That becomes more true insofar as the expected disenfranchisement is purposeful. If, as the linked civilrights.org op-ed suggests, the voter ID campaign is contrived voter suppression, we have a democracy screw-job on our hands.

Screwing democracy is authoritarian behavior.

Your patriotism is admirable, Chris, but I prefer to call the spade a spade.

1. The poor and minorities are less likely to vote by mail than other folks. The conventional wisdom that frequent absentee voters tend to be more conservative than average may (or may not) be breaking down as voting by mail becomes more widespread. But it’s still true that many low income people have less reliable mail delivery than the general population. And at least some civil rights groups oppose holding elections entirely by mail, arguing that the tradition of going to the local polling place is important to their constituents.

2. Discouraging poor and minority citizens from voting is only one of the partisan motivations for passing restrictive voter ID laws. The other is to stir up emotions over unauthorized immigration. For this purpose it doesn’t matter that, if non-citizens are registering and voting, that’s a registration problem and not a polling place problem. What matters is keeping the issue of the non-citizens among us in the public eye. Of course, this would never be acknowledged by proponents — and may not even be conscious.

There is a great deal of distance to traverse between “The state should help people get IDs and not favor one party over another” and even the remotest application of the word “authoritarian.”

We’re not exactly talking about a sliding scale with “Democracy” on one side and “Autocracy” on the other. A democracy can become less perfect without becoming more authoritarian.

The point is that rules can change in a democracy in fair or unfair ways, but what matters is that the game stays the same, namely that the democratic procedure of elections is in place to select those in power.

A system may become more or less democratic, but that does not mean that it necessarily is becoming more or less authoritarian in the process, especially as authoritarian regimes vary from one to another as much as they vary from democracies.

The authoritarian-ness of the law manifests in two ways.

One, it discriminates, knowingly or unknowingly, against groups so they do not even have the opportunity of “choosing not to participate.” Call it ‘unintended authoritarian consequences.’

Two, to the extent that discrimination is knowing, it represents an attempt to rig electoral rules to one side’s advantage. This is what you get when electoral management bodies are the elected agents of political parties.

Now, I’m not even calling for a response (in this post) to that principal-agent pathology. I’m just saying, if states want voters to present IDs, states should make efforts to get IDs into the hands of all registered voters.

Voter ID is somehow authoritarian:

I’m more with Daniel on this one, but I’d even take it one step further. While it wouldn’t surprise me to find that this most recent attempt is an attempt by the Republicans in Indiana to suppress minority and poor turnout for Democrats, I’m not convinced that there’s anything necessarily “authoritarian” about requiring voters to have a picture ID at the polling station. Yes, equal opportunity should require efforts to even the economic playing field, but calling it authoritarian strikes me as a bit of a stretch. The government absolutely has the right to know who you are when you go to a voting station, but it has absolutely no business knowing how you vote.

Voter ID is difficult:

Is there anything really that much more difficult about having to present a photo ID? I went to get a new driver’s license the other day (and no, I don’t own a car), and while it was not terrifically convenient, it wasn’t exactly a massive burden that would deter me from voting. If I didn’t want to take any tests, then I could have received a State ID even easier. The entire process was fairly simple and low cost.

More Participation = More Democratic

This is perhaps the least credible of the arguments. Different authoritarian regimes use democratic elections for legitimacy manipulate their populations in different ways. Sure, some suppress turnout and hope their loyalists will be the only ones to show up, but others (Saddam) make absolutely all of their population come out and cast their vote for their great leader. As for mandatory registration and voting, that strikes me as even less democratic than the problem that you are trying to resolve. Choosing not to participate in the system is also a choice, be it staying home because you want to catch your favorite TV show or perhaps because you’ve talked yourself out of voting for your actual interests because you’re a fan of an uncompromising but hopeless third-party candidate who’s funded by the party opposed to everything you hold dear.

You can argue that this most recent attempt at voter ID is discriminatory against poor/immigrants/elderly, or partisan against Democrats, or likely to suppress turnout, but none of these things necessarily make it “authoritarian.”

Partisan manipulation of election regimes is a characteristic shared by state governments and dictators from Central Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa.

American democracy will survive voter ID, but it’s a step in the authoritarian direction. The short-term solution is affirmative state action to issue those IDs. In the long term, we need a federally guaranteed, equal right to vote.

Now, is this really authoritarian? I don’t know if it would go that far, depending on your definition. Does this issue in general, and this particular instance, smell of horridly partisan manipulation of state laws to disenfranchise people? Yes.

As you said, American democracy will live on and, hopefully with time, overcome this. However, acts like this do severely undermine faith in the fairness in the political system.