Really? So, if we look at the records of the various debates on this issue in the state legislatures, the most prominent rationale offered by supporters of voter ID will prove to be “enabling prosecution”?
I find that a dubious proposition, and await citation.
That would come as a shock to the vast majority of Texas voters and probably also to the lawmakers who passed the recent Texas Voter ID law (since blocked). It was marketed to directly prevent such violations and politicians campaigned on such terms.
Virginia and Ohio may play differently, of course, but I’d be surprised if the average voter or average state politician thought of Voter ID in those terms.
Maybe. But you may be laboring under the impression that Republicans stopped working on this stuff after the election. They didn’t. The people mentioned in the article sound like dumbasses and the last thing we need is more of those, but if they didn’t exist, the party would have invented them (as they’ve tried to do in the past). And even though gerrymandering and shorter poll times and ID laws won’t fix this, they were going to be the “solution” anyway.
What makes you think they’re Democrats? One that’s cited in the Fox article was certainly an Obama supporter, and probably cast her own ballot(s) for him. It doesn’t say how she cast her granddaughter’s vote, nor how any of the other cases may have cast theirs. (Unless I missed it in the article somewhere.)
I suspect that’s another subtlety that will be lost once the pundits get hold of this.
All true…
But I’d prefer if the Republicans had been forced to invent them.
Have you ever seen that claim before?
How do you think these people got caught? The people quoted in the article were all testifying at a hearing that they were subpoenaed to attend, after the board of elections caught them having sent in more than one ballot.
Furthermore, I’m pretty sure you can vote a ton of different times in Ohio, at every polling place you can get to before they close. Other than your proper voting place, every other place will give you a provisional ballot and allow you to vote anyway, just in case. Better to get redundant votes than not to let someone vote at all.
Provisional ballots are examined after the election and if they’re found to be duplicates or redundant, they’re thrown out. Note that this would be true even with a voter ID law in place – you’d just take your ID to 30 different polling locations and vote 30 times. 29 would be provisional and they’d be thrown out. And you very may well get called into one of these hearings to explain yourself.
Ahh, good ol’ Cincy. From the comments:
Yes, there is.
Here in Minnesota, absentee ballots are held until the polling places close, then the workers look up each one in the book, and verify that the person did not vote in person, before they count the absentee one.
Note that it is perfectly legal in Minnesota to do both. If you sent in an absentee ballot, and then your schedule changes and you are in town on election day, you can go to the polls & vote in person. (Normally, you would only do this if you had changed your mind after mailing your absentee ballot – otherwise why bother? But I guess you might also do so if you were unsure that your absentee ballot arrived in time.)
Hey, get your own shtick and stop stealing ours!
Is that an answer, or an evasion? Perhaps a Zen exercise, where I have to figure out how your question answers mine?
How about prosecutions with actual evidence and judges and juries? Or shall we just put forth drunken Breitbarted and O’Keefe edited allegations? Again.
Except that all of that can be accomplished without an ID. What is the current problem? Someone could have come in and signed in for the person, and the poll watcher wouldn’t remember for sure if they’d come in or not. They also could lie. How do you solve that? You take everyone’s picture when they sign in. You require a finger print which can be checked against a fingerprint database. Heck, you take their picture when they register and every time before, and have people compare them. None of this requires anyone to have to acquire an extra document that would be inconvenient for people to get and thus disenfranchise those people who can’t afford the inconvenience (i.e. poor people).
That’s what proves the proposals to be disingenuous: there are other solutions that do not disenfranchise, but these are ignored.
And, no, I don’t get how there’s a difference between being told how to vote by an authority who checks to make sure you voted right (and doesn’t turn in the ones that are “wrong”) and having that authority just directly vote for you. Both are letting someone else control how you vote. There’s no magic in being the one who made marks on the paper.
I don’t have the energy.
I have been saying that the valid purpose of voter ID is building a framework that a allows criminal prosecution for months, in threads that you have been very active in.
You request now, therefore, is garbage.
I came up with the fingerprint idea months ago. I completely favor it.
I am not aware of any cases of church pastors checking to make sure their parishioners voted right.
Here. let me clear that up for you. I am well aware of your own opinion on the issue. How such a prospect of increased prosecution for “voter fraud” is full of crunchy goodness. I even commented to the effect that it is an excellent position in the sense that if there were to be increased prosecutions, you get to say you were right. And if there weren’t, you get to say that your voter id laws prevented such shenanigans.
But that’s not what I asked you. Read carefully. You said:
In standard English, that means that the people who framed this legislation* intended *that specific result. Which is to say, that is why they were doing it, it is their justification, or at least one of them.
So, I ask you which legislators had publicly announced that position. And you come back and sneer at me for not knowing what you said. But I didn’t ask you what you said, I asked you what they said. To prove what you said.
See how different those two things are? Very. Whole bunches of being different.
Tooting your own sonic screwdriver there, it seems.
Legislators vote for the text of a law. A hundred different representatives may favor the text for a hundred distinct reasons: one may be repaying a vote promise to a colleague from an unrelated earlier bill, one may be hoping it helps his party win, one may be hoping it helps his district. It’s utterly irrelevant: when the law passes, the questions is simply: what does it say? The motive of the legislators is simply not relevant in determining what a law does.
Bricker’s been babbling about voter ID for many years, I see. Now, with no imminent election available to steal, he pretends that he’s concerned with fair elections! But the nasty and purely partisan aspect of his position becomes clear in a few old posts.
Searching through Bricker’s hypocrisy makes me want to puke, so I’ll just show a random pair of Google’s top hits:
Almost everyone with a clue sees the present American political scene as a duel between the merely mediocre and a coalition of lunatics, idiots, and assholes. Bricker has nothing bad to say about Karl Rove, Sheriff Arpaio, or his other role models, yet posts crap like the above. What an asshole.
Would you read a history book, for heaven’s sakes? I suppose you think the anti-Negro literacy tests in the South were impartially administered and Negroes failed due to their ignorance.
It’s fucking racist assholes like your idols who administer voter-suppression tactics. In other posts you applaud their methods, and say, in as many words, Fuck the other side if it doesn’t try to counter-attack with similar slime. (And when it’s pointed out that the Demos can’t counterattack in many cases because state governments are run by racists, you reply "Natter natter natter … I guess the voters have spoken! 
" )
Completely? 100% ? Whatever the cost? What if it cost $1,000,000,000 per finger? What if the dye contains strychnine? What if you stopped hijacking threads with your pretentious and purposeless hyper-literalism?
This is an example of your hypocritic hyper-literalism. Not only is the comment useless – you’ve demonstrated time and time again that your attention to news is selective; you ignore information that doesn’t fit your prejudices, so “not being aware” of the facts is your modus operandi – but it ignores shit like recent excommunications (!!) for voting Democrat: