John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, has stated in the past that he is adamantly opposed to voter ID laws. According to Fetterman, “people of color” and low-income individuals are less likely to carry their identification at the polls than wealthy individuals and white individuals.
In the now-found interview from December 2021, Fetterman is heard discussing attempts in Pennsylvania to “pass a constitutional amendment making sure that universal voting ID for every time you vote.”
“Because Republican state legislators understand that at any given time, there’s tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who typically are on the poorer side and are people of color that are less likely to have their ID at any one given time,” he stated.
On various occasions, Fetterman has explicitly referred to voter ID laws as absurd, illogical, and unfair. The Pennsylvania lieutenant governor has even gone so far as to compare them to the rules in place during the Jim Crow era.
Not only are Fetterman’s cliched comments that only white and affluent Americans know how to achieve voter ID disproven by the fact that the overwhelming of non-white Americans have some type of government ID, but also, the vast majority of Americans — of any and all races — praise mandating American citizens to show ID in order to vote.
Seventy-five percent of registered voters in the United States, including 69 percent of black Americans, “think photo id should be shown before voting,” according to a survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports in 2021. A distinct poll conducted by Monmouth University in 2021 also discovered widespread support for requiring voters to present photo identification. According to this poll, “91% of Republicans, 87% of independents, and 62% of Democrats” all agree that the policy should be implemented.
Fetterman is hardly the first Democrat to push such an openly demeaning narrative, despite the fact that he insinuates that economically impoverished and non-white Americans do not possess the money to acquire an ID in order to vote. For example, Georgia Governor Stacy Abrams referred to the state’s recent elections bill, which included broadening voter ID laws, as “racist” and “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie” last year.
In addition, Joe Biden, the current President, has made it a habit of spreading the falsehood that voter identification requirements discriminate against certain groups of people. In fact, when Joe Biden was the Vice President in 2014, he stated that such a policy was “an attempt to repress minority voting masquerading as an attempt to end corruption.“
Pres. Biden says the 28 Republican voting measures enacted across 17 states are a “21st century Jim Crow assault.” pic.twitter.com/ip7zQAsGwn
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 13, 2021
In addition to this, Biden has gone out of his way to cast Republicans and their efforts to alter electoral procedures in a negative light. In a statement that was shockingly horrific and released in July 2021, the President of the United States referred to recently established voting regulations as an “attack reminiscent of Jim Crow in the 21st century.”