While they may have a disparate impact on Black young adults in the short term, vaccine passports are clearly nothing like voter ID laws. The comparison is absurd.

For starters, only one of these policies is intended to fix a real problem. Vaccine passports are meant to help stop the spread of COVID-19—an actual virus that frequently kills people and has upended the world as we once knew it. Voter ID laws are ostensibly meant to prevent in-person voter fraud—a phenomenon so rare as to be functionally nonexistent. If ballot stuffing and double-voting truly were rampant, it might actually be worth having a discussion about requiring IDs at the polls and the tradeoffs it entails. As it is, it’s not shocking that Democrats would support steps to combat a genuine crisis but not an imaginary one.

That’s the polite way of framing the issue. The blunter way to put it is that while vaccine passports are designed to help stop a currently worsening plague, voter ID rules are mostly designed to stop Democrats from voting—specifically young people and lower-income minorities, who for various reasons often have difficulty obtaining a driver’s license. Empirically speaking, it’s not clear that the laws actually suppress turnout much, if at all. But the restrictive intent is clear.