Okay, are you actually bringing up the idea of implementing Canada style voter ID here? That is in fact an item worth discussing.
If you are just bringing up “other countries have voter id, why aren’t they racist?” then no, you are contributing nothing of value to the discussion.
Like I said, you should probably meander to that other thread if you are looking to catch up.
When brought up in the other thread, pretty much no one objected to it. Czarcasm said something about it, though I’m not sure if he was serious. The only other objection was some issues of ease of implementation, and Bricker’s assertion that the EFF would forbid it.
If someone was okay with Canadian policies, except for the types of ID that black people tend to have, then yes, I would consider that a racist policy, and those who knowingly push for it, are either racist, or they are cynically playing to race.
I think it would be silly, pointless, and expensive. I would, however, consider it an improvement over the approaches designed to restrict Democratic voting.
Of all the approaches discussed in this thread I think the Canadian approach that Bryan Ekers gave is the best. I also like the idea of these things being determined by non-partisan voting boards. And if a non-partisan voting board concluded that a fingerprint was the best approach, I would support that decision.
A poll tax isn’t explicitly racist either. It still had a racially disparate outcome and was banned because of it. Voter ID is basically a poll tax. A poll tax that “everyone should have in 2016” and “is available to every citizen”, but a poll tax nonetheless.
You start mailing out free IDs to people who can’t drive and don’t have utility bills, birth certificates, home addresses (or even homes) then we are out of the “poll tax” woods, but I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
Alabama implemented a voter ID law a couple years ago and then promptly closed DMVs in all the areas of the State where poor black people predominated. Good luck convincing me that’s not racist.
No, but a failure to file that form means you’re complaining about a delay while refusing to exercise all the options available to you to end the delay.
In other words, you are speculating that perhaps the board would act slowly, or give an unfavorable result – even though you yourself admitted that the case you knew about involved a favorable result with no onerous request for documents.
I don’t agree that the law should be changed because you speculate it might not work well.
Disenfranchisement occurs when someone is denied the vote. What you describe is your worry that she might be disenfranchised if she moved. But even then, Kansas has Form RCD, so it seems you are speculating that she might move and then might have problems filing that form.
That’s not disenfranchisement. No one has lost the ability to vote in that story.
And…?
And…?
No, in this era of interest in good challenges especially in an on-going case in Kansas, it’s a simple matter of contacting the party currently suing.
In a representative democracy, you cannot invalidate a law by asking, “Well, why don’t they do it this better way?”
What persons allege that they provided sufficient information but were denied by the board?
This is, again, a claim that something might happen that you object to, rather than a claim that something DID happen you object to.
I claim no credit for it, of course, though I should point out that Elections Canada not only maintains the voter rolls and shares this information with their provincial counterparts, they also are responsible for drawing up district (“riding”) boundaries.
Frankly, the amount of meddling your elected officials are allowed to do is quite astonishing to me. If ever there was a temptation to corruption, this’d be it.
I agree with all of this and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. It’s pretty telling isn’t it? All we are saying is that you must produce photo ID in order to vote. You need multiple pieces of ID to get a job, to fly on an airplane. You need it to write checks, open a bank account, or to buy booze or cigarettes. I cannot count the number of activities in my life that require I have photo ID and carry it with me.
A person simply cannot function in the year 2016 without a photo ID. Why is it automatically assumed that it will be racial minorities who are so out of touch with modern society that they will be the ones harmed?
By that I mean that I expect a law to have a valid, neutral justification. If a democratically controlled legislature cutting or removing absentee ballot voting for the admitted purpose of reducing Republican turnout, and could not offer a valid reason apart from that, then I’d believe that law should be challenged.
If, on the other hand, a democratically controlled legislature cutting or removing absentee ballot voting for the admitted purpose of reducing voter fraud associated with absentee ballots, then I’d accept it as a valid exercise of legislative discretion – even if I were to learn that some members of the legislature favored the new policy because it would reduce Republican turnout.
Is there a Constitutional right to purchase arms to bear? A strict interpretation of the Second Amendment doesn’t seem to include that, just “keep” and “bear”.
Because the evidence suggests so, but on a correlation basis - it’s the poor who are less likely to have access to IDs, and in the US there’s a significant overlap between “poor” and “racial minorities”.
Naturally, the size and nature of the population without ID and/or with limited access to obtaining one depends on where you are, which IDs are considered valid for that location and how easy it is to obtain them. But people who can’t afford a car are unlikely to have a driver’s license or be travelling out of the country and thus need a passport. Since I’m not one of this population I have no idea how easy it is (cost- and effort-wise) to obtain another form of government ID nor to what extent one can function without one, but (speaking from my middle-class viewpoint) I suspect that if you’re far enough down the economic food chain you can operate without one and any cost for an ID you can normally get along without is too much.
Even the most texty of textualists would find that the right to a free press is implicated if the government criminalizes the purchase of ink and paper.
Sure… but a right simply means that the denial of the act by the government can be stopped, that there is a legal remedy.
I used “criminalized,” merely as an example. Even the most texty textualist S would agree there is a First Amendment remedy if the government prohibited the purchase of ink and paper in a civil context.
There is, grounded in the First Amendment.
Sure. The class of laws commonly known as racial purity or anti-miscegenation laws, of which I posted an example.
Thanks! That’s very interesting. To tie it back in to the topic of the thread, what does this mean for the implications of practical barriers to being able to fulfil that right? I was halfway through a post writing about how your second cite especially is useful in terms of this analogy, given it talks about how the secondary right to purchase can have conditions placed on it, much as with voting. But then I thought… that’s a secondary right as implicated by the text (per that), not the primary right. An analogous situation, compared with requiring documentation to be presented for each exertion of the right of voting, might be requiring documentation to be presented for each exertion of the right to bear or keep arms. I’m not quite sure how that would work.
Supporters? Mostly not. (They’re the marks.) The policy? Yeah, because it disproportionately negatively affects people of particular races. And there are workable alternatives that don’t. (**Bricker **himself came up with one, using fingerprints.)
It’s also antidemocratic, since its sole goal is to disenfranchise. There is no evidence of fraud, and this is well known, so any claim that this is the purpose is clearly false. Which leaves only the less than honorable purposes.
The claim that it will increase confidence in the fairness of elections is technically true, but you can’t very well claim you’re fighting a perceived lack of integrity in the voting process when you are the one creating said perception. That’s con man stuff.
That is what is going on here. Republicans trying to con people into letting them disenfranchise Democratic voters (by disenfranchising minorities). In that light, it’s not nearly so surprising that said party is now led by an actual con man.