It would be a tu quoque fallacy if I had suggested that the democrats’ doing it made it right.
In this case, I did not. What made it right (or at least acceptable) is that the Democrats could point to legitimate reasons, and those reasons justified the change.
Their motive was to create partisan advantage but their result was justifiable. Advantage: D.
You poor dear, some evil jackbooted oppressor has imposed Ignore settings on you. As if you haven’t simply chosen not to be bothered with anybody telling you how wrong you are. :rolleyes:
For the record:
Speaking of reading, you might want to read the link provided in the original topic since it was the basis of the fucking topic in the first place.
It was published on August 30, 2011, and mentions NEW roadblocks to voting being thrown up by Republicans.
Fucking retard.
I love how you signed your post. The path to enlightenment is self-knowledge.
My, what a journey of discovery this thread has become. Friend Bricker, in his never-ending quest for half-truth, injustice and the Republican way, has discovered a new moral principle to apply to politics: that the intention of the thing can be set aside if the result can be justified. While it is true that the Republicans in this effort are using the power of the legislature to stack the electoral deck in their favor, which is reprehensible, is totally hunky-dory and full of crunchy goodness because it has the justifiable effect of solving a problem which, essentially, does not exist.
Educated by Jesuits. It shows.
Yes but…
This whole push to change the way Pennsylvania allocates its electoral votes could be a mixed bag for Republicans.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/15/319666/gop-house-members-afraid-of-losing-their-own-seats-push-back-against-pa-gov-corbetts-vote-rigging-plan/
But doesn’t this method actually do more for democracy? Right now, the winner-take-all system means that the losing candidate gets zero votes. This system splits the votes up in at least rough proportion to the areas casting them.
Yes, it could hurt Obama. But the change furthers democracy. I thought that was always the touchstone?
I could be persuaded to this if Gerrymandering was not so prevalent (and I know both sides do it).
It only furthers democracy if everyone does it. If it’s done selectively and intentionally only in states where it favors one party then it does not further democracy.
It may be legal, but it’s an unethical gaming of the system, whichever party does it.
Right. And this is so self-evident that I find it hard to believe Bricker wasn’t well aware of it.
Do this tomorrow in California: favors Republicans. Do it tomorrow in Texas: favors Democrats. Do it tomorrow nationwide, honestly not sure who if anyone it favorh. It might make gerrymandering more important than ever, depending on whether a state’s electoral votes are distributed on a district-line basis or a overall-state-popular-vote basis. It would certainly “fix” one issue, which is that such a massive proportion of presidential-level campaigning happens in only a few relevant states. I think I’d be for it (although at that point, why not just go to straight nationwide popular vote?)
My point is, it’s entirely possible to take an action whose on-the-surface appearance makes things more (small-d) democratic (ie, switching California away from winner-take-all electoral votes), but whose actual meaningful impact would in fact be massively partisan – and I’m very suspicious of the motives of anyone proposing such a scheme.
Right.
My point is that it’s very possible to do something that favors “more democracy” while still scheming for partisan advantage. It’s why I brought up Massachusetts.
I’d be a lot more likely to support this if I didn’t see it as something that would be changed on a whim, for partisan reasons, exactly as Massachusetts kept dinking around with the Senatorial succession law, and exactly for the reason that the Pennsylvania governor is proposing it now. (I’d support it 100% if all states did it, and promised not to change for at least a couple of cycles. That’d give time to uncover unintended consequences. But I suspect that won’t happen.)
I’m uncertain what the Pennsylvania governor hopes to gain, anyway. The Republican representatives objecting to it (as quoted above) are in the same situation as many of the Democrats who won in 2008 were: on thin ice. Barring massive vote-splitting and an electoral college that is split within 10 votes, it won’t make a difference.
That said, yes, it is completely legal and constitutional for Pennsylvania’s legislature to do this if they so choose.
I don’t see how it couldn’t favor the Republican candidate. You’re basically getting rid of the advantage Democrats have in taking all electors from California and New York (tempered by the Democratic vote elsewhere granted), but allowing the advantage small states have with their two Senators to remain.
So although the election results are federal, and thus the rights should be the same for citizens of different states, and therefore the rules to implement the rights should be the same across the board - they aren’t.
Does nobody consider it unfair if the length of residency varies? Doesn’t this mean that when you move, you can no longer vote in your old place, but not yet in the new?
Um, Florida’s purge of the registration rolls, causing people with similar names to felons to be stricken, before the 2000 election, was a “rare exception”? Do you mean the Republican governors have stopped doing that now?
So how does absentee ballot work?
I don’t see what “honor” has to do with “doing it the way the founding fathers did it with 18th century technology instead of modern technology”. Or “the American way is the best because USA is the greatest, so we will keep doing it that way”.
I mean, you have heard of these things like computers, right? You could put all registered voters in one database, using the de-facto-ID of SSN, and cross-reference to make sure that John Smith who has moved from RI to Nevada to Florida can only vote in one place of residence. Or is a national database too much Anti-christ-ish? Too un-american, where laws were written to allow petty criminals to circumvent police?
Sure. At the same time, there’s no reason to think that all such acts are created equal.
To take an extreme hypothetical, suppose a republican discovers that a bunch of democratic voting workers are engaged in ongoing systematic fraud in which they literally just throw away republican votes without counting them. Now, the republican who did the discovering might be a partisan shill who, if he discovered the same fraud in the opposite direction, would just pretend he saw nothing and walk away. Nonetheless, we should clearly work to eliminate that fraud and punish the perpetrators even if the person who brought it to our attention is potentially partly partisanly motivated.
I guess for me these things work on several levels:
(a) what the stated goal is, and why that makes things more (lower-case-d) democratic
(b) to what extent we believe the stated goal would actually be achieved
(c) what the immediate impact would be, and whether THAT made things more democratic
(d) why it is that some party believes this would benefit them specifically
So the initial laws under discussion here, assuming for a moment that the most cynical interpretation is true, look like this:
(a) Stated goal is to reduce voter fraud. Reducing voter fraud, in and of itself, totally in isolation, is clearly a good thing
(b) however, as there is almost none of the type of voter fraud that this law claims to address, it’s hard to see how this law would actually accomplish anything
(c) in the meantime, the immediate impact (again, taking the most cynical view) is to make it disproportionately harder for certain groups of people to vote, thus reducing voter turnout only among specific groups. This, I argue, makes things clearly LESS democratic
(d) and the republicans believe it would benefit them because of long-term systemic demographic issues that are unlikely to change
Compare that to the Mass. thing:
(a) stated goal is to switch senatorial elections from special-election-by-the-people (which is perfectly democratic) to appointnment-by-duly-elected-governor (also, basically, democratic). Or back the other way.
(b) would presumably accomplish that goal
(c) immediate impact is to precisely accomplish that goal
(d) democrats believe it would benefit them because at that precise moment they happened to either control, or not control, the governorship. But it’s clearly just a temporary thing (assuming that the long term likelihood of a republican winning a statewide election for governor is about the same as the long term likelihood of a republican winning a statewide special senatorial election).
So there’s the same level of purely partisan cynicism, but I think what’s different is that there’s isn’t the actively anti-democratic borderline-disenfranchisement. Now, other reasonable people can certainly disagree with my analysis, but my point is, as it so often is when arguing with you, that merely bringing up a vaguely comparable situation in the other direction at some point in the past 5 years doesn’t ever actually address the discussion at hand. See, Michael Moore being compared to the ACORN guy.
Hmm. I guess that’s true… as it basically is direct popular vote, but with each individual’s vote weighted by an amount inversely proportional to their state’s population, and I strongly suspect that more-populated-states are more blue than less-populated-states, on the whole.
Well, they did another one in 2004 here and the Republican governor and legislature just implemented a whole bunch of sweeping changes that disenfranchise even more people, so they probably won’t bother in 2012.
How come nobody said “In case somebody dies on the job, either we hold the elections for his successor 6 weeks after his death, or else each Senator appoints a reserve to take over in case of death”? I mean a lot of the people in the House and Senate are very old (white) guys, so the chance of suddenly dying is not-trivial, right?
http://www.ocsea.org/generalnews/NewDirections/10_060918.pdf Blackweell did the same damn thing in Ohio. The 12 states that got right wing Republican governors last election are after the same thing.