However, these aren’t people who never bothered to vote; the people under discussion made the effort to register at some point in the not too distant past, and are now having their registration suspended and their right to vote removed, for reasons ranging from fairly good (“we think they moved and registered in this identified other state”) to not so good (“we have no record of them returning a junk-looking postcard that we can’t even prove they received in the first place”).
To allow felons to vote? Absofuckinglutely, as long as it doesn’t lead to unintended consequences such as a community with a large prison having their local government literally taken over by the inmates. Make sure they’re voting in the community in which they lived prior to arrest, to solve that problem. If our goal is to get criminals to rejoin society, having them engaged in the civic process is an obvious good.
Undocumented immigrants? A whole nother kettle of fish, but in general I think that’d be a good thing. Certainly, all other effects being equal, it’s a good thing; but obviously all other effects are not equal. Show the real-world ills created by giving the franchise to undocumented immigrants, and I’m happy to consider them.
Again: not all proposals to widen the franchise are good (“If you vote, you get to punch the shit out of one person without getting in trouble!” would certainly increase voter turnout). But for a proposal to be bad, it must create an ill that’s greater than the good it does.
To clarify, another principle is this: the franchise should never be withheld as a punishment. There are plenty of ways to punish or disincentivize behavior without involving access to the ballot, and access to the ballot is too important to fuck around with this way.
I’m not LHoD, but speaking only for myself: felons yes, illegal aliens no. You’ve got to be an adult citizen to vote, but the arguments for taking the franchise away from people convicted of crimes have never made sense to me. Even while they’re in prison, it’s an additional, unnecessary disengagement from the society that we want them to be able to rejoin someday.
This.
In my state, felons who are “off paper” (out of prison and off parole) can vote, and have been able to vote for a couple of generations now, and I have not heard of any resulting problems, so yes, I do support it. If they’ve done the time, why not? Permanently marginalizing them doesn’t seem to serve much purpose.*
Illegal aliens is an entirely different topic, and one on which my opinions have more to do with the absurdity of US immigration policies: we’ll give you a job if you get here, and we structure entire industries upon the availability of cheap and mostly undocumented labor, but we don’t want you to have any sort of “regular” status.
*aside from the fact that felons are disproportionately minority (which has quite a lot to do with systemic racism and disparate racial impact in the criminal justice system) and hence disproportionately likely to vote against the R.
I stand corrected. I think the point is still valid though - that people don’t vote doesn’t necessarily mean there are high barriers to voting.
You’re right, it’s a really bad analogy.
If my legislator strips me of my right to own a gun, I can vote in the next election to get a legislator more aligned with my view on gun control.
If my legislator strips me of my right to vote, I can…
Um…
…
…Second amendment solutions?
:rolleyes:
You can have a democracy without the personal right to own a murder weapon. You cannot have a democracy without the right to vote. And I don’t care how you gussy it up. I don’t care how many corners you set it behind. If I show up at the polls and cannot vote, and me and people like me make up enough of the electorate to swing the result of the election, it is not a legitimate election, and you are not dealing with a legitimate democracy.
I sometimes try to put myself in the headspace that’s okay with this. I try to imagine whether I’d be happy with my party winning in spite of, rather than because of the will of the populace. I try to imagine the smug glee I hear in some of these posts when hearing that my party successfully managed to swing a contested election by preventing citizens from voting.
And then I think to myself, “I’d rather fucking die than become that person.”
Your mileage may, obviously, vary.
(By the way - if you live in Georgia, and you feel your rights are infringed, there’s a whole school of right-wing thought that will back you up if you decide that shooting Brain Kemp is the best way to protect your rights. I think that school is patently insane, personally, but someone’s bound to back it up.)
Again, “high barriers” isn’t some sort of objective term that separates the Goofuses and Gallants. Virtually every barrier you could set will be high enough to exclude some voters, and not high enough to exclude other voters. The barriers in place may seem trivial to you, but may be insurmountable to a single dad with clinical depression and no access to reliable transportation; yet his vote is just as important for our system as yours.
The logical leap you are making is that being removed from the voting roll according to the prescribed method as dictated in the NVRA, validated by SCOTUS, and passed by the legislature of Georgia, somehow constitutes not being allowed to vote. That premise is unfounded.
There are lots of rules about who can, and cannot vote. This is merely one among many on the spectrum. Sure Georgia could make it easy, like, relax registration requirements, residency requirements, make the vote window super large, etc. That a given system is not set up to be maximum easiness doesn’t call into question the legitimacy of democracy itself.
True. And yet I think the barriers that exist currently are trivially small.
Now, I find that the person responsible for running elections is a partisan position much more problematic. Or that he himself is running for office - that’s more problematic. The exact match thing also seems a bit sketchy. But purging a shit ton of voters who couldn’t meet the trivially small barrier of actually voting in prior elections, or returning a postcard, or the number of other steps they could do - that’s kind of meh.
Point taken. However, the fact that many people don’t vote in places where there are few if any barriers to voting, doesn’t justify placing barriers in the way of people who want to vote.
Yet it’s the norm. In most states, the secretary of state is in charge of running elections, and that office is contested on a partisan basis.
You mean like working-class people who aren’t given time off to vote on Election Day, then have to come home and cook supper for the kids?
The one you don’t see because you don’t have time to go through all the junk mail, other than glance/toss or glance/keep?
We who have had a comparatively easy ride through life tend to considerably underestimate the logistical difficulties that poor and working-class people have to deal with.
Yes, trivially easy. In Georgia, a person can register to vote online, check if they are registered online, and vote by mail. That means they would receive the ballot well in advance and be able to vote at their convenience. Trivially easy.
It’s trivially easy to register to vote online if in fact you are online, and at least somewhat online-literate. That’s not a given in a working-class community. The best figures I can find are that eleven percent of American adults do not use the internet at all as of 2018, and those are disproportionately likely to be older, poorer, more rural, and less well educated (e.g., about 35% of adults with less than a high-school diploma are not online). Reasons for not being online range from merely thinking the internet irrelevant to their daily lives to not being able to afford a connection or the device to use it.
So, Republican voters. Seems like this might not be as targeted as people claim.
Another barrier that you underestimate is that of thinking to even look there. How widely known is it in Georgia that you can register online, and can apply for a mail ballot online? (And that, unlike in many states, you need no justification for asking for one?) Do they do ad campaigns to get the word out, or do you pretty much have to figure it out for yourself?
That’s what you get for quoting out of context. You do realize that that is completely irrelevant, as it is people getting stuff in the mail that is the problem.
Look, if democrats wanted to do the same thing to republicans, then we would get rid of absentee ballots.
“Oh, no!” the cry would go up, “what about all these old people that have a hard time getting to the polls?”
Should the response be that we are not creating barriers to voting, and that showing up at the poll is a trivial task that we have no problem doing, and so we can’t see why anyone else would have a problem with it either?
“But old people tend to vote republican,” the whining continues, “and this is targeted in order to keep republicans out of power.”
No, it is legal and constitutional. Show me in the constitution where it gives the right to vote by absentee ballot. Show me in the constitution where it says that you cannot get rid of a method of voting that is used largely by one party over the other.
Now, for all those “whatabouters”, convinced that democrats would be manipulating voting rules for their personal gain, the fact that democrats have not done this rather obvious step, and in fact, democrats tend to favor absentee ballots, should put your concerns about the possible hypocrisy of those you view as your enemy at rest.
More votes and easier access to the polls = better democracy. Less votes and harder access to the polls = worse democracy. I know which side I’m on, I just don’t know for sure which side will end up winning, but I personally would rather not win, if it meant dismantling democracy to do it. OTOH, losing means that the other side dismantles democracy.
Obviously, there are “some” who’s mileage varies.
I saw a show, decades ago, may have been Murphy Brown, where they had a famous war photographer. One of the pictures was a war torn landscape, with a man pointing a gun at an unarmed civilian. The title of the photo was, “Which side of the gun are you on?”
Well, pick a side, I’d rather be on the losing side than the wrong side.
“May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.” - Mal Reynolds
Older and more rural tends to be white; poorer and less well-educated tends to be black (at least in Georgia). However, older and more rural also tend not to be people moving house frequently, and hence needing to re-register. It’s the people who move frequently who need to re-register, and that demographic tends to be less well-off, less likely to be homeowners, less likely to hold long-term employment, which also correlates to less well-educated, and that adds up to the urban poor, who are not generally Republicans.
I don’t know about most states.
In my state, elections are run by the County Board of Election Commissioners, not the Secretary of State.
Every state has a chief election official at the state level with ultimate responsibility for the conduct of elections; while the scope of his/her authority varies, in no state does a county board have primary authority.
For example, in every state you become a candidate for Congress or the legislature in the first place by filing with a state office or board; the county can’t put you on the ballot if the state doesn’t accept your filing. (Filing for local office, at the city or county level, varies.) The state officer typically approves the voter application and other forms, and in many locations must approve the ballot design chosen by the county. The county may or may not be allowed to use equipment that isn’t approved by the state. Every state has a centralized database of voter records; in most states, the state official runs it, but in a few places the state officer merely sets the rules and procedures mandating how county systems coordinate and exchange data to form the statewide system. Regulations on how the election is to be managed are promulgated at the state level. etc.