Voter rolls have to be kept up to date. If someone has not voted for a while the state reaches out to see if they are still at the same address. If they do not respond they are taken off the rolls and they have to re-register. How pathetic are people that either voting every couple years, responding to a postcard, or registering to vote is undoable?
People are pretty pathetic, and you can quote me on that. Taking advantage of that for political gains is no bueno. YMMV.
But “America” doesn’t have a nationwide popular vote of any sort - not even to ratify proposed Constitutional amendments (the way, say, Australia does) - and each state is a democracy, at least when it comes to electing its Senators.
It’s all in the intent. The intent here is to prevent certain people from voting. Thus you notify them by postcard, which can be easily lost in the mail, not delivered, or mistaken for junk mail. Whether they vote regularly or not is their right and they should not lose the right to vote by virtue of not voting often. The people aren’t pathetic, the Republicans who want to keep them from voting are.
But if my postman doesn’t deliver it, or it looks like junk (I personally do a very fast sort of junk vs. read), then I get unregistered. And I don’t know I’m not registered until I show up at the polling place and get turned away.
What certain people does the return of postcards prevent from voting?
If you target specific populations, then a certain percentage of that specific population will be prevented from voting. Those who are not targeted will not be affected.
The certain people to whom cards were sent in the first place. You don’t think they select areas for the purge?
Did they select areas for the purge? Or did they mail cards to everyone in the state who hadn’t voted in the previous two general election cycles?
Goto 20
The specific population that is being targeted is people who didn’t vote in the last election, didn’t notify the county of their change of address, and don’t read their mail.
The Georgia Secretary of State’s website gives the requirements for voter registration. One of the things mentioned is pretty clear -
Those are being prevented from voting are those who didn’t vote last time, don’t have Internet access or a printer, can’t afford a stamp or an envelope, can’t make it to their local county board of registrars’ office or election office, public library, public assistance office, recruitment office, schools, and other government offices, have not applied for or renewed a driver’s license, and is not a college student.
That sounds pretty specific to me.
Regards,
Shodan
Did they decide to do this now because they knew that Democratic turn-out was smaller than it had been in the past.
Well, it seems like in this particular instance, they decided to do it in 2017.
*Since the last election, including midterms, usually less than two years ago
**By sending an easy-to-miss postcard that many will dismiss as junk mail because it is designed to look like junk mail
***Within 30 days
****Which has been made harder by the same people pushing this
*****Which has been made substantially harder by the same people pushing this
It feels like there’s a whole lot of asterisks needed to make what you posted look at all like the full picture. Sure, if you ignore everything wrong with this picture, things look hunky-dory.
Oh, also, the biggest, fattest asterisk belongs on the first sentence, because that’s the biggest misleading thing - where you pretend this is just business as usual. Because it isn’t! States have kept their voter rolls clean in the past, but this is actually a new strategy. And it’s one that is having a dramatic effect on voters - at least 100,000 of the people purged were confirmed to be still living in Georgia, and this strategy purged one in ten people in the state. Over half a million people, in a state with a population of 3 million. That’s weird, right? Doesn’t that strike you as at least a little odd?
It sounds like Democrats are worried because they might lose votes among people who don’t read their mail, don’t know how to work a stamp, and don’t vote anyway.
Regards,
Shodan
Not in the least, the motivations and mechanisms are perfectly clear. How dearly I wish it were weird and abnormal.
If any of you feel less informed than you might wish, Talking Points Memo has an excellent and concise breakdown of How The Fuck We Got Into This Mess.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/abrams-kemp-bring-long-running-war-over-voting-rights-to-georgia-governors-race
How about being worried that democracy itself is being undermined? Did that one ever occur to you?
There is a conservative idea, exemplified here, that Democrats just want poor people to have access to the polls because it’ll boost their numbers.
That’s exactly backward.
Democrats want increased access to the polls–and that’s part of why poor people support Democrats.
If it were only about relative partisan advantage, the Republican efforts to disenfranchise black people and poor people would be matched by Democratic efforts to disenfranchise the rural and rich white people. But you don’t see those efforts by Democrats: Democrats try to win by increasing, not decreasing, access to polls, because increasing civic engagement is a core value.
I see what point you are trying to make, and I agree with you. I don’t think the Democrats are doing what they do for (purely) partisan reasons. But your logic is faulty on that last part. You are arguing:
- There are two paths the Democrats can take, both of which give them a partisan advantage.
- Because the Democrats are taking only one path, and not the other, that proves they are taking that one path for non-partisan reasons.
But a party doesn’t have to take all possible paths in order for it to be taking one path for partisan reasons.
I mean, I know the Democrats are famously inept at electioneering, but the idea that there’s an obvious partisan political move they could make, and they’re not making it because it hasn’t occurred to them? Not buying it: they’re not making it because it’s against the core value of an engaged electorate.
Of course this isn’t universal: there have definitely been the odd occurrences where someone on the left tries to suppress the vote. Nothing like the multi-tiered Republican efforts to decrease voter turnout, however.