So, why does a lawyer answer a question with a question? Well, why shouldn’t a lawyer answer a question with a question? Its perfectly legal!
Gee, why? I have seen nothing but statements about why voter fraud isn’t a problem, because it’s low numbers won’t affect any election.
Right?
So why am I a “piece of work” for pointing out the same calculus affects your point?
In this case, because I am trying to figure out what answers will be swept aside as irrelevant. If i can point to a legislator making the point, but it doesn’t matter – then why bother?
Okay so in this thread we have Uzi, demanding that those lazy twats should just get IDs. The fact that millions don’t have them means to him that millions are too lazy to vote. He’s what I’d call the Pissed Off Conservative.
We have Magellan, who’s just dim and pretty much echos anything he hears that’s right-ish. He’s what I’d call the Simple Answers Conservative.
We have Emacknight, who I think is suffering from a bad case of the libertarians. He wants people to take responsibility and get IDs. So he’s the Ayn Rand Memorial Spank Bank Conservative.
We’ve got Bricker, who is smart enough to know the rest of it is bullshit, but is largely amoral and uncaring about anyone that isn’t in his immediate circle. And he didn’t need no government helping him! So Bricker is a Successful Without Any Help Conservative.
It’s like birdwatching. But instead of shitting on your car, they shit all over American ideals.
So, great defense of this GOP initiative, guys. You are really doing God’s work here.
Yeah, it’s pretty frustrating to have someone come along and puncture your confident assertions, isn’t it?
That’s my job, though.
The trouble is you do nothing but bat your eyelashes and pretend to be too stupid to understand what is being said.
Well, you actually suck at it. Pretending to be too stupid to understand isn’t the same thing as showing an assertion is without merit.
Except, Lobo, I haven’t said I don’t understand anything. Nor have I pretended not to understand anything in the thread. Instead, I have rebutted claims made in this thread.
My basic position has been, and remains, that photo ID laws for voters area. Wise idea, because they will allow meaningful enforcement of anti-fraud laws.
The general tenor of the response has been that because these laws may cause people who want to vote not to vote, they are bad.
Since I don’t agree that they present restrictions that are too onerous, I don’t share that concern.
Please tell me what I don’t understand. Or what I pretend not to understand.
Maybe he isn’t pretending, Lobohan. It wouldn’t be a matter of intelligence as such, but of the tightness of partisan blinkers.
Here’s how it goes: the topic of the thread is the designated hitter rule, which I hold to be an abomination. Bricker responds that the typical baseball game is designed to be nine innings long. I point out that the designated hitter rule places certain players in special categories with special privilege. **Bricker **cites the Big Golden Book of Baseball, page eight, wherein in states that a baseball game is usually nine innings long, except in the case of a tie.
This is repeated six or ten or eleventy-seven times, until Bricker declares that he has punctured my arguments adroitly, does a victory lap and pats himself on the back vigorously, having once again won the argument.
His office wall must be festooned with Participation Ribbons.
“With an ID requirement, you have…” pretty extensive experience in the world of criminal law “to take to a jury?”
Why don’t you try reading what you are responding to?
I’ve defended a boatload of bad check charges.
So I am fairly confident I understand what it takes to convict someone when the issues include an identity that was verified by a photo ID.
What you want it to be about is the evil motives supposedly animating the various state legislatures that support photo ID laws as a condition to cast a vote.
So why am I talking about the legalities?
Because your argument is based on an inference. You don’t have a mind reading machine; you’re not Kreskin. So when you say the motives involved are impure, you necessarily are asking the reader to infer that this is so, because any other motive is not credible.
When I point out that these actions are legal and have valuable effects in a legal context, I am supplying another, more salubrious, and credible motive – to rebut the inference you urge upon readers.
Suppose I were to offer absolutely convincing proof that the city council passed speeding laws to raise revenue in the form of traffic tickets. I have them on hidden camera admitting that if the revenue weren’t there, they would not bother.
Does that mean we should be against the speed laws? Demand they be repealed?
No. Even though they motive for their passage is improper, if we can see the laws serve an independent good, then we should keep them.
You want to keep the argument focused on the improper motives of the lawmakers. I don’t care. I want the argument on whether the laws are wise in their own right.
So just fucking say it then. What would the evidence be? Why are you being evasive?
So. Your case is bolstered, then, by slanderous innuendo such as:
Bereft of any evidence worth the name that there is any voter fraud worth our serious attention, you offer your intuition about the motives of Democrats. And my argument is “based on an inference”? Aren’t you dangerously close to the sort of hypocrisy you decry so very, very often?
The actual substance of my argument you have already stipulated, as you did here:
Mind reading is OK when you do it, but not for me? And who is this Kweskin fellow? I think I remember the old folks talking about somebody with a similar name.
This is perhaps your most egregiouisly insulting argument wherein, once again, you pretend not to understand what others are saying:
Of course not, its beneath the dignity of a slime mold to even offer such an embarrassingly bad analogy. There are posters here so genuinely stupid that I can fairly offer them some slack, they know not what they do, nor how they do it. But they deserve my compassionate restraint, they don’t have the firepower, I don’t challenge Stevie Hawking to a Mambo contest. You are not offered such leniency, you demand respect for your intelligence. And you have it, but there is a cost.
A just and worthy law is a fine thing, a gem of our civilization. By precisely the same token, a just and worthy law warped and twisted to an unjust end is a perversion. As a deft hand with erotic fiction can be a joy and a boon, crude porn is disgusting. If justice were not possible, and men incapable of it, then injustice is merely a universal condition. But justice is possible, men do reason, and when we fail at either or both, the failure is that much worse.
The motivation for these actions don’t require mind-reading, just as jury verdicts do not require a universal wisdom of Solomon. We reason, we arrive at a reasonable conclusion. The restrictions on voting rights, the restriction on voting times and hours, and the restrictions on voting registration add up to a convincing case for voter suppression. Not beyond any doubt, no leap of faith is required here. Beyond a reasonable doubt.
Now, you may assert as you claim to, that the beneficial effects of these actions far outweigh any negative effects. But you cannot prove the problem truly exists, and cannot prove that these efforts will solve the problem. Indeed, since we have almost no evidence that the problem truly exists, even if the problem is fixed we won’t know!
Are there no solutions, none, that doesn’t require these adverse effects? You started out by declaiming on the sacred value of voter confidence. Surely a prejudicial application of the law to adversely effect the power of a given block of voters cannot have a positive effect on their confidence? Do you imagine that black voters who find their Sunday voting custom specifically enjoined, they stand about and say “Well, that’s OK, because now I feel so much better about my electoral confidence!”?
What about them? They don’t count? Or have you some reliable metric that shows that the positive effect of these actions outweigh the negative? Would that be in Bricker Units, this measurement? Once again, bereft of actual proof, you would be falling back on bald assertion.
Your argument is little more than a tower of teetering rationalizations that can barely stand on their own, much less offer each other support. You demand that they be offered a respect they do not deserve, based on evidence you cannot offer.
To sum up: Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
You haven’t proven that it is too difficult or expensive to get an ID. Again, every other civilized country’s population seems to manage it just fine, yet you Americans can’t seem to make it work.
If I said by next Wednesday, you had to get your ID, then you’d have a point. It would be almost impossible. Yet, you have years between elections! Years! Do you know what a year is such that you can honestly say it is impossible to get your ass down to whatever government agency handles this shit to do what you have to do? That you can’t cover off most of the requirements online before you get there so you don’t have to go back again? That you can’t arrange a friend or relative to drive you there if transportation is such a burden?
The person who can’t get their ID within that time has either something seriously fucked up with their situation (a very small subset of non-ID holders) for which I honestly do feel sorry for them (a great opportunity for some enterprising political party to help them sort it out), or are so stupid such that simple tasks elude them, or are just plain too lazy. You seem to think that the latter two would just vote if you made it even easier for them to do so and that it is a great loss for democracy if they don’t vote.:dubious:
I see, you expect the government to do something rather than the parties who want these people to vote for them.
Accurate? No person should vote who can’t prove who they are. Did you see the link I posted on how Canada does it? Those 10% who don’t have an ID can drag along a friend/neighbor who does have an ID to vouch for them. Simple.
Did they vote before?
So, the Republicans will be in power forever?
Gee, I’ve already mentioned it. An enterprising political party would investiage the requirements and arrange to get the forms for an ID to the people who need them. They would arrange transportation. They would help these people.
Which every other country does now. You need an ID. Simple. Using it to vote is one of all the other useful things you can do with it.
If I made a law that said all Black people had to vote between 1AM - 4AM, that would suppress votes from a specific subgroup. If I made that same law such that is applied to everyone, it still would still suppress votes (who wants to vote between 1am and 4am?), but it is fair to all who choose to vote. One is wrong, the other just stupid. Saying voting is held on Monday, a month from now is neither. Canadian elections are held in similar time frames with similar notice. US elections are held a bit more regularly such that it is easier to plan when you do need your ID.
You keep offering excuses as if they are deal breakers. Some small portion of the population will have a problem complying. Most will not. I don’t even know how you can get a job without ID let alone vote.
What are you talking about?
Let’s take the case of Ramon Cue, who I have mentioned before. Cue is not a citizen, and records show he voted in 1996. But he says he’s a schizophrenic, doesn’t remember voting and said three others have his same name and birth date.
If that’s true, then he has a reasonable doubt defense built in – any of the other three could have been the voter. But if Florida had had a Voter ID with photo law, then they could show that the voter had an ID with Cue’s address and Cue’s photo. A jury can conclude from that that Cue was the voter.
Let’s get this one addressed separately:
[/quote]
Is that slanderous innuendo? Did I say that?
You didn’t link it. Did I really say that?
Or maybe I said it, but there was some context. Like, maybe, in reply to another post?
Hmmm. So is Ludovic’s line ALSO “slanderous innuendo?” Or just mine?
And gee, why no link?
All it means is that the person casting the vote had an ID that passed the polling place worker’s scrutiny. It had a picture resembling the person presenting it and the name and address of a registered voter.
Yeah, there’s just no way that a fraudulent vote could be cast there! But at least someone might get convicted, which is a net positive in Bricker’s world.
Eta: I’m not quite sure what they are going to be convicted of - denying that they cast a valid vote?
If the person were not a US citizen, they would be convicted of casting an illegal vote. If the person were a convicted felon in a state that does not permit convicted felons to vote, they would be convicted of casting an illegal vote.
The difference between this scheme and the non-ID world is obvious: without an ID scheme, there is very little risk of a non-citizen voter being caught. With ID, there is a very good chance.