I’m all for it. Higher voter turnout + $500 tax break.
While I would have no problem with you voting, we don’t have a system to ensure that other folks in the same position you are in also have the same understanding of American history and government that you do. You need to pass a language and history/civics test to become a citizen. If we allowed legal residents to take that test, and if they passed, allowed them to vote, that would be one thing. But we don’t.
There’s also the renouncing loyalty to other countries bit. That’s important too.
I have no particular national allegiances, except when it comes to unimportant things like sport.
I think that nationalism is, on the whole, and especially when it comes to everyday politics, a pointless and unproductive and anti-intellectual exercise. My decision, in a United States election, would be based on my evaluation of who would do the best job of serving the interests of the American people. I don’t have to hold any particular national allegiance to make that assessment; i simply have to believe (as i do) that a federal government has a responsibility to serve the interests of the people that it represents.
In about 99 percent of issues before the voters, national allegiance is pretty much irrelevant anyway. Even issues of foreign policy are, for the most part, to big and too complex to be susceptible to marrow-minded questions of national loyalty. And the two parties agree on plenty of substantive issues anyway: Barack Obama has been far too similar to George W. Bush in his foreign policy for my liking. Furthermore, even if i did have a greater foreign policy (or other) allegiance to my country of birth (Canada) or the country where i was raised (Australia), the fact is that in the vast majority of foreign policy situations, the general interests of those countries align with the interests of the United States.
Finally, to be honest, i think your question about allegiance is pretty rich given what qualifies as allegiance for some conservatives. I, along with a bunch of Americans, have been called a “supporter of Saddam” on this very board simply for opposing the US invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that millions of Americans citizens opposed it, and it has been shown (if we want to be really charitable) to have been a horrendously costly enterprise based on tremendous misrepresentation. In recent debates over immigration, i’ve seen supporters of amnesty for illegal immigrants referred to as traitors and as unAmerican.
What exactly would qualify as sufficient allegiance for people who make such accusations?
I get your complaints about nationalism. Nationalism has often resulted in a lot of ugliness in the world, and I’ve seen some ugly expressions of it in this country, although fortunately we haven’t had anything on the order of WWI.
However, we can’t have people voting in the interests of other countries, thus we require renunciation of all other national loyalties as part of the citizenship oath. The problem I have is that there are people who, while 99% of the issues have nothing to do with nationalism, some voters don’t care about any of those issues at all and vote based on what they want American poilcy towards their home country to be. And that’s after they get citizenship in many cases.
I think this is important, because there is absolutely no way that someone could possibly swear an oath and then continue to vote in the interests of other countries.
Here’s a cite that you’re wrong on both counts. If you still disagree, support your argument with a cite of your own.
Correlation is not causation.
Who and what are you addressing?
That cite doesn’t address my argument. It says what “will” happen, without evidence that things actually have happened. It’s not like voter ID laws are new. If they reduce turnout, there should be evidence. Likewise, there should be evidence that early voting has increased turnout. All they have is that minorities and young people are more likely to take advantage of early voting. Which is not the same as showing that without it, they would be less likely to vote.
The Monkey Cage linked to studies on voter ID laws:
Your link suggests some studies have found such an association, while others have not. Here’s a much more recent report that finds a stronger association between voter ID and reduced black turnout.
Conflicting studies generally mean the evidence is lacking.
The study you cited is certainly valid, but the sample is incredibly small. Most pollsters won’t even bother to do racial breakdowns in Kansas because there aren’t enough non-white voters to make it statistically significant. Tennessee is a good place to analyze such laws, but it’s only one state, and the drop was only 1.5%, which is not big enough to draw a conclusion from, especially since as the study notes, youth turnout dropped 7.1%. Except in 2012, youth turnout dropped nationwide and they don’t seem to have controlled for that. The black/white difference is more interesting, because black turnout exceeded white in 2012. But not in every single state, so the 1.5% drop doesn’t really prove anything.
Plus, given the numbers bandied about by liberal activists, you’d expect a pretty big drop, one noticeable and immediate. That obviously did not happen in 2012 for the groups predicted. Young voters were the main dropoff in turnout and that was only because their turnout was unusually high in 2008. Likewise, I’d predict the black vote to decline nationwide in 2016, so if that did happen, it wouldn’t be evidence of the harmful effect of ID laws unless turnout was down by more in states that had ID laws.
This is why it’s so hard to study – it might have dropped turnout due to difficulty for some in 2012, but this may have been counteracted by other voters who were motivated to come out precisely because they were worried Republicans were trying to suppress their votes.
There would be ways to actually combat real or imagined voter fraud without harming voter access or suppressing voters in any way, but those that are pushing voter ID requirements and eliminating early voting (early voting in particular doesn’t have anything at all to do with voter fraud) don’t seem to be at all interested, and for many they are up-front about why – that they want to help Republicans win.
I agree that voter ID doesn’t solve much. It’s a safeguard, but not a great one, and it may disenfranchise more than it prevents fraud. But there is real fraud in the system, such as non-citizens voting, double voting, felon voting, and voting where one doesn’t have a residence. ID stops none of that, but as Bricker has point out I believe, the voter ID requirement at least proves that the person voted. It’s the same reason ID is required to get a hotel room, or rent an apartment, or board a plane. If anything happens, they know who you are and you can’t easily claim it was somebody impersonating you. But I’d be willing to give up on ID if we’d take other measures to insure the integrity of the electoral system, such as requiring proof of citizenship for registration and regular purging of voter databases to eliminate those who are dead or have moved. There is nothing controversial about any of my suggestions: they were part of the Help America Vote Act and the Carter-Baker commission. Democrats, faced with an unmotivated base problem which has only gotten worse in recent years, suddenly find these things most objectionable
Which brings me to early voting. I don’t have an issue with early voting, so much as I think it’s a pathetic attempt by Democrats to win elections they might otherwise lose. Problem is, unmotivated people don’t come out and vote even though there are more days. And if it’s not increasing turnout, what’s the point? We have an election day for a reason, it’s not election month. The main argument against it is that people can often cast their votes before there are even debates. But it’s not an important issue to me, there’s no fraud and it’s not actually giving the Democrats an advantage. I just don’t see it as a fundamental civil rights issue and Democrats in their desperation are making it out to be such an issue. Early voting is not a right and it never will be.
You still haven’t demonstrated any sort of problem, or any sort of coherent definition of what “voting in the interests of other countries” might even look like.
Voting, after all, presupposes candidates. Say, just to formulate a hypothetical, that they allowed me to vote, and that i decided i was going to vote based on my ideal US policy towards Australia. That is, i would look at the candidates in the election and choose the one whose policies benefited Australia the most.
In doing this, i would still be choosing from the available candidates. Say, for the sake of the hypothetical, that the candidates were a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, a Green Party candidate, and two independents. In choosing one of these candidates based on my interests as a nefarious and subversive Australian, i would still be choosing a candidate available to every other voter, including all the American citizens. And some of those American citizens would presumably be choosing the same candidate as me, even if for different reasons.
Are they voting against American interests as well, if they vote for the same candidate as me, even if their decision takes no account of the candidate’s policy towards Australia? Hell, what if their own decisions are, in fact, motivated by greater concern for Australia than for America? You would never know it, because how do you even measure intent at the ballot box anyway, given that we have a secret ballot and no-one is required to provide you with a reason for voting for any particular candidate. Indeed, if a candidate has met the requirements to be on the ballot in the first place, then he or she can be presumed, a priori, to be a viable choice in the election, no matter what particular reasons anyone might have for casting a ballot in his or her favor.
Beyond that, in the incredibly unlikely event that the voters in one particular district or state managed to elect a candidate who might conceivably meet the definition of “voting in the interests of other countries,” the system of checks and balances in the political system itself, and the size and the competing interests within the system, would mitigate the harm that this one person might do anyway. That is, as James Madison argued in Federalist #51, one of the benefits of a large republic.
Your same reasoning applies to allowing children to vote. Or even non-residents.
Outstanding non-response. I shouldn’t have expected anything better, i guess, given the source.
Be nice. I don’t disagree with any of your arguments, I just explained why the founders created the system they did. What you said here:
does apply to felon voting, underage voting, and even non-resident voting. If we accept this argument as valid, and it’s not entirely unpersuasive, then I see no reason to limit it to just allowing non-citizen residents to vote.
But if you want a reason why I don’t like it, here’s one: candidates represent their voting base. If the voting base has no stake in the values that make America unique, neither will the candidates. And if a large portion of the voting base is concerned with say, US policy towards Cuba, Israel, or Taiwan, then our politics will dictate our relationships with those countries rather than our national interests and values. Oh, wait…
This is a silly argument for a few reasons.
First, felons can vote in a number of states. Unfortunately, removing voting rights from felons, even after they have paid their debt to society, is one area where America is pretty much unique, at least in the Western democratic world.
Second, even where felons cannot vote, the decision to remove the vote from them is a positive (i.e., an active) one, resulting from a specific bad act or acts on their part. Removing something as a penalty for a specific act is not the same as denying it by default in the first place.
My logic does not apply to underage voting, because age limits on voting adhere to very specific understandings, encoded in the law, about the line between minority and majority. That line will always be an inadequate representation of reality, but it is probably a necessary one given the difficulty of assessing the capacity of every single individual. I believe that the age of consent could usefully be lower than it is in some places; i believe that the drinking age should be 18; and i believe that one could make an argument for lowering the voting age. But whatever the age is, i also think that there is a practical need for having a bright line in the law, if only for purposes of practicality.
One could possibly that this makes it similar to allowing permanent residents to vote, but the difference is that anyone who qualifies as a permanent resident has already passed through an extensive screening process.
And that is why your point about my argument applying to non-resident voters is wrong. It is wrong precisely because i have only ever been arguing in favor of voting for people who have already gone through an extensive government screening process and been allowed permanent status in the United States. I have never asked for illegal aliens, tourists, people on temporary work visas, or other categories of temporary immigrants to be able to vote. If YOU want to extend the debate to felons, minors, and non-residents, go right ahead, but don’t pretend that this is the debate i was trying to have.
If you do want to play that game, we can play it in the other direction. It’s easy to argue that all the criteria that you want to inflict on non-citizen voters should also apply to citizens. That is, citizens should be forced to take a language and a civics test and demonstrate their loyalty to America before being allowed to vote.
Having gone through the process for permanent residency, and looked in considerable detail into the process of shifting from permanent residency to citizenship, it seems to me that most of the steps are very similar. They both require a whole lot of information, biometrics, and money. The main difference in obtaining citizenship, from the point of view of the applicant, is the language and civics issue, and the oath. I actually think that anyone granted residency should, after a probation period similar to the current one, convert automatically to citizenship without the waste and silliness of going through basically the same process all over again, plus a grade 8 multiple choice quiz.
This isn’t worth discussing, because it’s meaningless pabulum. Even in my limited experience of living in other countries (three western, English speaking, democratic nations) and traveling in Europe and Asia, i can tell you very clearly that America doesn’t really have unique values. The specific weight that particular issues are given might differ in the US but, your wide-eyed American exceptionalism notwithstanding, the United States isn’t that different from many other places, especially in terms of the basic desires and hopes and beliefs and values of everyday people. There is as much diversity of values and opinions *within *the United States and among its citizens as there is *between *America and many other nations.
To be honest, my point about knowing more about American history than most Americans was more of a throwaway line than anything. It’s not the main basis for my claim.
As i said, i don’t have a huge problem with not being able to vote but, to the extent that i do have a problem with it, my problem stems not from the fact that i know American history, but from the fact that i am subject to the same laws, restrictions, taxes, and such as any citizen. I’m not about to start yelling “No taxation without representation,” but i contribute to this society in the same way as a citizen, and suffer the same burdens, without having the same rights. And that doesn’t change even if i don’t know the difference between George Washington and George Washington Carver.