There are reasonable and unreasonable demands on a voter exercising his right to vote. Your increasingly bizarre scenarios are an example of an unreasonable demand. Instead of asking where the line is drawn, ask yourself how you would make voting accessible to a homeless citizen who has no identification of any kind. How do you even get him an ID card if all he has to his name is…his name? And if the barriers you put up end up disenfranchising a large group of people who tend to vote one way, how do you make sure that doesn’t happen?
Note: The answer isn’t “That’s their problem”
Seriously, I would like to hear a plan from a Republican on how he will make sure that many homeless, poor, and minorities who are Democrats can easily vote
I live in a town of some 2500 people, about 150 of us are regular voters that also attend town meetings. Our roommate and I walk in to vote, we get greeted by name with a wave and frequently home baked cookies. There is an advantage to small town America sometimes
So, it would have been less racist to give the racists what they were asking for? That’s odd. Slave owning states wanted more political power for white people at the expense of blacks. That ain’t “less racist”.
It is not wild speculation to say that the slave owning states would have had more political power if slaves had been counted as full persons. That’s a fact. What is “wildly speculating” is to assume that a group with more political power would have surrendered it more easily than they did having less political power. It absolutely would have extended slavery longer. There can be no question about about that.
Deal with what? It was the 15th amendment that gave blacks the right to vote.
But they were used as warm bodies to fill up the census. The idea that deeply ingrained prejudices would have been undermined by accounting trick is laughable.
No. I’m saying that even a casual analysis indicates it would have been worse. Why don’t you map out for us how slavery would have ended earlier and blacks gotten the vote earlier under your hypothetical scenario where the original constitution counted blacks as whole persons.
Where are you getting this from? Blacks were slaves no matter what % of a person they were counted as. It would have made no difference in whether they were slaves or not. But it would have given the slave holding states much more political power if they had been counted as whole persons. Are you saying it wouldn’t have?
Are you joking? Women were lobbying to vote and fighting against their disenfranchisement for long before the amendment passed allowing them to vote.
Only if you ignore the history of why the 3/5th person compromise came about.
Can I ask you a question, Terr? Do you believe, scout’s honor, cross your heart, do you believe that this effort on the part of Republicans is solely motivated by the terrible scandal of voter fraud? And has nothing whatever to do with lowering the number of probable Democrat votes?
Of course I don’t. Do you believe, cross your heart, do you believe that if Democrats thought that the these supposedly “ID-less” people would generally vote for Republicans, they would still be this adamant against the voter ID laws? Be honest now.
Do you see how one view is antithetical to democracy while the other is in line with expanding the franchise to as wide a group as possible? This isn’t one side wants to disenfranchise versus a side that wants to commit fraud. This is a shameful undermining of democracy.
The answer was inherent in my post. Yes, I think it is the case that the Democratic party is interested in ensuring that the people it represents have the franchise. That is very different from intentionally disenfranchising people in order to win an election. That’s positively antithetical to democracy. The two are not equivalent.
ETA: shifting back to known false scares (voter fraud! voter fraud!) does nothing to support the repugnant attack on democracy.
From here, according to The 2001 Carter-Ford Commission on Election Reform 6-11 percent of voting age citizens don’t have a state issued photo ID. That’s roughly between 18 an 33 million people.
Sorry, didn’t realize I had to spell things out so severely.
No, if there was an attempt to disenfranchise a set of people that are largely outside the Democratic Party’s base, I don’t think they would spend significant time and energy campaigning against such a measure.
I don’t think you can name a statistically significant group of people that would fit that definition.
I don’t think if you can name such a group, the Democratic Party would champion efforts to disenfranchise such a group.
Even if you just stick with the first sentence, how does this make your position any less abhorrent to the basic foundations of democracy?
“It’s okay to intentionally limit the franchise in order to win an election” is worthy of disdain and ridicule.
Cool. Tell it to Illinois Democrats who sent out ballots to military voters overseas weeks later than they should have, then disqualified the ballots returned because they were a few days late. Or tell it to Democrats in every recount ever that try as hard as they can to disqualify ballots they find questionable (and yes, Republicans do the same thing).
Your claim is that providing a free ID for a voter is still too much of a hassle because they have to find their way to the DMV to get the ID.
I think it is very relevant to ask how, if these people can’t make it one time to the DMV, how in the hell do they get to the polling places each election day?
If the first is an unconstitutional infringement on their right to vote, then surely the state has to hand deliver the ballot to their homes or else it would put an equal burden on them.
