No, not even mischief. The proposals for Voter ID improve the voting system. I am in favor of them. I have no need to stigmatize them with any pejorative term, no matter how light-hearted.
Sure. Trot out some examples of falsity promulgated by the Washington Times.
Someone mentioned earlier that voter ID disproportionately hurts Democrats. I don’t think that’s true anymore. The people most likely to not have ID and have trouble getting it are the elderly, not the poor. The poor either work or collect benefits, both of which require ID. They probably rent their apartments or homes, which also requires ID.
Elderly people may not have any current need for ID and are often trotted out as the examples when activist groups sue over these laws.
And who do the elderly vote for nowadays?
How? They solve no existing problem.
Neither does worrying about voter machines or campaign finance. Of course, there really is no comparison because we can actually find examples of voter fraud, we just disagree on whether they are significant enough to warrant voter ID laws. You can’t find any examples of voter machines being hacked or independent election spending directly influencing a politician’s votes in a quid pro quo manner. Yet the solutions proposed in both cases are much more far-reaching. And this to solve theoretical problems. At least voter ID purports to solve a problem that actually exists.
Except we didn’t really learn anything, imho. I guess a really extreme claim like “every single fact the Washing Times ever prints is automatically wrong” was disproved, but no one ever believed that to begin with. Is the Washington Times in fact a fair and balanced news source? I guess my only response to that question is… umm, beats me?
There’s an interesting question as to how one should treat apparently-factual claims about a situation from a generally politically biased news source. But I think it’s outside the scope of this thread, and I don’t think we really learned much about it one way or other from the Elucidator kerfluffle.
I’m mildly curious by what metric this has been established, on the assumption that merely making an appearance of improvement that can impress some people doesn’t count.
It was never strictly about voter ID, no matter how many times you guys repeat that. It was about using voter ID as a means to a nefarious and partisan end.
Its like we object to Republicans using baseball bats to club baby harp seals, to raise money for the $10 million Sarah Palin demands to shut the fuck up. I might object because those little seals are too cute to be clubbed, others might object because they don’t want Sarah Palin to shut up.
No matter what opinion you might have on those issues, the legality, Constitutionality, function and all America wooden goodness of the baseball bat…doesn’t enter into it. Its not about the baseball bat, its about what it is being used for.
The difference is that our campaign-finance system is an existing problem.
I honestly have no idea what campaign finance reform has to do with anything. It’s an interesting topic, but why is it in this thread?
I strongly disagree. But that’s a topic for another thread.
What’s the problem? The length of this thread suggests that there are many answers to that question. But for me it comes down to this: I, personally, have not studied any of these proposed laws at much length, because I, personally, do not have the knowledge and background that would be necessary to really predict the impact of any of these laws. But the Democratic party leaders who are the ones who initially objected to these laws DO have that knowledge and expertise, and they are the ones making the initial claim. Now, obviously they are partisans and we shouldn’t immediately take everything they have to say at face value… but, in this case, why would they lie? If voter ID laws were NOT having a disparate impact, why would Democrats object to them? (Assuming you’re not so cynical as to suggest that Democrats actually want voter fraud to occur.)
If you look at the who is supporting these laws, who is opposing them, and the context (these laws coming along at the same time as reduced voting hours, reducing early voting, etc.), Occam’s razor pretty clearly suggests that these laws ARE in fact likely to have a disparate impact, which is why they were proposed in the first place, and why so many on the left oppose them.
I will respond to this post at some point when I get a chance, but I have run out of time right now.
Sure, they do: the problem of ultra-close elections.
In what way? There is no quid pro quo, and “getting money out of politics” is a nebulous purpose with no particular justification as an end in itself.
There will always be ultra-close elections and I’ve never before heard them called a problem.
Of course it has justification as an end in itself. A democracy where the rich and the business interests always get their way is a plutocracy, not a democracy, and not a good society.
Is there any way to demonstrate that this is due to campaign financing? Has the campaign finance changes to date reduced the problem?
Or could it be that the economically powerful have other ways to leverage their power? Such as jobs. Would Michigan politicians support the auto industry even if they didn’t get donations from the auto industry? Of course. Same goes for coal in West Virginia, corn in Iowa, oil in Texas, Wall Street in New York. The power to move jobs out of one state and into another is where the real power lies.
Another theory is that since politicians mostly know other rich people, that’s where they get their views and ideas from. So they’ll always be biased towards the desires of the rich, because that’s whose parties they go to, that’s who their daughters marry, that’s who they hang out with at church.
A voter ID law is almost exactly as likely to cause an ultra-close election as it is to prevent one.
Where the hell did you study statistics?
And if an ultra-close election is a problem, the solution is always a recount.
I think the solution is to just call it a tie, since accurate vote counts are not possible.