The numbers in the news articles, and the number Obama used in the SOTU, was 6 hours.
Sure – reductio ad absurdum.
But the problem with statements like your examples – and with what we’re discussing now – is that they are absolute statements like: I want them to make sure that nobody has to wait more than an hour in order to vote in person at the polls. I don’t think this is unreasonable…
That’s the problem – it may, or may not, be unreasonable; you can’t answer the question by mentioning only one factor. How much it costs must also be weighed in.
I’m not reducing anything to absurd extremes, expect perhaps as an example of the problem. I’m asking people to accept that they can’t just announce a standard without understanding what reaching that standard costs. I don’t agree that a three hour wait is presumptively unreasonable, and I am virtually certain that a vast majority of the voting public do not wish to pay the money it would take to create polling places in which we were guaranteed no wait times exceed three hours.
That’s NOT reductio ad absurdum.
Is it?
Watch me:
Q: Is it unreasonable to expect this country to be able to set up elections so that nobody has to wait in line for more than three hours?
A: No.
Edit: I feel that we are now in the part of thread where Bricker uses excessive verbiage to nitpick minor points because, I don’t know, that’s how he gets his kicks on Friday nights. I’m losing interest.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I just wanted to say that my grandmother voted for the last time in the 2012 Presidential election. She had less than six weeks to go til her 108th birthday, but died before reaching it.
22 straight presidential elections, woo-hoo!
She voted at the nursing home, with the aid of her great-granddaughter.
Criminey.
Yes, my mistake: turns out you can answer it by mentioning only one factor.
So what I should have said was: you cannot meaningfully answer it by mentioning only one factor. Your answer, made by mentioning only one factor, is utterly useless. If we don’t know how much it costs, it’s beyond irresponsible to say it’s unreasonable not to buy it.
Amen. This isn’t fucking Somalia.
And MeanOldLady lives in Chicago, so she’d be no problem in Florida. 
How much money would that be, approximately? And why do you estimate the cost at that amount?
If you can’t put any kind of a quantitative estimate on the price of such electoral reform, or justify your estimate with economic reasons and evidence, but you still insist that the price must be greater than the public as a whole would be willing to pay, you’re obviously just talking out of your ass.
No. I can readily accept that I can’t accurately guess the cost to create average wait times under three hours. But I can suss out the kind of infrastructure necessary to guarantee a time under three hours.
That kind of scheme would have to have paid workers to mitigate against the risk of no-show workers. It would need on the order of triple the number of machines, and the reservation of alternate polling locations to mitigate against some problem with the facility.
The real question is this, Bricker… suppose I was able to convince you that in fact such a scheme (or at least one that made it highly unlikely that anyone would have to wait 3 hours… there’s a huge cost difference between a scheme that provides a 99% guarantee vs a 100% guarantee in just about every human endeavor) was practical and affordable, and suppose I were further able to convince you that one political party had been fighting against such a scheme, and against easy access to voting in general, out of base political concerns, believing that the voters most likely to be dissuaded by each additional degree of difficulty in voting were more likely to vote for their opponents.
What would that make you think about that political party? Would terms like “voter suppression” and “antidemocratic” be appropriate ones to use?
You’d also have to convince me that the other party was free of analogous base political concerns. Otherwise it’s simply observing that this is how political parties operate.
This is beautiful. After going through a fabulous song-and-dance number complete with soft-shoe to show us all that we absolutely cannot come up with a solution to a problem or, in fact, even think about possible solutions to a problem or even agree that there should be a solution to a problem if we don’t have exact numbers so that we know exactly how much that solution will cost, Bricker is suddenly rock-solid convinced that we will need “triple the number of machines” to solve this problem which previously had no discernable solution. He is furthermore absolutely certain that the American taxpayer will not want to pay for this arbitrary tripling of machines, which will cost an unknown – but, he is sure, quite large – amount of money.
Right. Again, you are an embarrassment. And you need to work on your heel-toe combo, it’s looking a little sloppy.
Free of? What if they existed in both parties in non-zero amounts, but were hugely more prevalent in one party than in the other?
The Democrats figure that the more people who vote, the better it is for them, because more people are voting their way. * Tres* duh! All indications are that this trend will continue, but the Republicans want to change the wind rather than trim their sails.
The waiting lines suck, no two ways about it. But it lifted this radical lefty’s heart to see it done, to see people stick it out, and do their duty. The Apathy Party has always been more my enemy than any dull-normal Republican could even dream. But they didn’t stay home and drink beer, they went to the polls. America! Fuck, yeah!
Your guys are losing, so they’ve decided to cheat wholesale. Bugger the electoral voting, suppress urban and undesirable voters, change the rules to fit. Perhaps the Dems have a “base” and sordid plan for achieving their ends. But how do you get more “base” than that? How much lower can you go, how much lower are you willing to go?
Because all your base are belong to us.
That was an actual, factual question. I’m asking how come some areas have worse voting facilities - are they financed by each district separatedly? How are districts defined?
In Spain, “voting schools” (so called because the location is usually, you guessed it, a school) are designed trying to give each “table” about the same amount of people; voters are assigned to a school and table. A single voting zone (say, a town) can have several schools, each of which can have one or more tables. If a voting zone has very few people, that’s not considered a problem - if it has more than a certain amount, it’s time to get another table or, eventually, another school. Queues over half an hour are unusual; they may go up to one hour (the horror) early in a sunny morning - we always vote on Sundays and it’s usually Spring or Fall, so people who might otherwise have stayed in bed late will get up, go vote and then go “enjoy the sun” with some outdoors activities if the day is nice.
She is not a native English speaker. Part of the problem was that she needed a translator, and one wasn’t available and wouldn’t be for some time, for whatever reason.
So what if it took her hours to vote? She GOT to vote, and it was counted (and I’d put good money on betting about who she voted for, and that her candidate won). She wasn’t disenfranchised, she was inconvenienced.
So she’s old - is that some ticket to special treatment now? Is voting quickly the new standard of a Civil Right? Would this be a story if she was a 102 year old white Republican? Highly doubtful.
Non-story.
She needed a translator? How does that work, exactly at a polling place? Was the ballot available in her native language? I don’t know how these things work in FL, but in CA ballots are available in quite a few different languages.
You know what you could do? You could add in extra early voting days. I hear that’s something that’s worked in the past. I hear that, when people can vote on days other than Election Day, there tend to be fewer people voting on Election Day. I seem to recall something about that all the way back in post #11.
She only speaks/reads Haitian Creole. Also worthy of mentioning - she waited in line for EARLY voting, not on election day, so it’s not like she was inconvenienced at the last second of the last day of voting.
Yup, non-story, except to those with an agenda. Can’t imagine who that would be.
That’s because of your ignorance, then. If you paid attention to good media, you would’ve seen how before the election, people who were not utterly morally bankrupt republicans, were already complaining about the voter disenfranchisement that Republicans were VERY open about.
As was pointed out, lines were 6 hours long long in Florida on Election Day. Not just for her. She is an example of all the people who were willing to wait that long to vote, but she was far from the only one. THAT is why there’s a problem that needs solving.
Can’t imagine what kind of agenda someone who would ignore that would have. No sirree.