By Tara Devlin
They’re really just mad that people can still vote
Republicans are screaming about “ID to shovel snow but not to vote” because they need another fake outrage to prop up their voter suppression.
I.D. to get a city job? Oh, the humanity!
After the recent blizzards, New York City’s Department of Sanitation ran an “Emergency Snow Shovelers” program to help clear snow and ice from bus stops, corners, crosswalks, fire hydrants, and other public areas. It’s a per diem, hourly job run by the city, not a volunteer program, with advertised rates that can approach around 30 dollars an hour and increase after a set number of hours or under blizzard conditions.
Like any employer, the city has to know who it’s hiring and whether those workers are legally allowed to work. That is why applicants are told to show up with two forms of ID and a Social Security card, so the city can verify identity, put them on payroll, and handle taxes and work eligibility the way the law requires. That’s not “Jim Crow” it’s the exact same basic employment law that every boss in America is supposed to follow.
You can always pick up a shovel — for free
Despite Traitor Trump pretending (?) to be confused about the snow-shoveling program, the fascist fauxrage machine neglects to mention that nobody is stopping anyone from picking up a shovel and helping their neighbors for free. The identification requirement kicks in only if you want to be hired and paid by the City of New York, because at that point you are an employee, not just a good Samaritan.
So when Republicans scream, “You need ID to shovel snow, but not to vote in New York!” they are intentionally leaving out the fact that the ID is tied to getting a government paycheck, not your ability to move snow off a sidewalk after a storm.
How New York actually handles voter ID
New York’s election rules already have their own identity verification pathway, and it does not look anything like a temp job application. The New York City Board of Elections explains that registered voters generally do not need to show ID at the polls because identification is provided when a voter registers.
The myth of in person voter fraud
The whole voter ID discourse is built on the disingenuous Republican canard that there is massive in person voter impersonation going on at the polls. But when courts and researchers actually look at the evidence, again and again it’s made clear that voter fraud is infinitesimal—so rare it doesn’t move the meter.
Research summarized by the Brennan Center found incident rates for alleged voter impersonation in the range of between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent in reviewed elections, far below anything that could plausibly swing results. That’s why federal courts have repeatedly recognized that strict ID regimes do nothing but impose serious burdens on poor, elderly, and marginalized voters—the very people Republicans are trying to stop from voting.
Who pays the price for “free” IDs
Republicans love to insist that voter ID laws are harmless because “everyone has ID” or that they’ll hand out voter IDs for free. What they don’t mention is the real world cost of getting the underlying documents people need to obtain that “free” ID: birth certificates, passports, travel to government offices, and the lost wages from taking time off work.
Those bureaucratic scavenger hunts hit hardest on the very people Republicans least want to see in the voting booth—low income workers, people with unstable housing, seniors, and communities already on the margins. So while they pretend it’s “just common sense” to add more locks to the door of the voting booth, they know exactly whose votes they’re making harder to cast.
Another disingenuous Republican meltdown
That’s why this blizzard talking point is so attractive to the right wing media ecosystem. They take a straightforward municipal hiring process—“bring ID so we can pay you to shovel”—and twist it into a story about how Democrats “secretly admit” ID is necessary to stop fraud.
They never mention that the IDs are strictly about employment verification and payroll, not about whether a person is permitted to lift a shovel. They never mention that New York’s voting system already has built in safeguards that successfully stop fraud.
The whole arc of American voting rights history has been about knocking down barriers and expanding participation, from the end of formal Jim Crow to the Voting Rights Act to the end of poll taxes. Republicans look at a multiracial, liberal democracy and see a math problem they can’t solve without cheating, so they do all they can to erect obstacles.
If they truly believed their ideas were popular, they’d be registering voters, not purging them; opening polling places, not closing them; making Election Day a holiday, not a gauntlet. Instead, they throw a tantrum over ID to get a city paycheck while quietly trying to turn the right to vote into a privilege only rich Republicans get to enjoy.
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