That’s incredibly vague and doesn’t make any sense. I’m not sure what a ‘wacky date’ is, but if anything its retired people that have all the time in the world and they by in large vote Republican. Low turnout does indeed produce wild results, I’m not sure it follows teacher unions and AFCLME benefit though.
Do you have anything more concrete?
How many ships disappear each year?
Now, “they” want you to think this is caused by rogue waves, but how do we know it’s not krakens?
I’m not sure I’d 100% agree with the general point, since rich people who make bad decisions can do things like crash economies that are far beyond their resources to mitigate, but the point that rich people can actually fix many of the mistakes they make is a very good one.
And in the general case it’s a good argument for fines as an efficient punishment. When paid, they make the wronged party whole.
This is almost word-for-word the Republican campaign for voter ID laws, except substitute “Mexicans” for “krakens.”
Here are proud Democrats at work in the City of Bell, California.
Voter fraud led to scandal
Assertions about discrepancies in the 2009 election also are being examined by the FBI and California’s Secretary of State office. A source at the FBI confirmed that they were aware of the accusations. In the police report filed, were listed the names of 19 voters who allegedly were either living in Lebanon, or were deceased at the time that their votes were cast.[14] As Los Angeles prosecutors investigate potential voter fraud, several citizens have allegedly told The Times that city officials encouraged them to fill out absentee ballots in a manner that election experts say has significantly raised the possibility that state law has been violated.[15] “Under state law, this is not to be done unless someone is ill or disabled. If, in fact, the election itself has been tainted by improper electioneering or other violations of state law, then that involves civil — maybe even criminal — penalties, and in some circumstances, you can overturn the election itself”, former Attorney General Brown said. “If (officials) met in a back room and said, 'How can we run an election where nobody shows up so we can then fatten our own salaries and pensions?” “That could constitute a violation that would bring into question the entire election”, he added.[16]
Great, so we have 19 counts of voting fraud. Anymore cites?
ETA: The question you quoted was me asking for evidence of voter suppression by Democrats, but either way is cool.
I bet that the content you propose as “facts about voter fraud,” is not, in fact, composed of neutral facts about voter fraud.
As evidence:
This is not true – or at least, it’s not provably true.
I contend that the kind of voter fraud stopped by Voter ID includes non-citizens voting.
Do you agree?
How is this an example of voter suppression by Democrats, or how are you defining “voter suppression” such that this fits?
The allegation is that city officials encouraged MORE people to vote, not fewer. (Yes, I recognize that they encouraged people who allegedly should not have been voting in that election in the first place, which makes this an example of election fraud, but it doesn’t fit any definition of voter suppression that I’ve ever seen.)
During the 2000 recount in Florida, there were accusations that Democrats were trying to disenfranchise members of the military by having their ballots thrown out.
I’d label that “voter suppression”, but maybe you won’t think it fits the definition either.
Depending on how the law is framed, I’ll stipulate that it can be true; I’ve not examined this particular question before. Are you suggesting that in modern times (say, the past half-century) there has been at least one election in the US whose outcome was changed by the in-person votes of non-citizens, and that had voter ID laws been in effect that wouldn’t have happened? If so, can you cite the election or elections in question?
I have to change my mind on this. It would be absolutely impossible to collect the votes of people who’s identity can’t be confirmed and then count them later after confirmation. Just can’t be done, violates the laws of thermodynamics or something like that. So instead we should put up as many barriers to voting as possible just in case someone commits voter fraud that affects an election some day, or gets eaten by a kraken.
No, you’re right, that’s not cool. It shouldn’t happen. This allegation was over the improper discarding of “1,527 of the postal ballots, many of them from soldiers and sailors on active service, were rejected” in the final minutes of an election to be decided by 900 or so votes in Florida. It doesn’t make it right though.
But lets put this in context. In my State, Wisconsin, a GOP controlled legislature passed a Voter ID law in 2011 despite the fact 300,000 potential voters (9% of the electorate) do not have the ID to vote.
So in effect you are saying poor people need not apply. Now, I agree that people should get emissions testing & repairs and people should return library books, but if you are going to be focused on “punishment” rather than making sure that you are actually advocating for better decisions to be made then, well, that simply doesn’t make any sense to me. As iiandyiiii said, let’s work to make the outcomes better - rather than just tell poor people, well you made a mistake once and since you don’t have money to fix it like the rest of us do, sucks for you. Maybe do things like find a way to get poor people to have a reduced charge for emissions or have some help for repairs. You can make it income based or however you’d like to go about doing so. Simply punishing isn’t going to change anything, or, just as important, teach their children a different or better way of going about things (esp in the library card example).
And if that makes me a poverty apologist, well, I’ll take that moniker on.
Yeah, let’s look at that. From what I know about that case, it was ethically the wrong thing to do to try to throw up hurdles to voters, even if there was a solid legal justification for those hurdles. I am not at all happy that Democrats did it.
But the next part is important: Gore disavowed the strategy. The head of the Democratic party said, in effect, that it was important to count every vote, and when Gore’s campaign could have mounted legal challenges to military ballots that were incorrectly cast, they didn’t. As that article suggests, that decision–to count all votes–may have cost Gore the election (and resulted in the deaths of thousands of US soldiers in the wars that W started, but that’s another kettle of fish).
That’s the right thing to do. When in doubt, count all votes.
As for the library book issue, I’m familiar with the fines issue, through three measures. First, at my public school library, the outsize portion of books that are lost are lost by kids living in poverty. Our school library requires kids to pay for lost books at the end of the year, with dire threats for those that don’t return them–but when we know that a family can’t afford to pay for a book, we quietly take care of it behind the scene. The alternative is to punish a kid for not having the solid support system that wealthier families have.
Second, I take my class to the public library several times a year. Sometimes a kid will lose a book. When it’s a middle-class family, they’ll replace the book. When it’s a kid in poverty, that replacement is probably not going to happen. The library quietly removes the book from the system and warns the kid not to let it happen again; and it rarely does. They decide taht they could try to teach a kid a lesson about responsibility, or they could try to teach a kid a lesson about loving to read and about World War II history and about alligators and about Shel Silverstein’s poetry and about whatever else sparks that kid’s intellectual life. The librarians know which lessons they ought to teach, and I salute them for it.
Third, I pay library fines myself all the time, around $10-$20 a year probably, plus extra when my bookworm daughter loses a book. THat’s the price I pay for the library, because I can afford it. If we couldn’t afford it, I’d really want the library to work with us, because going to the library is so crucial to my kid’s life.
It is poor judgment to ban kids from using libraries because they can['t afford to pay fines. Rich people have the slack to mess up; poor kids who don’t don’t need to suffer for it.
I’m a bit skeptical of the 9% and 10% figures for “voters” who don’t have “government-issued ID”. Does anyone have a cite to the actual study / analysis on how those figures were reached?
Except, again, the middle class and wealthy are better able to paper over their “mistakes”.
This brought to mind an accident I was in a couple months ago - I’ve been driving for over 35 years and had zero accidents until that day, zero, nada, none. While I’ll be the first to admit there was an element of luck to that, clearly I’m NOT a reckless driver, either, because if I had been my record wouldn’t have been that spotless. Anyhow, I was sitting at an intersection waiting for a light to turn green when I got rear-ended.
Here’s my though process: “Holy S***! I just got hit! Is my passenger OK? Am I OK? Shit, shit, shit - how much is this going to cost me? I just finished paying for new shocks on this thing, and got the brakes fixed, and now THIS? How much is my insurance going up? What am I going to have to give up to pay for it? We’ve got TWO families depending on me getting people to and from work (we were returning from work, and my passenger’s car is dead and she hasn’t money to fix it so she’s depending on others to help her keep her job).” In other words, I’m a responsible poor person wondering how the f*** I’m going to pay for this shit.
I get out of my pick-up. The woman who rear-ended me is CLEARLY much better off financially based just on the vehicle she’s driving and the amount of jewelry/high fashion clothing she has on. She still has her cellphone in her hand when she looks at me and says "I am so sorry!"
(I must admit, the apology went a long way towards cooling my fear and anger down)
Here’s the thing - if my auto insurance goes up because of this I have to squeeze that out of my budget somehow. Which probably means cutting back on our food. We’re down to eating meat maybe two-three times a week and not by choice. Maybe I have to give up any kind of fresh fruit other than bananas, which are stupid cheap (and I’m stupid tired of them, to be honest). Maybe I have to start charging my co-worker for gas instead of letting her keep those few pennies in hopes of maybe getting HER vehicle fixed. I don’t know, all I know is that my budget is calculated down to the penny, I have virtually no cushion whatsoever, and if my premiums go up I don’t know how the hell I’m going to pay them or what I can cut otherwise - we don’t drink, we don’t smoke, we don’t go out… about the only thing left is giving up Netflix, I guess we can just sit home and watch infomercials, but somehow I doubt that $7/month is going to be enough.
The lady who hit me? Maybe she cuts back on her Starbuck’s habit, or just has a mani instead of a mani-pedi or something.
See the difference?
You can bitch all you want about irresponsible poor people, but irresponsible not-poor people not only display irresponsibility, but they can have a VERY large impact on poor people who are impacted by irresponsibility, like texting and driving and rear-ending the motionless pickup at the traffic light. SHE isn’t the one who will have to pay my increased premiums, or worry about losing her job because it takes awhile for her to get the money to get a vehicle fixed instead of just writing a check for it.
As it happened - she was found at fault and her insurance company paid for the repairs to my pick up. All fixed within 10 days of the accident. Fortunately, the vehicle was still safe to drive in the meanwhile. I was fortunate in that the mechanic across the street was willing to look it over without charging me, but then, I’ve been a regular customer for 18 years so he was willing to do me the favor. If it hadn’t been safe to drive both me and my coworker might have been screwed because we’d be begging others to drive the both of us to and from work. But the point it, that could have been two of the working poor losing their livelihoods due the irresponsibility of someone not poor - so let’s stop with this nonsense that somehow only poor people are irresponsible, and that somehow only their irresponsibility inconveniences or affects others. It works both ways. It’s just that when you have some monetary reserves you have more resources to deal with this sort of thing. I don’t have the money to rent a car, get my car fixed immediately, or otherwise use money to fix such a problem.
There have been several of these studies; I’m most familiar with the one prepared on behalf of the Brennan Center (PDF), which was done via a telephone survey: they hired a survey company to call up a sampling of voting-age Americans and ask whether said individuals had current photo ID bearing their current legal name and address.
It really seems to me that folks are intent on making poor people hate life so much that they kill themselves off.
The American underclass is growing in number. A lot of folks who were previously able to afford “bad choices” are now unable to do that. And for some reason, at the same time, it is becoming increasing difficult to escape the consequence of a bad choice, particularly if you’re poor. It used to be that having bad credit would only affect your ability to secure more credit. But now it can make it hard to get an apartment or find employment. Being homeless and unemployed increases your chances of making more bed choices. Why? Because your range of options becomes increasingly more constrained.
Being fair does not mean treating everyone the exact same. We don’t all have the same ability to exercise “personal responsibility!”, and that should be taken into account when we hand out punishments.
The fact that life will never be fair is not sufficient to advocate removing consequences for stupid or irresponsible behavior.