I lived on Mount Desert Island, in Southwest Harbor. The nearest DMV was in Ellsworth, 30 miles away from where I lived. My neighbors had no car, virtually no public transportation (it wouldn’t get you there and it would take literally all day one way), not a whole lot of money, and worked year-round. I don’t think any of them ever had photo IDs. If they wanted to get photo IDs, they’d have to take time off work, find someone willing to drive them, and then handle processing fees - and that’s assuming they had their birth certificates. Would they be able to do that? If they could, would they be willing to do that?
This isn’t exactly some far-flung scenario. No, the far-flung scenario is people impersonating someone else on the voter rolls - the evidence indicates that that almost never happens. You’re burning down the forest to fight the leprechaun menace.
Man, remember when people called you “racist” for supporting these laws? Remember how shitty it felt to have people assume your motives were dishonest and harmful? I remember, because you have literally not stopped complaining about it since.
I did check, care to take away this accusation of bullshit? When you do deny the existence of lawyers taking a case pro bono or that there are lawyers from organizations that do help in cases like his and get paid by the organization to help him it is clear that what you are showing here is only very deep ignorance on the matter.
And the case is in Texas indeed, and it has to be noted that even your last bit on your post was based also on an argument from ignorance, what happens in your state (if it is WV) is that the new law there is not as strict as some other states’ voter ID laws, as it allows people to vote on provisional ballots if they forget or don’t have ID.
And speaking of the fraud that the laws supposedly attempted to stamp out: now the new supreme leader has tweeted that he does not need to see any evidence to fall for the conspiracies theories:
At least falling for a conspiracy theory is a less controversial reason for Republicans to support voter ID with no funds to help the ones that would be affected by the rule changes. But IMO it does not take away that beside lousy conspiracy theories there are still a good number of conservatives that are doing it for racist reasons.
How do you prove whether or not it is happening? Suppose I hadn’t tried to vote in that election when someone signed in under my name - how would that have ever been flagged?
If I’m making up the claim that you look for test cases…
…then this seems like an ill-timed admission. What was wrong about my characterization? The wolves? Yes, fair enough: the wolves were hyperbole. I agree you have never actually claimed wolves were involved.
Then perhaps you should identify the use of those fallacies when they happen?
Here’s an example: the above paragraph is argument by assertion. That’s a logical fallacy.
This is again argument by assertion, since what constitutes “integrity,” is not defined, and my definition (that the identify of every voter be ascertained before allowing that vote to be cast) seems to differ from yours (make it as easy as possible for voters to vote).
There is no showing that your definition is a pure fact. You simply assert that it is. That’s not sufficient. That’s a weak argument – a logical fallacy.
See?
I’d be perfectly fine with alternate proposals, as long as they contain the essential element of non-repudiation: that is, a voter is sufficiently identified that if it develops his vote was illegal, he may realistically be prosecuted.
If you want to create a fleet of mobile Voter ID motorhomes to visit poor neighborhoods and remote fishing villages, I am absolutely in favor of it.
But when I say “you,” I of course mean your proxies in the legislatures, the elected Democrats, and I don’t see any such proposals arising from them. They simply inveigh against Voter ID.
On one side are the very low numbers of people voting fraudulently in a way that Voter ID would prevent. On the other side are the millions of registered voters with no photo ID.
You two are making the incorrect assumption that everyone would look at the numbers here and if more people would be prevented from voting by Voter ID laws than fraudulent votes cast, then of course the laws are a bad idea. You’re looking at it like it’s a scientific survey sampling eligible voters and you want it to be as accurate as possible.
I’ve come to realize that these people don’t view it that way; that it’s not just a factual argument about which number is larger. Maybe it has to do with the authoritarian mindset, the “law and order” types - their motivation is to have laws around the voting process and then to minimize the amount of people whose votes are counted outside of the law. We can have laws that set the standards for voting, and to them, the Voter ID laws are perfectly reasonable. It doesn’t matter that there are millions who won’t go to the trouble to get a photo ID, that’s their fault, and is equivalent to not taking the trouble to get themselves to a polling station on election day. What matters to them is that once the laws are fixed, we stick by those laws.
I can almost sympathize with that - if there were only a 2:1 ratio of the numbers, then maybe I can see it. But with a ratio of 100,000:1 like I think it actually is, the voter suppression becomes much more important.
Read the post two above yours. How do you know what the numbers are? If I bring in 30 people 10 minutes before the polls close and have them quickly look over the list and claim they are someone who hasn’t already voted how would you ever know there were 30 illegal votes?
I make no such inaccurate assumption. I’m well aware that many Americans are blandly indifferent to the mathematics of the situation, preferring instead whatever fits their ideologies.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list before I was asked what my name was. If that’s possible then that should be changed. Then it would quickly become a high risk/low reward behavior since you’d have to identify people who hadn’t voted beforehand and pretend to be them.
That’s true for me too - the registration book is pretty big, and from what I recall, it’s upside-down for me to read, so that the election official across the table can read it.
It’s just much easier to fraudulently cast a mail-in ballot, that who would bother with the risk of in-person fraud? A large-scale campaign to skew the vote count in any particular direction (large-scale being maybe 10 or more) would just entail too many risks to try to pull it off at the polling stations. To what extend fraud is committed, it would have to be by mail-in ballot. There’s just no conceivable vote-skewing fraud that’s possible, that Voter ID laws would prevent.
I pointed it out because you seemed to be arguing about the mathematics (“How many extreme cases do you think there are? Is it a higher or lower than the number of fraudulent voters?”)
If the lawyers were helping him pro bono, couldn’t they file a simple name change petition pro bono? Or do they decline to do that because it would actually solve the problem and not contribute to the woe is me mentality?
I admit that I am unfamiliar with TX law, but I am unaware that any jurisdiction forbids the casting of provisional ballots. That is the whole point of provisional balloting. I say that I am casting a legal vote, but the poll worker is unsure, I cast the ballot and the powers that be decide later if it is valid. If I am refused outright, then there is no remedy. Does TX not permit provisional balloting?
I was asking a particular person if they had an opinion on the potential issue of the proposed solution creating a bigger problem than it solves, with an intended follow-up to ask if they cared.
I don’t think it is a “woe is me” mentality, but the point here is more likely for the voter’s group lawyer is that they are looking for a precedent that would be applicable for all the other people in the same or similar situations.
In any case, the claim that there were no lawyers involved or that the person affected must had paid them so there was ‘no economical excuse’ was, well, bullshit…
Texas does permit provisional balloting, but you are required to confirm the ID you claimed to had at the time of the election at a later day. Of course if you do not have that ID six days later… to the trash goes your ballot. But thanks to the recent court orders there were more options for people with no voter IDs to vote, so there was less of a chance to get boggled with a provisional ballot. The West Virginia new law will not be in effect until 2018, but even for that one it was reported that an ID would not be required for voting at all in some circumstances. One peculiar one was that if the poll worker knows the voter he can waive the ID requirement by making the voter sign an affidavit.
IMHO the lack of funds for the people affected in places like Texas is truly a jerk move as also seen in other legislatures. If the numbers of affected people are so few then a subsidy or more help for the people affected should not be much of a burden.
A question for Bricker: let’s presume that some (definitely not all) advocates for voter ID do so because they don’t like black people and want to make it harder for them to vote. How comfortable are you working with them for the policies that overlap both your goals? If you recognized their true motives (say, certain NC state reps), would you call them out and oppose them, or continue to work with them as long as your policy goals overlapped?
I imagine a similar struggle may have entered the minds of Planned Parenthood workers that heard their founder Margaret Sanger say that the consequences of breeding from stock lacking human vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and crime, and so we work now to facilitate the process of weeding out the unfit and preventing the birth of defectives.
And I suspect they probably resolved it as I would: to call out and oppose that motive but continue to support the worthwhile goal of Voter ID.
In other words, nothing should stop me from simultaneously rejecting and opposing racist persons and policies while continuing to support facially race-neutral and viable policies.
Ultimately, I can’t oppose a valid idea merely because an unworthy person also favors it, of course – the “halo effect” is an illusion. If I were to learn that Idi Amin believed that the integral of cos x dx is sin x + C, I could continue to support the proposition, and not stop out of worry that my support for this trig integral’s truth translated into support for Idi Amin.
No. Voter photo IDs, free voter photo IDs, supplied by the states would apply to everyone equally.
Voters only need to produce a proper photo ID (drivers license, passport, state ID, etc.) in order to prove that they are who they say they are when they vote.