If we had an election today on the fate of voter ID laws, who would have the most difficult time voting? Poor and minority voters. This is because in many states, the voting machines are allocated in such a way that affluent voters can waltz right through their precincts while poorer voters sometimes have to wait hours. Anyone whose head is not firmly lodged up his ass can see that this is intended to suppress the vote of certain voters. So in any vote to ratify organized suppression of voters, one must account for the fact that many voters would be suppressed from voting by other means.
Well, obviously there is NOW. At the time, there wasn’t. I’m entirely confident that you would not argue in favor of Jim Crow laws now. But if we take someone who subscribes to the same ethical and political philosophies that you subscribe to, and transport them back to the South in the 1950s, and put them in the body of a white man…
In any case, you’re dodging the question. Do you agree that the arguments you are using in favor of voter ID laws could be used in favor of Jim Crow laws?
“Its not a crime to be poor in America, but it might as well be.”
- Will Rogers
The legislature passed it. Bricker believes it. That settles it.
No, I disagree. Jim Crow laws suffered from a fatal flaw: their application was immediately, clearly, and undeniably racist. The photo ID laws do not suffer from that characteristic.
Since it is not racist to suppress poor voters, and it is only a coincidence that they happen to be mostly black.
Utterly irrelevant, since no one of any race is having votes suppressed.
Mileage varies.
You missed “assertion of facts not in evidence” (see his most recent post as of this writing).
That said, we shouldn’t be too hard on him – I suppose that these days a Virginia Republican must vent the pain somehow, and quibbling on a message board is better than drinking oneself into a stupor or pounding one’s fist through the drywall.
No, it doesn’t. Evidence varies from zero to none for the proposition. That still makes the mileage zero.
The stated purpose was to suppress votes. That you cannot deny, because several Republican lawmakers have been quoted here admitting that. That the majority of the votes were black, and therefore presumed to be voting Democratic, is just a coincidence.
“The” stated purpose? No. One stated purpose, “admitted” by a scant tiny minority of those voting for the initiative, was to suppress votes. Another stated purpose was to increase voter confidence, especially in the event of very close elections.
You like the admission by the very few, so you accept that; you don’t like the better explanation provided by many, so you reject it.
Seriously? Is “voter confidence” sincerely believed by anyone with an IQ over 80? I invite any such person to tell us just how many miscast votes there have been in recent times.
It isn’t that we like or dislike the different admissions / announced justifications. Instead we note that there is considerable support for seeing partisan motivation in the additional laws and regulations accompanying this one. And evidence of neither voter non-confidence nor actual in person voter fraud to support the other justification.
And just how does restricting voting hours, restricting early voting and closing polls on Sunday fit under that rubric?
I believe it.
It’s up to you to decide what you imagine my IQ to be, but I’d humbly suggest that a person with an IQ of 80 could not converse here in the way I have over the past fourteen years.
Now, miscast votes. I suspect that Florida had perhaps 150 miscast votes out of the millions that were cast in the last presidential election.
And of course those votes were meaningless: there were 8.47 million votes cast, and Obama won by over 74,000. Even if we were to imagine every single one of those votes were removed from Obama’s total, anyone can see it wouldn’t have affected the race a bit. So it’s certainly fair to point out that voter confidence in the results is utterly unaffected by the spectre of miscast – or more accurately, illegally cast – votes.
But that’s not the issue. The issue is Florida in 2000, where the margin of victory was ~500 votes. In that case, it becomes starkly evident that a couple hundred illegally cast votes might be an issue of voter confidence, especially if you cannot say precisely how many there even were. Washington State in 2006 also comes to mind.
And you should know that this is my point, because I’m certain you’ve been in threads in which I’ve explained it before.
I know your own IQ exceeds 80, so that’s not the reason you apparently forgot.
It doesn’t. And I’m not speaking up in favor of those measures.
If you wish to say, “I accept Photo ID but am strongly against restricting voting hours, restricting early voting and closing polls on Sunday,” then I’d agree with you.
Suppose me and my friends got elected to a majority in the state legislature, and after looking at the voting statistics, determined that most people who voted absentee lived in precincts that were heavily conservative. So we passed a law banning absentee ballots, for anyone, anywhere, with the public claim that absentee ballots were being abused for fraudulent purposes. Do we have to prove there was fraud? Is that voter suppression? Or just good stewardship of the electoral process?
No, you don’t have to prove a thing. That’s what being in a representative democracy is all about.
Would you oppose Photo ID laws that also include measures that restrict hours, early voting and close voting on Sunday?