Study: 46 Out of 47 European Countries Require Photo ID to Vote

So much 'Jim Crow' voter suppression. And the lone outlier government -- the recently Brexited UK -- has proposed a new law to institute ID requirements at the polls, too. Via Real Clear Investigations, a further piece of support for why common-sense integrity measures like this, while angrily decried by American 'progressives,' are in fact widely popular among normal people. It's beyond reasonable to ask voters to confirm their identity and eligibility prior to allowing them to cast a ballot. Such commonplace provisions are the rule, not the exception among Western democracies:

46 of 47 European countries require photo identification to vote https://t.co/GyDwyStwu9
— Ryan Fazio (@ryanfazio) June 3, 2021

Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections – warning anew of racist voter “suppression” otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story – of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned. A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they've experienced fraud under looser voting regimes...Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe -- a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy -- all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote.

As noted above, the one holdout is coming on board with the norm -- inevitably leading to left-wing criticisms of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for supposedly being racist, suppressing the vote, etc. Setting aside the fact that I'm not sure Johnson or his Conservative party are even hypothetically interested in limiting turnout at the moment, given their massive polling lead over Labour, these arguments are stale and don't align with most voters' intuitive sense of basic fair play. And for all the screaming about "suppression" here in the US, even supposedly "restrictive" states are more permissive in many key aspects than voting regimes in place around much of the democratized world:

Seventy-four percent of European countries entirely ban absentee voting for citizens who reside domestically. Another 6% limit it to those hospitalized or in the military, and they require third-party verification and a photo voter ID. Another 15% require a photo ID for absentee voting. Similarly, government-issued photo IDs are required to vote by 33 nations in the 37-member Organistion for Economic Co-operation and Development (which has considerable European overlap)...Despite the record of Europe and the vast majority of the rest of the developed world, congressional Democrats are pushing to remove identification requirements for voting. The House recently passed the For the People Act of 2021, which replaces state voter ID rules with a signed statement from the voter, and makes permanent the pandemic’s mail-in ballot voting. The mailing out of blank absentee ballots en masse would become a fixture of American elections...Meanwhile, efforts in Republican states to require voter IDs for in-person voting and absentee ballots have triggered boycotts from Major League Baseball and other corporations. Georgia’s new absentee provisions raised a ruckus despite being much less restrictive than much of the rest of the world. Anyone who wants an absentee ballot can obtain one. A reason need not be given, such as being out of town, but one must have an ID to get an absentee ballot.

Click through for a number of examples of fraudulent elections across the globe in which the cheating was made possible by lax or non-existent ID mandates. Imagine that. Meanwhile, on the subject of bogus, politically-motivated cries of "racism," here's a journactivist dutifully repeating the 'Jim Crow' line about the filibuster while lobbying Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to destroy that legislative tool in furtherance of leftist policy goals:

Reporter: The filibuster is a relic of the Jim Crow era, so if you don't support things from the Jim Crow era, why would you support the filibuster?

Sinema: "The filibuster...was created as a tool to bring together members of different parties to find compromise"
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) June 2, 2021

The filibuster pre-dates the Jim Crow era, and Democrats have used it promiscuously over the years -- including all the way back in...2020. To block, among other things...police reform. This is a garbage talking point is a naked effort to turn a prosaic power dispute over parliamentary tactics into an identity issue. The Left, including many in the media, are addicted to this line of debate-avoiding "argument," so they're increasingly trying to apply it to anything they don't like. And on that score, I'll leave you with this: