided to “become residents of Tennessee” because his parents moved.
He claimed they registered to vote in Davidson County and received voter registration cards, but this was impossible, as my former Washington Examiner colleague Beckett Adams wrote. Tennessee didn’t implement an online voter registration system until 2017 — the year after the election Winkie wrote about.
Oh, and in an update to the original Vice article, Winkie “realized” that he registered to vote during a campus drive (he was attending Vanderbilt University at the time).
But Winkie wrote that he “felt” he had what was needed to prove he lived in Tennessee. “I had my valid Georgia driver’s license. I had my Vanderbilt University student ID. I even had my voter registration card, a couple of utility bills, my lease, and a copy of my birth certificate,” he wrote. “I have doubts about the prevalence of in-person voting fraud and therefore the necessity of voter ID laws — but there are three reasonable components to test for: identity, citizenship, and residency, which I felt I was able to supply with everything I had with me.”
Yeah, that’s not how laws work.
As Adams pointed out, Winkie simply decided to become a resident of Tennessee without actually doing anything to become a resident.
“He didn’t register his vehicles in Tennessee and he didn’t apply for a driver’s license. He didn’t even apply for a free State-sponsored photo ID from one of Tennessee’s driver centers. The only effort he put into becoming a Tennesseean was when he supposedly registered online at the last possible moment to vote in the 2016 election. But even that is doubtful given it’d be another year before this was even an option for state residents,” Adams wrote. “Basically, he was a Georgian who decided suddenly he wanted to be a Tennessean and did nothing to make it happen. The Volunteer State didn’t accommodate his whims and he has been crying foul ever since.”
But yeah, voting is really hard.