Yes, the process starts with a numbers match attempt that produces an unacceptable failure rate. If it ended there, you’d have something to complain about.
A fact that implies nothing but that suppressing the other side’s votes can be as effective as turning out your own. In any case, I was asking for an ethical or political argument, such as I myself made in the OP.
“Ethics”? What are these “ethics” of which you speak?
Is this thing on?
Bricker has already stated that the Brennan Center is, at the very least, biased, so they are. They simply are not to be believed – even when State officials (as you highlighted) admit that “typographical errors by election workers are responsible for most of the failures” when it comes to matches.
I misremembered. It’s 24 years (1974-1998) rather than 28. For every time slot and intelligence slot, the Democratic party is strongest among the least intelligent and weakest among the most. The Republican party is weakest among the least intelligent and strongest among the most. Given that Republicans have also always had fewer numbers, this is pretty significant.
The above-mentioned instances of clerical error, along with technical glitches and/or mistakes made by voters, are all what is behind most of these latest instances of rampant voter fraud, by the way.
You are over the line, here. Even deciding that the efforts of one political party might be racist does not permit one to simply say that another poster is affiliated with an explicitly racist organization.
I will also not accept a claim that you were merely indicating that Bricker is unique–particlarly since you broke snowflake into two words.
Knock it off with the personal insults.
[ /Moderating ]
I assume in the interests of fairness you’ll give bricker a warning for calling me a freak.
Edit: what does snow flake being two words have to do with anything?
oh I get it snow is white. Well you can accept my claim if you like. I don’t care, I do apologize for crossing the line with the KKK comment, but if you want to over analyze my grammar that’s your own business.
I agree with the OP, but I will go a step further: I think that vote suppressors are outright committing evil. They aren’t trying to persuade people not to vote by making reasoned arguments: they are trying to deny people the right to vote through methods such as intimidation, striking them off the voting roles, getting ballots incorrectly cast, etc.
It is a fundamentally different way of looking at what all people are created equal is all about. They have no problem with their political opponents and their supporters being disenfranchised in any way, as long as they do not personally have to serve time for it.
For whatever it’s worth, I was offended by the KKK comment, but took no particular notice of the snowflake thing; I just assumed it was in sarcastic response to my pointing out that my own name is spelled with an ñ.
If you DID mean something racial with “snowflake,” I will be retroactively offended, but otherwise, that’s a non-issue.
And to the extent your apology for the “KKK” comment was directed at me, I accept.
Actually I thought it was that “flake” is a derogatory term. (But I didn’t think you meant it that way.)
-FrL-
Both are tactics to achieve the same result. Skew the results in your own favor. Here’s why:
Lets say, just to make the numbers easier that there are 100 voters and that the current sentiment in the US is 60/40 in Obama’s favor. So, in a perfectly fair election in which everybody’s view was accounted for, Obama would win 60 to 40.
But lets save 40% of people don’t vote. Then Obama wins the election 36 to 24. The election still reflects that actual sentiment of all the people. But now an opportunity exists for McCain.
A) Suppose McCain runs a ‘Get out the Vote’ campaign with 100% efficiency. Obviously, he targets people sympathetic to him, and not Obama, and suddenly McCain wins the election 36 to 40, rather than losing.
B) McCain instead runs a nefarious ‘Suppress the Vote’ campaign with 50% efficienty. He targets the down trodden, the poor, and minorities, and suddenly McCain wins the election 18 to 24, rather than losing.
In both A) and B) the election results are skewed and I would be consider them to be unfair. As Bricker noted earlier, votes are fungible. Removing a vote from the other side has the same effect as adding one to your own. And it’s not the individual vote that matters, but rather the results in total.
Of course they are. That does not mean both are equally legitimate. I made an argument in the OP that they are not. Nobody, least of all Bricker, has yet responded to it in those terms.
The problem with responding “in those terms” is that it’s an opinion poll, nothing more.
I say, as I said in post #2, that these measures are not inherently wrong.
You’ve said that they are.
What more is left in that discussion? You and I do not share a common agreement on what’s right and wrong, or agree about a definitive authority for decisions about right and wrong.
Bricker: You never responded to my post from the pit thread on this topic, so here it is:
Yes, there’s a line. And the line is between an action which has some cover justification, but which is solely (or largely) motivated by a desire to influence the outcome of the election by lowering turnout; and an action which will have a side effect of potentially influencing the outcome of the election by lowering turnout, but which serves some other compelling and useful purposes, one compelling and useful enough to take that action despite its antidemocratic side effects.
Now, pretty much any action can be claimed to have a legitimate side effect. Which is why I very strongly feel that any action which has a likely side effect of making it harder for people to vote should NOT just be another law like any other. Either it should come out of lengthy deliberations of some sort of non-partisan election commission; or it should have to pass some sort of very heightened scrutiny.
Nothing is more dangerous to the principles of democracy than giving elected officials the power to muck with elections, because it destroys the checks and balances. Ideally, if an elected official does something that the majority of people don’t like, he gets voted out. But if an elected official does something that screws up the election, and a majority of people don’t like it, he might NOT get voted out, and then you’re in some sort of vicious circle.
In any case, I’d like you to state your position very very clearly. Which one of the following does it most closely match:
(1) Laws and government actions that affect elections are (both legally and ethically) indistinguishable from any other law. Thus, as long as there’s any kind of legitimacy to reducing voter fraud (which there obviously is, on the surface of it), it’s totally reasonable and right for the party in power to pass such a law, and the voter-suppression side effects are totally irrelevant
(2) Voter fraud is such a huge problem in all these states (which just happen to all have republican-controlled assemblies or governors or whoever is promulgating these laws) that the need for reduced voter fraud is compelling enough to make it worth the risk of reducing voter turnout. Thus the actions are legitimate
(3) Sure it’s underhanded and a bit sleazy. But it’s all part of the politics game, and the party in power always does it, so suck it up, whiners.
(4) ?
:dubious: No, Bricker, in that post you merely argued that there is some value in not making it too easy to vote, which might be an interesting discussion to have in another thread; but it does not constitute an argument, not even an oblique one, in support of the position you took in the Pit thread linked in the OP, i.e., the moral equivalency of the Dems’ tactics to encourage high voter turnout and the Pubs’ tactics to discourage it.
So? Has that ever stopped you from making an ethical or political argument before? I told you plain and clear in the OP what I think is right here, and it’s based on my conception of what voting is for. If you disagree with that you ought at least to be able to state, and ideally to defend, your grounds and your alternate conception.
If you’ve got anything at all beyond partisan interest, that is.
Otherwise, it just looks like more bobbing and weaving.
(1) most closely matches my view.
Yes, quite often. I seldom make ethical or moral arguments on this board, for precisely that reason. About the only argument I make here on the SDMB that rests even partly on matters of ethics or morality is for abolition of the death penalty.
No. Because my appeal to ethics and morality doesn’t share much with your ideas of how we derive ethics and morality. The way we live together in this country is by agreeing on an objective method of lawmaking. Having used that process, I’m now entitled to rely on the results as representing choices, methods, or processes that are generally considered ethical or moral by the populace.