Bricker has posted 2061 times in this thread. (:eek: ) I’ll paraphrase his response and let him take the morning off.
Suppose that despite disenfranchisments and voter suppression, as well as votingmachinefraud, the GOP wins an election by only five votes.
They’re not worried about protests of the hundreds of blacks who might complain that they couldn’t vote without a passport or a concealed-carry permit, nor about thousands of names purged by malicious voter purges (cf. Florida), nor about voting machine audits – contracts with the private companies that supply such machines effectively prohibit audits. It’s enough for the GOP to be able to smirk and say “Voter ID worked! Without it there might have been 7 or 8 cases of voter fraud and our win would be suspect.”
Well, I suppose that might be a step up from what I was beginning to suspect - Bricker’s motivation is to try to demonstrate that lefty-liberals are caca-heads and is doing his very bestest to prove it - because if that was the case, he’d’ve failed quite comically.
Could it be that we have misunderstood the Counselor’s meaning of “voter fraud”? Perhaps it means like how exit polls were skewed by voters who actually voted for Bush, but were ashamed to admit it, so they said they voted for Kerry. Maybe. I guess. There are more twists and turns in that man’s thinking that an earthworm orgy.
Or maybe we are confused by word count? He has produced enough words on voter fraud to make a mid-sized Russian novel, but voter fraud is of no real interest to him. If the subject were liberal hypocrisy, he might have returned a seventeen volume polemic, none less than a thousand pages in a cramped and tiny font.
Or perhaps it reflect Roberto Duran’s famous “No mas” quote, like what he was really saying was “I could get up out of this corner and kick your ass into next week, but I’m not going to bother, everyone already knows I’ve won, anyway.”
And this is unrelated to voter fraud? I’d’a thought the two were inextricably linked, in that public confidence is undermined if they are convinced that voter fraud is happening and though it’s hard to demonstrate that it happens a lot, in the occasional ultra-close election, it may be a factor.
Is your confidence undermined because you perceive voter fraud is a factor in ultra-close elections? Are you open to education about much larger sources of electoral “error” (i.e. the final tally not being an accurate reflection of the will of the electorate)?
Closer, but no: I am saying that in an ultra-close election, lacking Voter ID laws, public confidence in the result is undermined.
I don’t agree. I don’t agree that a person who chooses not to vote because they cannot obtain a free photo ID is “suppressed.”
And neither do the courts.
So why should I care that you want call them “suppressed?” They are not “suppressed.” As the Court explained in Crawford, these regulations are not excessively burdensome. I agree. The courts agree. The majority of voters agree. We all agree. Your opinion isn’t enough to sway me.
I am capable of discussing both the paper and the second link that commented on the paper. The paper was not a blog entry; the commentary was a bog entry, called an article in an effort to boost its credibility. I called out that trick.
That’s not a deflection. If you want to confine the discussion to the paper, stop referencing the blogger. I won’t keep mentioning it, except in reply to posts.
Sure it does.
Its facts are modest, and are analogous to “24 hour light,” you invoked earlier. No complex methodology is used; it’s simply a report of turnout figures in Georgia. No peer review is needed.
Well, OK, what about the “public confidence” of people who are hindered and discouraged from voting by these laws? Their “public confidence” doesn’t count?
Suppose you were Elbonian. And you see your state legislators carefully craft a bill that hinders Elbonian access to the polls. How could that have any other effect than to lower your trust and confidence?
Wiping out an immune system and implanting another might be a viable cure of, say, leukemia. But a hangnail?
Yes, that’s a true statement. But it’s grounded in public perception, not in my belief that voter fraud is statistically significant.
Sure. Although at the threshold I should point out that in our system, the will of the electorate is expressed by the individual voter casting a vote, which includes expending the effort necessary to do so. So, for example, if I were to learn that Candidate A is favored by 80% of the electorate, but of that cohort, nine in ten of them choose to stay home and watch TV instead of standing in line to vote, then I don’t agree that Candidate A’s 80% standing amongst “the electorate,” is meaningful.
In short: “the electorate,” is the voting-eligible population willing to undertake the effort and time and expense necessary to cast a vote, where “expense,” can refer to things like the expenditure of gas, bus fare, time off from work, and “effort,” can refer to the pre-voting necessity of registering, as well as the Election Day travel, parking, walking, standing in line, and of course securing the necessary documentation to prove your identity.
None of the measures discussed here are meaningful hinderances. They are not the “excessively burdensome requirements,” that Storer v. Brown contemplates.
They impose “only a limited burden on voters’ rights,” which the precise interests advanced by the State are sufficient to justify.
To answer more succinctly: if you feel hindered by needing to obtain a free photo ID, then your feeling doesn’t count.
Then also at that threshold, you display an ignorance of (or at least indifference to) historical disenfranchisement efforts that took place in within living memory and were a major impetus for the Civil Rights era. Will you acknowledge that systematic disenfranchisement has occurred and does occur, even though in “[y]our system” it is not supposed to?
Public perception that has been twisted by an irresponsible right wing propaganda machine.
In any case the perception of the minorities also matters. And more when there is data to support the perception among minorities that several estates are disenfranchising them in a significant way.
There almost certainly has been very much voting machine fraud – it’s a major scandal that gets not nearly enough attention. (Sorry to hijack this thread to discuss it, but BBQ Pit would be swamped if we started a thread for every type of Republican perfidy.)
The third link above references this pdf paper which gives a detailed statistical proof of cheating by Republicans in general elections 2008/2012 (and by Romney in 2012 primary elections). The link complains that Kansas’ Republican authorities have prevented scholars from investigating the matter.
The first link above links to dozens of researched suspicions. (The site seemed hosed when I tried it, but it’s still a useful index.)
Voter suppression is just one cheating method employed by the GOP, and is a relatively “legal” one at that. The bastards have other criminal methods in their toolkit.
So, is voter fraud concerning (as a factor in elections) relative to other possibilities like machine error/sabotage, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, etc., or should we be concerned that the public (apparently) finds voter fraud to be concerning? How meta are we getting, here?
Should I be concerned that Bricker finds it concerning that the public (apparently) finds voter fraud concerning? If I do, is my concern a matter for anyone else’s concern? If so, I’m concerned that their concerns are misplaced.
No, I never said the things you both accuse me of saying. As usual, you’re both speaking from ignorance.
I first saw this story on VICE. When I posted, I simply used the links that the VICE story provided, which you’ll note, characterizes it as “the Washington Post reports.” Since I linked directly to the study, the cite to the Washington Post was simply to acknowledge where the story originated.
The two of you trying in vain to spin it as if I am an idiot and as if the Washington Post link is not worthy of consideration because it’s from a blog on the site are about the level of discourse and deception expected from y’all.
Sure. But I think a lot of what concerns me about that issue is that with this formulation, any change to those levels of effort and time, or any inequities in how those levels apply to different groups, are basically changes to who is part of the electorate, but changes which can be disguised as purely procedural.
We all agree (I hope?) that a law which explicitly made it harder for legal voters who are Ethiopian-Americans to vote, or legal voters who are very old and poor to vote, or legal voters who have moved a lot to vote, would all be unacceptable. But (our claim is) that’s what the actual effect of these laws is, in practice. Now, maybe the additional burden does not reach whatever level the supreme court counts as burdensome. But it seems like your position is “yes, people on my side have motives that are either sleazy, or are just uninformed, but as long as the extra burden that is added to groups of voters who demographically are likely to disagree with me doesn’t actually meet the legal level specified by the supreme court, well, then, hey, the fact that the law also has a possible hypothetical benefit that only I have ever proposed and which might never actually come up means that the whole situation is hunky dory! Yay my team!”
I don’t think anyone expects you to say that you think these laws are illegal or unconstitutional… certainly you’re more knowledgeable about this than most of us. What you could certainly say is “it bothers me that ‘my side’ has put so much time and effort into these laws. While I find them to be legal, I also view them as antidemocratic and abhorrent” or something like that.
Overall, if the Republican party as a whole was a person who was going to die and go up to the pearly gates and be judged by St. Peter (or does God do the judging, and just tell St. Peter what the outcome is?), do you think that whole recent spate of voter ID laws would be a positive, a neutral, or a negative?
Certainly it did in the past. But merely because it did in the past is not sufficient reason to disallow valid neutral justifications for current Voter ID laws.
So I acknowledge that it happened in the past, but I do not concede it does occur now.