Georgia purges 1 in 10 voters from voter rolls

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@Shodan

No, you’re SOL.

I think the interest of Georgia in maintaining clean voter rolls outweighs the need to cater to that set of circumstances.

Except that this set of circumstances is by no means less likely than this set:

Come on - I don’t vote, I don’t read my mail, I don’t watch the news, I don’t know the multiple ways available to re-register, I didn’t realize that I need to notify my county of a change of address.

Why would you assume that 700,000 people in Georgia are mostly lazy or stupid, rather than mostly “SOL”?

You’re assuming they’re too lazy or stupid to fulfill the requirements. But the requirements are trying to push out the people who would struggle to deal with this. People who move around a lot. People without stable living conditions. People who might not speak the best english. People who don’t have time to obsessively comb political forums (be honest - did you hear about this outside of StraightDope?). And as has been pointed out several times, these letters are easy to miss - there are a lot of people who just straight-up do not read direct mail.

@kayaker

When the local telephone company was sold to a different company, the first bills they sent out had big, bold, lettering IMPORTANT NEW INFORMATION type crap. I got one of their mailings at work and threw it away with the other junk mail.

They redesigned their envelopes and resent the monthly bills. They forgave late fees since 20% of their customers did as I did and tossed their first mailing away, unopened.

(bolding mine)

Is kayaker lazy and stupid? Or the other 20% of people?

@Snowboarder_Bo

I get 3-4 letters per week from Cox Communications that are labeled “IMPORTANT CUSTOMER INFORMATION!” but they’re all just mass-mail marketing bullshit. I learned after the first 2 not to ever open another one.

A tear-away envelope thing like that marked VOTER REGISTRATION VERIFICATION might have a 50% of getting opened by me because I really care about voting.

For the general population, not so much.

How about Snowboarder Bo? Lazy? Stupid? Or is there something else going on here? Most direct mail is bullshit. Everyone knows that. Most people just don’t have the time or interest to sift through it.

That’s why they’re doing it like this.

And the fact that at least 100,000 legitimate voters got caught up in this should be an indication that it’s not just a matter of laziness or stupidity. It cannot be this easy to strip someone of their rights.

And it wouldn’t be such a big deal if Georgia had same-day registration or provisional ballots, two procedures that help ensure that minor snafus like this don’t turn into voter suppression. But it doesn’t. I’d say I wonder why, but let’s be honest, I already know why.

At some point I should be treated as an adult. Adults don’t expect the government to feed them their rights with a spoon.

No, but equally, adults should not expect the government to play this kind of “blink-and-you-miss-it” game with our fundamental rights. Remember, many of these people - tens of thousands of which have not even moved - will go to the polls in November thinking that they’re still registered to vote and nothing has changed, and be turned away, because they did not return a direct mail postcard that looks like any other piece of direct mail marketing. And you’re okay with this, because they had their chance. A chance that one in ten registered voters apparently didn’t take.

You want to tell me that most or all of those people were too stupid or lazy, and that therefore it’s okay to do this? For the sake of “keeping the rolls up to date”, something we have to do to prevent the vanishingly rare issues of impersonation voter fraud and double voting?

That’s just fucking bonkers.

Also, “I don’t watch the news”? This wasn’t in the fucking news until a few days before the deadline ended! :mad: