I’d like to highlight what I believe is a serious flaw here.
For you, there should be two separate questions: what you think a wise social policy is about non-citizens being allowed to vote, and what you think a wise social policy is to implement our current rule (where they are not allowed to vote).
Your answers appears to mingle them: because you might be in favor of non-citizens voting, you might be amenable to weakening the checks under the current law to stop them from voting.
Well the status quo informs where the burden will be.
Lets say that due to purported concerns about the security of state issued ID, the ID requirement was that you had to present was a FEDERALLY issued ID such as a passport, military or federal employee ID, a social services card (lets just say these things exist for things like food stamps, welfare and medicaid but not for social security and medicare), or you could go down to any of the federal ID centers (conveniently located in every almost every city in the country) to get your free secure federally issued ID. How could anyone complain as long as the IDs are free? Do we really have to make it easier to get a FREE federal ID?
This response perfectly highlights the problem.
You see, a dollar is a dollar. Money in fungible. All observers agree that the dollar in this pocket is equal in value to the dollar in that pocket.
But we’re not talking about dollars. We’re talking about two different things: the difficulty that some minority voters may have with using Voter ID, and the confidence that the electorate will gain in the results of ultra-close elections.
You compare them and decide that the difficulty far outweighs the value of confidence.
But other people weigh the same question differently. And their weight was persuasive to the legislature, while yours was not.
If the legislature passes it, and the courts uphold it, then that’s what society wants, and I’d be fine with it.
To be fair, literacy tests and poll taxes did that too. Some people felt really good about the outcome. Sure the burdens today fall largely on blacks and the people who feel better are mostly white but that is totally different than the literacy tests and poll taxes of yesteryear. Its not like there is any malice or discriminatory intent underlying the Voter ID laws.
I don’t believe that the impact is dramatic enough to outweigh the value. So I care about both things, but in weighing them, find one outweighs the other.
Well, I think that non citizens are currently unable to vote, so it’s not really an issue. But if (if) I ever came to believe that anyone who lives here should be able to vote here, I would be of the opinion that that person should register using the current method. And sign a form at the voting booth, and leave his ID at home.
So your own personal confidence in the voting process “outweighs” the impact it has on minorities practicing their right to vote? And that’s not “racist”? At all? I’m not calling you Hitler, but you just said you feel better when policies are enacted that ensure fewer poor minorities are able to vote. That’s at least a little bit racist.
Who knows but it is not objectionable in principle compared to voter ID laws that pick and choose criteria that just HAPPEN to create greater burdens for lots of blacks and no burden for lots of whites.
Making voting more cumbersome at the polling place is pissing in the wind. Any registered voter should be able to vote with ease. Adding a layer or more of difficulty to the process of voting itself is the wrong way to go.
This is not a purely subjective issue.
There is real evidence that in person voter fraud is negligible while the voter suppression created by these sort of voter ID laws is not.
We aren’t talking about the color of starbucks coffee cups at Christmastime, this isn’t about “feewings” or at least it shouldn’t be.
Who gives a shit if people would “feel” safer if we banned assault weapons over handguns. We have DATA, there is a right answer.
Who gives a shit if people “feel” that vaccines aren’t safe. We have DATA, there is a right answer.
Who gives a shit if people “feel” that microwaving food alters them to make the food harmful and carcinogenic. We have DATA, there is a right answer.
Who gives a shit if people would “feel” more confident in elections if we imposed a burden on black people that made it more difficult for them to vote? We have DATA, there is a right answer.
We are talking about the META-right. The right that protests all the other rights. Feewings do not trump rights, or at least they shouldn’t. We don’t let people’s feewings trump the right to free speech (see KKK, Westboro Baptist church), why should we let them interfere with our right to vote?
I don’t put it past the Democrats to engage in low down dirty tricks (See Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile), and it is just as wrong and despicable when they do it as when Republicans do it.
Actually this is the complete wrong way to analyze the issue and this is a good example.
While I agree with the overwhelming evidence that vaccines are safe, they are not risk free. There is a non-zero risk associated with vaccines and their administration. I personally believe the benefit vastly outweighs any and all of the potential risks, but I accept that there will be others that don’t hold the same assessment.
So the data may conclusively say that the risk of adverse impact of a vaccine is less than 1 in 1,000,000 or whatever it happens to be, that’s where the data and factual information ends. How a person interprets and assesses the relative value is not a factual question that mere data can answer.
If the risk is 50/50, then we’d probably agree that there are merits to both positions. If the risk is 60/40, probably the same result. At some point each person may decide for themselves that the relative risk is no longer worth the relative benefit. Data may present what those percentages are, but data will not control an individual’s assessment of that data.
But given the basis relies upon “one simply can’t print newspapers without ink” and “the very ability to print a paper means you have to use paper and ink”, and both aren’t true, doesn’t that knock out that particular rung of reasoning? One can print newspapers without ink. One’s ability to print a paper doesn’t mean you have to use paper and ink. It’s not a matter of “abandoning” those options entirely, just that those options aren’t necessary, which seems to be the crux of the points the Supreme Court is going by.
And there’d have to be no less restrictive means of achieving the aim. Yay, Wikipedia.
Pardon, but your cite doesn’t appear to address my reference to a gun purchasing case. Gun usage, yes - and while the whole “the right to bear and keep a firearm implicates a right to train with them” seems like bollocks to me (especially since this presumably compelling government interest carries no particular requirement on the other end), that doesn’t really matter much. That said, this still doesn’t work for me as an analogy to gun purchase.
I also have to admit I don’t see what the middle section of your quote has to do with anything useful. Under British law, colonial Americans considered themselves to have the right to trade in weapons and ammunition. They then didn’t. One would have thought that the shock of suddenly being deprived of imports would later lead to an enshrinement in direct language of the right to purchase, if this was the terms they were thinking in. Apparently, not so.
I must admit, I’m still confused; why are gun purchasing and voter ID questions merely intermediate scrutiny questions? I may disagree with the reasoning in the cases you cite from, but it seems to me that the courts in question agree that gun purchasing is, by corollary, a Constitutional right.
Too, there’s not only personal assessment, but personal situation. If Bob, with his minor cold, has the option of taking a pill which will instantly cure him of all ills, or kill him, with a 50/50 chance each way, I don’t think any of us would think ill (pi) of him not taking it. Whereas Jed with his inoperable cancer would take that chance like a shot. The assessment of the risk is the same, but their own individual context can play a big role.
And when the Data says that there is 0 in 1,000,000 chance (which is the chance of causing autism, other vaccine issues are higher, documented, and are not the ones that people are freaking out about.)? Is it still rational to interpret and assess this information with relative values?
Did you see this part from the opinion:
That directly addresses purchase, not by analogy.
The middle section is describing commerce - commerce in arms.
For 1st and 2nd amendment analysis, the magnitude of the implication of the right controls the level of scrutiny.
I was thinking of the outside risk of other adverse reactions to vaccinations, not necessarily autism risk, which appears to be zero. Like some of the ones the CDC lists here.
But we’re talking about a public policy here, not individual assessment. Someone’s personal doubts about the voting process shouldn’t be allowed to disenfranchise thousands of poor and minority voters. This is a policy that should be decided with facts. Voter fraud is negligible, that’s a fact. Voter suppression in the form of Voter ID laws, on the other hand, is measurable, and has a clear disparate impact on poor people and minorities. The facts are very clear in this particular situation. People’s “confidence” in the system is irrelevant.
Yep. It doesn’t give the reasoning. Or, at least, the reasoning was not quoted.
Under British law. I mean, it’s nice to have the historical context, but a passage simply talking about the history of gun exports (and otherwise) and their effects on the nascent American psyche isn’t particularly useful in looking at this question. I could have c&p’d someone’s personal gun purchasing history and that would have been “describing… commerce in arms”, but it wouldn’t have really helped any.
Ah, ok! So the courts have found (I would imagine in very separate cases) that the magnitude of the implication to a right to purchase ink and paper in the 1st amendment is greater than that of the implication to the right to purchase firearms in the 2nd amendment (and to tie it in again, the implication to the right to vote in… uh, whatever part of the Constitution that is.)