A Voter Restriction/Access Thread

[Belsnickel]

(03-13-2021, 12:03 AM)Vas Deferens Wrote: It’s crazy. I’ve been reflecting on a lot of father son moments as my father passed last week. This keeps coming back into focus for several reasons. Related, the amount of Trump mailers I disposed of from his hospice room was obscene, let alone the deceptive positioning of including a pseudo ‘check’ the recipient cannot deposit.

I’d love to know the podcast. Thanks.

Been there, man. My father passed on December 1, 2019 and his youngest brother, to whom I was the closest relative, passed back in August. My father didn't have a ton of that stuff, but my uncle sure as shit did. He lived in the poorest county in Pennsylvania and there are Trump signs everywhere up there. It's insane.

The podcast is the Well Red Podcast. https://wellredcomedy.com/podcast/

[Dill]

(03-12-2021, 11:42 PM)Brownshoe Wrote: I feel like voting someone in the most powerful position in the world should at least require the proof of identification that it takes to access a bank account. I don't care about mail in voting as long as you can prove it's you. I think everyone should be able to get any identification they need to vote for free, so it's easy for everyone to vote.

To your question I don't know what the biggest threat to election integrity is. I just don't see a problem with improving security, and providing everyone with the means to prove it's them so there's no voter suppression. Like I said I just think it would be a pretty simple ask to provide enough proof of who you are to be able to access your bank account AND have the government give you the means to do that for FREE so there's no excuse not to be able to vote.

Providing proof was not simple for 92 year-old Gen Kiedrowski in Minnesota. When she wanted to apply for a voter ID in 2012, she had to provide a copy of her marriage license ($9) and her birth certificate, which required an extra search because her parents had changed their name when they came to the U.S. ($26). With documents in hand, she had to wait in a line for 2 1/2 hrs to apply for a voter id ($11).  Her entire previous adult life she had voted without problem.  https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2012/05/voter-id-we-dont-see-need/

The cost of stated provided voter ideas for everyone has been an issue in Minneapolis. Back in 2011 it was calculated as $12 million for Hennepin County, when the governor vetoed a voter ID requirement back then.

Another calculation made a year later in a state report projected a lower figure for "free" ids, but a total cost to the state of up to $72 million dollars. (See page 3) https://ceimn.org/sites/default/files/Cost-of-Minnesotas-Proposed-Elections-Amendment_corrected.pdf.

The questions for Minnesotans back then was--is this cost effective? That's why I ask "What poses the greatest threat to election integrity." Apparently the kind of voter fraud which involves one ineligible voter or someone voting for someone else is very rare, and unlikely to change any election outcome. E.g. in the 2016 election, 11 people were flagged for illegal voting--mostly felons who did not know they were not allowed to vote. It's not clear that margin could have turned a single county, mush less  an entire state. https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2018/01/10/reality-check-voter-fraud-minnesota/ 

But if you know that a certain demographic might have more trouble getting voter IDs--like rural blacks and native Americans--then voter ID laws can shave percentages of that vote.

A far greater danger to election integrity are actions taken by officials, like Brian Kemp, who held the office of Sec. of State in Georgia, while also running for office, and purged the state voter roles of over 100,000 people who had not voted in the last election. And they had no notification. https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/10/19/georgia-voter-purge

Rules that require voters to have a street address or forbid college students from voting in the county of their college may massively cut the number of votes to favor one side. 

The odd thing is that hundreds of thousands of people who have been voting their entire lifetimes are tremendously inconvenienced by these voter ID laws, which seem likely designed not to secure election integrity, but election results. 

[Dill]

(03-12-2021, 08:40 PM)BigPapaKain Wrote: You didn't ask me, but I'd say the head of the Executive branch spreading falsehoods about said integrity for years prior to an election he's even involved in.

But that's just me.

LOL I was going to bring that up at some point BigPap. 

What Trump has been doing is not new though. 

E.g., check out this headline from the American Experiment site from 2016, which trumpets "documented fraud" of over 1,300 cases in Minnesota.
https://www.americanexperiment.org/widespread-voter-fraud-documented-in-new-minnesota-supreme-court-case/

As it turns out, this "Voters Alliance" group is bring a case to court which just CLAIMS this fraud has occurred. But like Trump's 2020 lawsuits. It goes no where. As I note in the post above, only 11 cases actually resulted in prosecution back in 2016. 

So it's really a party thing too, not just the ex pres. 

[GMDino]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/everybody-shouldnt-be-voting-republican-vote-suppression-national-review-history.html?fbclid=IwAR2bXNjDNongtvkbF1d6HkEo6UNLu9H9DXCmpLEdN1qVmuPcb2SQ7DcFFCw

Quote:Everybody Shouldn’t Be Voting,’ Republican Blurts Out
By Jonathan Chait


Photo: Ross D Franklin/AP/Shutterstock
Representative John Kavanagh, a Republican legislator who chairs Arizona’s Government and Elections Committee and is shepherding through a bill to make voting more cumbersome and therefore rare, described his party’s motives with blundering candor.

“There’s a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans,” he told CNN. “Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting … Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues. Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”

Kavanagh’s error was to articulate in public beliefs that conservatives prefer to leave to members of their movement who aren’t accountable to the electorate. If I had to guess, his argument is something he’s picked up from reading conservative media, and he never realized his role as elected official makes it unwise to repeat — especially on-camera.

Donald Trump’s presidency, with its continuous demands to silence his opposition and efforts to undermine the election, highlighted his party’s anti-democratic character. But hostility to democracy is a long tradition on the right, including (perhaps especially) in its loftiest highbrow quarters.

Respectable conservative organs like National Review not only supported segregation and opposed civil rights, but also opposed laws to safeguard voting rights. The NR formula on voting rights has always combined several classic elements. First, there are usually some arch, snobbish gibes at right-wing populist demagogues, who are crass and beneath the dignity of the deserving elites at National Review. Second, the dismissal of rank bigotry is set against a “frank” concession that most Black people do not actually deserve the franchise because they are, like the poor whites who support the demagogues, too ignorant to exercise their vote wisely. And third, it declares states’ rights to be the paramount consideration, so that ultimately no federal solution can be imposed, however troubling the abuses of the state-level authorities.

In 1965, James J. Kilpatrick’s National Review cover story dismissed the need for a Voting Rights Act. Yes, Kilpatrick conceded, white Southerns had mistreated Black people. (“No reasonable man would deny that in times past, the South has sinned against the Negro; here and there, in times present, the abuse continues.”) However, the fact remained, “Over most of this century, the great bulk of Southern Negroes have been genuinely unqualified for the franchise. They emerged illiterate from slavery; they remained for generations, metaphorically, under the age of twenty-one.” And the principle of federalism meant Congress could not dictate voting procedures to the states, so, sadly, the Voting Rights Act “undertakes to remedy a perversion of the Constitution by perverting the Constitution.”

A 1966 column by Buckley began with some mockery of Alabama governor George Wallace. But Buckley proceeded to his main point. “For some reason it has been hailed as a triumph of democratic justice that so many Negroes succeeding in voting last week,” he sneered, mocking the absurdity of illiterate Black Alabamans being permitted to vote. Weighing the competing absurdities of the two “evils” — Wallace’s buffoonery, or Black people voting despite having been denied an education by their state — he concluded “the latter” was worse. (The text of these columns are not online. Joshua Tait, a University of North Carolina historian specializing in conservative thought, shared the quotes with me.)

After the 1960s, most mainstream conservatives abandoned their defense of de jure segregation in the South, and two decades later had to abandon their defense of the same system in South Africa. But the idea that voting rights ought to be restricted remains a staple of conservative thought to this day. The chilly reception National Review and other right-wing elites afforded Trump was in keeping with their traditional contempt for demagoguery. But the danger they identified in him was not that he threatened democracy, but seemed in their mind to embody it. “We must weed out ignorant Americans from the electorate,” insisted David Harsanyi in 2016. National Review’s Kevin Williamson, in a column last year headlined “On the Dangers of Democracy,” warned, “The rising authoritarianism of our time is not an aberration but the ordinary natural fulfillment of mass democracy when it has overflowed its constitutional restraints.”

Conservatives are hysterical in opposition to proposals in Congress to guarantee voting access and limit gerrymandering. National Review calls H.R. 1, the main House bill to promote election reform, “a partisan assault on American democracy.” But NR should be more honest in its criticism: Democracy is not what it wants at all, and never has been.

One side effect of the rise of Trump and the embracing of the Q Anon and such is that the one trick pony, less intelligent members of the gop are getting the microphones more and then tend to say what they think vs the McConnell's of the world who couch their speech to hide it.