Deja moo: The feeling you’ve heard this bullshit before.
Sorry. That wasn’t fair. I retract it.
There’s one aspect of weighing that your reasoning doesn’t capture, and it’s the weighing most germane to my claim.
Your item (1): These voter ID laws will make it much harder for people in these demographics to vote (here’s some data).
“Much” harder? No, I don’t agree. I contend that, as the Supreme Court said when weighing the issue, “…we cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters. . . . When we consider only the statute’s broad application to all Indiana voters we conclude that it ‘imposes only a limited burden on voters’ rights.'”
At some point in this, or another, thread I offered the following analogy: I warn all Democratic-leaning voters that on Election Day, I intend to make a voodoo doll to represent liberal-minded voters, and stick pins in it.
Even if you could show me that 500,000 voters across the country were swayed by that announcement and decided to stay home, I would not agree that their decision was reasonable and I would not agree I was guilty of any crime or civil infraction involving voter intimidation.
The reasonableness of the voters’ decision to stay home instead of voting, in other words, must also be weighed.
Yes, and because that justification includes weighing the effects of the law and the ill it seeks to mitigate.
If it suppresses voter turnout, it will do so because voters are unreasonable about the decision to secure requisite ID.
And the voodoo?
A few words more: I poo-poohed your position as “la-la-la-I-don’t want to know.” That may have been harsh, and I apologized.
But in light of the attention drawn to the event in this discussion, can you explain to me why you have (apparently) still chosen not to read up on the details of the Massachusetts business?
And you were doing so well, too, for a few moments there…
“That may have been harsh…”? Followed up by a suggestion that someone is failing to take your personal obsession with sufficient seriousness? Do we owe that to you, for some reason?
“Well, golly, Bricker says this is very, very important, I guess I’d best fling myself into this, because Bricker says its important…”
A remarkably effective approach - simply declare all objections to be unreasonable.
It’s much easier than actually discussing them, and it *feels *so good, too!
The ill it pretends to mitigate does not exist. The closest you ever came to proving it exists was claiming that the law prevents prosecutions, hence, the lack of evidence for voter fraud is explained away. Thereby performing the logical miracle of making a lack of evidence stand in the place of actual evidence.
A law that would infringe on voting rights to mitigate the dreadful threat of citizens gored by unicorns would be an absurdity, as is this.
I won’t even go into blaming the unreasonableness of discouraged voters on themselves. I find it hard to believe you even said it.
Legally, sure, the important thing is: did they act constitutionally?
Can’t we just tuck the ugly raggedy end of this thread back in on itself, say somewhere near the top of page two, and walk away? It seems like it’s on endless loop, and posts #2126 and #2123 might as well stand for summaries of the pro-democracy and the denial-of-vote-suppression sides respectively.
Let me unequivocally state that I am shocked and outraged by Massachusetts and the Democratic party in general. Whatever they did was two-cocked and may they both disappear from the pages of history.
Of course, I may be stating as such for future partisan gain, but that would be a rather jaundiced view.
Aw, hell, can’t help it!
You have no such power. Your announcement would have been met with amusement and scorn, because its, well, stupid.
These laws, however, are real. The power they reflect is tangible, and factual. People will go to the polls to vote, as they have before, and will be turned away. See the difference? And people who might have gone will not go, because they are discouraged and insulted by their own legislators. Unlike your voodoo powers, they are real.
Though you are right that you would not be guilty of any infraction, though you may have rendered yourself certifiable. All your other arguments having face-planted in Olympic fashion, you just now come up with this happy horseshit?
My interest is renewed, I can hardly wait to see what you try next.
Agreed. And even if the voters THOUGHT I had such power, and actually stayed home, in verifiable numbers, you’d still agree that the only reaction is amusement and scorn, right?
Oh, my God, somebody slipped Bricker some acid! Look, relax, take it easy, I have some experience in this, so do others, we can talk you down…
[QUOTE=Bricker]
But your latter summary is correct: both are legal, both examples of what politicians do when they have power, and both subject to reversal by the people if they are particularly outraged. That’s how the system works. I don’t like some results, and like others, but I don’t think of any of them as alarming.
[/QUOTE]
Of course, voter suppression, if sufficiently successful, is NOT subject to reversal by the people, or at least suddenly requires a much higher hurdle of effort and organization to reverse… which is precisely the reason that I find the voter ID issue so troubling and antiDemocratic, and categorically different from the MA issue.
So if I were in charge of voting, and there was a particular polling place whose precinct was overwhelmingly very devout Catholics, and they had morning mass from 9 to 11 a.m. on Tuesday mornings, and I (giving some justifications of budget cuts) change the hours of all polling places to be from 9 to 11 a.m., that would be OK? After all, I’m an atheist, so to me, going to sit in some building and have some guy tell you what the imaginary guy in the sky wants you to do is just as unreasonable as believing in Voodoo… my point being, you don’t get to judge what beliefs are reasonable. If some significant portion of the population honestly believes in Voodoo, and believes that they are threatened by that person’s actions, then that person’s actions are interfering with the election just as much as if they deliberately caused a serious of traffic accidents near particularly chosen polling places, or other such dirty tricks.
Of course, that’s not a good analogy to something much closer to actual reality here, which is requiring some form of ID, where the actual burden to voters varies greatly from voter to voter based on how close they live to various places where one gets an ID, what their working hours are, what ID forms they already have, yada yada yada. And we could probably argue endlessly about how hard it would ACTUALLY be etc etc, but I don’t think we’d ever really get anywhere there. Maybe some learned scholar can actually do a study to give us some good statistics, but to me the point is this: I’m quite certain (and you don’t seem to particularly dispute this) that the MOTIVE of the Republicans proposing these laws is to suppress turnout. And since they’re not idiots, I assume that it will, in fact, suppress turnout.
And while voter ID, with its strong analogies to poll taxes and literacy tests, is a form of voter suppression that I find particularly odious, I would also object to a variety of other things… scheduled street construction that just happened to be nearer to more democratic-leaning polling places, mucking with the hours of polling places in ways that are demographically more likely to have an affect on certain classes of people. Heck, there are the long-standing reports from Ohio in 2004 that lines at polling places were much longer in black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods. That could easily be a deliberate and planned outcome of policies or decisions made by Republicans. I don’t know that to be the case, but that’s the sort of thing that, if it did happen, I would condemn for the same reasons I condemn the voter ID laws. (Granted, it’s unclear what the “justification” for such a law or policy might be, but I’m sure something could be ginned up which would be about as relevant as the type of fraudulent voting that the voter ID laws would nominally address.)
As I’ve argued at great length several times in this thread, if you make it harder for people to do something, then fewer of those people will do that thing, period. Maybe the SHOULDN’T, but they will.
Well, there are two separate questions there:
(1) Why was I incurious enough not to become very well informed about that issue before it was brought up in this thread, and
(2) Why did I not respond to your requests/prodding and go read up about it once you had brought it up
And, by the way, given that you have a history of being accused of trying to derail threads by bringing up “the democrats did it too”, I hope that you realize how ridiculously off the original topic we are now, in that you’re now not only saying that the democrats did it too, but you’re interrogating a particular left-leaning poster on why his reaction to your claim that the democrats did it too is not what you want it to be. But I find this digression interesting in its own right, so I will proceed, with the objection strongly registered that, purely from a relevance-to-the-OP standpoint, this is a load of hooey.
So, for (1), well, there are zillions of things that happen in the world, and I only care about some of them. So there doesn’t really need to be a reason at all. But to the extent that there is a reason, it’s a combination of:
(a) it doesn’t affect me… I don’t live in MA, I don’t vote for democrats in the MA legislature or particularly endorse or praise them. It’s not like I’m going to have to decide between voting for a democrat whose positions I generally like, but who was engaged in (possibly) underhanded shenanigans; versus a different candidate. It has no real impact on me, worst case it proves that some democrats some times can be corrupt, which I certainly already knew, so… why bother?
[sub]And note, by the way, given that my initial reaction is fairly negative towards the democrats, that it’s far more likely that learning more would make me feel kinder towards them rather than harsher. That is, it already seems pretty darn shady, it’s hard to see what could make it MORE shady, since I already know what they did, and it’s not like it’s also going to turn out that they murdered babies or something. I mean, the story would have to go into some weird place where the democrats met in a hotel room to plan this shady business and while there they also vastly overspent on state-funded booze or something, to make it worse. Whereas there are all sorts of ways that, if I learned more, it could in fact be not as bad for the Dems as I had initially thought. So if I was motivated purely by partisanship, that might in fact induce me to learn more.[/sub]
And (b), as I’ve said a few times, it’s just not fun and satisfying to learn about people you agree with doing things you don’t like. For a long time, Obama’s position on gay marriage was one I didn’t agree with. It bothered me that he had that position. It made me think less of him, and it disappointed me. I wasn’t in denial about it, but I also felt no desire to go really research the subtleties of his position in-depth, which I suppose I could have done, because that would have just been depressing and vaguely self-flagellating.
For (2), I think my position on that is expressed in a couple of paragraphs from my last post:
In other words, I reject your right to just pick some random thing and promote it, without argument or proof, to super-relevant analogy, something so utterly comparable to the current issue, that not only might it be interesting to see what someone’s opinion on that other topic is, but it’s downright essential, we can’t even begin to evaluate the current topic without knowing what they thought about that other topic.
Which is ridiculous both on a theoretical level, but also on an actual level. In actuality, there is only a tenuous connection between the two issues. I claim that reasonable people, who place different weight on different issues, can come to radically different conclusions about the voter ID issue and the MA issue. And given that that’s the null hypothesis for any two issues in the world, it’s up to you to make the extraordinary claim that it’s NOT the case here, if you believe that to be true.
More importantly, though, even if the two issues WERE much much closer to being analogous, it still wouldn’t matter. I mean, imagine the MA thing just had never happened, or we’d never heard of it. We’d still be having this debate over voter ID, and the arguments that I (and other lefties) have made would still be valid, or not valid, entirely on their own merit. Maybe we’d be 5% more or less hypocritical, but (a) arguing about whether we were or not is just a distraction from the actual debate, and (b) whether or not we were 5% more or less hypocritical would have no affect on the validity, or lack thereof, of our arguments in this thread about this topic.
So, to sum up, I refuse to play along with your debate tactic, because I find it to be an irrelevant distraction. (Granted, I’m playing along with the debate ABOUT your debate topic, which is an even MORE irrelevant distraction… guess I’m a hypocrite after all 
)
Who does?
I don’t get to judge? Fine. Who does?
to you? No, because you don’t get to decide what’s reasonable.
However, if our elected representatives passed a law allowing this, and our court system found it was reasonable… Then that would be ok. Because THAT is our system for deciding.
Obviously a tricky question, and obviously (at some point) the answer is going to be the courts. But, before you jump in and say “a-ha! the courts DID declare it reasonable, I win!”, two points:
(1) if I were in charge, this would be one of those issues with an extremely heightened level of scrutiny. So anyone doing anything of this sort would have to prove that (a) there was a compelling need for what they were hoping to accomplish, (b) the law they were proposing would in fact address that need, and (c) the impact on voter turnout would be minimal, with all possible reasonable accommodations being made to lessen that impact. In other words, there would be a much tougher test that the law would have to pass before it could go into effect.
Which isn’t to say that no law which increased the level of IDs necessary in order to vote could ever pass muster, but to do so a whole bunch of things would have to be addressed and fixed first.
(2) A large part of this discussion, at least for me, is not discussing whether the law was in fact legal and constitutional. It may have been, and if so that reflects poorly on our legal system (imho). For me, a large part of the issue is that I believe the actions taken by those proposing the laws were unethical and antiDemocratic. One thing I find puzzling while debating with you is that you find it incredibly difficult to admit that those things can all be true at the same time, and constantly shift the discussion back to legality.
You’d agree, (as I believe you have done in this thread), that poll taxes, literacy tests, and other jim-crow era voter-intimidation crap were, at the time, legal… and yet they were unethical, unAmerican and antiDemocratic? Similarly, the first time someone came up with the idea of gerrymandering, I’m sure it was legal (and it likely still is today in many contexts), but it was still unethical and antiDemocratic. And yet when I charge that the voter ID laws are unethical and antiDemocratic, you respond by asking very legalistic questions about how precisely things should be judged and resolved. Sure, if I were proposing a piece of legislation, it would appropriate, nay essential, for those issues to be very precisely and fairly hammered out. But I’m not proposing a law, I’m just a guy expressing an opinion.
You believe that these laws are legal and constitutional. You’re a lawyer, I’m not, I’m certainly not going to argue with you on that claim. I believe these laws are unethical and antiDemocratic. I agree that’s a more nebulous claim to make, and that’s why I’ve devoted so many electrons to making it.
Then it would be legal. That wouldn’t make it OK. If someone in an official capacity in charge of elections changed the hours of voting in that fashion with the deliberate intent of reducing voter turnout among specific demographics, that is the absolute OPPOSITE of OK, even if it’s OK’d by the courts (that includes either just and fair courts doing their best with a code of law and precedent that doesn’t cover this type of shenanigans, or the kind of racist and biased courts that upheld Jim Crow laws in the South for so long.)
(Are we done discussing MA, by the way?)
At the risk of sounding rather meta…
…who should decide the question of what levels of scrutiny are used?
Ok. The problem with this is, while I can hardly refute the claim that it’s just your opinion, obviously my opinion differs. And so we’re back to either pointing out that the laws enjoy broad popular support (in other words, more people agree with my opinion than with yours) or simply saying we’ll agree that each of us has a different opinion.
Here, I don’t agree with your opinion.
And since it appears that your opinion does not then reach either the legal validity or the popular support associated with the issue… What are we left with?
I suppose so. See, in my opinion, you should educate yourself on the issue, but you disagree. I have no further ammunition, so I concede the point.
My argument is that it is wrong to put rules in place that will block legitimate voters from voting. I haven’t really made an argument with respect to fraudulent votes at all. I suppose if I had to, it would be that there should be remedies in place to stop it, but those remedies should
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Not cause worse problems than they solve (If you stop 10 people who shouldn’t be voting from voting at the cost of stopping 1000 people who should, for instance, that’s not an improvement)
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Be targeted to solve the problem it’s intended to solve. I’m doing this from memory, but don’t most voter fraud cases revolve around fraudulent registration or absentee ballots? That’s something that voter ID wouldn’t really solve.
It is difficult to derive any meaningful statistical values when it comes to voter fraud, for the same reasons we can’t give an average for the length of a unicorn’s dick.
Well, we know the average penguin is two feet tall, so the dick must be smaller than that.