Fortunately, this isn’t the Elections forum, so when adahar is behaving like a braindead cocknugget, we’re free to call him a braindead cocknugget.
Cocknugget doesn’t even make sense. Buttnugget.
I’m not defending generic perfidify. I am defending the Voter ID laws. Your cite does not show anyone – Juan or other – being unable to vote because Florida required a photo ID.
I don’t deny there’s a larger picture. But I say that on balance, the value of these laws is a positive and the mere fact that some motives beyond the positive may have influenced some legislators is not sufficient to change that.
Returning to the thread topic – humiliating Counsellor Brickhead – will he accept the challenge to name 1 (one) improper voter that Voter ID would have prevented, for every 100 voters that the “lefties” and centrists demonstrate were fraudulently disenfranchised by GOP state governments?
As I believe I mentioned above, I am not defending a broad category called “fraudulently disenfranchised by GOP state governments.”
So why would you possibly expect me to tie Voter ID, the specific issue, to “fraudulently disenfranchised by GOP state governments?”
And you’ll notice that my arguments never depend on name-calling, and I thus don’t do it. You, of course, need to.
Let it be noted that in advancing and defending a perfidious Republican effort to tilt the electoral process in their favor, Bricker has displayed admirable civility and politeness.
Attaboy, Bricker!
There. Done.
And let it be noted that when discussing the Democratic success in passing a set of laws that say, “The governor can appoint a replacement Senator, but only if he’s a Democrat,” elucidator has tepidly mentioned he thought it was “sordid,” but only because the Republicans made them do it, somehow.
That’s an interesting point… both of these situations are ones in which their very nature make it hard to get accurate counts. If people are successfully voting fraudulently in-person, no one will know. And if a change to voter ID laws makes it moderately more difficult to vote, and 1000 people who would have voted without that change instead don’t vote, no one will know exactly who they are either.
So… how can we know? Well, the best that we can do is to look at research and statistical analysis and so forth to try to get estimates as to the scale of the problem. Unfortunately, that kind of meaningful prediction and analysis has been short on the ground in this thread, but there have been at least some serious predictions suggesting that voter ID laws might suppress voter turnout by around 2%. If there’s been a similar analysis about likely amounts of in-person voter fraud, I’m unaware of it.
Except for *every *person who shows up to vote, whether legitimately or fraudulently, and is told they already had. And the officials who so note. But the number of times that’s ever been reported is in single digits.
Nor do you need to, and to demand names is to divert attention from the broader effects and the obvious true purpose.
To do a statistical analysis, you first must have data. To do that, you must first find some actual incidents of the type. Those most motivated to do so have failed in a truly epic manner.
Even Bricker’s cite from Miami that he’s so proud of is inapplicable - there are a couple of cases of fraudulent registration, yes, and probably quite a few more out there, but not of fraudulent voting, and nothing that would be prevented by his pet ID laws. I’m sure he knows his cite is not what he tells us it is, and there’s no need to grant it to him.
I’m aware of several “might in the future suppress” studies. I’m not aware of any study that looks at actual election results and concludes that such suppression actually happened. Indiana’s ID law has been around since 2005 and upheld by the Supreme. Court in 2008. Where is the showing that voters were lost in Indiana as a result?
Is there any study that looks at ACTUAL results, as opposed to future predictions, and supports your claim?
OK, I’ve come up with yet another approach to this topic.
I assume you’d agree that two different voter ID laws in two different states could have vastly different actual impacts based on seemingly minor details of implementation, how many people already have IDs, how easy it is to cast provisional ballots without them, and a host of other such factors. A “voter ID” law could in fact be a law intended and designed to prevent fraud, or it could in fact be a law intended to throw up barriers in voting with disparate impact.
And without a really specific and in-depth knowledge base that I certainly don’t have and no one in this thread seems to have either, it’s not necessarily easy to tell one kind from the other.
Therefore, again, we look at context. If this voter ID law was suggested as part of a package of laws written by a group of legislators who were also proposing many other laws clearly designed to make the results of elections more transparent and trustworthy (ie, auditable paper trails from touch screen voting), then it seems likely that these legislators actually wrote a law which was intended to do what it claimed. On the other hand, if this voter ID law was suggested as part of a package of laws including reducing voting hours, eliminating early voting and so forth, then there’s far more reason to suspect that the implementation details of the specific law were set up in a more nefarious way.
And as far as I know (and again, I’m not an expert on any of this) nearly all the voter ID laws we’re discussing in this thread are closer to the latter than to the former.
This issue is difficult to discuss because it involves so many different laws with so many different variables in so many different states. But if legislators in Texas passed a bunch of laws relating to voting, all of which seemed intent on making voting harder, and one of them was a voter ID law, then it’s just nonsensical to think that they actually crafted that voter ID law in a way that fits with its claimed purpose. So while you might support voter ID laws in some abstract sense, we don’t live in an abstract sense, and in the real world, if we assume that the people who write laws have some level of basic competence (if not morality), there’s every reason to believe that these voter ID laws will have the effect that was intended. Not the effect that was CLAIMED to be intended, but the effect that was actually intended.
To put it another way, you’ve admitted that the motives of some number of the people behind these laws are impure. But if those are the people who were filling in the precise little details that could make the difference between a good law and voter suppression, then why should you trust the law that they wrote?
Because I can read the law itself, and not need to infer anything.
My uncle is a well known political scientist who has a particular expertise for taking large scale statistics and drawing human-level conclusions from them. A year or two ago I asked him about this voter ID issue and he stated without hesitation that it was something that Republicans should be ashamed of, basically seeming to agree with the general liberal position in this thread.
A couple of months ago I asked him to link me to any studies of the actual impact that these voter ID laws have had in voting rates, and he said that as far as he knows (and he would know) there have been none.
So… it seems like at least for now we continue to be without actual hard data one way or the other.
(And without knowing how similar the details of the Indiana law are, I don’t know if there’s any reason to think it’s really comparable to the more recent wave of laws that prompted this thread.)
I might have missed it in the last 4000 posts but how does voter ID laws make in person voter ID more reliably prosecuted? I admit I don’t know much about in person voter fraud, but I don’t know a whole lot about many mythical things.
We don’t have to catch them, we just have to have evidence that they exist. We still have voter rolls so surely we have mountains of evidence of in person voting of dead people or people showing up to vote only to find that someone else has already voted in their name. Or is the voter fraud the result of fraudulent registration? Or is it like the sword I bought last week that glows in the presence of orcs, and it only cost me an extra $500 but isn’t the extra security of knowing when there are orcs about well worth the price?
Can you, though? If the law says “the voter will need to show one of the following three types of ID…” that means nothing without also knowing:
-what percentage of voters in that state have each of the types of ID
-how much time it takes to get each type of ID
-how much money it takes to get each type of ID
-how likely it is that people who don’t have a particular type of ID have all the necessary prerequisite paperwork already
-how much oversight there is over the whole process
-what various fallback options there are
-how all of the various answers to the above questions vary by demographics, and how those demographics align with party affiliation
and so forth. You’re a sharp guy and a lawyer, but I see no reason to think that you have all of that sort of knowledge about states other than your own at your fingertips.
Why do you suppose those studies – ones about actual turnout – are not available?
Not “at my fingertips,” to be sure. But most are not tremendously difficult to find. Pick a state.
This. This is classic Bricker, worthy of consideration for his Greatest Hits compilation. So much misinformation and evasion in so few words.
Not a fact, but a “mere fact”. Sure, its a fact, but its a sorta kinda fact, not to be confused with a fact. And “some motives”. Not all of them, Shirley. Maybe the majority of them, perhaps, could be, but that is still just “some”! Maybe only a few, maybe more than half, maybe almost all…no matter, they all qualify as “some”.
And “beyond the positive”! Oh, my, what a gem! What a perfect little pearl! Its not negative, mind you, but it exceeds mere positive, like thinking outside the box, it is innovative and inclusive, it allows for another whole category of value!
And again, “may”. Of course, we are not certain the it actually did, rather than might have. We cannot know that! But it may have! A very open-minded admission, to be sure, to allow for the possibility that the bleeding obvious is truth. And coupled with that classic Bricker verbal workhorse, “some”.
And we end at “not sufficient”. A judgement call, to be sure, but one he boldly makes! Yes, certainly, there is some skulduggery and perfidy afoot! But not sufficient to actually taint such a noble goal as voter confidence. These things take place in a perfect vacuum of value, where motivation is not important, not consequential, not “sufficient”. And hence, to be ignored.
A pity, perhaps, that what would be sufficient cannot be defined, fans of Brickerese mental gymnastics may be disappointed. But enough, he has spoken, it is not sufficient. Those ruffians and lesser citizens affected will simply have to suck it up, for the good of the Republicans. The Republic. Sorry, slip of the keyboard…
But entirely…nay, relentlessly…polite.
Let me remind Counsellor that the thread topic is “I Pit the (ID-demanding) GOP vote-suppressors”. The “ID” is just a parenthetical adjective – the thread encompasses all GOP vote-suppression malice. Counsellor has posted almost 700 times in this thread (:eek: 
), apparently to solve a self-imposed logic puzzle! Can he divert attention from GOP malice, cynicism and corrupt politics by proving, after some practice, that he’ll support voter ID in the abstract? (And in a form weasel-word tailored to bypass the malicious intents of actual GOP ID programs.) He diverts the thread this way even knowing that in practical present-day U.S. politics GOP perfidy is a far bigger problem. The others may let you get away with it, but I won’t.
Once and for all, please. Yes or no, Please.
@ Bricker – Do you acknowledge that, had malicious GOP authorities had their way, that effect on election integrity would have been larger, most probably by a factor of at least ten, compared with the reality of the problems your voter ID solves?
Do you finally realize, after so many hundreds and thousands of posts, that this thread is not about some hypothetical defect-free voter ID system, but rather malicious GOP election plans, thwarted or not, and based on voter ID or not?
Do you admit that, however corrupt you think Democrat politicians are, the GOP is certainly worse, with
[ul]
[li] a wide range of measures to disenfranchise Democrat voters (IANAL but surely some of this behavior is criminal)[/li][li] sabotaging credit rating etc. with Congressional stunts[/li][li] feeding on American racism (“I don’t know if he’s born in Kenya.” – which Bricker would be the first esquire to jump in for: “He’s under oath, your Honor, and honestly doesn’t know personally where the President was born.” :smack: )[/li][/ul]
Do you admit that GOP vote-suppressors, whether they demand ID or not, are one of the most heinous breeds of party villains ever to appear? Bricker should condemn them also, and not in uncertain terms.
“never depend on name-calling” My arguments don’t depend on name-calling, but many GOP leaders really do deserve utter contempt. Some Democrat Congressman have faults, but none approaches the (feigned?) bitterness and hatreds, perfidy, hypocrisy, and even (feigned?) lunacy common among present-day GOP congresspeople and top commentators.
Multiple choice: Is this GOP behavior
admirable
wrong
other. Do you agree that top Democrats, whatever their faults, are nowhere nearly as outrageous?