It’s clearly unconstitutional. There’s something called the Freedom of Association:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1_2_13_1/
I hate the disingenuous fuckers who pretend that mail-in ballots are rife with fraud. So many problems would be solved if mail-in ballots were the standard. They have (imo) no shortcomings which couldn’t be rectified.
I don’t think it will. There are a lot of us stubborn fucks who would take this as a challenge. I’m fully vaccinated and I’m retired. I can afford to spend a few days in jail for giving people water and rides.
Worth risking your life over?
The cop that shoots someone for giving someone a ride to the polls will be rewarded with a couple weeks paid vacation.
I’m white. Cops don’t shoot old white women, just the old black ones.
Fair, but I do think that it will have a chilling effect.
It is hard enough to get people to volunteer for GOTV efforts in the first place. Asking them to break a law, even if it is an unconstitutional law, will make it harder.
If it just drops turnout by a couple percent, that’s often all they need.
Couldn’t believe it when I read the article about that. Sure, at some completely superficial setting-the-world-to-rights-after-a-night-of-drinking sense, ‘people should only be allowed to vote if they understand what they are doing’ makes sort of sense, but who gets to decide if they understand what they are doing? and anyway, if the a politician wants to govern all of the people, then all of those people should have a say in it, no matter what.
Reading between the lines, what I think this is, is an admission that capturing the middle, uncommitted, unpolarised, disinterested ground, is hard for the Republican party in its current form and phase. But the problem to be solved there is not to forbid that middle ground its right to vote, but to be relevant to that middle ground. If you think uninformed people are the problem why you’re not getting votes, you’re doing a terrible job of informing them.
I salute you for your futile attempt to shine the light of reason on Republican thinking. My hat is off to you.
"If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy .” ― David Frum
So prophetic
You basically said it: Republicans have mostly - maybe completely - given up on the idea that they can actually win elections based on persuasion; they have to win through tribal fear, vote mining, and vote ‘purification’ (read: rigging) for lack of a better way of saying it.
Someone tell me if I’m remembering this right – Didn’t Texas already have a law against transporting people to the polls other than relatives? Was this law in place for the 2018 election, or the 2020 election? Whatever became of it?
I 100% back this line of thinking. Let’s ban everyone from voting who gets their “news” from QAnon, Infowars, OANN or Fox. They’re clearly low-information voters and don’t deserve to participate in public affairs.
That’s not what the GOP really mean, though; they mean that the ones with capital and “quality” debt are inherently wiser and more capable of governing than those who are brown and have student or loan shark debt.
There’s a certain sociopathy associated with the conservative white person’s view of capitalism. It’s this notion that life is, to some extent, a game of survival, and that those who can scam their way to the top are ‘smart’ and ‘fitter’ for survival, and that those who get scammed aren’t really victims of a bad system but are suckers and unfit for survival in their jungle.
It doesn’t matter if you point out to them that Johnny White Boy has a rich uncle, stepdad, or dead grandmother who can bail his ass out with a family fortune; he’s still a great business guy if he manages to live in a beautiful mansion that he could never afford without burning through an inheritance. He’s still smarter than the working class black, brown, or white ‘triggered’ millennial who’s got six figure debt and getting crushed by a horrible job market.
I know it’s not, but I’m looking at that quote from the Arizona guy: "… everybody shouldn’t be voting … if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues … ”
If being totally uninformed is a disqualification, there go half the GOP’s votes. Let’s do it!
Let’s take the voting station near his house and move it to the fucking desert.
And make it illegal for anyone to drive him there or give him water.
I’d argue that this viewpoint in fact pre-dates capitalism per se. Property and status qualifications for voting rights, explicit or de facto, go back at least as far as ancient Athenian democracy, and were nearly ubiquitous in early American voting laws when capitalism was still a pretty new idea.
I understand it goes back, but I attack the outdated premise (realizing I’m probably preaching to the choir). Wealth isn’t necessarily a good way to determine who’s qualified to participate in democracy, although it probably is a good way to screen out those whose interests are not the same as yours, which is probably way conservatives have always entertained the idea of “quality” voting and restrictions based on wealth (or the lack of it).
To be fair, I accept that those with wealth and the more industrious among our citizenry do have - or should have - a place at the table, where their voices can be heard and raised hands can be seen. But my view of democracy is pluralistic, not aristocratic, and not even necessarily majoritarian.
In their time, I totally get why they had concerns about “quality” voting. In fact, a lot can go wrong with democracy. We know what happens with state ballot initiatives and propositions. They had the examples of ancient Greece’s and Rome’s failures to draw upon, as well as examples of quasi-democracy that were more stable, such as the parliaments of England and the colonies. They had just lived through Shays Rebellion and the disaster of post-Revolutionary France wasn’t too many years into the future.
But we have a more complete data set to draw upon now. Democracies that have emerged in the last 75-150 years have given us some blueprints to work with. The catch is that they require some degree of checks and balances among socioeconomic classes, and they require a balance between public and private power. They require an acknowledgment that a democratic society doesn’t function too well on the false promise of equal opportunity that works in theory but not in practice; it requires a true redistribution of wealth and power such that there people of all backgrounds have open access to benefit from the amenities and advances of modern civilization (i.e. affordable healthcare, education, occupational training, etc).