When they had multiple days on which to vote, and the option of voting by post? Yeah, that isn’t a problem with the infrastructure.
One day I may get bored watching Bricker dismantle the arguments of retarded lefties with surgical precision, but I doubt that day will come soon.
It’s simple. Either the organisations conducting these elections broke the law, or they didn’t. If they did, they should be held to account. If not, what they did was acceptable. If you dislike the law, change it - your side is, after all, in power now.
I’m assuming that, as so many people are asserting that it would be cheap to do, the people in these areas wouldn’t mind their taxes going up to pay for it.
No, we’re grownups who say we’ll pay what we need to pay to fix the plumbing, when we know full well that it will cost a good deal less than the home entertainment system we just dropped a bundle on without considering the cost.
It is a simple and elegant solution! People who are disadvantaged in the exercise of their voting rights should simply vote for candidates who will change the laws!
“Doctor, I can’t swallow!”
“Take these two tablets and call me in the morning.”
“But, doctor, I can’t swallow them!”
“Take these two suppositories, and call me in the morning.”
Nope, I understand it. People, who have had to queue many times in the past to fill out a ridiculously complicated voting form, are somehow surprised when they have to queue again, despite their unexplained refusal to use one of the other options available to them.
They’re not victims, they’re idiots.
Of course, the Republicans are trying to get elected. That’s what politicians do - all of them, or at least all the successful ones.
The answer here is the same as in the voter ID thread. Instead of whinging about it, Democrats should turn it to their advantage. Get people to use postal votes, let them know they can vote at their convenience, and increase the turnout.
If you want to do away with in-person voting, advocate that. Voting to some is a social experience. They don’t do it because they’re stupid. They do it because they are part of a community.
It isn’t insane to expect that a poor community can have voting times of under an hour.
The difference, friend Steophan, is that Democrats want more people to vote because it helps their prospects. Republicans want fewer people to vote because it helps their prospects. One of these is compatible with American ideals.
As I say, if you’re gonna disallow in-person voting make that case. I vote in Washington and it certainly works. But if you’re allowing in-person voting, you need to make those votes count and not turn people away with outrageous waits.
Correct. It’s always amusing when, in your sarcasm, you answer the question correctly. I assume you are too stupid to realise how often you do this.
This would be more meaningful if you’d ever provided any facts. All you seem to do is follow Bricker around, saying a slightly less meaningful variant on “no u”.
But yes, if someone is given multiple opportunities to vote, including doing so at home, at their leisure, then there is no excuse for not being able to vote.
This is the whole point here. The complaints hinge on the assumption that people were not given reasonable opportunity to vote. They were, and refused to take it. They were not disenfranchised, they chose not to exercise their right.
I really do think the best solution is a public awareness campaign to encourage people to vote by mail. It’s a lot easier than trying to fix umpteen number of polling districts. I don’t think this would cost all that much-- I’m sure TV stations could be “encouraged” to make public awareness announcements, and people should be given instructions for voting by mail when they register. Every registered voter could be sent an application for an absentee ballot. And long term, transition to 100% vote by mail. Some states already do this. In CA, I think we’re up to about 30% of voters voting by mail.
I find it pretty astonishing that people are apparently seriously arguing that paying for sufficient election infrastructure to make voting not terribly burdensome might be too expensive for a wealthy democracy.
Well, I’d be against spending more money on “voting infrastructure” if my state allowed vote-by-mail for everyone. It’s like buying more fax machines to accommodate the shrinking number of non-email users.
Neither side should be trying to turn this situation to their advantage. This is the kind of partisan bullshit that is to be avoided when the topic is access to the polls.
Agreed. I know a lot of people who, prior to the last election here, still thought that you were only allowed to vote absentee/early if you had a valid reason for not being able to go to the polls on Election Day. But Franklin County pushed early voting pretty hard in TV/radio commercials and the like, and it proved pretty successful. (And not insanely expensive.)
Bricker, is Obama the leader of the representative democracy you reside in? What cost would be worthwhile to ensure that fewer than 129 voters are discouraged by the length of lines at voting stations? Is limiting waiting time incurred at a polling station a legitimate goal of the state? Also, would a law enacted by your elected representatives such as the Voter Empowerment Act be valid and constitutional? In a representative democracy, who determines the correct balance of risk and expenditure? On what basis do you think that fingerprinting is cheaper than issuing ID cards? Is it incumbent on an individual to support the cheaper of two equally effective methods of resolving a problem, regardless of the popularity of the cheaper method?
Who gets to decide the percentage cut-off point for “kill[ing] the economy”?
Here is the article in question. The New York Times reports that MIT found blacks and Hispanics waited twice as long as whites on average. Here is their graph of mean times.
If they reside in a district that is economically disadvantaged, they should simply move to a better neighborhood! Pull themselves into the voting booth by their own bootstraps, in a convoluted manner of speaking.