# I Pit the ID-demanding GOP vote-suppressors (Part 1) **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [June 12, 2012, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943 "2012-06-12T19:15:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 448
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2016, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8941 "2016-03-25T21:21:03Z")
[Those damn Injuns](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/native-american-voting-rights-lawsuits) just can’t be trusted to vote correctly, either. > [@](#): > > Poor Bear v. Jackson County: In September 2014, members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from the Pine Ridge Reservation filed a lawsuit against Jackson County, South Dakota, alleging that county officials refused to create a satellite office where Sioux residents could register and file in-person absentee ballots. For tribal citizens, the closest place to submit their absentee ballots is the county auditor’s office in Kadoka, a town that’s 95 percent white and roughly 27 miles away. (Native Americans must travel twice as far as white residents in the county to submit ballots in person, according to the lawsuit.) > … > Brakebill v. Jaeger: … According to the lawsuit, Native Americans in North Dakota have to travel an average of nearly 30 miles to obtain a driver’s license. The lawsuit also claims that many Native Americans lack tribal government IDs with residential addresses, which is an alternative form of ID under state law. > … > Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission v. San Juan County: Less than two years ago, prospective Navajo Nation voters in San Juan County, Utah—where Native Americans are nearly 47 percent of the population—had to travel an average of two hours to submit a ballot in the predominantly white city of Monticello, without access to reliable public transportation. Nothing actually new here, of course. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2016, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8942 "2016-03-25T21:28:16Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > [Those damn Injuns](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/native-american-voting-rights-lawsuits) just can’t be trusted to vote correctly, either.Nothing actually new here, of course. Bricker, I suspect, thinks that’s awesome and will state something about limousines to the polling place. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8943 "2016-03-26T01:57:51Z")
So, saying “Spoiler Alert!” would have been too much trouble? ---
**Author:** ![BigAppleBucky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigapplebucky/32/178_2.png) [@BigAppleBucky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigAppleBucky)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8944 "2016-03-26T03:20:58Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Well, then, that makes it “incredibly stupid partisan skulduggery”. Assuming, of course, it passes the strict statistical and methodological analysis of our resident expert. So either it’s bad governance on the part of the GOP (mere stupidity) or a conspiracy to suppress the vote. Let’s see if they re-open the 340+ polling places that have been shut down since 2008 in the general election. Same thing happened in 2004 in Ohio. My second daughter’s best friend was attending Oberlin College at the time and waited in line in a cold November rain for five hours to vote. This was the story in many primarily Democratic leaning districts in Ohio. [Ohio story 1](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/opinion/26tue4.html?_r=0) > [@](#): > > Everyone complains that young people don’t vote, but consider the experience of students at Kenyon College in Ohio in the 2004 election. Officials in Knox County, Ohio, provided just two voting machines for the school’s 1,300 voters. Some students waited in line for 10 hours, and the last bleary-eyed voter did not cast a ballot until nearly 4 a.m. > > That same day in Columbus, voters in black neighborhoods waited as long as four hours, often in the rain. Many voters there and in other urban areas — including Toledo and Youngstown — left their overcrowded polling places in disgust, or because they could not wait any longer, without casting a ballot. In many of Ohio’s white-majority suburbs, the lines were far shorter. [Story 2](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64737-2004Dec14.html?nav=rss_politics/elections/2004) > [@](#): > > COLUMBUS, Ohio – Tanya Thivener’s is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line snaking out of the precinct door. > > She stood in line for four hours – one hour in the rain – and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her mother’s house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote? > > Fifteen minutes, her mother replied. Just 120,000 votes. Might have made a real difference. Imagine how many lives might have been saved. [Story 3](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/03/hitchens200503) > [@](#): > > In some way or another, these bottlenecks had a tendency to occur in working-class and, shall we just say, nonwhite precincts. So did many disputes about “provisional” ballots, the sort that are handed out when a voter can prove his or her identity but not his or her registration at that polling place. These glitches might all be attributable to inefficiency or incompetence (though Gambier had higher turnouts and much shorter lines in 1992 and 1996). Inefficiency and incompetence could also explain the other oddities of the Ohio process—from machines that redirected votes from one column to the other to machines that recorded amazing tallies for unknown fringe candidates, to machines that apparently showed that voters who waited for a long time still somehow failed to register a vote at the top of the ticket for any candidate for the presidency of these United States. I’ll call it GOP SOP until they prove differently. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8945 "2016-03-26T03:57:53Z")
Has there been any change in the proportion of available polling sites? What I’m thinking is that maybe the proportion of polling sites available for pee-ons remained the same, but the closing of so many polling places made a “tipping point”. Like, previously, there situation wasn’t all that good, but nobody cared until it unraveled entirely. Say you have two groups of people, one that regularly overeats to a gross extent, and one that eats about half as much. If you were to enforce a _diktat_ that both groups must cut their intake in half…the porkers will suffer, but the lesser folk may starve. Even though both groups are faced with the same demand, one-half. By way of careful thinking, you could even say they were fairly treated, both sacrificed the same amount. Sorta kinda. Anyway, that might explain some of the piss-poor thinking that went into this. They cut the budget, but they cut the results “fairly”. Each group lost, say, fifty percent of their polling places, but could vote anywhere at all. So, people with cars drive a little further to vote, people without cars… Because as easy as it is to buy this conspiracy, I’m still stuck wondering how they ever imagined they would get away with it. Unless they imagined it was totally defensible because, hey, it was _fair!_ Those people getting screwed weren’t getting screwed any harder, any faster, or any more! ---
**Author:** ![BigAppleBucky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigapplebucky/32/178_2.png) [@BigAppleBucky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigAppleBucky)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8946 "2016-03-26T16:51:38Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Because as easy as it is to buy this conspiracy, I’m still stuck wondering how they ever imagined they would get away with it. Unless they imagined it was totally defensible because, hey, it was _fair!_ Those people getting screwed weren’t getting screwed any harder, any faster, or any more! One could start with the recent Supreme Court decision that all but killed the Voting Rights Act. My home township has a population of around 300,000. If we had just three polling places the whole voting process would simply break down. We have 178 election districts. Usually between three and five ED’s per facility, but each ED has its own voting machine. In presidential elections we get between 300 and 600 voters per machine. Voting starts at 6 AM and goes to 9 PM, 15 hours. So, even in a busy ED about 20 votes per hour. Also there are extra stands (fka booths) set up so three or four people at a time can be marking their ballots. The actual scanning takes about twenty seconds. In the 2014 general election we had about five people waiting “on” line at 9 PM. There probably will be a few more than that this year, but not too many. The NYS Board of Elections is totally bipartisan. Neither party wants to give the other an advantage so they have arrived at a pretty decent set-up. Certainly more fair than some of those in other states. ---
**Author:** ![inscrutable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/a88e4f/32.png) [@inscrutable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/inscrutable)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8947 "2016-03-26T18:41:41Z")
> [@BigAppleBucky](#): > > [Well, look at this:](http://reverbpress.com/politics/meet-the-tea-party-republican-behind-arizonas-colossal-voting-clusterfk/) > > Ratios varied widely. Very, very widely within Maricopa County. > > Gee, and it’s a county-wide function so funding wouldn’t vary within the county, would it? Does the cited article state how many illegals waited five hours to vote? ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8948 "2016-03-26T18:43:53Z")
> [@inscrutable](#): > > Does the cited article state how many illegals waited five hours to vote? Go away. ---
**Author:** ![inscrutable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/a88e4f/32.png) [@inscrutable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/inscrutable)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8949 "2016-03-26T18:58:32Z")
> [@inscrutable](#): > > Does the cited article state how many illegals waited five hours to vote? Voter turnout in Cave Creek vs. voter turnout in inner-city Phoenix? Polling places per square mile in Cave Creek vs. inner-city Phoenix? ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8950 "2016-03-26T19:26:34Z")
> [@BigAppleBucky](#): > > One could start with the recent Supreme Court decision that all but killed the Voting Rights Act. You mean the “Voting Privileges for Democrats Act?” Yeah, that was a shame. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2016, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8951 "2016-03-26T19:29:16Z")
Ooh. Snap. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8952 "2016-03-27T02:38:56Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > You mean the “Voting Privileges for Democrats Act?” . . . So you’re on record as opposing voting rights for Democrats. No surprise. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 2:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8953 "2016-03-27T02:57:12Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > So you’re on record as opposing voting rights for Democrats. > > No surprise. No, but I might make an exception for aggressively illiterate folks such as you. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8954 "2016-03-27T03:19:50Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > No, but I might make an exception for aggressively illiterate folks such as you… > It was always the Doctor and Sarah. So Bricker’s still fighting against voter fraud? Does he know there are far more cases of lightning strikes in America than voter fraud? And lightning often causes severe injury or death, while 99.99% of voter frauds have no effect at all. (Most of the remaining 0.01% just mean one right-winger is elected instead of another.) Does he know that the Cruzite Sec’y State of Iowa illegally spent federal funds intended to _increase_ ballot access on investigating voter fraud but still _uncovered more instances of illegal suppression than voter fraud_? And … > [@](#): > > Schultz took other steps to restrict voting. Shortly before the 2012 election, he tried to purge state voter rolls of more than 3,500 people who he claimed were illegal voters after his office checked their names against national immigration databases and supposedly determined they weren’t citizens. Iowa judges repeatedly rejected this move as an illegal overreach of Schultz’s powers, and civil rights groups objected that his methods would sweep out legitimate voters alongside those who weren’t eligible to vote. The legal process dragged on for years. Resolution didn’t arrive until this past March, when Schultz’s successor as secretary of state, Republican Paul Pate, dropped an appeal to the state Supreme Court that Schultz had initiated. Despite this blatant crime by Schultz, I’ll bet Bricker would just grin and say “The system worked! Sec’y of State Schultz didn’t get away with his crime!” … Ignoring similar instances we don’t know about _because_ the Republiocrite got away with it. Stupid as Bricker is, I think he knows all this. He just won’t admit it here. I’m not sure, with his right-wing holier-than-thou hypocrisies, that he’s even capable of admitting it to himself. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8955 "2016-03-27T03:28:14Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > No, but I might make an exception for aggressively illiterate folks such as you. So you’re on record as favoring literacy tests for voters. Jim Crow Bricker. Cool. No surprise. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8956 "2016-03-27T03:40:12Z")
What the fuck is “aggressively illiterate”? Somebody accosts you on the street and demands you read to him? Begs you to paint a sign for him to hold up next to the freeway: “Stone Stupid, Please Help!”? ---
**Author:** ![D\_Anconia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/67e7ee/32.png) [@D\_Anconia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/D_Anconia)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8957 "2016-03-27T05:06:06Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > What the fuck is “aggressively illiterate”? You are the poster child for such. I’m sure you would tell us, if you were able to do so. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8958 "2016-03-27T06:03:19Z")
Another example of conservative projection. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2016, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8959 "2016-03-27T14:15:41Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > You mean the “Voting Privileges for Democrats Act?” Voting is a _right_, not a privilege, Counselor. :rolleyes: Thanks for the admission of your true motive here, though, even if it’s something you merely let slip. ---
**Author:** ![E-DUB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/e-dub/32/403_2.png) [@E-DUB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-DUB)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2016, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943/8960 "2016-03-28T01:02:12Z")
Maybe they’ll legislate against lightning strikes. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943.md?page=447) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-id-demanding-gop-vote-suppressors-part-1/624943.md?page=449)