Best Bar B Q in the world down in Texas, doesn’t seem to help all that much.
Seems like you are saying that you and I absolutely agree on what the effects of this law would be, and then just disagree on how good or bad an idea that would be. And I don’t think that’s the case. I think we strongly disagree about how many people would likely be impacted, and where on the laziness spectrum those people would fall. Furthermore, there’s no reason to think that honest debate can’t cause people to change their minds about the relative ethical weights of various different factors. Why would that be unchangable? Why would that be something where our moral compasses would be so utterly alien as to disallow communication?
I’m going to bring something up here which you’re a bit touchy about, which is Jim Crow laws. Not because I’m trying to say “well, Jim Crow laws were found to be unconstitutional, therefore voter ID laws are also unconstitutional, hey I’ve made a legal point”, rather because I think they’re such a perfect analogy.
So imagine it’s 1950, and you (being a decent person) oppose “literacy tests” for voting in the Jim Crow south. And you encounter someone on the other side of the issue who first points out that the literacy tests have passed every constitutional and legal muster that exists (which is true), and that they certainly address a legitimate governmental purpose (which is true), and then makes fun of anyone who would fail a literacy test, talking about how hard his father worked to learn to read and how hard he worked to learn to read; and then just refuses to actually talk about the morality of it, saying “well, you and I just weight things differently”.
What tack would you take to get through to that person? Would you just give up and say “yup, well, guess he just weighs things differently than I do, whatevs”?
Right, so isn’t the key test of voter ID laws the extent to which they are being put to invidious use? And I feel that your complacency in reading the law and saying “well, this sounds reasonable to me, I approve” without really knowing about the real-world consequences one way or the other is at least somewhat equivalent to someone just saying “hey, it’s just a literacy test, just making sure people can read, nothing racial there”. Which, on the surface, it certainly was.
The main things I remember people complaining about concerning Florida were:
(1) Butterfly ballot
(2) Voter rolls being purged
(3) Supreme court stopping a recount in progress via bizarre argument that is not allowed to be used as precedent
(4) The Florida Secretary of State, who had to decide whether or not to certify the results, was Bush’s Florida campaign chief (I don’t think I have that one quite right)
(5) First-pass-the-pole voting system and Nader
(6) Something about excluding overseas military absentee votes
I’m not saying that in-person voter fraud was never discussed, but if you hypothetically imagine me losing faith in America and becoming an anarchist due to Florida 2000, it would be because of any of the above reasons long before anything relating to voter fraud. (I suppose this might be a left-vs-right issue… is there a widespread belief among conservatives that Florida was only as close as it was due to voter fraud?)
Anyhow, back to the main meat of where I think we really disagree, which is how likely it is for voter ID laws to prevent someone from voting. Seems to me that you’re trying to present it as a white or black issue… that is, there might possibly be a very very few people for whom the voter ID laws actually present a genuinely legitimate obstacle to voting (not sure whether you’re saying that number is tiny or zero), but for everyone else, they presented only a trivial challenge, and therefore, if they didn’t end up voting, it’s their own damn fault, and we don’t need them anyway, esteem-too-lightly, etc, etc.
But I think it’s far more nuanced than that.
Let’s take me, for an example. I’m a generally civically aware and vaguely organized person. I always vote in every major election. I give money to charities. I pay my taxes.
So what happens if a law changes which adds a medium-sized obstacle to me voting in the next election? (Obviously not voter ID, as I do of course have ID, but something that presents a burden which is about as hard for me to overcome as the frequently discussed drive-4-hours-to-the-nearest-DMV).
Well, I’d like to think I’d overcome that burden. But lots of things might go wrong:
-Maybe I just lost my job
-Maybe I have a one-year-old-baby and am just far busier and more sleep deprived than normal
-Maybe I had a weekend planned out to deal with this and then had a medical emergency
-Maybe I misread the instructions, go to the wrong place, and then miss the deadline
-Maybe I just don’t hear about the rules change because no one went out of their way to publicize it and I was out of the country for a while
-Maybe I thought my wife was going to deal with it and she thought I was going to deal with it
So, let’s assume that none of those things are very likely, and there’s a 95% chance that I will successfully overcome that burden.
Well, that means that for every 20 people like me, there’s one who did NOT successfully overcome that burden, and will not be voting in the upcoming election who otherwise would.
And of course, I’m an educated person with a good working knowledge of the political system who is kept on his mental toes by arguing on the SDMB all day long. If my neighbor who is just as hard-working and cares just as much as I do is, for instance, very old and not very mobile, then the percentage of failure might go way up for that person, and not for any moral failing involving buying plasma TVs.
Now, is it necessarily terrible to change how difficult it is to vote? Well, that’s an interesting question that probably deserves its own thread. Certainly, some nations (like Australia) have made voting mandatory, and seem to be trundling along just fine. What is terrible, however, is the idea that all of the above, all of the just-a-few-percent here and just-a-few-percent-there, did not happen as an unfortunate side effect of having to close polling places due to budget cuts, or while transitioning over to a new system that everyone agrees will be better in the long run, and does not apply equally to all people. It applies far more to people with one political leaning (as predicted by demographics) than the other, and it was engineered specifically and cynically in order to suppress voter turnout.
You can go on and on all you want about esteeming things too lightly and people buying new furniture but the fact of the matter is that you are enthusiastically supporting naked and cynical voter suppression at its most slimy.
Do you *really *hope for an answer more specific than “I disagree”? After all these years [sic], that’s all he has.
Granting for the sake of argument that this is true, I would say this particular thread poisons any such chance. I’ll be happy to discuss this in GD, or by e-mail, and explore whether you can offer any insights that might swing my weighting of these factors around.
I might end up doing that, but not before exploring the specifics of whether or not he acknowledged the actual disparity of application – that is, if he agreed that the neutral literacy test was in practice being applied unequally, so that equally knowledgeable white and black voters were treated differently. Note that this differs from disparate impact alone.
Again, though, the evil of the literacy test was not applying it equally to black and white voters – letting the white voter slide and holding the black voter to strict compliance. I don’t care about the “real world consequences,” if that means simply a measurement of the end results. I care about an even-handed, blind application of the valid neutral standard.
No complaints about the purge being stopped and invalid voters left on the rolls?
I heard it a lot. It’s almost certainly wrong, of course, but it highlights the weakness.
No.
Harken back to an example I raised earlier in the thread: the voodoo thought experiment.
Imagine that Caleb, a famous psychic and voodoo practitioner, announces that he intends to place a voodoo curse on anyone who votes for Smith. And imagine that you learn, reliably, that this resonates strongly enough amongst the voting population that a measurable percentage of Smith voters stay home.
Are you now inclined to argue that Caleb’s announcement is tantamount to voter suppression?
I am not. Even though I agree that it’s very likely he swayed measurable votes away from Smith, I take the position that the deterred Smith voters were unreasonable when they let fear of a voodoo curse guide their actions.
Yes. Correct.
That’s not the fact. The fact is that the requirement is valid on its face, and voters that are stymied are unreasonably stymied.
You disagree. I get that.
But do you believe that there is some blind objective way to measure the weight you assign to these competing burdens and assess it as the correct weight?
In California, the County Registrar of Voters processes the application to register to vote. The results are communicated upward to the Secretary of State, but the approval is at the County level. There is no “automatic registration;” I had to fill out an application. (But it’s very simple and easy.)
They actually do issue a little card with name, address, and party affiliation, but no one at the actual voting station ever looks for this. It isn’t asked for.
In California, no one asks you for ID when you vote. They ask you for your name and address, which are checked off against a list of those who are eligible. In horrid theory, some asshole could go in ahead of me, claim to be Trinopus of 1313 Mockingbird Lane, and vote in my place. I’d arrive, and find my name already checked off.
However, there are means for me to vote anyway, a temporary contingency ballot. They wouldn’t just send me home.
I have no idea how often, if ever, this happens in my county. I’m willing to bet is never did in the last two Federal Elections.
What we’re opposing in this thread are those states where they have made the registration process difficult, and especially difficult in a way that is strongly disadvantageous to the working poor, who can’t take a day off to drive to the county seat or state capital – especially if the result is, “Come back next Tuesday and bring more documentation.”
Many of us believe that these rules were made deliberately in order to reduce the number of working poor people from voting, because they are unlikely to vote for Republican candidates. That’s pit-worthy, wouldn’t you think?
It strikes me as utterly insane that anyone is still defending that kind of practice.
nm
And I find this to be foolish. At best, hopelessly idealistic.
It doesn’t - it offers games where it has a statistical edge, letting it win over the long run. Having drive and ambition can give someone an edge, increasing their chances of success, but it no more guarantees success for an specific individual than a house advantage of 5.26% at Roulette guarantees the house will win a specific spin.
Sure… I am not suggesting any individual has a guarantee of success.
Is there a specific difference between a random event and a sheerly random event, then?
It makes perfect sense to reduce the voting effectiveness of people you don’t agree with and don’t identify with. Especially those lazy of will and body.
You know … *those *people.
And it doesn’t make perfect sense. It creates a weapon that could very easily be used against you.
(This is why the Senate’s filibuster will likely never be done away with. It lets the other side have a higher chance of passing legislation. Neither side wants that.)
Oppressive voter-ID laws are a bit like setting fire to the slums, hoping it will prevent people from voting…without realizing that fires spread in an uncontrollable fashion. Nice one, Cyril: you just set fire to your own mansion.
Let’s address this idea head on. Suppose that you are the head of the Republican party for some city or other. And there’s a city council election coming up, and it’s going to be super duper close. And one of your advisers says “hey, there’s a large Haitian immigrant community who are practitioners of Voodoo. I reached out to the chief Voodoo priest. If we offer him certain inducements, he’ll announce a big Voodoo ceremony on the same day as the election, we’ll probably siphon off a bunch of Democratic voters, should be enough to tilt the election”. Now, let’s also assume for the moment that however this deal is phrased, or however the priest is rewarded, it is absolutely clearly 100% legal.
Would you decide to invoke that plan? If you did so and then won the election, would you feel even the slightest twinge of guilt? Does that kind of thing make America a better place? A better functioning democracy?
I guess I got a bit overenthusiastic to describe is as a “fact”.
No. But I don’t believe you’ve even made a reasonable effort to really understand what those burdens are. I personally have no idea how many people will actually be affected by voter ID laws. And I personally have no idea how many of those affected will be affected only because they are “lazy”, vs how many of them will have had truly substantial obstacles put in their way. But I don’t think you know either. And I’d rather err on the side of NOT compromising the franchise. And of course the fact that these laws were proposed by people who know a lot more about electoral dynamics than I do makes me very suspicious about what the effects would be.
One other point… suppose that the law was changed in your home state and suddenly a new obstacle was imposed between you and voting, some about as difficult as the several-hour-trip-to-the-DMV-on-one-of-only-a-few-days, or something along those lines. What’s the likelihood that you would successfully overcome that obstacle and be properly registered to vote by the next election? Because I guarantee you that it’s not 100%. It might be 99+, but it’s not 100. I mentioned earlier that for me it’s probably around 95. So for people just like me, people just as well-intentioned, just as knowledgeable, just as hard working, one in twenty won’t vote in the next election. Was the vote of those one in twenty suppressed?
While I’d prefer an inclusive practice to an exclusive one…well, you said it yourself: it’s 100% legal.
It’s a bit ugly, and, yeah, I’d have moral qualms before, during, and after. But it’s politics. It isn’t all that much different from having a big fish-fry for my candidate, or arranging rides to the polling stations for poor voters.
It’s not as bad as mud-slinging ads that contain strong material untruths. (“John Kerry was branded a coward by his own troops in Vietnam.”) That’s the point where my own morality would stop me. I could not orchestrate a “Swift boating.”
I would not invoke the plan.
But your problem is now that apparently, my personal standards of conduct are necessary for political action to be justified.
I don’t agree to a scheme in which you seek my personal approval only when you are confident it will result in a result you enjoy, and discard my personal approval when it does not assist you. Do I also get to constrain government in all things I would do differently?
Our political sphere works because it balances different actors’ different priorities and goals. If my moral judgment on only one issue is to be sought, then I decline to offer it. It allows your side to engage in questionable tactics, and then resist the same targeted at you by invoking my personal ethical bar.
On reflection, perhaps I will change my answer. Perhaps my answer should be, “We are only this close in the expected election because of the Democrats’ use of walking around money. I think this payment to the voodoo guy is an excellent counter to that practice!”
Or perhaps I might say, “Look, I know for a fact that if we don’t pay this guy, the Democrats will, even those who have expressed opposition to similar moves from us. So we have to do it in self-defense.”
See what I mean? You can’t point to my disapproval to one issue in a vacuum and infer my disapproval in the real context of the world and the many factors that may arise.
No one has yet shown me any single case in which I agree that there is a substantial obstacle. From that lack, I conclude that the likelihood of enough cases of ‘substantial obstacle,’ existing is essentially nil.
No. And if the new “obstacle,” is justifiably assessed as a valid, neutral requirement, then what do I care? It is simply what’s needed to be done for voting, going forward. If one in twenty don’t choose to vote as a result, then I guess they won’t vote. Life goes on.
Has it been?
How would I know? Max created it and didn’t specify.
Well, so long as we recognize that it’s a somewhat important aspect.
I don’t know where you got any of that. So suppose the voodoo thing happened. You personally would not have done it, but the Republicans in charge of that place did do it. Then some liberals start a thread entitled “I pit the voodoo-priest-bribing GOP vote-suppressors”. Would your initial impulse be to join in the pitting, or to defend the legality of the action?
I’m not saying that the voter ID laws should be illegal. (Well, I might be, depending on how you parse “should be”. I wish it was the case that our legal framework was such that actions of that sort were illegal, but I’m not trying to imply that that’s the case in our current legal framework.) I’m saying they’re detestable.
After the nth time you ominously used the phrase “Walking around money”, I finally actually read about it. Turns out that when I flew to Pennsyvania to stay with my cousin for a few days right before the 2008 election and went around knocking on doors trying to get out the vote, and there were doughnuts at the house of the neighborhood organizer, I was engaged in an act of political chicanery that is absolutely comparable to changing the law so that senior citizens won’t be able to vote. Who knew? You have finally found Liberal Hypocrisy!!!
More seriously, though, if your opinion is that the voodoo bribe would just be a “dirty trick”, then I think you have to ask yourself whether it’s massively escalating the level of dirty trick that is being practiced. If you have a bunch of examples of liberals passing laws in the past decade or so which have the intended effect that we worry the voter ID laws will have, but in the opposite direction, with similarly flimsy justification, feel free to point them out.
So just to be clear, the most extreme example that has been bought up in this thread of someone having to devote many hours driving to and from DMVs and whatnot is so minor that if that was what literally everyone had to do you would still not find it too onerous? You’re not just saying “the worst examples that have been brought up are acceptable as the extreme”, you’re saying “they would be acceptable even as the average”?
So, remember, I’m complimenting you by saying that you probably have a 99.9%+ chance of successfully navigating whatever obstacle it is. But that’s not a certainty. So let’s say that democrats gain control of the state legislature of your state (Virginia?), and pass a law which shuffles a bunch of polling places around and requires voters to re-specify which one they will be voting at, with some reasonable justification (it will save money), but everyone knows that the real reason they did it was because the new metric, when neutrally applied, means that all the rural areas (heavily Republican) will get reshuffled, but all the urban areas (heavily Democratic) will not.
So you are quite confident that this will not stop you, since you’re a lawyer and a very politically involved person. So first you put off dealing with it for maybe a bit longer than you should have. Then an absolute comedy of errors ensues, in which one time when you could go do the registering you are sick, then the next time your car has broken down, then the next time your first grandchild is being born, and then next time it turns out that an innocent clerical error prevents it, and you have to deal with fixing that clerical error, and on and on, and you end up putting an awful lot of effort in (although you could have done more), and you just don’t get it resolved in time to vote in the next election, and then your state goes narrowly democratic, and studies suggest that the margin was less than the number of red votes “suppressed” by this new scheme. Now, presumably the vast majority of people who were “suppressed” didn’t have your experience, most of them were just lazy and forgot to deal with it. But you certainly didn’t fit into that category.
So, at the end of that hypothetical, would you feel that you had been wronged by the democrats int he legislature? Would you feel that words like “disenfranchisement” and “suppression” were reasonable to use? Would you go start a “I pit the polling-place-moving Democratic vote-suppressors” thread? Would you get pissy if someone else in that thread just kept going on and on about how it was legal and it was the will of the people and it had a valid neutral justification and why are you trying to impose your will on everyone?
Well, afraid you teed it up for him, there, you said “disenfranchisement”. Which it isn’t, it doesn’t directly prevent voting, it just hinders it, makes it more tiresome. He would pounce on that word like a starving dog on a pork chop.