Did you discount the part where I said that I might have done it after all, depending on the overall picture? If, for example, I felt the opposition had done so etching technically legal but questionable ethically, I might conclude that the voodoo tactic was justified?
I don’t really agree…but if that were the only message I heard, I probably wouldn’t choose to join a thread and counter your statements. I’d feel that detestable was too strong, but that I understood how you might think it justified.
If that were the only use of walking-around money, then your sarcasm would be justified. But as Democrat Jeff Smith explains:
I assume the doughnuts you ate were not stuffed with untraceable bills.
I don’t agree it’s massively escalating the level of dirty trick.
No. I am saying that any scheme will inconvenience some more than others.
If I live across the street from the polling place, I can walk over, rain or shine. But there is some poor schlub who lives the farthest possible place away from the polling place (but still in the precinct). He has a tougher time than I do.
Now, perhaps if the polling locations were set up so that every single voter had to go that far, I might take a dim view of it. But my sanguine view is motivated by the fact that even the worse cases I have heard strike me as tolerable, AND there are very very few of them.
No, I’d think I had an unpredictable run of bad luck, and shit happens. I’d put on my big boy pants and work to avoid similar problems in the future.
This sounds suspiciously like personal responsibility. Your lack of blaming someone else for your misfortunes makes me seriously question your commitment to America!
The reason I asked is that one student in that news story wanted to vote in North Carolina, where she is a sophomore in college, but she only had an Alabama drivers license. If she switched residency to NC, it seems likely she would get a NC drivers license. At least to me it does.
Why would she get a drivers license if she doesn’t have a car in NC? An out of state driver’s license is perfectly valid for most proof-of-identity and proof-of-age purposes.
So you not only need to get the requisite ID, you have to make certain that the idiot clerk doesn’t misspell it and disqualify you. If you’re not white.
I’m struggling to see how that scenario would have played out differently without the photo ID laws. The voter’s name has be checked agains the roster, no? That gives the clerk the same opportunity to play that game, no?
I’m not arguing about that. I just don’t see how the Voter ID law caused this problem. You can’t just waltz into a polling station, grab a ballot and vote, so you have to give your name to someone, and that someone can then play this same game.
The ID law wouldn’t of course. As I pointed out at the end, the voters had proper IDs.
But the title of this thread, lest we forget, is “I Pit the ID-demanding GOP vote suppressors”, not “I pit the Voter ID law”, so this post is completely appropriate.
And, in case anyone raises the point, it boggles the mind to think that someone might think that this might be a Democratic operative busting the chops of this prospective voter, for reasons that have been much hashed out above and elsewhere
IANAL; I was just thinking broadly about the requirement that there be no “test or device” that may impede the casting of a vote (or registration therefor).
And while spelling one’s own name is not in itself, by any measure, an onerous task, when the task becomes “spell your name over and over, correcting any mistakes the poll worker is making, in an exercise that takes several times the length of time other voters required to obtain a ballot and vote”, I think we’re straying into that territory. And when a second person with similar ethnicity is forced to undergo the same process (by a different poll worker) and people of white ethnicities are not, that’s a red flag. And of course when the State and County Boards of Elections both agree that the exercise was unnecessary, it does tend to confirm one’s suspicions.
Not that I’m suggesting that the people involved should sue - the local Boards of Elections, as noted, acted appropriately - but there do seem to be more of these incidents post-2014.
Oh, OK. I took your posting "So the law as written is perfectly valid, and you need have no complaints. " as a reference to the Voter ID law. But even if we agree that the clerk in question is more likely to be a Republican than a Democrat, the fact is we simply don’t know.
Well, no good at all, of course. The clerk was, at best, being an asshole and at worst violating the rights of the voters. However, if no ID were required at all, do you think the instances of “spell your name” would increase or decrease, for minorities in particular?
Much better way to suppress votes in Democratic areas - just don’t give 'em a place to vote or working voting machines.
In the crucial state of Ohio in 2004 one of my daughter’s friends waited in line in a cold rain for five hours to vote near Oberlin College. Suburban GOP areas had no such wait times.
