That… WHAT?! I’m sorry, how the fuck is that even remotely legal?!
This has been discussed in this thread - Has New Hampshire just enacted a poll tax?
Answer: No, they haven’t.
we we thought voter ID was going to be impossible until we let the idiots decide:
Has Donald Trump ever gone out and bought groceries?
Trump’s obvious detachment from the real world aside, it’s important to understand that the kinds of election & voting systems tinkering that the Republicans are engaging in represent a form of authoritarianism. One legal scholar refers to it as “stealth authoritarianism,” which is the kind of insidious authoritarian scheme in which the rules of the democratic system are used against democracy, not for it. Thus, the “rule of law” follows not the spirit of the law, but rather the letter of the law or the absence of clarity on the law, or new laws themselves, are used to discourage and undermine true democracy that is inclusive to all people who live in it, in support of special political interests.
Republicans control congress not because they are more popular, but because they have gerrymandered their way into power. They control the presidency not because they won more votes nationwide, but because they won the electoral college (not to mention sought illegal intervention from a foreign state actor). They control both the legislative and executive at the federal level and numerous state governments in part because they have devised increasingly sophisticated methods of making voter participation among lower-income minorities difficult. And they use the power they already have to increase their political leverage to those ends. They control the highest court and increasingly more lower courts at the federal level because they were able to take unprecedented steps to violated the spirit of their power to advise and confirm presidential appointees. The party that is in power now is not the party that is most popular. Moreover, they voted into law a tax cut that was highly unpopular among the majority and seek to gut a healthcare bill that actually is popular among said majority.
Conservatives can point to the letter of the Constitution and the rule of law all they want, but the more that a small but powerful group of interests continues to be elected and re-elected and to vote for laws in spite of what the majority clearly wants, the more authoritarian that society becomes. The authoritarianism is stealthy (to borrow a term) initially, but as they increasingly defy the will of the majority, and as this fact becomes more obvious, authoritarian regimes inevitably feel threatened, and their authoritarianism becomes more visible. The rule of law is no longer about supporting democracy at that point, but is instead weaponized to attack critics of the government. A government at that point could enact laws against sedition to “protect” the government and loyal citizens in times of “emergency”, and the “independent” judiciary whom they’ve appointed over the better part of a decade could find a way to justify it.
If you think about it, the precursors of an authoritarian society are already clearly present and visible. The longer this condition continues, the more visible and obvious the authoritarianism becomes.
You may want to pull the electoral college part out of that argument. While the merits of the electoral college are a valid debate topic, but it was actually intended to reduce faction and the fact we have popular votes at all for the federal executive not required.
While not perfect, that process use to be far more distant from the individual voters and was often purely decided by the state legislatures.
As an example the Lincoln/Douglas debates were held in front of the Illinois state legislature as even senators were elected by the state legislatures until 1913. A big reason this was changed is that state legislatures were spending more time electing federal senators than dealing with the states needs.
Populism is not always an emancipatory force, and Madison explains in Federalist No. 10 why they thought a representative republic is more effective against partisanship and factionalism.
I doubt that we will know the full cost of gerrymandering for decades, but remember that the system of checks and balances which were intended to make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates” was also compromised by congress ceding an incredible amount of power to the executive branch.
None of us will probably live long enough to know for sure but I am betting that voluntary abdication by the legislative branch will have had more impact on the rise of an authoritarian society than a direct popular election would.
You make a lot of valid points in your post, and I agree with a lot of what you wrote.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t really making a case against the electoral college system per se in that post; I was pointing out that the president does not reflect the majority of voters in this country. Even if we acknowledge the EC’s merits, it’s probably not healthy to have the popular vote loser become president in 2 of the last 4 elections. I’m pointing out that this is a symptom of a very serious problem, as is the fact that gerrymandering has produced a legislature that has maintained power over the legislative branch despite not winning a majority of votes. This are signs of a creeping authoritarianism in which a minority political faction finds ways to game the system to maintain power over a majority of voters. The longer they’re able to do this, the more undemocratic our society can become. And as awareness of their schemes rises, the more desperate they will become to defend themselves against normally democratic methods of resistance and political counter-attack.
Having said the above, it’s clear that Republicans are actually getting a lot of support, despite the fact that they are behaving in ways that are undemocratic, they are incontrovertibly getting tens of millions of votes in each election. So it’s not like all of this anti-democratic activity is the result of Republican-backed poll workers stuffing ballot boxes and secretly discarding the paper ballots of Democrat voters. It’s not like they’re declaring Democratic rivals as ineligible to run for office and striking their names from the lists of eligible candidates to vote for. Not yet anyway. No, it seems like the Republicans are actually governing undemocratically with a lot of consent. There are tens of millions of voters who are fine with what Republicans are doing, and what this probably means is that a lot of voters are authoritarian themselves.
And that’s hardly surprising. Consider the institutions that America trusts the most and trusts the least:
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have confidence in our military. But it’s a dangerous, dangerous warning sign when 87% of US citizens trust the military, while 30% trust the media and anywhere from 25-36% of citizens have confidence in the 2 main parties the vote for. It’s basically a sign that Americans have for more respect for institutions that function on authority and distrust those that represent the interests of liberty and self-rule.
Thus, it’s not surprising that an authoritarian populist governs this country. Moreover, I think we need to be careful in assuming he couldn’t successfully achieve a major, unprecedented power grab. In the end, the final “check” aren’t institutions; the “checks” are the voting public that either expresses support for those institutions by voting for representatives who strengthen them, or weaken those institutions by voting for people who destroy these guardrails, or by simply not voting at all, or by voting for candidates who have absolutely no chance of winning an election as a way of “protesting” in futility.
Brian Kemp, Enemy of Democracy An expert on voter suppression, he will help keep Georgia red.
His voter suppression efforts (aimed almost exclusively at minorities) have actually reduced the number of registered voters in the state since 2012.
But those still registered can vote with confidence!
Let me save Brickhead, our Dear Esquire, a click.
Brian Kemp was elected and re-elected to the office of Secretary of State — if the elected representative of the Sovereign People of Georgia wants to suppress minority votes, who are you to argue with the result of this democratic process? Yes, Kemp’s elections may have been aided by older voter-suppression methods, but that voter suppression was also the result of democratic processes.
And anyway, if the Democrats were allowed the upper hand in these United States, they’d be filling top Washington posts with liars, sycophantic cronies, and corrupt billionaires; they’d be causing recessions with regulations coming from their bleary-eyed concern about “cancer.” They’d be funding opera with confiscatory taxes on our beloved billionaires.
Why do you hate democracy, BigAppleBucky ? Go back to France or Sweden or North Korea, or wherever is in better tune with your fascistic world-view.
An all-too-rare victory for democracy in Florida:
When same-sex marriage had only minority public support, the liberal voices on this message board were almost unanimous in their disdain of deciding important issues by majority vote.
Fascinating to now to see the supposed fidelity to the majority. (Not the EC majority, mind you; that’s still the product of idiot voters too dumb to know who’s buttering their bread. But TOTAL voters, that’s what we should rely upon!)
Until the next time that those idiots do something liberals don’t like, of course.
Ah, Bricker, you can always be counted on to be gloating about something irrelevant.
What! The Devil you say! Liberal hypocrisy! Heavens, man, why didn’t you say something!
What are you on about here? 
My best guess it that you think the fact that we believe that civil rights should not be left up to the tyranny of the majority, but that we still are upset about partisan road blocks to prevent undesirables from voting means that we are hypocrites?
But I don’t think that even you would be that desperate to hunt down examples of Liberal hypocrisy.
I think some liberal somewhere said the Electoral College should be abolished because it enabled Trump to become president, hence Bricker’s latest.
Personally, I think you should be abolishing religious colleges instead. Start with Bob Jones, work your way to Liberty University, and so forth.
But what does that have to do with voter suppression
Mysterious are the pathways in the land of Bricker…
Bricker is always keen to point out the molehills of liberal hypocrisy to distract from the mountains on his side. A pity that his examples are so frequently tenuous at best.
The sad part is that the strawman holds up better and makes more sense than the actual response.
These people are shameless. The reason being given is that the closing precincts are not ADA compliant and there isn’t time to.make them so. All of the precincts were open for last month’s GOP primary runoff. Was ADA compliance not a problem then?
Even the Republican nominee for governor, Brian Kemp, has spoken out against the closures.
Can’t they keep the precincts open and make arrangements for disabled voters to vote absentee, or to let them vote at the precincts that are compliant?