Yes, and both sides can make the claim that there are actual measurable effects to restricting handguns (leading to more deaths that could have been prevented through armed self-defense) or not restricting handguns (leading to more deaths at the hands of armed criminals). It’s unclear that voter fraud has such an effect. “Voter confidence”… how do you (indeed, how can you) quantify it?
Besides, that doesn’t answer my question: would ten law-abiding citizens having their guns confiscated if in the process one criminal was disarmed be considered a failure?
Of course, what the proponent is really arguing is that their sense of being able to defend themselves outweighs the actual cost of ubiquitous gun ownership. Just as the sense of voting process validity outweighs the cost in suppressed votes.
It may be good faith in the context of a discussion where you’re worried about sincere support of a position, but IMO it’s not good faith in the context of discussing the rules society lives by.
I think it’s pretty lame for one side to revel in the ability to swing their fist freely and insist that the cost of the occasional impact with my nose is reasonable.
Sure, if we were talking about fists and noses…because we agree that nose-punching is a bright-line border.
Here, in contrast, there’s no question that any reasonable observer agrees some additional burdens are acceptable, even if they fall disproportionately on the poor. Higher-end (salaried) jobs typically permit people to take time to vote without a loss of salary, while hourly wage jobs are more likely to mean that a person taking time to vote may lose some wages.
So the question in this case is not one of a bright-line border, but rather one of degree. This is one reason, I suspect, that Max suggests that the issue is not susceptible to argument by analogy.
In my view, yes, that policy would be considered a failure. In fact, in my view, one law-abiding citizen losing his right to bear arms in order to take ten guns away from ten criminals is not an acceptable bargain.
But I don’t agree that this calculus has relevance to this debate. I can certainly appreciate the opposite point of view. I don’t claim my opinion is correct in so,e objectively verifiable sense. It is simply how I believe we as a society should weigh those two competing interests.
Typical tactic, arrogating to yourself the mantle of “reasonableness”, no matter how careful or detailed the information provided to you that it is not that at all. Convenient, too, if you can dismiss anything you’re told as prima facie unreasonable no matter the evidence.
Well, now,** Elvish,** be fair! Reasonable observers agree that voter confidence is of crucial significance, because voter fraud might have some importance in a ultra sooper dooper close election. These same reasonable observers will note that voter fraud is more likely to favor the party most aligned with the concerns of illegal aliens and felons. Which is to say, Democrats.
The fact that so few such reasonable observers are present in this debate can be attributed to the fact that the overwhelming bias of the Boards favors the unreasonable side, liberals, lefties and DFH. People who have a demonstrable prejudice against reasonable observation and tend to favor math and arithmetic, insisting that the factual incidence of voter fraud is vanishingly small and can be discounted as irrelevant.
The views of such people are therefore demonstrably unreasonable, and can be discounted.
Sounds like special pleading to me. It’s easy to adjust the scenario such that a particular type of firearm has been used by a few criminals, such rare cases having been trumped up to sound commonplace. In response, a politician calls for the banning or heavy restriction of that particular gun type, which might affect ten criminals but also a half million gun owners who possess that type. Their right to bear other gun types is unaffected. Maybe they can keep their now-restricted guns if they undergo a complex registration process that was previously unnecessary. Some will not be able to satisfy this process. Fuck 'em?
Again I’d direct your attention to Max’s argument, the truth of which I conceded yesterday, that holds that voting is not susceptible to much in the way of argument by analogy.
But putting that aside, my own stance would probably be in opposition to what you describe, but it would depend greatly on just how complex this registration process was.
Certainly if the new registration process involved a one-time requirement to spend, let’s say, eight hours and travel to a location less than thirty miles away, I don’t think I’d raise objections.
It’s close enough for these purposes - a right being modified.
Well, imagine if the regulation was being proposed by someone who was known to be motivated to ban guns. How much would you trust them to keep it simple?
Now picture a voter ID regulation being proposed by someone with a motive to discourage people from voting for a particular party. How much do you trust them?
I would not be guided by whether I trusted a given politician, since no matter who first proposed the law, and how trustworthy they were, a later untrustworthy politician might be in charge. So I would be guided by what the law said, and not what I perceived the motivations behind it to be.
And a fine abstraction that is, too! The pristine purity of law, independent of character, crystalline, cold, and unsullied. But how often can we depend on such good fortune, that men with sordid and malign motives will somehow fail to produce the injustice they aspire to? Perhaps in this case their corrupt character and greed for power miraculously manifested itself as a good and worthy law, but!..
They are still the men they were, and they are still making laws, and if at first you don’t oppress, try, try again. You don’t have to wait for the “untrustworthy politician” to arrive, they are already there! And there isn’t much they won’t do to stay there.
The only way I’d be tempted to use an argument by numbers in this thread is something involving an overwhelming comparison… if I felt that I could make a convincing argument that the number of voters affected by the ID was in the tens or hundreds of thousands while the number of cases of voter fraud prevented was in the single digits. And even so, it wouldn’t be “hey, look, this number is much bigger than this number, therefore my argument is correct”. Instead, it would just be a kind of attempt to get you to take pause and recognize the ridiculousness of your position. (I’m not sure whether I think the numbers are QUITE that ridiculous, but the main reason I’m not actively pursuing that tack is that I just don’t feel qualified to say what those numbers are…)
I don’t see what that has to do with Idaho vs. Washington state in my previous analogy, however. My reason for bringing that up was to say that I don’t think there’s some absolute scale of how difficult it should be to vote that applies universally (although clearly poll taxes are universally unconstitutional)… rather, that CHANGES in how difficult it is to vote have a huge potential for abuse, and thus have to be examined very carefully.
I think there are some analogies relating to this issue that are reasonable, I’m just skeptical of things that analogize the act of voting with the act of anything else.
Well, it’s not PROOF. It’s not like my argument is “these people had evil motives, therefore their law is unconstitutional, QED I’m done”. Rather that’s just another piece of evidence which, put together with many other arguments, make me strongly oppose these laws. For instance, another thread of argument is the idea that the “neutral justification” is a weak one. That argument contains 3 elements: (1) The number of cases is in-person voter fraud we actually know about is tiny (2) voter confidence itself is not hugely important (3) and even if it was, this improvement wouldn’t really make much of dent in the actual debates that have occurred in the wake of close elections. So, put all three of those together, and have I proved anything? No… but all of that together is, to me, a strong argument against your position. And in fact I think there are similarly strong arguments from about 3 entirely different angles. Can I point to any one of them and say “look, here is the equation that ends with X bigger than Y, I win”? No, but all of them together add up to a VERY strong case.
I’m not sure I agree… and even if I did agree, I don’t really see how that matters in this discussion. Surely our general approach to morality can’t be “well, those guys there are being evil and criminal… but, ehh, lots of people are evil and criminal, so whatever”.
Maybe I just misread the import of your hypothetical. I thought you were saying that, as a given, the changes to Idaho were objectionable even if the result was clearly still less onerous than the status quo of Washington (or whichever state changed vs. stayed the same).
The thing is… in each of these, doesn’t it really come down to how strongly you weigh the importance of these issues? I’m especially looking at your (2): “Voter confidence is not hugely important.” Obviously I disagree; voter confidence is the single most critical aspect of a representative democracy, in my view. But just as you’ve acknowledged, I can’t prove that. It’s more of an article of faith, in that I cannot point to examples of what happens when voter confidence erodes, because we haven’t had any large-scale erosion of voter confidence. But on smaller scale, Bush was dogged through his presidency with mutterings about Florida in 2000 and his lack of a legitimate claim to the presidency. And look how much mileage an utterly fictional claim about Obama’s lack of legal eligibility to the presidency got!
In my opinion, the opposition in a two-party system is always looking for a way to run down their opponents, but seldom question the legitimacy of their targets’ holding the office in the first place…unless there’s some hook on which to plausibly hang such questions. (And given the utter lack of factual basis for Kenyan Obama, the word ‘plausibly’ can be stretched pretty damn thin).
To some degree, we can thank the Electoral College for insulating us with respect to the Presidency: no matter how any vote counts turned out, one can argue that what really matters is the votes of the electors, and so both Bush and Obama were unambiguously elected, no matter what hanging chads or long form certificate inspectors might hallucinate. But that kind of insulation simply doesn’t exist for senate or governor’s races.
Anyway, my point is: if I agreed that voter confidence wasn’t particularly important, we wouldn’t be having this debate.
I think it can. If the prevalence of evil and criminal behavior is so nearly ubiquitous that it’s the rule rather than the exception, a call to action over one unremarkable example has little to justify it.
What a marvelous creature is “voter confidence”, how quickly it adapts! Started out being a matter of voter’s confidence that their votes were not negated by illegal voters practicing deception, now it represents itself as a worrisome sense that one’s votes are not properly tallied or regarded.
Calls to mind a point I’ve made to you several times thus far, a point that seems to have escaped your notice or is too minor and insignificant to warrant a response: what about the “voter confidence” of those affected by these underhanded machinations? What about the voter who is privileged to observe his legislators conspiring to undermine his voting power? What about their “voter confidence”?
Seems to me you have opened a can of worms without considering the prospect of having to eat some of them. I have a sense that some clarification is pending. Oh,my goodness, yes, you will be clarifying like a motherfuck!
I wasn’t saying the (hypothetical) changes in Idaho WERE objectionable, I was saying that they aren’t automatically NOT objectionable just because some other (hypothetical) state had preexisting more-onerous restrictions in place beforehand.
At some point, yes. But I’m trying to lay things out not just as “well, there are competing interests A and B on one side, and C and D on the other… if you think that A and B are more important than C and D you will agree with me, if you don’t, well, I guess you won’t”, but more like “Well, there are competing interests A and B on one side and C and D on the other. But really this issue only barely addresses C at all, and C really isn’t that important (more below), AND the people who proposed C and D were doing it for venal and self-serving reasons”.
Think about it this way… the 2000 Florida debacle was an absolute perfect storm of stuff going wrong, and yes, a lot of people ended up viewing Bush as an illegitimately elected president, for various reasons. And:
(a) the Republic survived just fine,
and
(b) even if there had been previous legislation which made the “determining who actually voted and whether they were who they said they were” side of things absolutely perfect (and voter ID laws would only go a tiny way towards that, if at all… someone with a driver’s license can still dangle a chad) there STILL would have been plenty of outrage and unrest and claims of illegitimacy based on, for instance, the butterfly ballot, and the voting roll purges, and the fact that the person who was in charge of certifying the election was entirely NOT non-partisan, and so forth. So you’ve got a situation which even at it’s WORST causes anger and resentment and increased hostility in political discourse, which are not trivial issues but are not anywhere near an existential threat to this country’s survival. Then your proposed solution addresses only a fraction of that issue… and even if that issue was fixed perfectly, the anger and resentment and increased hostility would likely still go on. That’s why I call voter confidence unimportant, not just because you and I have different priorities
Imagine, for a second, that this whole debate happened in 1999, and your side won, and heck, I’ll give you a huge boost and somehow make it so that everyone was totally confident that the actual voter counts were the voter counts, so we all agreed that Bush won by 207 votes among votes actually cast (or whatever). But would the specter of “hey, they just passed this law which everyone agrees was intended to disenfranchise poor people, and now they won the presidency by the narrowest margin in history” somehow result in a situation with LESS anger and resentment and incivility and questioning-of-Bush’s-legitimacy?
That’s true in certain types of situations… for instance, I despise Gerrymandering, and have said so repeatedly. But if everyone knew that in Tennessee, whichever party was in power would Gerrymander the state as much as they possibly could, and eventually the pendulum would swing, and the other party would do exactly the same thing, and that had been going on for decades, well, I would say “hey, I think Tennessee should reform their redistricting policy” but I wouldn’t get all outraged about how the Republicans Gerrymandered when they were in power in 2008 or something. But give how long this thread has been going and how full of outrage it is, with fairly few people saying “look, here are links to 40 times in the past Century when both parties have pulled similar shenanigans” I don’t think it’s clear that this level of attempted-voter-suppression has risen to the level of unobjectionable common chicanery.
Bricker will be delighted to know that Virginia has taken steps to increase confidence in election integrity. Up to 350,000 Virginians (of a demographic favorable to Democrats) may have to reapply to vote in November. I think many will decline the chance to re-register [del]due to annoyed impatience[/del] so that their disenfranchisement can serve as a monument to confidence in electoral integrity.