I should also have pointed out that you’re doing the Fight Against Ignorance a disservice by referring to the pro-factual-reality and pro-democracy position as “liberal”. That gives the anti-factual-reality and anti-democracy faction pushing these laws permission of a sort to dismiss any such arguments as simple partisan advantage-seeking, of the same sort as they are doing, and to respond with the usual “You guys would do it too if you had the power” and “You guys haven’t done it because you’re just not as smart as us” crap.
It is true that strengthening, or at least maintaining, democracy disproportionately benefits a party that supports the basic principles of democracy, but so what? Isn’t the problem that there’s a party that doesn’t? Don’t give it to them - this stuff matters.
Good. If more people are voting as a result, that’s fine with me. And if fewer people are voting as a result, that’s also fine with me… since these requirements are not onerous or unreasonable.
I get your point – if the margin of error for a recount produces such swings, why should we focus on the more miniscule voter fraud numbers?
But who do we, the proponents of the change, have to persuade? I say we have to persuade either the general public or the state legislatures. And we appear to have done so.
And I think that a waiting period is extremely reasonable. So perhaps we have the outline of what our agreement might look like.
In the case you describe, I’d oppose the law. There’s no question that racheting up the difficulty of obtaining an ID could quickly push a Voter ID scheme into unacceptable territory. In fact, given Pennsylvania’s experience, and our discussion here, I’d be prepared to say that any plan that does not include at least one election in between the passage of the law and its being implemented is presumptively unreasonable.
Yes. But I don’t think I would challenge the law based on that, because even though your motives and action were unethical, there’s a reasonable, neutral basis for the change. The way to defeat that change is at the ballot box.
So that makes it even more important to have an intervening election that separates the law from the effect, giving the people unchanged opportunity to vote out the rascals if they don’t like what was done.
Well, yes, that’s why the laws were passed and existed. But this debate is not (at least mostly) “do these laws in fact exist” it’s “are these laws good/bad/ethical/unethical/antidemocratic/corrupt”. I assume you agree that laws can be legally passed by a majority of the population, and a majority of the legislature, and be bad laws. And, slightly paradoxically, they can even be antidemocratic (ie, poll taxes, literacy tests and the like.)
But you’re again looking at things in legal terms. If you and I both agree that the hypothetical I propose with changing poll opening times from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. is:
(a) legal, and
(b) unethical
then we come to two questions:
(1) how you would feel/act if legislators of your party were responsible for an equivalent action? Would you go onto a message board and explain in very legalistic terms why their action had a legitimate purpose and was therefore legal and you therefore support it and why is everyone so pissed off?
(2) Should the legal framework that governs elections be in some fashion different so that actions like this that you and I both agree are unethical and can sway elections would, in fact, be potentially illegal?
You mean like John Husted of Ohio trying to vary voting hours to favor Republican districts? You mean like Gov Skeletor of Florida dicking around with early voting? You mean like demanding restrictions that will fall disproportionately on undesirable voters?
Shouldn’t even have to be illegal. It is so shameful and repugnant to our democratic ethics that the simple fact of exposure would be enough. The public shame of such wretched perversion should be enough to dissuade anyone who can cover their heart and Pledge Allegiance without their goddam tongue catching fire!
Maybe the Republicans in the State Legislature, but the general public voters in Minnesota soundly rejected the Voter Restriction (Photo Id) Amendment in November.
Except that of course clearly that’s not happening, which is exactly why it SHOULD be illegal. If there are 60 democrats in some legislative body representing me and my interests, there are certainly going to be some number of them who have somewhat loose morals and ethical standards… and I don’t want to be in a situation where I have to be repudiating some legal-but-unethical actions that some of them have taken while still innerly appreciating the advantage that those unethical actions gave to “my side”, particularly if the other option is that my side is NOT engaging in such shenanigans but the other side is, at which point I occupy the moral high ground but the political low ground. If more election-altering shenanigans (including things like Gerrymandering) were illegal (or at least totally out of the hands of the legislature) in the first place, then I wouldn’t have to be stuck in that quandary.
Well, you want to slam 'em up in Stateville Prison, I most likely won’t fuss too much about it, I am widely known for being open to persuasion and reason.
(2) No – I think that (apart from ensuring that an intervening election must always happen before a such a change can be made) I don’t see the need for any other rules fencing off elections.
Oh. Well, suppose you have the capacity to read the handwriting on the wall, the one that says your demographic is shrinking like a dick in a cold shower. Shriveled, pathetic…well, just your demographic is getting smaller. Leave it at that.
Suppose you are examining the option of fucking over unreliable voters, effectively spaying and neutering them for years to come. Because if you don’t, its pretty sure your game is just about over. Maybe you can squeek through one more election, maybe you can put this partisan move over if you squeek through the next election. After all, you won the election that got you the power to screw your political enemies in the first place.
Worse case: you lose that next election, the selfless initiative for the protection of voter confidence fails. No worse off than you were, are you? You grab for it, you miss, but you are no worse off than if you hadn’t tried. But if you win that one, you succeed in keeping that growing demographic shortcoming from interfering with a permanent Republican Reich…uh, incumbency. Or at the very least water it down.
So, why wouldn’t they? For fear of losing the inner city vote?
Well… not to sound circular, but what’s the point of posting on the SDMB other than to persuade the SDMB community? I mean, if the SDMB community were arguing about some point of legalistic fact concerning whether these laws had been properly and legally put into place, then the fact that the populace or legislature had voted for them would certainly be relevant. But the discussion has in general been about whether the laws are wise/ethical/moral/antidemocratic. And “but the legislature had legally achieved a quorum when it passed this resolution” is 100% irrelevant to that.
Is that because you actually don’t at all see the problem with elected bodies overseeing their own elections? Or because you just think it’s a crappy situation but don’t see any better way to do it? (Just to be clear, the problem I’m talking about here is that if there’s a legislative body whose electorate is such that it “should” be balanced between two parties, shifting from majority-one to majority-other ever few years as the political pendulum shifts, and then one party, while presumably-temporarily in power, suddenly passes a bunch of laws that influence how the elections are held – gerrymandering, mucking with hours or locations or polling places, voter ID, absentee, standards for what signatures are accepted, what have you – then they can permanently shift the balance of the electorate by a few percentage points, which could easily be enough to effectively keep them in power. Which suddenly means that the way to correct this injustice, ie the ballot box, just won’t work.)
A lot depends on how shameless they are willing to become. When this stuff started, they were only aiming to trim back the Dem vote a bit, just enough to win, to cover the spread. But that was then, and this is now. Gov Skeletor of Florida pulled out all the stops…blatantly, publicly…and it still didn’t work.
What next? What new creative adventure awaits? How much do they imagine they can get away with, and are they right?
There’s plenty of reasons to post here other than to persuade the group of people that post frequently. As a general principal – and specifically NOT including you in this generalization – people who post frequently are not amenable to changing their views.
But readers, lurkers – them, I have hope for.
Sure it will – because there’s going to be an intervening election between rule change and rule effect. And if the to-be-disadvantaged electorate can’t stir itself to vote to shut such schemes down, then my first reaction is those schemes are not that objectionable.
Well, first of all, that’s just a proposal you’ve made up out of whole cloth, not something that exists in the real world. And it’s also a bit unrealistic. So in the model I’m discussing (where the “correct” behavior is 6 or 8 years of one party in power, then 6 or 8 years of the other party, and back and forth as the political pendulum swings), do you really think that if one party comes into power during their pendulum’s upswing, and then they engage in some electoral chicanery which will take effect in the next-but-one election (presumably with some legitimate-purpose-cover… I mean, it’s not like they just pass a bill entitled “our plan to subvert the electorate forever, mauahaha”), then suddenly that will cause them to get thrown out of office? How many people pay enough attention to what seem like arcane political maneuvers to place them ahead of guns or taxes or wars or whatever else it is they normal cast their vote because of? (And bear in mind that close to half of the populace is presumably fans of the party in power anyhow, and would have to be AWFULLY principled to vote out the party they support as a gesture of protest over something that party did which will benefit that party.)
(Not to mention, of course, that there are some pesky technicalities with your proposal in general… so one party gets in power, and passes laws changing the next-but-one election. The idealistic populace revolts and throws them out of office, and the other party is on power. Can they now undo those laws? Because those laws now affect the NEXT election, not the next-but-one. Or can they only undo them in the FUTURE not the present, leading to an insane dance of constantly changing electoral laws?)
Look, you’re asking me if I’d approve of such laws. And the answer is that if there’s an intervening election, I would. That’s not a proposal I made up with no analog in the real world: that’s the real-world condition upon which my approval of the tactic is premised.
But is your position that an intervening election makes such laws more reasonable (which I agree with), or that an intervening election basically is an automatic free-pass to acceptability, no matter what?
So let’s cross our fingers and assume that the next 3 years are great ones for the US economy, and the 2016 election sees the emergence of a charismatic Democratic presidential candidate who sweeps a bunch of lesser Democratic officeholders into office on her coattails (as happens sometimes), and both houses of the Virginia legislature go Democratic. (I think you live in Virginia, which is why I picked this example.) Hey, it might happen. Anyhow, as it turns out, the newly elected Democratic legislators turn out to be amoral and ruthless, and immediately pass a package of laws changing how elections are run in Virginia, including, but not limited, to:
-gerrymandering like no one has ever gerrymandered before
-tons of publicly-funded voter-outreach, voter-accessibility and voter-registration programs, all of which happen to focus on Dem-friendly demographics
-mucking with voting hours and absentee ballot programs in ways designed to benefit Democrats
-suddenly there are tons of extra voting machines in Dem-leaning precincts and not so many in Pub-leaning ones… so guess where the long lines are going to be
Now, fortunately, due to the Bricker amendment, none of these things can actually take effect until the 2020 elections. But in 2018 everyone’s attention is focused on how the president is dealing with the Iran-Israel war (which, even you would have to admit, she handles masterfully) and despite a bunch of protests about these new laws, the Dems maintain their majority in Virginia. At which point, the new laws take effect, and when 2022 rolls around and the pendulum starts shifting back to more “normal” electoral balances around the country, hey, what do you know, the Dems still maintain their majorities.
So, would reaction to all of this be:
(a) hey, well played, good show old chap, you won this round
or
(b) the legal system that allows this is fundamentally fucked?
At some point, we have to trust that elections are the way in which we the people express our collective sovereign will. And if we the people see such reforms pass, and ignore them, I can only assume we favor them.