Or a success, depending on the actual intent of the legislation, and we all know what it is.
You keep announcing standards like this, as though somehow you have been given permission to declare authoritatively that a particular standard is the one we should use.
I don’t agree. I say that the actual standard is: “As long as Voter ID programs do not impose unreasonable hardships as barriers to obtaining ID, they are a success.”
If a person has no unreasonable barrier in getting a photo ID, but fails to get one anyway, that does not count as a failure of the system.
The difference between my announced standard, and your announced standard, is that mine comports with the Supreme Court’s ruling, and yours is just some shit you wish were true.
So discriminatory intent or disciminatory impact means nothing?
This is a silly analogy but… lets say that we made owning (putting aside the poll tax issue) a bottle of hair relaxer a precondition to voting. Would that be OK? Would it matter that hair relaxer is much more available in some neighborhoods than others? Does it matter that black households generally already have hair relaxer in the house and the white folks would all have to go out and get some, perhaps waiting in long lines to do so?
Well, the courts basically don’t recognize the existence of the field of statistics, so fuck 'em.
As far as Joe and Ed and Reba are concerned, you, in your relationship with them, can hold them responsible for their failure to get their ID.
Once you have that sort of relationship with, say, 10% of the otherwise eligible voters in this country who lack ID, get back to me.
And this bill just moves the goalposts. It says that every citizen has the right to vote. Okay. Now you’ll have to prove you’re a citizen to vote. What’s that? You don’t have a copy of your birth certificate? You don’t have a passport? Oh some of you will have to spend money to prove you’re a citizen. This is obviously a secret poll tax. 
It’s just stupid. It’ll never pass.
Absolutely! And I’m not attempting to justify the existing system. It was already here when I got here; the question now is: do we make it better, or do we make it worse?
We can make it better in a number of ways, e.g. more opportunities for early voting, especially on evenings and weekends. And we should! Will that bring about perfection? Of course not! Who’s talking about perfection? Not me; apparently my use of a thought experiment has been misinterpreted.
The"flaw" I am so concerned about is not that voter IDs will fall short of perfection. I’m not comparing them with perfection; I’m comparing them with their absence, IOW, things as they are in most places in the U.S., and things as they were up until recently in the rest of the country.
Our friend Bricker says that because of the lack of voter IDs, you sometimes get as many as 100 ineligible voters casting ballots in a mid-sized state, and that can tip an extremely close election. I have no argument with that. But if you’re trying to solve a problem, you don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease. That’s a fundamental standard. So if the problem you’re solving is that tiny, your solution has to be pretty damn close to perfect.
It’s the tininess of the problem that’s the source of the need for a near-perfect solution.
The problem with this analogy (apart from the poll tax issue) is that there’s no relationship whatsoever between hair relaxer and voting.
This is precisely the point the Supreme Court emphasized when they approved Voter ID:
So hair relaxers, even if free, are not permitted to serve as qualifiers to vote because they are unrelated to voter qualifications.
I have to point out that neither of those proves that one holds US citizenship.
In the sense of post #101.
Thank you for reminding us exactly why the Constitution itself needs amending in this regard.
So what document does?
This is a message board not a court of law, a distinction which you regularly miss.
This thread is a debate about what we think the law should be not what the law is. So my opinions on what I think the legal standard should be are completely valid and on topic here.
If Antonin Scalia decides he wants his opinions to be included, he can post them himself. He’s an articulate writer. So I don’t see how he needs you to present them on his behalf. Perhaps you should work on developing your own opinions rather than just repeating somebody else’s.
Agreed. I think Bricker has lost track of the intent of this thread, which is to propose a new amendment to the Constitution. In that case, it doesn’t matter what the SCOTUS has said in the past unless it supports the proposition, in which case no amendment is needed.
To which I would add: Not necessarily the same amendment as Pocan and Ellison’s H.J.R. 28. Many posters here agree with the intent but see problems with the wording. So? How would you re-word it?
"The right of any United States citizen of at least 18 years of age to vote in elections for Federal office shall not be infringed.
“Congress may enforce this amendment with appropriate legislation.”
I’d still favor a criminal exception. But just to head off the possibility of that being abused, I’d make a small change to my previous suggestion:
That’s cool, but it would never pass.
Why “Federal” only?
Nobody ever talks about it because it only allows one extreme remedy for violations, but there is already a part of the Constitution that gives a list of offices that people (well, just men at the time, as can be seen) ought to be able to vote for:
Some would argue - and I would tend to agree - that laws for state elections like Governor or state legislator should be handled by the state involved.
That’s my reasoning too.
In all likelihood, very few states would choose to have more restrictive voting standards than the Federal government, because they hold their state elections at the same time as Congressional elections, and it would be a PITA to have different classes of eligible voters for the two. But an amendment that didn’t tell the states what they had to do with their own elections would have a much better chance of getting through 38 state legislatures than one that did.
Note to John Mace: can you imagine any Constitutional amendment being ratified, these days?