No, it’s a holdover from the days when a lot of communicable diseases (some quite nasty) and infestations were transmitted through clothes and bedding and what-not. Those tags were certifications of original ownership and health department inspections.
I haven’t seen any Democrats rushing to take those laws off of the books, either.
And I’d kindly ask you to find out exactly how many people have been prosecuted recently for removing those tags.
But don’t take you strawman down just yet; you can use him tomorrow for Halloween.
No. But since it’s not a felony for the purchaser of a pillow to remove the tag, you’ve just shown the fallacy of Subverted Support.
Well, in every single state in the union, prisons “just happen” to include a disproportionate number of blacks. I can’t quite figure out how Bushco managed to pull that trick off, though.
Serious rebuttal: the fact that blacks are disproportionately represented among released felons is a consequence of the fact that blacks are disproportionately represented among current, incarcerated felons. Since this is true in every single state in the country, in states controlled by Democrats as well as by Republicans, and since it has been true before any of the current individuals came to power, I do not believe you can point to this as evidence of a Republican subversion of democracy.
False Analogy. In your example, he’s clearly enforcing the law arbitrarily - that is, he’s enforcing it at times, and not enforcing it at other times. Show me how, in the real situation we’re discussing, the law is being enforced arbitrarily.
I would demand my right to cast a provisional ballot, and then clear up the misunderstanding as soon as practicable. And I’d be happy that my state was keeping felons from voting.
The principle of sending an innocent person to prison versus letting guilty ones go free is not applicable to this situation. It’s a false analogy.
When discussing the price of tea in Malta, your view on the temperature of spit in Sumatra is not relevant.
My response to BrainGlutton answered what I’d do if my name appeared, inaccurately, as a convicted felon. Blackwell’s decision above refers to persons attempting to vote at a polling place other than their own.
Now, you might well eschew your “booms” until you ask me what I’d do if I arrived at my polling place and was told that I wasn’t at the right polling place.
Interestingly enough, this is not a purely theoretical question: when I last moved, this happened to me. Despite assurances from both my visit to the registrar when I re-registered and a phone call the week before the election, I arrived at what I was told was my polling place and was told I was at the wrong one. The helpful people there directed me to Polling Location #2. Upon my arrival there, it turned out that it, too, was wrong. They directed me back to Polling Location #1. When I explained - through clenched teeth - that I had just BEEN to Location #1, someone remembered that my address was often confused with a similar sounding one. (That is, I lived at XXX Mumbltey Place, and there was a Mumbly ROAD as well, which served Polling Location #1). It turns out that residents of Mumbltey Place vote at Polling Location #3, while Mumbly Road residents vote at either #1 or #2, depending how far north or south they lived.
So, what did I do? Well, judging by the stories above, had I been planning vote Democratic, I was likely to dissolve in tears and huddle, trembling, unable to move, until perhaps revived by a cup of organic tea and the latest Mother Jones magazine. But being a stalwart Republican, I simply WENT TO THE CORRECT POLLING LOCATION AND CAST MY VOTE.
Because prison effects immediate, measurable, and long-lasting harm. A person consigned to prison loses the opportunity to make a living. He is placed in the way of actual, often violent, felons, and exposed to a sharply increased risk of physical assault.
More to the point, there is no balance between a innocent person convicted and a guilty person set free. But votes are fungible. One vote counts as much as the next one does.
My right to live free is, of course, much more important to me than my right to vote. But in both cases – unjust conviction of crime, or unjust disenfranchisement because I have the same name as a convict – I am being unjustly deprived of my rights. The difference is in degree, not in kind; there is no “false analogy” between the two situations. As for votes being fungible – as I said, I have no problem with everyone being allowed to vote, no questions asked, so long as nobody votes twice.
In both cases you are “deprived of rights.” In only one case do you suffer immediate personal economic harm and the immediate threat of physical harm. It is the addition of those factors that invalidates the analogy.
Is there a due process problem with depriving people of their constitutional right to vote?
Emotionally I’d rather let 100 false votes go through than deny one real person the right to vote: being able to participate in society in this fashion is NOT fungible, inasmuch as your vote and my vote are different acts, and my vote is an act fundamentally peculiar to me.
Intellectually, I’m not happy at all with the amount of fraud going on on either side of the equation. I’d love to see police resources diverted from crimes like marijuana possession and directed toward getting serious prison time for people fucking up elections. Committing election fraud seems to me like treason, and should be prosecuted as such. But right now, it seems that very few people, and very very few upper-level people, are facing any penalties at all for committing such serious crimes.
This morning there were a couple of guys on This Week ranting about this subject. They didn’t say much of any substance except that it was mildly amusing to hear the Democrat use the phrase “activist judges.” (Not that they can’t, it’s just not the norm.)
Florida’s list of felons had 22,000 African Americans and 61 Hispanics. Hispanics tend to break for Republicans, and African Americans the opposite.
How in the hell is this not arbitrary enforcement of the law?
Finally, you had the opportunity to jump to three separate polling places after you moved? Great, what if you didn’t have a car? Or should an automobile be a legal requirement to vote in this country?
Admitting those 100 illegal votes effectively disenfranchises 100 legitimate votes for the opposition, whereas tossing one legitimate vote is still just one legitimate vote. I’m sure that the votes of those 100 legitimate voters who were just effectively disenfranchised by your admission of 100 illegal votes feel much as you do, inasmuch as they are acts fundamentally peculiar to them.
Such cost/benefit analysis may not make the one legitmate voter who had his vote tossed with the 100 illegal votes any more happy, but it does make for a more accurate reflection of the electoral will (all other things being equal, which they may very well not be in Florida :rolleyes: )
On the converse side, what is the direct, immediate harm that’s caused when a person who has previously been convicted of a felony has their vote counted?
If we’re going to make any errors, shouldn’t it be to err on the side of more people voting, more democracy, a higher percentage of people having a say in how their government is run?
My understanding is that use of that list was - correctly - stopped. I have no idea how the data for that list was developed, but it does boggle the mind that a neutral list of all felons would contain only 22,000 blacks and only 61 Hispanics. But since that list isn’t being used…
I didn’t have a car that day, as it happens. My car had been totalled the week before when some idiot plowed into me as I was at a red light. I was on my trusty ten-speed. People probably thought I was a Green voter.
That’s an emotional argument, as you concede. LOGICALLY, your vote is perfectly fungible with any vote that opposes yours, especially given the practical reality of our two-party system.
If those people are illegal aliens, or felons in states where felons are denied the vote, then they don’t legally HAVE a say in how this government is run. You’re suggesting we tilt the balance towards admitting illegal votes as the cost pf permitting legitimate votes. Since permitting legitimate votes may be done without permitting illegal votes, I don’t agree. The worst case scenario is that someone thought to be a felon casts a provisional ballot, which is counted after their correct status is discovered. You seem to be saying that this extra step is enough to scare away real voters, and therefore should be eschewed; I say it’s nonsense. I was once turned away from two separate polling stations, and I persisted until I discovered the correct one and cast my vote. There is no reason to permit illegal votes to be counted just because some voters might be slightly inconvenienced.
I do agree that an illegal vote effectively disenfranchises a vote somewhere that is cancelled out. But I also feel that a person who is turned away from the polls is impacted in a way more harmful than the silently disenfranchised. Even though the Jeb Bush list was thrown out in court, it is a fine example of how arbitrarily the Republican attempts are. I honestly wouldn’t have a problem with such a list if some care had been taken while building it. And I feel that technology should be brought to the forefront to battle against this type of fraudulant voters. And to some degree, it has. The days of John Kennedy getting the overwhelming majority of the dead Chicagoan vote are long gone. Yet in watching the actions of the Republican Party, one wouldn’t think so.
As it stands, we have anecdotal evidence of voter fraud (In the manner of dead or fake voters on the rolls) that more likely resulted from the questionable practice of paying temp workers for each completed voter registration card than any organized push, versus systematic and publicized cases of targeted voter supression by the Republican party, in addition to voter fraud in the manner of misleading flyers and mailers.
So after the obviously biased list from Florida, and the bungled list from Ohio where charges may be filed against the Republicans who brought it, the Republican claims that illegal votes are being counted starts to sound partisan. In their zealousness to curb illegal registrations the Republicans are halting legitmate votes. And since the Republican furor over faulty or illegal registrations seems to only exist in heavily democratic precincts, I think it can be rightly pointed out to be partisan bullshit.
The issue isn’t really about ex-cons having their votes counted; FWIW, I think that anyone who has done their time should have certain rights restored to them, especially voting. Ex-cons are just used most often as an example of “illegitimate” votes. One can also use illegal immigrants, or people registered and voting in multiple states.
It is the prevalence of illegitimate votes (period) which disenfranchises equal numbers of legitimate voters.
Not if a statistically significant number are illegitimate votes. Face it, as tight as this Presidential race is, a few thousand votes, one-way-or-the-other in key precincts could turn the election for a given state, which could very well turn the election nationally. And you know that the media will cover it with an electron microscope, so there won’t be too much “silent” disenfranchisement, because every instance of voter fruad that is reported for one side will make every single voter for the other side feel “disenfranchised.”
Which in turn will (further) undermine the the confidence in the final turnout, leading to even more rancorous partisanship, even more bitter elections in 2006 and 2008, until no one believes the poll results as reported, and who knows where we go from there.
But Tank, the Republicans are going about it tens-of-thousands of votes at a time. In a manner that begs nothing for it’s partisan appearance.
What I would like to see is a volunteer base put to a usefull task of making an attempt to track down and prove/disprove questionable registrants, and then make a case for a challenge. How its getting done now is sloppy and hits legitimate voters.
So sloppy, that they are losing every challenge to their attempts in court.
I would think that it would be in their best interest to produce a list that can hold up to scrutiny, rather than get the bad PR and blanket rulings that hogtie their efforts. These ham handed attempts are doing damage to the Republican Party, and I would be embarrased if I were one.
Sure they are; there’s 4 precincts in Ohio that has more registered voters than eligible voters. And mail sent to many came back “undeliverable.” If those were likely Republican voters, the Democrats would be filing just as many lawsuits.
Only two that I’m presently aware of, in Ohio again. One, Susan Dlott, a Clinton-appointed Democrat, shut down voter challenges, calling them “unconstitutional,” even after being sent a Justice Department memo informing her that there is no federal law against voter challenge systems like Ohio’s.
She claims that these challenges would disrupt the entire voting process. In her defense, a Republican judge (US District Judge John Adams) ruled the same way. But the Ohio Secretary of State and Attorney General are split on the issue, and both are Republicans.