We will. The Senate will kill this election year fear-mongering.
Likewise, we have seen no real proof that voting by illegal immigrants is an actual problem, or just hyperventilation by proponents of the law.
My late grandmother never even had a birth certificate. Her parents never applied for one and the church she was baptised in is long gone so there’s no record of her being born at all. Of course she was on the voter rolls from the day she turned 21 to 6 months after she died. I can just imagine some clerk telling an elderly person who’s been voting for 60+ years that they need to prove their citizenship with documents that might not even exist! :eek:
The different is that it’s unconstitutional in the United States to make people pay for the right to vote. It’s not unconstitutional to make them pay for a driver’s license.
Here we can prove our identity any number of ways for the sake of voting - driver’s license, health card, birth certificate; I’ve known people to bring a couple of bills with them that show their name and address. I don’t see why any jurisdiction needs to go through the enormous trouble and expense of creating “Voting cards,” which suggests to me there’s some ulterior motive.
Most politicians are very much in favor of Voter Ids (e.g. “Vote for me or terrorists will kill you!”, “Vote for me or gays will ruin your marriage!”)
Oh, you mean voter IDs…
Never mind.
Again, what about the folks who CAN’T get a valid ID because of birth certificate issues? All this hand-wringing about ‘those who don’t want to make the effort’ and there are people who want to make the effort but are still being excluded!
Oh I totally agree with you there. It’s just that when I think about minority disenfranchisement, I instantly start thinking of the South. Why? It’s just a part of the South’s history.
Really? What part of Georgia? Because, you see, I was born and raised there - and I can swap Georgian anecdotes with you all day long.
The reason I ask is that, when I was growing up in Georgia, and I went to get my first driver’s license - I had to go a county over. That’s about 20 miles give or take. And, wait for it… I had to go on a Wednesday, because that’s the only day the DMV office in my area was open.
How about we solve the problem this way? If you want to vote, show up with some form of proof of who you are. There are 17 different forms of identification that the state of Georgia currently accepts - phone bills, birth certificates, etc. We’ll stick with that absent proof of serious voter fraud in the form of fraudulent idenfitication.
And, I’ll be honest - I don’t think illegal immigrants engaging in voter fraud has really ever been an issue in Georgia. I’ll be happy to look at any cite you want to provide to the contrary.
No I’m not making that mistake - I never even tried to prove that DMV employees discriminate based on race. In fact, I don’t think they are racist at all (inefficient is another story). All I’m saying is that the ambiguity in the law provides for that possibility. I just won’t accept a law that gives a DMV employee the potential to use race as a method of disenfranchising someone.
See… it doesn’t really matter what we want. Americans of all sizes, stripes, and stupidity have the Constitutional right to vote. And we have a duty to protect that right from even the best of politicians’ intentions.
Finally, I just want to say - I wholeheartedly approve of you rising up to defend the notion that GA is not a stupid redneck racist state. I know from first-hand experience that it’s not like that, and as a Georgian who has moved away - frequently defend GA’s honor as well from ignorant people who assume it to be nothing but an outpost of the Klan.
However, this law was designed by Georgia republicans whose constituency is as white as Christmas, and gives the appearance (whether you believe the arguments or not) that it disenfranchises black voters. It’s sad to say, but Georgia, based on her history, is not going to be given the benefit of the doubt. Not by outsiders, and not be me. Georgia has GOT to do better than that.
And this would come to what? 1/10 of 1% of the voters? Can there really be that many voters with documentation problems so serious that they can’t even qualify for the equivalent of a driver’s license?
Why is the notion of vote fraud so hard to swallow? Several times in this thread it has been mentioned that voter fraud is not really an issue. But we only have to look to history to see it is.
Certainly a few dead people voting here and there is not likely to swing an election one way or another but we have seen very close calls where that could well be a difference.
We also saw George Bush pull off two squeakers. I am not saying here that he won due to voter fraud but things were close enough that voter fraud could have made a notable difference.
In short when a candidate wins by a million votes 80 dead people (or whatever) voting is meaningless but if the candidate wins by 200 votes it becomes significant and worth stopping. Add to that all sorts of other shenanigans that can be used to sway an election and 100 votes here, 1000 there and so on can combine to make a noticeable difference (Florida in 2000 anyone?). You never know when the next close one will be.
Sure it is. You’re being intentionally obtuse. It may not have been hard for you to find a DMV, but what about the old black lady in Edgewood, reliant on MARTA and only comfortable traveling familiar routes. Or the rural poor person in one of the state’s 99 counties without a DMV office?
makes me think of this, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
At some point in the history of this nation, a restaurant owner probably said, “if you like those damn n*ggers so much, let 'em eat at your place, but here they sit out back.” You sir, are his heir.
One might have similar reservations about allowing someone with a lack of intellectual honesty the right to vote. Lucky for you, they aren’t leguslating around that reservation
forgot what forum I was in – sorry for the *ad hominem * polecat
Having to pay for the ID card is only one issue that makes me strongly oppose the proposal. Paying to obtain any documentation in order to vote is a poll tax, pure and simple.
Also, read lissener’s post above. This, above all, illustrates why mandating a national voter ID card is not only wrong but discriminatory. After reading the arguments expressed in this thread and elsewhere, I’m convinced those who are for it, (a) are not poor, (b) are not Black, © have no idea how it must be to have no access to a vehicle or public transportation, (d) don’t recall, weren’t affected, weren’t yet born, or simply don’t care about the all-too-recent past when literacy tests and the like were used to minimize minority voter turnout, and (e) have no family members who are former victims of these digusting practices.
People can pull national security or any other spurious argument out of their asses if it helps them rationalize their borderline racist bents so they can sleep at night, but please don’t insult those who would be adversely affected by this new swing to an old, tired, and woefully familiar dance, by calling this crap anything other than it is.
The bottom line is minorities (read: African Americans) vote for democrats in overwhelming numbers. Republicans want to affect those numbers. It’s not about any damned thing else. Sure, sure, a national voter ID card would affect some poor Whites as well, but such collateral effects would have minimal impact on the goal of lowering democrat voter turnout by targeting and disenfranchising minorities.
And before anyone pisses me off further by asking for a cite to my contentions above, I can only refer to my grandfather who experienced first-hand having to jump through hoops simply to exercise his RIGHT to vote, and was CONVINCED, until listening to the news yesterday afternoon, that those horrible days were firmly entombed in America’s less-than-honorable past.
It’s MORE than simply inconveniencing people. It’s MORE than inappropriately impacting people economically. It’s the message such state-sponsored, government-supported practices send to those who have a history of being trod upon. Racially targeted, ethically bereft practices to minimize minority voter turnout in the early 1960s were wrong then, mandated voter ID cards targeted to the disenfranchised to accomplish the same goal is just as bloody wrong today! :mad:
Another wrinkle: How long would these voter ID cards be good for? If it’s already obstructionist for some folks to go X miles and pay $Y for an ID, having to do it every Z years wouldn’t help matters any.
As the number of illegal immigrants in Georgia has more than doubled in the past ten years to about 470,000–roughly 5% of the state’s population–and Georgia currently has the fastest growing population of illegal immigrants in the nation, I have very little doubt that sooner or later this will be a major problem. And I think I’ve said all I care to say on the subject.
Indiana recently elected a Republican governor for the first time in a long time. First thing he did was close a bunch of BMV branches, including heavily used branches in poor urban (Democrat) areas. Second thing he did was ram through legislation requiring a driver’s license to vote. Indiana being Indiana, everybody just smiled and went about their business.
The system we used to have was just fine. The poll workers had a copy of your signature, taken from your registration form, on file. When you showed up to vote, you had to sign your name. The poll worker compared the signatures. If they didn’t match up you had some explaining to do before you could vote. I guess the republicans were frustrated with the number of poor black people who were able to reproduce their own signatures and had to do something about it.
Notice that the party in power is typically the one doing the fraud. Which is the bigger problem - a dozen criminals or illegal immigrants voting democratic, or a thousand potential democratic voters being excluded from voting to keep these dozen from voting?
As for Lonesome Polecat - despite the fact that some fund could pay for it, poll taxes are unconstitutional. End of story. You must also be the only person in the entire country who doesn’t consider going in person to a drivers license bureau an incredible hassle.
If it were done my way, I’d give a little test, and anyone thinking WMDs were actually found in Iraq, or that Saddam was involved in 9/11 would be banned on account of stupidity. But that is (rightly) against the law and constitution. Anyone can play the who’s fit to vote game.
Some states dont require proof of citizenship to obtain drivers licenses. Therefore it would require a passport to obtain the document. Passports are more than 100 bucks. To get one you require a burth cirtificate. Can you find yours. It would clearly be difficult for the poorer people. It would be expensive and a difficult process for many.
I think requiring people to pay for an ID to vote is an illegal idea - it is a poll tax. I guess I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of living without any sort of ID. And if people are getting government assistance without one, Georgia is going to be in massive trouble before long. As noted above, we have the fastest growing population of illegal immigrants in the country. It has gotten so bad in Columbus I won’t go out to eat alone in certain areas of town because I don’t enjoy being called a whore over dinner.
We’re talking about millions of people
Also driver’s licenses didn’t used to require a valid birth cert. They just happened to tighten the method for obtaining one right before requiring one to vote. Nice huh?
Oh really? How about those of us unwilling to show up at a polling place to vote at all? Should we be disenfrachised too, because we aren’t willing to go to “so little trouble and expense. . . to vote?” In California I’m allowed to vote by mail with an absentee ballot
So don’t give me any of that “we don’t need people voting who’re unwilling to go to certain types of trouble and expense” hooey. That attitude is downright undemocratic and offensive.
Please explain to me why it should be incumbent upon the victims or opponents of this legislation to have to bear the “personal responsibility” of solving the problems created by the perpetrators of it.
This whole debacle is just yet another example of the hypocracy of the Republican party and what they purport to stand for. It is utterly disgusting that Republican leaders work to enact legislation that will not only serve to disenfrachise a good chunk of the voting population, but that will create an enormous and expensive bureaucracy, and yet dare to bill themselves as the party of smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Worse yet, people still believe them!