Supressing far, far more legitimate voters than illegitimate ones is a BAD THING.
Logically, if she weighs the same as a duck…
But how do we know the majority wants vote supression? I know, let’s take a vote! wait…
No. In a representative democracy, consensus is defined by popularity. Thus argumentum ad populum is not a fallacy when the subject is the legitimacy of a measure passed by democratic process. (If the subject were the objective correctness of a proposition, of course, you’d be correct. Good thing that’s not what I’m claiming.)
Didn’t you have to learn this stuff in high school? Wasn’t there a class on speech and debate? A club? Something?
Been done. In every state that’s enacted voter ID laws.
So you’re acknowledging that you’re not right, but relying on the fact that most people want it.
Okay, I acknowledge that surveys may suggest that majorities would in general favor voter IDs. Let’s provide them with facts, and then ask again. Let’s ask if they think it would be worth the cost.
Relatedly, I suppose you must favor abortion rights. After all, majorities do, so therefore…
I thought voter fraud was a serious problem that could sway elections?
How is what you’re describing healthy for a republic?
He’s assuming that 100% of the votes suppressed would be fraudulent votes. If all fraudulent/suppressed votes were for Democrats, it would certainly look like the Democrats were being unfairly suppressed in general, but being that the suppressed votes were fraudulent, in the end it would be healthier for the country.
Of course, given that it’s nearly impossible to be that accurate without suppressing legitimate voters, it’s a silly damn assumption.
That’s not really been my argument. The chance of voter fraud affecting a given election is very small. When an election is decided by 50,000 votes, or even 10,000 votes, we simply can’t posit a voter fraud problem that could have swayed it. Sure, there might have been 600 non-citizens voting – who cares? So the winner won by 9,400 instead of 10,000 – big deal.
The problem arises only in the very rare cases when an election’s results are within a margin of error that includes voter fraud numbers.
The Washington State governor’s race in 2004 is a good example. No one knew ahead of time that the race would be so razor-thin. After a recount, Democrat Christine Gregoire was ahead by 129 votes.
That is not the time to discover that 200 voters were illegal aliens.
What do you do? You can’t subtract 200 votes from Gregoire – that would clearly be unfair, absent some showing they all voted for her. At the same time, you realize that the opponent is going to point to those votes as evidence that the winner shouldn’t be considered the winner.
So my point is: prudence dictates we implement a system ahead of time that allows us to reliably associate voters with voting. That may not stop fraud, but it creates a real framework for catching and punishing non-citizen voters, for example. Now, a voter can simply deny he was the one casting the ballots.
I do not. However, when I get a few minutes, I’ll go through the other thread and take a look at your responses.
Why is “liberals” in quotes? I sometimes have difficulty trying to pin down precisely what insinuation you are trying to float, here. Must be all that flowery rhetoric.
And the loss of Democrat voters? Would that be the result of removing the Dem advantage in illegal alien voters and felon voters, the slime you posted previously? (I think that’s number one on the Bricker Slime List, hard to top that one…) Or would that be the loss of perfectly legitimate voters?
So, anyway, if a few more Republicans are elected to Congress, or the President, who would not have otherwise been elected, that’s a small price to pay to eradicate this desperately urgent crisis of voter confidence? Is that what this boils down to?
Gotta admire the stern rectumtude of the Republican Party here, no sacrifice is too great for the Democrats to make! Damned white of you guys!
Jeebus McRebus, Bricker, is there anything too low for you guys? Is there any line you won’t cross? Any political trickery and deceit that is too disgusting for you to embrace?
Can you tell us what it is? Or would you prefer to keep that as a surprise?
Dude, you can hardly give any examples of six fraudulent voters, let alone 60 or 600. [ETA: This was of course @Bricker’s last post.]
A problem that, so far as you can prove, does not actually exist.
But we’ve already established that ID doesn’t do that.
The real issue here is that Bricker is okay with his side winning by cheating.
No, no, no! Its legal and constitutional, so its not cheating! If it was cheating, it would be illegal! Like the way the Democrats permit illegal aliens and felons to vote! That’s cheating!
I have yet to see an answer to my question about why it is any more difficult for a “minority” to get an ID than a “non-minority”.
That I can actually agree with, so long as the framework does not impede legitimate voters. That’s the hard part.
By the way (this isn’t directed to you specifically Bricker, but to the conversation in general), it’s actually somewhat logical that enthusiastic voter fraud efforts would catch more Democrat voters than Republicans, even if it was 100% unintentional.
Start with the following suppositions:
- For any social program, including voting, there is the set of people who clearly qualify, the set of people who clearly don’t qualify, and the set of people who are on the ‘fringe’, where special circumstances or coincidences tend to make people who qualify hard to tell apart from the people who don’t qualify but can look like they do through their own special circumstances or coincidences.
- Ideally, both the left and the right would be happy to make sure 100% of the people who qualify get into the program and 0% of the people who don’t qualify don’t get in. However, it takes a lot of resources to pick apart the qualified people from the non in the fringe, typically more than we have available. Chasing the margins, basically. Because of this:
- Left-wingers tend to want to extend social programs to everyone who qualifies, including the fringe, even if it means some people who don’t qualify get in. This makes sense, because generally the left’s goal is to provide services to people, and they don’t want to leave anyone out who could benefit from the service.
- Right-wingers tend to want to restrict social programs such that nobody who doesn’t qualify gets in, even if it means some people on the fringe who do qualify get left out. This also makes sense, because even if the right agrees with the program, they want to be sure their money is well-used, which means not paying for people who don’t deserve it.
The positions in general are sensible and in and of themselves non-partisan, in that they don’t take into account who the people are or who they support, only if they qualify for the program.
But when it comes to voting, the people in the fringe will tend to vote Democrat, because there’s a better chance they will be let into social programs in general, whether legitimately or not. The fact that cracking down on the fringe will disproportionately affect Democrat voters is a side effect, not the goal, although I imagine it’s not an unwelcome side effect.
Unfortunately, in doing so, it becomes a partisan matter and makes things real damn complicated.
Dirk isn’t being sarcastic, he’s just a member of the Leo Strauss, Avraham Stern and Joseph Vogt school of thought.
Anyway, here’s a good primer on the 2000 election.
Edit:
As Bricker will no doubt point out, a law does not have to be explicitly written to discriminate in order to discriminate in fact.
This effect is demonstrated herefor instance.