Which assumptions does Bricker reject?
Address the specific points, if you will. Thanks!
Don’t ask Clotha about the topic, you’ll confuse him. He’s only here to defend Bricker.
Well… yes. But to some extent, you could make the same argument about registering to vote at all, or registering for TANF – which is arguably of at least equal importance in the lives of those that need it. I don’t think anyone has seriously advanced the notion that because you must return the TANF form to a single location in each county – a location that is only open 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. Monday through Friday – the program is unduly burdensome. And this is a program that by its very nature is needed by people struggling with poverty.
So I feel like that kind of demand is not unduly burdensome.
Unfortunately, I think that this is a problem inherent in vesting power in our elected officials.
And I’m certainly willing to say it’s crappy. But I’m not as filled with righteous anger because in my view it’s not unusual for any party to use their position of power to leverage their own advantage. So I agree it’s a base, crappy, contemptible thing for elected officials to use their power to govern to instead give their own party advantages. I just think it’s par for the course.
I realize we’re really getting into semantics with this response, but:
“The will of the electorate” in this context is a tricky phrase. We do not, as some countries do, make voting mandatory. “The will of the electorate,” thus includes people who chose not to register, or register but decide on Election Day that they don’t want to brave the early snowstorm. Yes?
So if that’s true, then I would argue that “the will of the electorate” is not meaningfully hurt by requiring ID, because some portion of the electorate has chosen not to vote.
I’m following your wise suggestion:
However, since I started ignoring you, to my dismay you’ve made some excellentposts, and frankly I feel like kind of a stupid ass now for doing it as long as I did.
Right. History supports this view, and has repeatedly reaffirmed its truth.
You are absolutely right. As a poor man’s solution, I suggested no changes to election procedure become effective until at least one election cycle has passed – this is the same solution used for Congressional pay raises. No Congress can vote itself a pay raise; it may only vote the subsequent Congress a raise.
This is not a perfect bulwark, of course.
Again extremely valid. But politics is described as the art of the possible. I don’t believe either party would support any real reform that would take power out of their hands in this way.
Sure, a worthy goal, but even as you acknowledge, people have tried to game the system, and have had some success.
It wasn’t you.
Suddenly, this is a lot less fun.
“Chosen” being the operative word. Whether you regard the resulting burdens as onerous or petty, they did not choose them. They were not offered a choice, and the decision made for them runs counter to any empowerment to make such a choice. Deliberately, with political malice aforethought.
So, that’s it then? Bricker retreats to the last bunker, the Citadel of Equivalence, they’re all the same, all corrupt, no difference worth noting? Well, OK, sure, why not? Except, of course, that the Republicans did this and the Dems didn’t. Except for that minor detail…
“Chosen not to vote” being the operative phrase.
By that I mean that while they did not choose the burden, nor more than the people who decide not to vote because of the snowstorm chose the snow, they did choose not to vote.
This particular move, yes, comes from the Republicans. But that’s not emblematic of the Democrats’ purity in refusing to use political power to gain political advantage.
That’s true, no bout adoubt it! Just because somebody is guilty, doesn’t make somebody else innocent! Yeppers, you got that one nailed down! You’ll get no argument from me on that one! Got a mind like a steel…what’s that thing, slams shut, grabs a leg?..whatever!
Bricker triumphs again! And the peasants rejoice…
The difference is, are you reading closely?
The difference is, that the GOP is making it snow mostly on the Democrats. If this burden fell randomly on voters, you might have a point, although I’d still be against it.
But your analogy of a snowstorm is nonsense for two reasons:
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A snowstorm is a random event that cannot be controlled.
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Snow is being created in this analogy and being dumped on likely Democratic party voters.
So *choose *is a little disingenuous, don’t you think?
I suspect you’d find that the Dems have, recently at least, decided that getting more people to vote helps them more, than making it harder for others. So it’s really not that comparable.
Sometimes you’re just rah-rahing the bad guys. Sorry.
And because promoting participation in an election is healthy for democracy, while restricting it weakens it - *regardless *of partisan advantage.
This logic would permit a law requiring everyone to chop off the tip of their little finger, Yakuza style, in order to vote. Sure, we’d have .01% turnout at the voting booths, but that just means 99.99% chose not to vote. We’d still be respecting the will of the electorate, right?
Sure… but there’s a HUGE difference between “hey, look, over there is the state of Washington, and in the state of Washington it’s MUCH harder to register to vote than in any other state… but it’s been that way for years, and there doesn’t seem to be any partisan intent behind it” and “hey, look, over there is the state of Idaho, and someone there is proposing changing the rules so that it gets much harder to register, disproportionately affecting their political opponents”. It’s an entirely reasonable position (and again, I’m talking about an ethical/moral opinion) that the status quo in Washington in that example is just fine, while the proposed change in Idaho is not, even if the proposed law in Idaho still doesn’t make things as onerous as they are to begin with in Washington.
And comparisons to things other than voting are a bit spurious. Voting is really not much like anything else. It’s not essential-to-life for each individual person, so a rational person is going to prioritize if far behind actually having a job and food and shelter. At the same time it is ESSENTIAL for the functioning of a democracy as a whole that people vote. So simply saying “well, that person was able to do X in some other context, clearly they can do X” might prove that they CAN do X, but of course a fair bit of this discussion is not about “voting was made IMPOSSIBLE” but “voting was made DIFFICULT”. Obstacles don’t need to be un-overcomable in order to be objectionable.
This is one of my strongest areas of disagreement with you, both in terms of your opinion, and in terms of how you have presented it.
First of all, there’s a big difference between a situation where a well meaning politician has written a law intending to do X, and some people suspect that it might as a side effect do Y, and we’re trying to debate whether it will do Y, but it’s a complicated and subtle issue, and reasonable people disagree… vs a situation where we all agree that the politician was scuzzy, and he wrote a law claiming to do X, and we all agree that he had as a strong (sole?) motivation that it actually do Y, and then we’re debating whether it will really do Y. In that case, I feel like the presumption is that it WILL do Y. It’s a very odd and unusual position to be saying “I agree that these politicians unethically wrote this law intending that it accomplish X… but they failed, it won’t really accomplish X, therefore I support it for its on-the-surface stated position”.
I suppose it’s possible (and note that despite how long this thread is and how carefully I’ve read your posts I’m still not quite sure what your precise position is here) that your claim is “they wrote these laws, with justification voter-confidence, but with actual motivation of supressing-liberal-voters, and they likely WILL succeed in suppressing-liberal-voters, but that suppression happens without applying an undue burden so it’s peachy keen”. But that just seems to be giving politicians carte blanche to be as scuzzy and dirty tricky as they possibly can as long as they stay within the letter of the law.
On a different note, I believe that it is our moral and ethical obligation to oppose dirty and scummy political tricks. That doesn’t mean you have to leave your party over them, or wail and beat your breast, but when they do something scuzzy, and then you cheerfully leap in and start depending the scuzzy action with both oratorical fists, the message is “eh, I don’t care about the scumminess”. It makes you seem totally mercenary. That, I suspect, is at least one cause of how much anger you’ve gotten in this thread.
(And note, if you’re going to bring up the Massachusetts Senate once again, that I at least would never have accused you of being unethically OK with Republican dirty tricks if you had just never posted a word about voter ID ever. Not posting about something is not implicitly supporting it except in some very contrived situations.)
Reymille, you’re responding to post number five thousand, four hundred eleven in this thread.
The “Yakuza solution,” you mention above would be an example of an onerous burden, and my characterization of needing photo ID to vote is not a onerous burden, a distinction which was discussed in more than a few of the five thousand four hundred ten posts preceding the one to which you replied.
I apologize if you just began reading on this page.
Can you expand a bit on this?
Elsewhere in this thread, several participants argued strongly that it was appropriate to measure votes fungibly – that is, if voter ID prevents a thousand valid votes at the cost of preventing ten fraudulent ones, it’s a failure.
If you accept that calculus, can you explain just why an observer should be content with Idaho and Washington in your example?
OK. I think we have a strong attachment to argument by analogy, but I’ll accept that voting is sui generis.
OK, another “first of all” right back at you. Even if that’s the initial presumption, why would that presumption stand in the absence of any confirming evidence. Again I’ll point out that Voter ID laws have been active in many states for many years. I’d say the presumption cannot stand without someone being able to point out why we cannot actually confirm it.
Unfortunately, I believe that the majority of successful politicians that rise above purely local, part-time positions are, in fact, “…as scuzzy and dirty tricky as they possibly can as long as they stay within the law.”
If I may, I said a ratio of one-to-one was unproductive and a single prevented vote over the number of prevented frauds was a failure. “Fungibility”, as far as I recall, was a concept you brought up and I don’t think it applies, personally. I’m not sure what interpretations other users may have described.
An alternate comparison might be the idea of banning handguns because criminals use handguns. Such a law may impact a larger number of law-abiding citizens who own handguns with no intent whatsoever to ever use them in a criminal act. Would ten law-abiding citizens affected while only one criminal is be considered a failure?
Assume for the purposes of this question that there is no constitutional issue with the proposed ban.
I think someone could argue either side of the question in good faith. A gun rights proponent would weigh the value of individual self-defense much greater than the cost of criminal activity; a gun control proponent would just as sincerely give weight to the cost of crime and little weight to the value of self-defense. Indeed, we don’t have to imagine it: we see that essential debate all around us.