So voter ID is useless because it might rain or the voting hours might change? There seems to be a clear disconnect here.
Not sure what you mean. I'm saying that errecting barriers to people voting has a huge impact on election results. If you elect barriers to some folks- people that don't currently have the right kind of ID- but not others, then you are corrupting the result of the election. Whether in theory people ought to just push through those barriers or not isn't the issue, the issue is how severely that measure will skew the election results. I'm using the rain example to show that even relatively small barriers do in fact dramatically skew election results.
That's quite a few people. How can this be possible?
Well, for example, I would not currently be able to vote if my state adopted the strictest of the voter ID laws unless I went and got a new ID. I have several valid photo IDs- a passport, a driver's license from the state I lived in before entering law school, and a student ID. But, many of the laws only accept IDs issued by the state in which you would be voting, and since I'm not driving while I'm at school here, I didn't get a driver's license here.
Likewise, my grandmother could not vote with her current ID in some of the states. She has a passport as well and a Medicare card, but her driver's license was allowed to expire a few years ago since she is too old to drive.
The biggest category of people whose IDs wouldn't allow them to vote are people who move more frequently. Very few people update the addresses on their IDs right away every time they move houses. So, young people very often have previous addresses on their IDs. Many of the laws exclude IDs that don't have a current address.
So, those are three big categories of people that get hit hard by the worst of the voter ID laws- students, the eldery and young people. Other categories are people in the military, people in cities where you can get by without a car, and the poor.
It is more important that these numbers are accurate or inaccurate, rather than your summation of the source.
I'm not sure what you mean.
How is voter ID corrupting the system when it isn't in effect? Do you have links to support your assertions?
Again, it is corrupting the system by suppressing the votes of up to 10% of the population. That is a massive corruption of the system on par with the Jim Crow days. Excluding one person from voting who is a legal voter is exactly as bad as one person who isn't a legal voter voting. Either way, you're cheating the result by one vote.