Uzi, you seem to be sidling up to the notion that because some people don’t deserve to vote, hindering their ability to vote doesn’t matter, because you are not infringing on anything they actually should have. I caution you that slopes don’t get any slipperier than that. I don’t even want people I totally agree with deciding things like that.
I said this earlier, other countries have universal ID or universal passport.
If you want to require IDs you need to make them universal. I’d have no problem with that.
Dude, could we start with planetary, then maybe galactic…?
God no! Everyone has a right to vote barring some minimal restrictions. Age, currently within a penitentiary (my personal opinion until they are out they don’t get to vote), etc.
What I’m debating is that the requirement for an ID isn’t more than a minimal restriction for the vast majority of people rather than a major one like people are making out in this thread. There are exceptions, of course.
Canada doesn’t. You have to make the effort to go down to the registry office and pay for your ID. Most can manage this just fine. The rest can usually do it with a little assistance from friends, family, or just contacting the government and asking them how to go about it.
I have one here in Hong Kong. I’m required to have it and to pay for it myself. It has a built in chip that I can use to go through customs easily, rent an apartment and prove my identity at the bank. It is really useful. I would think the chance of someone stealing my identity here is lower than other places.
Yes, having photo ID is really useful. Some people don’t have it. Before we make photo ID a hurdle to being able to take part in the political process of a democracy for no good reason, how about we make sure everyone has it?
sigh
Okay, let me make sure I’m not misunderstanding you.
You think that the solution to overcoming an additional hurdle to voting is to go to the political party you are aligned with and ask them for help, under no guarantees that you will actually get it? That we should rely on private organizations to help people be able to vote due to government action making it harder? And that there shouldn’t be any concerted effort by the government to ensure that everyone who wants to vote legally can?
Yes, but the voting officials are still forced to take that guy’s word for it, ID or not! I don’t find this point particularly important, so I’m willing to drop it, but seriously… If you’re letting someone with no voter ID vote, you’re opening the door to all kinds of abuses. You still have to trust them.
No! NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! This is simply wrong. It is not easily done. Again, in an age where photo ID is increasingly important, 11% of citizens who could vote don’t have it. You mean to tell me that they lack it despite the fact that it’s so easy to attain, or is it more reasonable to assume that they don’t have it because it can be fucking difficult to get ID? I’ve explained several times why it would be difficult.
The USA isn’t most places in the world. It has a government where one party is incompetent and the other is actively trying to self-destruct. It has a crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, lines at the DMV that are hours long, etc. “American Exceptionalism”, if you will.
I’m not American. But you know why the government should pay for my ID? Because they are making it a prerequisite to vote. This isn’t rocket science. If the government requires something of me to vote, it can’t cost money. Poll taxes. Ring a bell?
Any figures on how many people lack ID? Or any information about what systems are in place to provide said ID?
Not the point. The reason that our libertarian distrust for big government is so important in this case is because if you even suggest something like a federal voter tracking program, or a federal program that would ensure that everyone has a mandatory ID, people will scream bloody murder.
Well, then that’s a problem, IMO.
No, really fucking important issue! This wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for the sheer number of people without ID. And that number itself is indicative of another likely issue – getting ID may be a damn good bit harder than you think it is.
I don’t have to prove that being poor makes you incapable. I simply have to point out that being poor can, in some circumstances, make getting ID inordinately difficult, then point out that those circumstances are not uncommon. The former I have done more often than I am willing to count in this very thread. The latter… Well, 50% of American citizens are basically scraping by, and count as “low-income” according to the tax brackets. Once again, I’d like to bring up that 11% figure… Is it so hard to draw a line between “Some poor people have real trouble getting photo ID” and “11% of Americans don’t have photo ID”?
Yeah, for some reason, this doesn’t happen in the USA.
Divorced from reality in the sense that you think it is okay to seriously disenfranchise 11% of the voting populace for the sake of preventing voter fraud, a non-issue with an effective rate of less than 0.0004%. Divorced from reality in the sense that you think that because you had no problems getting a photo ID, nobody ever could. Divorced from reality in the sense that you think that there’s no way of detecting or preventing voter fraud. Divorced from reality in the sense that you think that those that can’t get voter ID don’t deserve to be burdened with the responsibility of voting.
I am beginning to realize that my approach of answering questions posed to me honestly is a real disadvantage when debating people that won’t do the same.
The answer is no: I don’t believe for the majority of Democrats that the primary motivation is to continue to get felons or illegal alien votes.
But I do believe that if voter ID laws helped them, they generally would not oppose them so vocally.
How? Unless the person you’re claiming to be shows up while you’re there, how are you caught? You vote as Joe Blow, then walk away. Hours later the real Joe shows up. How exactly are you caught?
And I am not even focusing on this type of voter fraud. I am talking about Sven Yorgensen who came to this country illegally, across the border from British Columbia, without attracting the attention of the INS, settled down in Portland and registered to vote as a US citizen, even though he is not one. How is he caught?
And yet I see you Navy sitting in Hong Kong harbour on a regular basis, on its way to save some portion of the world from themselves, I presume.
I’m finding it hard to work up much sympathy, actually.
The government requires that you prove who you are and gives you a number of options to do so. It is your choice to comply or not. 90% seem to be capable of doing so.
Well having been poor, dirt poor actually, myself, I have a good idea on the difficulties involved. But given 4 years to address the issue, I’m pretty sure I could figure it out.
I never said I didn’t have problems. They seemed a pain at the time, but they weren’t insurmountable. I think this is where we differ. I don’t think being poor means a person is an incompetent.
Well, there are plenty of people who will pose questions to you dishonestly. I’m too lazy, its too much work.
Then why did you make such nasty insinuations? Was it a form of Republican humor? Was that it, you were joking?
Oh, wait, I see the semantics now. Not the majority of Democrats, not their primary motivation. To continue to get those tainted votes. Continue? Because they already are getting these votes?
Damn, but you’re slippery, Counselor! Slicker than greased owl shit.
That Democrats may exhibit the human tendencies of self-interest or even, yes! hypocrisy! yes, even that!..doesn’t enter into it. They’re not the ones doing it. And what they might do if the situation were different is nothing more than speculation.
Before I hold my nose and wade into this thread, I want to make a few preliminary comments:
(1) Bricker is not a liar.
(2) I don’t think that everyone who is supporting ID laws in this thread is stupid, or a jerk, or a partisan hack, or anything of that sort.
Sure, but as of right now, we (the US) don’t, and what we’re debating in this thread is a proposed change. If I was creating a democracy in the modern world from scratch, with no pre-existing political parties or demographics or anything, I would set up a system with electronic voting machines that produced a verified-by-the-voter paper record of their votes, making dangling-chad-style inaccuracies extremely unlikely, and also some kind of national identification that was free and extraordinarily easy to get and non-privacy-invasive and impossible to counterfeit, and on and on and on. But assessing how to make changes in current US society is not as simple as saying “well, let’s look at what an ideal democracy might look like in a vacuum and just randomly do things that in some way make us closer to that, and assume the outcome would be positive”.
I (and many other people in this thread) claim that the immediate impact of the laws as they’re currently being proposed would be to not reduce voter fraud, but to suppress a measurable percentage of voters who are more likely to vote D than R. If that’s the case (I believe it is, but will not claim it has been proven beyond all doubt), then the fact that such a law might be on the road towards some platonic ideal of democracy has no bearing on whether or not that law should be implemented today in the country we actually live in.
That’s pretty irrelevant, though. As long as there are SOME barriers to getting the ID card (even something as simple as going to some place and signing your name and not even having to pay money), then purely due to human nature, there are some people for whom that extra barrier is going to be the tipping point that prevents them from voting… in some cases for reasons that we would deride (eh, they’re just lazy, going down to that office is too much of a hassle) and in some cases for reasons that we would respect (already working 11 jobs, don’t own a car because spending every penny to support children and elderly parents, etc.) When considering what effect such a law would have on large numbers of people, the fact that there are plenty of people in that group who will in fact be able to overcome that hurdle, and that arguably the vast majority SHOULD be able to overcome that hurdle, doesn’t change the fact that there WILL be an impact. Any time you make something harder to do, fewer people will do it, period. That’s pretty much the whole point of the law of supply and demand. If you raise the price of donuts from .75 each to .85 each, you’ll sell fewer donuts, even if it’s hard to specifically identify precise people who could afford .75 but not .85 for donuts.
One final point: Even if this is in no way an actual US legal principle, I think that any laws which affect voting and elections should be subject to a much higher level of scrutiny than other laws, because they risk damaging the democratic apparatus itself. One of the nice things about democracies is that they’re self-correcting. If the Dems get into power and start going nuts doing stupid Dem stuff, they’ll get voted out. Then the Pubs will get into power and start going nuts doing stupid Pub stuff, and they’ll get voted out, etc., and the will of the majority is (eventually, kinda, sorta) implemented. But if the Dems get into power, and then use that power to make it even marginally easier for them to get elected in the future, then that’s INCREDIBLY dangerous to the democracy as a whole. (This self-correcting nature is another reason that free expression and an active and independent journalistic establishment is so important… the self-correction can only happen if people are honestly and fairly informed about what is actually happening.)
When I posted those words, I used the exact format and quoted the similar phrase I was responding to. I was, in other words, illustrating the maxim that, as my high school debate teacher would drill into our heads incessantly, a gratuitous assertion may be equally gratuitously denied. I was showing that line line I was quoting was invalid, by employing the same flawed tactic in the precisely opposite direction. And to make the point crystal clear, I quoted the inspiring line right above my text.
See that? The same use of ‘gung ho,’ the same if use of an interrogatory opening phrase, the same sentence pattern – see?
Oh, yeah, of course. Sorta kinda explains that one. And the others?
Like in GD, when you were making the point that a complicated scheme of voter fraud might not be necessary, all you needed was community action and awareness. And how you personally heard a CASA worker offer helpful hints in that direction. (Quote and link upthread, if memory fails…) Anecdata, offered on the basis of your solid credibility.
Just a passing observation, was it? Not pertinent to any particular question, then?
Factual statement, intended to rebut the claim that no illegal alien would possibly risk doing anything that might get him noticed or deported.
Like so many of your arguments, its a rational argument, but not a reasonable one. Notice how deftly you phrase it: no one could possibly, etc. Of course its possible, the realm of possibility is vast and encompassing. That is rational, we cannot say it is impossible. But is it likely? That’s where a reasonable argument differs from a strictly rational one. When you claim that our position is that voter fraud is impossible, and it follows that you only have to prove that it is possible, you win. Nope.
…rebut the claim that no illegal alien would possibly….
And no, not perzackly, again your skirt the facts. You were saying that illegal aliens are, to your certain knowledge, demonstrating in favor of the DREAM act, that was your proof that illegal aliens would not fear detection and deportation, not when the chance to affect American policy with their one vote was in the offing. How do you know? Well, this guy on TV said so!
You brought up the CASA worker anecdote to rebut the point that any effective voter fraud would require a logistical nightmare of conspiracy. No, no, says Bricker, I heard someone say something once, which means that voter fraud may well be part of the illegal immigrant community’s plan. Or something, anyway, you heard this, and offer it as anectdata. Is there a weaker form of evidence anywhere?
You claim that voter fraud exists, and is important enough that urgent, emergency action is required. The crisis is such that minor side effects, like adding additional burdens to a certain unreliable class of voters, can be shrugged off, darn shame, oh well. As you well know, huge efforts to detect voter fraud of gone unrewarded, the snipe is hunted, the snipe is not found.
You shrug that off, there is no good way to detect voter fraud, all of these efforts have failed as a result. Again, a rational argument that is not a reasonable argument. That these efforts failed because there is nothing to detect you feel free to dismiss. Which, given the effort expended by tighty righties, is the more likely? Saying something can happen is not the same as saying it is reasonable to assume that it has.
What you have is a set of interlocking rationalizations, each one weak on its own. But you apparently wish us to believe that if you innerconnect weak rationalizations, like a series of factory-reject Legos, they can be assembled into a compelling and reasonable argument. You cannot expect to bolster a weak argument with another weak argument, and that a strong, plausible argument will result.
That’s not how my argument went. Here are the two posts which began it:
And my response is: they’re risking very little, since with no voter ID scheme, there is no real way to prosecute a person who claims to be a citizen, registers, and votes, if that person is not listed with INS as a non-citizen.
So I disagree with your view that it’s unlikely, and not a reasonable possibility.
Again, no. I’ve made this point repeatedly, but I don’t mind doing it again: I claim that because very close elections are possible, we should act now to cut off possible avenues of voter fraud.
Do I have that right? Your actual position is not that voter fraud exists, but that it could exist at some future date, and pre-emptive measures are necessary? And that those pre-emptive measures are so important, so crucial, that hindering an unreliable group of voters is thereby kosher?
The actual quote. Which makes it abundantly clear that you offered your anectdata to refute my thesis about the complex logistics of voter fraud. And offering the further insinuation that there exists a illegal voting culture within the community.
Aren’t you one of those guys who is quick to scorn the use of personal anecdote as evidence?
My error. No need to have one in England, Only episode of suspected voter fraud (or electoral fraud) I can think of in recent memory was this.
Yes.
As long as the “hindering” amounts only to a requirement that the voters secure for themselves a free photo ID, yes.
And what if this made it virtually impossible for 5% of the electorate to vote, and convinced another 5% that voting, which they already didn’t care much about, is too much of a pain in the ass to deal with?