Not lying – using language to suggest violations of rights, without mentioning those are not rights that may be legally vindicated, just “rights” in the author’s personal view:
The entire discussion is rife with rhetoric about amorphous principles cast as solid pillars of social construction.
I’m just guessing here, but judging from the response, the black citizens of Georgia are not willing to “take one for the team” if it means surrendering the next election on the altar of the integrity of voting rolls. I think maybe if they lose by a few thousand votes they will be rather cross with Mr Kemp. Just a hunch.
Suppose they might just shrug their shoulders and accept that they are a lazy and feckless bunch who do not deserve to vote. Ya think?
You mean, like, “voter confidence”?
Like that, except that people actually care enough about voter confidence to pass Voter ID laws, and people don’t care enough about whatever you’re asking for to pass it. See, if they did, then you’d have it.
So, actually, nothing like “voter confidence.”
Probably they would, if their constitutional right to vote weren’t being infringed.
There is no constitutional right to not be removed from a voter roll in compliance with SCOTUS precedent and the NVRA.
The barriers to voting in Georgia, as most places in the US, are trivially low.
I suspect that your definition of “trivally low” would change significantly if it were the right to own guns which were being infringed.
Before I consider the absurd parallel, you’d have to demonstrate how they are analogous.
I can’t tell if you’re serious here. Did everyone intrinsically care about voter confidence, or did, before the laws were passed, a minority of people who cared about it make a case that it was an important issue, in an attempt to persuade others to adopt their view?
If the latter, did you show up in threads about voter confidence saying, “Nyah nyah, not checking voter laws is perfectly legal, so I don’t know why you’re blathering about amorphous principles”? Or did you recognize that they were trying to change opinion?
What you’re doing appears to be an attempt to shut down discussion by pointing out something both true (current law allows this) and trivial. You seem to ignore that an effort to change the law includes precisely this sort of conversation.
I’m not sure why you insist on ignoring this.
They’re not analogous, because people wouldn’t tolerate this sort of infringement of the right to own guns. But they’ll tolerate infringements to the right to vote, even though that’s a much more important right if you want to maintain a democracy.
Your debate style is really irritating. It reminds me of libertarian arguments that assume everyone has perfect information and makes the rational choice when making any decision. Sure, if you accept that premise then you are assuming everyone who voted for R’s didn’t find the voter suppression tactics an overriding reason not to vote that way, and so the people of GA spoke and their representatives did their duty and proceeded with this sketchy voter-roll cleanse.
I’m assuming if the D’s were in complete charge and decided to pass laws to remove all registered R’s from rolls, that wouldn’t be a problem for you either. Because, you know, the people of GA elected the D’s to do this.
Unless this law and its implementation were spelled out as part of the platform that the Sec. of State ran on, I repeat, you have no idea how the voters of GA feel about this.
There are many more restrictions on owning guns in America than on voting. In some places, it’s effectively impossible to do so - or if you can own it, you may not carry or use it. That’s about as much use as a vote in North Korea.
Your argument goes the other way - as gun ownership is (per the constitution) an inalienable right, and necessary for the security of the nation, it should be as easy to own one as to vote. Hopefully you’ll be protesting just as strongly against New York’s firearm laws as against this purging of the rolls.
Wrong
So, then, we are assured that the fact that a disproportionate number of black citizens are affected by all this…we can safely conclude that it is merely a coincidence? That might go a long way to soothing rancor and disaffection.
Maybe they didn’t know, didn’t have any idea that such actions as these would have a partisan impact? Now they have been advised, are they shocked shocked? Rushing with all deliberate speed to fix this before the election? Maybe I missed this part, somebody can point it out to me…
I await, “with the calm confidence of a Methodist with four aces”.
The barriers to voting in Georgia might seem low to you and to me. But the actual fact is that they’re sufficiently high barriers to remove 10% of the electorate from the rolls. That is not a low barrier.
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking more about that “exact match of name across multiple databases” thing. It occurs to me that there’s a fairly large set of people, in Western society, who are likely to change their name at some point during their life (usually, not too long after they reach voting age). And name-change procedures in the US are generally pretty informal. Would it be surprising if, after such a person changed their name, the change didn’t completely propagate through all of the relevant databases? And is it a coincidence that that set of people also tends to vote Democratic?
I don’t think this is a good measure of the difficulty in voting given most eligible voters don’t vote at all. Because most don’t vote, can we conclude that voting is hard? No. That could be true, but it could also be that most people aren’t interested.
It seems self-evident to me that voters are on a continuum of tenacity, organization, and self-motivation. Every act you make to make voting more convenient, to account for people losing track of something, and to incentivize voting will lead to some number more people voting who wouldn’t have voted otherwise. And the opposite is true: every act you take to make voting less convenient, to remove failsafes for folks losing track, or to remove incentives for voting will result in some number fewer people voting who would have voted otherwise.
There’s not a static population of Goofuses and Gallants. There’s a spectrum.
A bedrock principle for me is this: the more people who are engaged and involved in our civic society, the better off we are. Measures that lead to greater engagement are, everything else equal, good measures. Measures that lead to less engagement are bad measures, everything else equal.
But of course everything else isn’t equal. A measure that led to fewer voters, but also prevented some other ill (e.g., fraudulent election results), can be a good measure. That’s why I support folks voting in person after having registered, instead of everyone just getting to show up wherever they want to vote and handing in a sticky note with their votes on it.
So the question is this: what ill is being prevented by the voter roll purge that is greater than the ill it is creating?
That question remains unanswered, but I think I know the real answer: the ill that’s being prevented is a Democratic victory in the Georgia governor’s race.
That’s not true. Turnout in every Presidential election since 1932 has been more than half of the voting-age population, except for 1996 when it was 49%.
And the denominator for that count was voting-age population, which presumably includes persons institutionalized in prisons, jails, and nursing homes, or ineligible to vote under the laws of their state due to past felony convictions. So even in 1996, it seems that a majority of those who could have registered and voted, did.
Now you could make the more narrow claim that less than half of all persons eligible to register and vote in off-year elections do so, and you’d be on safe ground there.
I know this is an aside from the main topic, but I’m curious: do you support moves to allow felons and/or illegal aliens to vote? Your “bedrock principle” would seem to suggest that you would …