So then are you then conceding your opponents’ view of the facts on this issue? Is it all about which of two things is more right; the two things being a more accurate polling of the public or greater confidence in the vote?
Suppose the majority could be convinced that voter ID laws actually hurt polling accuracy? Would you then change your stance?
And yet when it comes to determining whether or not it’s right, the step you take is first and foremost wondering “I wonder how the American public would vote on this”? That you’d even attempt to justify your decision with that epistemology is mind-boggling. That’s where my confusion stems.
That said, I’m with Bryan Ekers. Your case for what is right is incredibly broken. The idea that we should make it harder to vote, in some cases very considerably harder to vote, for a large portion of the populace in order to:
This despite the fact that participation in American democracy is among the lowest in the western world, that voter ID is likely to dissuade more people from voting, and that those dissuaded are largely on one side of the political spectrum.
And when I try to get to the bottom of how we determine which of us is being unreasonable, your answer was “let’s let people vote on it”, which is not an actual epistemology so much as an appeal to popularity, which fails on a very basic level and here more specifically because most people don’t understand why this is an issue. Again, let’s clarify:
Pro:
Con:
Huh, I was about to say I was with you, and also ask Bricker if popularity is a metric of morality, else why does he cite the popularity of voter ID laws in this and other threads in discussions of the morality of said laws.
Seriously. Bricker, why do you do this? We’re not talking about popularity. We’re well aware that voter ID laws have massive, widespread, bipartisan support. We’re asking if that’s justified. The fact that 80% of Americans think it’s a good idea is completely meaningless; why do you think it’s a good idea? Well, you gave us reasons, but they seem like pretty terrible reasons when you stack them up against the reasons why voter ID laws are bad. And then I went to ask you how we determine which of us is right, and your response was “let people vote”? Hence my wondering if you cared about whether or not you were right. Just to sum up the discussion so far.
Just to seek clarification, requiring a voter to identify himself or herself isn’t really a problem. It’s making the standards higher than absolutely necessary that is the issue (or so I gather). Looking down the list of acceptable identification for a Canadian voter, I have to admit that a citizen who couldn’t pass (or at least couldn’t without financial hardship), well, I’m not UNsympathetic; I’d like to know what can be done to fix the problem by the next election. Related, if there’s an effort to make the current requirements more restrictive, I’d want a good reason why. If there’s a sotto voce hint that the goal is to bias an election toward a particular party, then I feel justified in being dismissive of the ostensibly real reason (to reduce voter fraud) because the proponents have shown they have motivation to lie.
I don’t know if any of the above is impossible for a literate western-educated adult to understand, but if so, I can attempt to clarify.
Well, the part about a citizen who couldn’t pass has some structure issues that make it hard to understand. 
It’s not meaningless. It’s critical.
I have spoken until I’m blue in the face about voter confidence in the results of close elections, and you now ask why massive, wide-spread support is a meaningful metric?
Answer: because that wide-spread support means that people are more confident in the integrity of close election results. In other words, for the issue at hand, the measure of popular support is hugely relevant.
They seem TO YOU like pretty terrible reasons. But to me, they correctly weigh the competing interests in play here.
You surely cannot claim there is an objective, measureable answer here. I say that preventing cheating is more important to our society than ensuring we make it as easy as possible for every person to vote. You seem to want to take it as a given that our first priority is to make it as easy as possible for every single person to vote. I say “nay nay.” I say that the goal of making it easy should be balanced against the goal to not have bad votes, and that the second goal is more important than the first.
You disagree.
That’s fine.
But you also agree that most voters agree with me and disagree with you. So on what basis to you continue to claim your view should triumph?
This only proves (tentatively) that the public wants something and the evidence that they want it is that they want it. It in no way proves that they should get it. In fact, they shouldn’t get things that will violate rights of individual citizens without a compelling social interest and tenuous issues of “confidence” don’t strike me so, if I may be so bold. There are other issues that have a far greater impact on elections and do not have a disenfranchising effect.
Sure, once you decide that a citizen who misses his chance to vote is of no import, that it can’t “compete” with interests that are by any plausible metric overblown at best.
The Bricker who answered “(2)” earlier would disagree also, I’d’ve thought. If a law prevents one bad vote but also two good votes, how is that a net improvement? If anything, it strikes me as a Blackstone reversal: better ten innocents be punished than one guilty man go free.
I’ll hazard the answer has something to do with civil rights not being decided by referendum.
How should they be decided?
This debate always returns to this question, and you never answer it.
How should civil rights be decided? Specifically.
That’s never the question under debate in threads about “should voter ID laws currently under debate be passed?” or “are voter ID laws currently under debate necessary?” or “are voter ID laws currently under debate a good idea?” If you want to discuss the mechanics of how legislation is passed and how constitutional amendments are ratified, open a thread in GQ.
The thing is, there’s a different cure for the public’s confidence: hucksters could stop playing up the terrrrrrible danger of voter fraud. For example:
We have two proposals for curing the ills of voter confidence:
I agree with you that increasing voter confidence is a good thing. I simply believe that the best approach is for right-wing shills* to quit dissembling about voter fraud.
Nice try, but it’s exactly the question, and it’s one you never answer. You pontificate at length about how popular support doesn’t mean a law is right, but you never quite go the extra step to describe how you think laws should really be made.
The only time I bring this up is when you, or someone on your side, say something like:
How should they be decided?
You raised the question. You implied that the current method is not legitimate; that it shouldn’t be used. So what should?
To be clear, I believe it’s very common – in the sense that it happens every election. I just think it’s rare in that it would almost never result in a different outcome for the election. There might be 300 fraudulent votes in Virginia’s next presidential election. But that usually means that instead of Candidate A winning 2,146,987 to 1,896,311 votes, he should have won 2,146,687 to 1,896,611.
An election close enough to be affected by fraud is very rare.
But the presence of voter fraud is very common.
The questions need greater precision.
Just to drag this to the point where anyone can see the problem:
“Sure, to you it seems like the rights of the negroes to freedom is more important than my right to own my property, but to me, the decision in the Dredd Scot case seems to correctly weigh the competing interests in play here.”
Your reasons suck. To the point where you refusing to justify them to this degree - not even challenging my assertion of the pros and cons in the previous post - makes your position seem patently absurd.
No, but as with any “game”, we make the rules. So let’s talk about the “rules” of voting.
In an American election, the goal is to elect a representative who best represents the interest of those in his district. To simplify this, one could basically state that the goal of voting is to allow as many people as possible to legitimately cast their vote while preventing as many fraudulent votes as possible. You with me so far?
With that in mind, it necessarily follows that any action that places further hurdles between people and the voting booth needs to be scrutinized intensely, as there is an inherent equality between a vote denied and a vote hampered to the point of unwillingness. In other words, the lost vote of a person who found needing to get ID for the first time in his life an unreasonable hassle (because he had to take off work, because he has a philosophical issue with it, because the nearest DMV is 120 fucking miles away and he doesn’t have a driver’s license) is far closer to the lost vote of someone whose rights were denied to them than the lost vote of someone who chose not to vote. These are people who would have voted otherwise. Obviously, the more significant this hurdle, the more this scale tips, but the point is that putting barriers between people and the voting booth goes directly against the goal of the election, and if it happens, we need good justification.
Now, that said, I’ve already provided the equation to determine whether or not this is a given simply in terms of preventing fraud. It’s kinda not pretty. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that implementing this law will lead to more skewed, rather than less skewed, elections - the portion of people with no ID is massive; voter fraud is about as common as leprechaun sightings by sober people; and those without voter ID are very largely liberals while there’s no such partisan divide when it comes to voter fraud.
So what else is there? On one side, we have biasing the electoral system. On the other, we have what you’ve claimed: instilling “confidence”. However, confidence is not an issue. If people are worried about elections being thrown by fraud, responding to that by making it harder for a good 10% of the populace to vote is like responding to a hypochondriac who is convinced he has cancer by proscribing invasive surgery, radiation treatments, and chemotherapy, rather than, say, a convincing placebo drug, or the more obvious solution of showing him that he doesn’t have cancer. You know, educate the populace. Or at least get your side of the political divide to stop lying about it.
What’s more, when we’re talking about “confidence”, here’s a fun one for you. If we had a third candidate who picked up every single eligible voter who didn’t vote in the 2012 election, they wouldn’t just win, they’d win by a fucking landslide. Ever wonder if the lack of voter participation might have something to do with confidence? The fact that maybe 1 in 3 people voted for the last president and he still won by quite a lot? I dunno, maybe that’s just me. Or speaking of confidence, remember the 2000 election? I’d say the supreme court stepping in to stop a recount of the ballots would really hurt “confidence”. And yet despite all this, “confidence” isn’t an issue. We aren’t facing uprisings or rebellions. Save for a handful at the whackdoodle fringe who deny the legitimacy of any government (which will always exist no matter how airtight or transparent the system), people may grumble but generally admit that the government is legitimate. Hell, most of the people complaining don’t think Obama cheated, just that he’s not allowed to be president.
So confidence is a worthless argument for this. Unless we get far more people seriously complaining about fraud (which shouldn’t be a thing in the first place - there’s something wrong with republicans to hyping up the amount of voter fraud, then turning around and complaining that people aren’t confident in elections any more), it’s meaningless and worthless, and deserves as much attention as concerns about leprechauns. None of this is subjective, mind you - it’s objective based on how the world currently is.
Then there’s this argument.
No, I simply find that voter ID is placing hurdles in place for no good reason. That is, none of the reasons you have offered make any sense. What’s more, within the confines of the rules of the electoral system, making it as easy as possible for every person to vote directly aligns with the goals of the system! If you have 100% participation, then there’s no room for the silent plurality to say “well, we didn’t want this”. I mean, do you reject that higher degrees of voter participation is a good thing? If you do, then there’s no point in having this discussion in the first place. But more on the subject of “ease”, part of the problem with voter ID laws is that the hurdles they place are not inconsequential.
Yes, a vote that is not cast due to the voter not being willing to jump through the hoops is not as bad as a fraudulent vote that is cast. But not by much. The end result is the same, and it’s that end result that matters. Certainly not twice as much. And yet the disparity between the number of people with no photo ID and cases of voter fraud demonstrated is massive. Massive to the point where I don’t think you reasonably can argue that passing voter ID laws won’t lead to there being far more prevented votes than prevented cases of voter fraud.
However, here’s a question for you. What if, in order to get photo ID, a person had to take several days off of work, pay a non-trivial sum of money, and provide documents that require even further money and time? How would that effect the balance? Would it still be reasonable to tell these people “If you wanted to vote, you just should have cared more”?
The fact that you are wrong. Objectively, factually wrong. And so is most of the American public - and they’re wrong on an even weaker way, as if you presented them with accurate information, I get the feeling most of them would change their stance. You think this is all about value judgments. You’re wrong, but it’s a lot harder to prove that you’re wrong.
The two issues are quite separate, as separate as:
A: How do you accomplish X?, and
B: Should you accomplish X?
(A) is fairly mundane and GQ-ish; (B) is where issues of morality and rationality are debated. Discussing (B) does not require a parallel discussion about the mechanics of (A) and I see your strategy in attempting to force one, but I will not indulge such an obvious attempt at diversion, especially after I see you being clearly defeated on the morality and rationality of (B).
No, I did not raise or imply any such question. A process can be 100% legitimate, and still should not be used in a particular way. I don’t think you’re finding this to be a difficult concept, its the same last-ditch effort I’ve seen you use before - someone argues against a legislative result; you imply they hate and wish to overthrow democracy. Yawn.
Except when you support your arguments about (B) by announcing moral rules that, if accepted as true, compel the conclusion that you’re correct about (B).
That then becomes (C) are these moral rules correct?
And my question is the same: how do we determine moral rules applicable to the whole secular society?
My answer’s the same: it’s not relevant.
OK. Then I don’t accept your attempt to declare moral rules.
I dunno if you noticed, but I basically went down a good half of Matt Dillahunty’s talk about secular morality and ethics up there in an attempt to explain to you how we justify these things. I’m not just declaring from on high “this is how things have to be”. We actually put in a fair amount of work justifying our statements on morals.
You’re refusing to accept something that only ever existed in your imagination.
Maybe this is your first step to atheism.