No, you don’t. That was established several times in this thread.
But you only need to go to the next county if you want a DL. If you want to get a DL, you generally need a car to take the driving test. I’m not sure how you think you can get a DL without a car.
Lots of opinion masquerading as fact. It doesn’t take long to determine what one needs to vote in Alabama.
http://www.alabamavotes.gov/GetRegForm.aspx?m=voters
That said does closing an office or offices disproportionately impact the poor? Yes. Everything requires any increase in time or money disproportionately impacts the poor. Again, with limited resources and constraints on state and local governments that cannot print unlimited dollars to buy votes choices have to be made about what services or products to fund.
If you raise the costs of getting into a state park by $0.25/person that is a disproportionate impact on the poor. Sales tax by 1/2% disproportionate impact on the poor. Does that mean that policies or facilities should never change or be closed? No. Not at all. It means in a free nation with free people that individuals need to learn to manage their affairs.
A right to something does not mean the state is obligated to remove every obstacle or cost associated with exercising that right. Let’s go through a few of the first 10 amendments and see how the poor are disproportionately impacted with regards to the ease of exercising the rights explicitly written that the government does not have the delegated authority to curtail.
1st amendment: everyone can speak, aside from the mute that I am sure someone will point out as an exception. But when it comes to assembly, religion at a church or other house of worship, and especially the press money is important. We have freedom of the press but we sure aren’t entitled to equal access to printing presses, broadcast towers, or satellites.
2nd amendment: outside of a few enclaves like Chicago or Hawaii, iirc, it’s relatively easy to get a firearm. The state is not obligated in anyway to provide equal access or equal ease in getting a firearm. The poor are definitely disproportionately impacted by the costs of firearms, ammunition, and the relative pain to get one, legally.
Now I’m of the opinion that it should be easy and cheap to get necessary documentation like Social Security cards, birth certificates, and passports. But I don’t think the government needs to go door to door and make sure that people don’t lose theirs via flood, fire, automobile accident, termites, or locusts. Nor do I think the government needs to go door to door and ensure you have one to begin with. Freedom has responsibilities to go with the rights and the men and women who died to secure a free nation would shake their head at the excuse making for the so-called poor who cannot take a bit of time and effort out of their lives to work to exercise a right that other people gave their lives for.
The correct course of action, though admittedly politically difficult, is to close the relevant offices in the rich areas, not the poor areas.
I don’t think it’s rich as much as it is populated. Poor and rural is just an inconvenient and often hard combination. Access to good schooling, medical care, city culture is all lacking in areas where population density makes certain infrastructure or services inefficient.
It’s good to see first class mail is damn near universal and that phone lines are subsidized but there is a limit to what the “people” are willing to pay for the rural areas.
Since you asked, it was unclear to me that you meant “no reasonably accurate paraphrasing of what someone said that might make him seem to lack empathy,” rather than “no personal attacks.” Correction noted.
ETA: And for the life of me, I don’t have any idea why elucidator got a warning for such an innocuous statement.
Yep, and she also angered or maybe entertained the audience is a better word, by speaking in a southern accent.
Well, I no longer speak with a southern accent because I’ve been in California now for more than 40 years, but if I start talking to someone with a southern accent, it comes right back. I don’t do it on purpose, it just happens.
So, while I agree that Hilary can be calculating, I don’t suspect that’s what she’s doing with the accent.
Except that the “rich” areas are where the population density is, so your plan amounts to: Inconvenience the greatest number of people possible. That’s not only politically difficult, it’s also bad public policy.
Your original claim was that this hasn’t happened in Alabama for 45 years. If you want to revise your claim to be that it happens all the time in Alabama but not at the statewide level, you’re welcome to such a revision. I suspect that new claim would also be false, but I’m not sure I have the time for this gamesmanship.
As for the decree, I can’t tell if you’ve misread it or if you are just making the overly literal claim that it lacks that phrase. It is indeed a consent decree entered to stop the attempted suppression of black votes. If you doubt this, I encourage you to read the complaint which is posted on the same website as the consent decree.
I should add that, just because a place is largely poor, if it’s low density then it might very well have FEWER poor people in it than a richer, but more populous area. It would not surprise me if there were more poor people living in the urban, “rich” areas of AL than in the more remote, rural areas.
Just want to say I totally love you guys, and if I had a puppy, I’d give you half!
I don’t agree that it is necessarily bad public policy to inconvenience more people than necessary. It depends on the particular problem being addressed.
Saw a guy on Ms Maddow last night, a newspaper guy from 'Bama, offered a view that is worth considering. He says that it really wasn’t a directed effort to cut back poor/black voter access, it was all about the batshit Republican cadre in 'Bama refusing to raise any taxes, any where, for any reason. Such that basic services, like DMV offices, are in keep kim-chee. And that the Gov., while not overtly sympathetic to his poor/black constituents, is not actively trying to do them harm, either.
Which is to say, yeah, its the Republican’s fault, but not quite the way we were thinking. Plausible enough, I suppose.
While I’m about it, and I’m all about it, any more info on these mobile voter ID vans? Is that plan dependent upon extra funding? How many are we talking, here?
It’s not bad public policy to inconvenience more people than necessary? Do you realize what you just said? Maybe you and I have a different definition of the word “necessary”.
This may get back to the philosophical debate between utilitarianism (increase maximal good) and rights-based ethics (keep any one person from having their rights violated), or at least something like that.
A utilitarian system is going to focus on inconveniencing the fewest number of people. A rights-based system is fine inconveniencing more people if it results in the violation of no rights.
A related approach might be this: try to minimize the inconvenience to any one person even at the cost of increasing inconvenience for many people. That is, a policy that means everyone has to spend an additional five minutes on average voting, but also means that nobody needs to spend more than two hours voting, might be superior to a status quo in which nobody has their time increased but the worst voting experiences involve spending more than two hours voting.
If closing an urban elections office means that 10,000 people need to spend an extra twenty minutes driving across town, whereas closing a rural office means that 1,000 people need to spend an extra two hours driving across the state, it’s defensible public policy.
All numbers pulled from my butt.
That’s still different than saying you want to inconvenience more people “than necessary”. Necessary for what?
For every situation there is a minimum number of people that could be inconvenienced. Sometimes the right thing to do will involve inconveniencing more than that number. Hence sometimes the right thing to do will involve inconveniencing more people than necessary.
Again, maybe we use words differently, but if it’s the right thing to do, then it’s necessary to do a it. I’ll just chalk it up to a difference in emphasis. It just sounded really weird to say you would be OK with inconveniencing more people than necessary without clarifying what you considered to be necessary or not.
At any rate, I think the 2nd point I made is more on topic. Don’t assume that more poor people live in the rural areas than in the urban ones.
You misunderstand each other (I think) because you elide this distinction:
More than necessary to achieve X given Y.
More than necessary to achieve the right balance of X and Y.
We both use “necessary” in both senses at play here, but you’re misunderstanding the sense in which I meant the term. Once I clarified my meaning in my previous post, did you understand?
Again so you don’t have to scroll up: For every situation, there is a minimal number of people that could be inconvenienced. Sometimes the right thing to do will result in inconveniencing a number of people larger than that minimal number.
Makes sense?
Forget the word “necessary,” then. The above is what I am saying.
I don’t assume that. The right thing to do here will involve knowing those numbers and many other numbers besides. My only point with my first (?) comment in this conversation was to point out that minimizing the number of people inconvenienced is not the only desidaratum. This meanwhile was intended to support (against one line of attack) my contention that, other things being equal, it is better to inconvenience a rich person than it is to inconvenience a poor person.