Marvin...the problem you are trying to fix doesn't exist. The problem of alleged voter fraud is manufactured as a legally defensible way to discriminate. The laws are discriminatory because that is the point. Your alternatives will be acceptable only if they achieve discrimination that favors the GOP to the same extent or greater. More importantly, all of this is going to get much, much worse because of the magnitude of the demographic problem the GOP is facing into the future.
More Georgia
- Thread starter Marvin the Martian
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The problem I am trying to fix does exist. I am trying to fix the problem of people having to deal with laws trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist. These state laws that prohibit people from voting are real, they do exist. Given that, how can we make it possible for the person that moved to Wisconsin and can't produce a birth certificate from 75 years ago upon demand to vote? I can yell and complain about Wisconsin's law, and I do, but that doesn't change the law.
Have any voter ID laws been repealed? I don't recall seeing that happen. If these laws are here to stay, how can we get ahead of the curve. Out there today, is an elderly person who doesn't have the proper ID and it would be a huge cost and inconvenience to get that ID. How do we get them to vote?
Don’t forget, Trump’s own handpicked commission to study voter fraud didn’t find anything
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.us...-found-no-evidence-of-voter-fraud?context=amp
If you want to make it easier for white elderly Republicans to vote (without also making it easier for democrats to vote or even making it marginally harder for democrats to vote) I am sure you will find willing allies on the right. But such things that you might regard as a "fix" in fact only make the disenfranchisement problem worse.
So how would a fingerprint test make it harder for minorities to vote than it now is?
will be interesting to see how many, and which, polling stations run out of ballots election day.
Let's think by analogy about the literacy tests that were once used as a core part of Jim Crow laws. In principle there is nothing discriminatory about a literacy test. In practice white people were exempted from the test (because they were found to be of good moral character) or grandfathered in.
Of course the literacy test was solving a problem that didn't exist (like your fingerprint test) that was a pretext for discrimination. The basic idea is to create a hurdle for voting and then discriminate in the enforcement of the hurdle.
VanPastorMan
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You're not addressing the reality Marvin is addressing, instead you're bitching about it. BItching only exacerbates the problem by fueling the current divisive nature of our politics. Marvin is looking for a real solution that isn't divisive.
Think of it this way, what if all ID laws were outlawed and Republicans started cheating like mad. Then what? No laws to stop them.
I love that story. Have you ever actually looked into it, or do you just regurgitate Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity?
how is submitting to a fingerprint test any easier than getting an ID?
that said, wouldn't you need a valid picture ID to prove who you were for the fingerprinting??
and you'll still need the ID at the poles anyway for address purposes, so all you've done is add more and more layers, not to mention the inevitable scan/fingerprint tech glitches that would shut down the entire polling station.
not to mention the overall creepiness and privacy concerns.
thank you Rube Goldberg. bwg
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SO I originally thought, but (not to speak for att) I think he's suggesting that Marvin's getting pulled into the snare of agreeing with ID laws. The problem with att's analogy is that there's a legitimate reason to "guarantee" one vote per person -- the integrity of our voting system, which is the foundation of our nation and is reasonably intact so far. We're long past the point of merely trusting the system. If a large enough portion of the citizenry want more security for our voting system, we have to go down that path. Marvin's looking for as feasible and viable a way while disenfranchising as few as possible.
If we used Marvin's system, could the Georgians be pulling their current shenanigans?
I don't think that's what Marvin's doing. I think he's accepting voter ID laws as faits accomplis, and wondering what we can do to minimize their harm.
If so, my apologies to Marvin.
Laws that don't provide any strong benefit to some politically powerful group will not be enacted. Conversely, laws that do provide strong benefits to a politically powerful group will be hard to repeal. Marvin's proposals, if they truly did not disproportionately disenfranchise Democrats, would enjoy the same support that effort to repeal voter ID laws currently enjoy. They would be as hard to achieve as repealing voter ID laws. To the extent that current voter ID laws are faits accomplis it is because of the disenfranchisement not in spite of it.
I don't understand what you're getting at here. If you think we can't fix the problem because powerful people won't let us, then what are we even doing talking about it?
Let me see if I can be clear. The problem we don't face is voter fraud (there is no such fraud to fix). The problem we do face is systematic and widespread disenfranchisement of democratic voters. We don't fix our real problem by creating more or alternative bureaucratic hurdles to voting that may by manipulated by partisan officials and approved by partisan judges. Such fixes by themselves won't be passed by partisan gate keepers if they are real fixes in any case.
The only way we do fix our real problem is by removing the partisan officials who created the problem, profit by it and make such laws as voter ID laws faits accomplis. Obviously, given our elections are dramatically skewed by disenfranchisement of Democrats it is a very hard problem to fix.
Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans including the majority of Democrats support voter ID laws. They support it for the simple reason that they believe it will improve the integrity of our elections. Since Americans support it so strongly politicians should figure out how to implement it as least obtrusively and onerously as possible.
Our elections aren't dramatically skewed by disenfranchisement of Democrats. That's total hyperbole. More likely they aren't skewed at all. Almost every time voter ID requirements are enacted voting rates for those groups that supposedly at risk for disenfranchisement actually go up. The theoretical projections have not matched the actual results.
I know, and so does everyone else, particularly Marvin. This is why I suggest you are misunderstanding his point.
I didn't remotely take his posts as suggesting any such thing, but rather as recognizing that voter ID laws had already been passed and upheld, and we needed to find a way to minimize the real harms that come from them.
This is it. I see no way of stopping the laws where they now exist. So, how can we make them any less discriminatory.
Voter ID laws are the literacy tests of our times. Today, such laws seem obviously and inevitably discriminatory. But the public and courts of the day would not agree with us. Presumably, back when literacy tests were common most voters would have agreed that, at least in principle, voters should be literate i.e., have enough understanding to cast a modestly informed vote. Presumably courts agreed that states had the right to extend the franchise only to those with the minimal sophistication necessary to participate.
Using a modest social good as a pretext, the southern democrats passed such laws. But it was merely a pretext--and widely understood to be a pretext. What was actually happening was that the literacy tests were used to systematically disenfranchise minorities and the poor.
Take us back to the 1950s. Should the people of that time have been asking how to pass a better literacy test that avoided the harms of discrimination? From today's vantage point such a question seems absurd because we understand the point was never literacy it was discrimination.
The question of a better voter ID law seems equivalently absurd to me.
Our current elections are dramatically skewed against Democrats. The results are particularly pronounced in the House due to gerrymandering. Predictions are the democrats would have to produce a 7% advantage in vote share to achieve an equal split in house seats. Turnout among black americans was dramatically lower in 2016 than in previous cycles.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...s-we-did-the-research/?utm_term=.544879afb64d
It is absurd, but this line again suggests you fundamentally misunderstand what we are actually talking about.
It may be absurd. Let us use Georgia. What is the reasonable timeframe for Georgia overturning their law? Maybe 10 years? Maybe longer? For me, if I can reduce the disenfranchisement for those 10 years, I am ever so slightly happier. I would greatly prefer no disenfranchisement. Tell me a reasonable path to eliminating that in Georgia before 2020? But maybe, just maybe, we can reduce it before 2020.
It is never good to bleed, but it is better to bleed moderately than to bleed horribly.
We were talking about voter ID laws and now you’re talking about gerrymandering. Don’t you think the fact that Obama wasn’t running again in 2016 was the primary reason black voting was down? It almost certainly had nothing to do with voter ID laws.
This would be more accurate. An argument can be made that the actual extent of disenfrachisement is relatively small, but an argument cannot be made that it is null.
It is no more likely that there will be Republican Bigfoots voting than Democratic Bigfoots. This is silly.
I think you're debating what technocratic solution would enable Republicans to only filter out fraudulent votes when partisan Republicans are only interested in filtering out Democratic votes. Who is your constituency for these technocratic reforms, and why wouldn't that same technocratic constituency simply repeal the voter suppression laws altogether? You say political reality prevents that, but the very same political reality would prevent what you propose.
I think Marv is assuming away political reality. The Republicans who enact voter disenfranchisement laws masquerading as voter security laws will not cooperate with his technocratic proposals to "fix" the disenfranchisement problem. Because from their perspective, disenfranchisement isn't a problem at all. It's the entire point of what they're trying to do.
It's a terrible mistake to accept The Other Guys' framing of the question. If they get to decide what the question is, you will never like the answer. In that sense, this is a saps' game.
I agree.
Again, I just don't think that's what Marvin is doing. I think he's saying, "We've already given up a touchdown, thanks to shitty refs, so let's try to get a field goal before halftime and then regroup."
This is unfair, but that's sort of a Vichy response. I do not and will not accept purposeful voter disenfranchisement. This "just the tip" stuff is bullshit. We're being asked to accept as normal that it's okay for Republicans to disenfranchise Democrats if they only do it in little bits and pieces, so it's up to sensible liberals to cooperate in the disenfranchisement. F#ck that.
I am trying to think of a way to reframe the question so we can retake the initiative. I do not want these laws, but guess what, in many red states there is no way for Dems to revoke the laws.
So, let's try to find something that people who "feel" voter fraud is real but also are not racist might accept. Once the GOP rejects that, we might keep those voters.
In all seriousness, have you ever explained that voter fraud is not real and had someone who previously disagreed with you suddenly agree? I do not see much progress in changing opinions.
Of course I don't change any minds stating the plain truth. Neither would you get any traction with technocratic proposals to "fix" a problem they intended to create.
The thing to do is win elections and change the laws then. There is no intermediate compromise on this.
att's argument is a perfect example of the perfect being to enemy of the good.
I don't want to accept it as normal. And I hope Marvin doesn't, either. If he does, then I apologize for giving him too much credit. All I took from his arguments was this: "It's happened, what can we do right now to counteract it as fast as possible, even imperfectly, while we also strive for a longer-term solution on a deeper level."
I don't see why you and att have a problem with this. In a perfect world, all voter ID laws would be repealed. In perfect world, Trump would not be President. But we don't live in a perfect world. We may get there someday, but in the meantime, what's wrong with figuring out ways to make the imperfect world slightly less shitty?
The fish is way off of the liberal deep end here. Marv is on right track. We have had a systems to make sure people casting ballots are who they say they are and that the cast only a single ballot for decades and decades. As I posted above, Colorado has a well established and I think effective VOTER ID SYSTEM in place now. The ID is the voter's signature. The only reason the Democrats don't bitch about that form of ID and verification is that everybody has a signature. Not even the Democrats claim, as does the Fish, that we don't need that form of ID and verification. Marv's idea about fingerprints would be similar. The fish calling that disenfranchisement or bits and pieces, or whatever the hell else is silly.
All that being said, even assuming that a photo voter ID restricts blacks more than whites, the antidote would be efforts in assisting people to obtain ID's; not in tossing all notions of voter verification in the dumpster.
I shouldn't weigh in because I've not read all these posts, and forgive me if I'm mischaracterizing, but at a glance it looks like Rockfish is saying that a rational response built around "these are the cards we're dealt" cedes ground to the Republicans in a harmful way. If so, I think it's another example of anchoring. One side stakes their ground in unreasonable territory; in response, instead of calling it out as crazy and refusing to negotiate on such terms, the other side too often acknowledges that position and instantly gives it recognition and bargaining value. That's generally not an effective negotiating technique.
Well, now I suspect I may have been wrong about this.
