Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman about voter suppression for the March 12, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol were fueled by a mixture of things, but importantly by a big lie about the theft of the election, itself fueled by a multiyear GOP effort to propagate urgent concerns about voter fraud—that effort abetted by some media that now express dismay at the not-unpredictable effects.
But while the need to defend the integrity of US elections may be, for some, a sincere delusion, if you will, that’s not what’s at work when the Republican chair of a Georgia county board of elections demands that voter access be restricted, “so that we at least have a shot at winning.” Or when Donald Trump declared of a defeated franchise-expanding congressional proposal last year, “They had things, levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Voter suppression is a Republican strategy. And it’s not slowed or shamed in the wake of January 6, but moving full steam ahead. Media’s ability to confront assaults on democracy as precisely that will mean letting go of their go-to bipartisan balancing act, woefully inadequate to a crisis that will shape the political landscape for years to come.
Ari Berman covers voting rights as a senior reporter at Mother Jones. He’s the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.
Ari Berman: Hey, Janine, good to talk to you again. Thank you.
JJ: I guess tell us first about the what of what’s happening, because it’s a dizzying array of things. And maybe Georgia is deservedly in a spotlight, but that’s not the only place where we’re seeing overt and targeted GOP efforts to restrict access to the vote. What’s the landscape of this?
AB: That’s right. We are seeing the biggest assault against voting rights in decades. Historians believe it’s the biggest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction, depending on how many of these bills end up being signed into law. But 253 restrictions on voting have been introduced in 43 states in the first two months of this year alone; that is seven times higher than last year.
And, of course, we’ve talked about this a lot on the program. This is not the first time the Republican Party has tried to make it more difficult to vote. So for them to introduce seven times as many bills as they had already been introducing just gives you a sense of how much they’ve tried to intensify this effort.
JJ: And the nature of the bills should put paid to the pretense that they’re about election integrity, because they’re aimed at mail-in voting, and at in-person voting, and making them all harder. So what’s the range of of specific interventions that are looking to be made?
AB: I would say the general theme is they’re trying to target the voting methods they believe that Democrats in communities of color used most in 2020. But that paints a pretty broad brush, because mail voting was something that Republicans used in very large numbers until 2020. But a lot of the bills restrict mail voting in lots of different ways, from trying to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting in Georgia, so you could only vote in Georgia by mail for a very limited number of reasons; or preventing states from sending out absentee ballots to voters automatically, like in Florida; or getting rid of ballot drop boxes—another thing that’s been discussed in Florida, which 1.5 million people used in the last election.
Or changing the deadline for when you have to send your ballot back. There’s a really crazy bill in Arizona that says your ballot has to be postmarked by the Thursday before the election, which is something I’ve never seen before, that it could actually arrive on Election Day, but it wouldn’t be counted if it wasn’t postmarked by the Thursday beforehand.
So a lot of these bills are aimed at mail voting. But the real tell here is that they are going to push more people into in-person voting by cutting back on mail voting. But then they’re cutting in-person voting as well, namely early voting, which I guess they perceive as benefiting Democrats more than Republicans, even though a ton of Republicans use early voting as well.
In Iowa, the governor just signed a law cutting eight days of early voting. In Georgia, they’re trying to cut weekend voting, including Sunday voting, when Black churches do “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote drives. There’s a bunch of other states that are considering similar things.
So that’s the general tenor of it, but it’s really coming from all angles. And every single day, it seems like we get a crazier bill. And people say, “Oh, this has no chance of passing.” And then it starts passing committees, then it starts passing different chambers of legislature, and before you know, it’s signed into law. So it is a very, very perilous time we’re in right now.
JJ: Yeah, there’s no skimping on the craven. One thing folks might have seen is Georgia trying to make it a crime to give water to people who are waiting in line to vote, which I saw covered as kind of like a wacky factcheck story, you know: “I saw this on Facebook, is it really true?” “Yeah, it actually is really true.” But that was just kind of a strange angle on what is really just an ominous, dark cloud phenomenon.
And I wanted to say, the fact that these Republicans’ goal is a country in which great numbers of people who don’t look like them have no electoral voice—I’m not saying that that’s not reported; media acknowledge that that is the goal. But I feel like that should be the template for this coverage; that fact should shape coverage. Politicians should be questioned based on this knowledge — that it’s not a misunderstanding, and it’s not confusion; it’s a strategy to suppress votes. And I feel like anytime you don’t name that, you advance it.
Ari Berman: “A lot of people are covering this as a normal debate, and it’s not a normal debate; it’s an effort to try to overturn the election by other means.” (cc photo: Shawn)
AB: Well, I think the media has done a much better job of covering this issue than they have in the past. I think they have still been slow to cover the severity of it, although it’s starting to get significantly more coverage. But, yeah, again, a lot of these things are being still covered as the usual kind of legislative debates—where there’s nothing normal about this process, this process shouldn’t even be happening, there should be no reason that we’re debating any of these bills.
There could have been a few tweaks made to the system. The No. 1 thing I would have liked to see, for example, is election officials allowed to process mail ballots quicker, so it doesn’t take seven days after the election to release the votes in Pennsylvania or Georgia or other places. But that would have been a small technocratic fix to the system.
The question is: Why are they even debating measures to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting? Why are they even debating bills to cut early voting? These are things that should have never even come up; if they were introduced at all, they should have never been passed out of committee, and they certainly should have never been passed both chambers of the legislature, and they certainly never should have been signed into law by governors.
And I still think a lot of people are covering this as a normal debate, and it’s not a normal debate; it’s an effort to try to overturn the election by other means. Donald Trump very publicly called on states to overturn the election results; he tried to get the courts to throw out the results. That failed. And now they’re moving on to the state legislative strategy, where they’re trying to get state legislatures to enact laws that are going to have the same kind of impact. And instead of trying to “find” 11,000 votes in Georgia, as Trump asked the secretary of state to do—I don’t know how he expected the secretary of state to do that, but he asked him to do that. And now, basically, the legislature is trying to just reduce 11,000 Democratic votes, and potentially a whole lot more than that, by changing the state’s voting laws.
And these are not small changes around the edges. These are major changes that are going to affect millions of voters. In Georgia, 1.3 million people voted by mail; many, many, many fewer people will be allowed to do so. Hundreds of thousands of people voted on days of early voting that could be eliminated. In Florida, 1.5 million people used mail ballot drop boxes; they just want to get rid of them entirely. So these are pretty major changes to the system that I think still need to be treated with more severity than they have been so far.
JJ: Yeah. And Carol Anderson talks about “bureaucratic violence,” and I think there can be a tendency to—you know, when you have that Raffensperger call from Trump, “Find those votes,” that’s a real smoking gun; that’s real obvious. But if there’s a legislative move to erase those 11,000, plus more, votes, it somehow isn’t presented as an act of violence; it’s presented as almost more lamentable than oppressive. And I think that’s kind of what you’re saying: It can kind of get lost because there’s a lot of going on, it’s at levels that we don’t often see, and it’s not so overt and aggressive, maybe, as when Donald Trump is saying it.
AB: Exactly. I mean, you have Republicans in some states saying some pretty crazy things. There was a Republican state rep in Arizona who just had a quote to CNN that said: “Everybody shouldn’t be voting. Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes as well.”
JJ: Oh my God.
AB: Which is straight-up Jim Crow language. I can imagine a segregationist Democrat saying that in 1890s Alabama or Mississippi, trying to defend literacy tests or poll taxes. But this is a hard story to dramatize, because you don’t have Trump at the center of it, and you don’t have people actually experiencing these restrictions on voting. So I am sure we will see long lines as a result of this. I am sure we will see people disenfranchised as a result of it.
But there’s no elections coming up, so it’s a little bit hard to dramatize. And I’m afraid that a lot of people aren’t going to see the impact of this until it’s too late, until there’s actually photos of long lines, and videos of long lines, and lots of complaints about people who didn’t get mailed ballots or aren’t eligible to vote by mail, or stories of people who are purged by the voter rolls.
I mean, those are more dramatic stories, and those haven’t happened yet, because this is still in the legislative debate phase. All we really can go on are the legislative debates and those kinds of things that are happening.
And I’ve actually been listening to a fair amount of the legislative debates in Georgia, and they’ve been pretty interesting and pretty dramatic. In Georgia, for example, we have a lot of Black legislators that grew up during Jim Crow, who have been speaking in the House and the Senate about these bills, and talking about how they grew up with this, and how they’re having to go through it again. I think that’s pretty dramatic.
And I think that’s one way the media can cover this better, is to actually show some of these debates. But of course, people don’t usually pay attention to the Georgia legislature, the Arizona legislature, or these other kinds of things.
JJ: Right.
AB: It’s not a sexy topic. There’s not as much local reporting as there used to be. And it requires some time and effort to navigate the landscape in these states, if you’re not familiar with it.
JJ: You said, in a recent interview, that part of what’s so interesting about the voter suppression virus throughout the Republican Party is how orchestrated it is. And so that’s where I think it kind of works against journalists’ tendency to tell a particular story about a particular person in a particular place, when the most important story might have to do with how all those local instances are actually being orchestrated from above, and that might be the thing that we need to talk about.
I did want to draw you out on one very particular thing that you wrote about that I didn’t see elsewhere. We really can’t underestimate the planning and the thought and the looking to cut off every possible avenue of escape. And you wrote about Pennsylvania Republicans trying to push through a constitutional amendment to gerrymander the state courts, which is another place—we keep thinking, “All right, well, if we don’t win in Congress, we don’t win at the Supreme Court, there might be state courts,” you know. I think people are thinking of all kinds of levels to fight minority rule. And this effort to gerrymander state courts, I think is very interesting, and I hadn’t heard about it elsewhere. I wonder if you could tell us just briefly about that.
AB: Yeah, it’s very disturbing, and I’m glad you brought it up. It’s been tabled for a little while, but I think it’s going to reappear later this year. State courts in Pennsylvania struck down Republican gerrymandering efforts. They struck down the congressional districts that Republicans gerrymandered, and that led to fairer districts in Pennsylvania, so they had a more even congressional delegation. They also, of course, refused to throw out the results of the 2020 election, and they made it easier to vote by mail in a number of instances.
And so now what Republicans are trying to do is, basically they lost in court, so now they’re trying to change the courts themselves. And in Pennsylvania judges are elected, and they run statewide. And they want to change it so that judges are elected by districts. And they want to actually draw the districts, which is something that I’ve rarely if ever seen.
No. 1, judges usually aren’t even elected. No. 2, if they are elected, it makes sense that they would run statewide, because they’re supposed to represent all citizens in the state. I mean, you pledge your loyalty to the Pennsylvania constitution, not to a particular district you represent.
And having the legislature essentially gerrymander the courts that struck down gerrymandering would be a real assault on democracy, particularly at a time when the Supreme Court has said, No. 1, we’re not even going to review partisan gerrymandering; that can only be reviewed in state courts, which makes state courts a lot more important. But No. 2, the Supreme Court just doesn’t take an expansive view of voting rights to begin with. And a lot of states have more expansive protections for voting rights in their constitution than the federal Constitution, which is something that I also think is really interesting.
So you’re right, state courts are a very underutilized part of protecting voting rights. And that’s exactly why they’re trying to change them in Pennsylvania.
JJ: And it’s exactly the kind of thing that you would just miss, particularly if it’s in one state. Although, we know that if it works in one place, it gets ALECed all over the place. Also, it wouldn’t necessarily lift up to your attention, and yet it can be so important.
In the few minutes we have left: At the end of your recent piece for Mother Jones, you point to the scale of response that is actually appropriate to the assault on democracy, no less, that’s going on now. And you say, “The only real way to reverse minority rule is through big structural reforms”: things like abolishing the Electoral College, eliminating the filibuster, ending gerrymandering, enshrining the right to vote in the Constitution, and statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. I would encourage folks to read the piece in its entirety.
But if I could just ask you—I mean, I’m a media critic, and I can see what social change might be helpful, and I also know the way that media tend to scoff at big social change ideas—until they happen. So things need to happen that are big things, that are big, big changes, big visionary changes, but we shouldn’t necessarily expect media to have the wind at our backs as we’re pushing for these things. But if you could just talk about, maybe, what’s in Congress that we can push for now, or just a bigger vision of what’s appropriate to respond to this attack on voting rights?
AB: Yeah, I think you’re right that we are going to need really big structural change to fix what’s happening to our democracy. In the intermediate to abolishing the Electoral College or adopting the National Popular Vote Compact, I do think there’s two really important bills in Congress, HR 1, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that would be really transformative in adding federal protection for voting rights.
HR 1 would put in place all sorts of reforms to make it easier to vote nationwide for federal elections, like automatic registration, Election Day registration, expanded mail voting, early voting, all of those things across the board. And then the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would be a critical check in states like Georgia, to require them once again to have to approve their voting changes with the federal government, which would give the Biden Justice Department, for example, the ability to block a lot of the changes we’re talking about in places like Arizona and Georgia that are serial offenders. And so if those two pieces of legislation alone passed, I think it would be very, very important.
And then there’s other things I think that are really important: Obviously, statehood for DC is long overdue; it would go at least a little bit of a way to making the Senate more representative of the country as a whole. Same for Puerto Rico, if they wanted to go that direction.
But I think the Democratic Party has to realize, most importantly, this cannot be business as usual. They are facing an unprecedented assault on democracy from the Republican Party. If they don’t do anything about it, that assault on democracy is going to get much worse. And Democrats are also going to lose the ability to do anything about it, because they’re going to be out of power very, very soon, in 2022 or 2024. And so I think there needs to be urgency from Democrats in dealing with the structural threats to our democracy, because if they don’t deal with it now, you can make a very good argument they’re probably not going to get another chance to deal with it anytime soon.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ari Berman. The book is Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. It’s out from Picador. Find his work, including “The Insurrection Was Put Down. The GOP Plan for Minority Rule Marches On,” online at MotherJones.com. Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AB: Thanks so much, Janine. Good to talk to you again.
Reactionaries & neoConfederates have successfully limited voter access 200 years before Paul Weyrich? But, until HR1’s insideous poison pills are mentioned in this article, I’m flabbergasted that it’s in Fair.org! I’m including Naked Capitalism’s round-up of BLATANTLY anti-democratic problems, sneeringly ignored (typically by Mother Jones: curse their using her name) but, pretty disgusting to go unquestioned, in a purported journalists’ blog? DNC’s cutting polling places in Black, Latinx, poor blue collar & student cities; forcing life long VERY vulnerable primary voters into COVID, disappearing 225K votes in one NYC borough in 2016, then repeating it across the municipal area; Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s sneering testimony, Donna’s book & Mark Penn’s flight yo FOX has all been noted, herein. So, half truths about bought-off party elite and their complicit media, CRUSHING any candidate, advocating single-payer Universal Healthcare, AGW mitigation, BLM, $15/hr or opposing forever-wars and corruption seem kinda shocking, given the source? Both halves of our tag-team kleptocracy are simply lining their own pockets with intentionally obvious theatrics. Propagating a protection scheme, distracting us from L.O.T.E & the choice is THEIR’S, ratching us ever further into autocratic duopoly with ridiculous thugs, no sane citizen would ever vote for?
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/03/h-r-1-the-for-the-people-act-legitimizes-wapos-propornot-reporting-institutionalizes-ballot-marking-devices-and-cripples-minor-parties.html
https://www.gp.org/hr1
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/campaign-finance-reform/congress-lets-fix-problems-hr-1-so-we-can-enact-bills-much
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw
AND: HR1/S1 increases the limits that the Democratic and Republican national committees can give to their candidates’ campaigns from $5,000 to $100,000,000.
Section 5214: the other stuff that needs to be removed, since it
Increases the fundraising requirements for a party to qualify for public matching funds from $5,000 to $25,000 in 20 states.
Locks in a two-party-plus-independents structure for state redistricting. This would ultimately exclude small and new parties from participating on redistricting boards.
Does away with general election grants that have historically been accessed when a party wins 5 percent or more of the vote in the previous presidential election…
along with promulgating Bezos’ whole bogus DNC/CAP/Atlantic Council RussiaRussiaRussia neo-McCarthyite lie, that our victims must be Russian terrorists (or, is it China now?) This is how autocractic duopoly’s distract from rampant kleptocracy!
Yo me, the SCARY thing is: all lefty blogs, corporate media and “progressive” leaders simultaneously going gish gallop, full-court press LYING about these BLATANT poison pills, nobody aknowleging all the folks, noticing how corrupt and repressive “our” side had become, senile and apparently, perfectly willing to sacrifice ALL of us for short-term profit. They’d pulled up the ladder, LONG ago?
For 200 years, people took time out of their day to vote in person. Somehow, people then could find the time to vote. Today, people can’t be bothered with taking off time one day every four years? That is restricting? Somehow blacks cannot vote on any day other than Sundays? Sounds pretty racist that you think blacks cannot vote any day other than Sunday or that they’re too lazy to take an hour off. Somehow whites can, but blacks cannot? Very racist thought.
So what is your point? That voting should be restricted to only those people who can take the time off to do it? Why is that a good idea at all?
So, move back to more restrictive forms of voting that worked for 200 years
That’s blatantly anti-democracy. And it doesn’t answer the question of why that’s a good idea.
And those forms of voting only “worked”, if you look at them in snapshots and from certain perspectives. They didn’t work for women at all until the 1900’s. The didn’t work for Blacks in the South until the 1960’s.
They didn’t work for women and blacks due to laws. Those laws are not being challenged. Why do you create strawmen?
It’s a good idea, because it reduces the chance of fraud. Whether or not there is fraud, we can debate, but it cannot be debated that if you have to show up, it is much harder to vote illegally due to logistics alone.
Whether you consider statehood for Puerto Rico a just and democratic outcome depends on whether you think of us as Americans being denied rights or as a people who were invaded, had U.S. citizenship imposed upon us, and have been denied nationhood.
Puerto Ricans don’t want nationhood, you say? It’s true that a very slim majority of (53%) recently voted for statehood. However, our analysis of that result must be informed by history — just as it is when we think of how decades of structural racism continue to shape the lives of Black Americans.
In Puerto Rico’s case the history is this: the United States invaded, exploited the island economically, and suppressed its independence movement. It’s a miracle that more Puerto Ricans don’t want statehood; after all, it’s the chance for a small, poor nation to join the richest country in the world. But how did Puerto Rico get so poor and vulnerable? The U.S. has been in charge for 120 years, and you don’t need to know all the details to guess that it hasn’t always ruled with
Puerto Rican prosperity as its guiding purpose.
Think of an orphaned boy, adopted by often neglectful and sometimes abusive parents, who then inevitably considers himself too weak and vulnerable to stand on his own two feet and instead hopes to be permanently adopted by this less-than-loving family.
For all these reasons, independence lacks strong support. But that can change, and it is the only truly “liberal” option that respects Puerto Rican nationhood.
They didn’t work for women and blacks due to laws. Those laws are not being challenged. Why do you create strawmen?
It’s a good idea, because it reduces the chance of fraud. Whether or not there is fraud, we can debate, but it cannot be debated that if you have to show up, it is much harder to vote illegally due to logistics alone.
___________________________________________________________________________________
BS all around.
These laws and measures are designed to have a disproportionate impact on urban minority areas and suppress that vote. Full stop.
There’s no real debate about voting fraud. It happens on such a minimal level and can probably only realistically impact elections for like the local dog catcher. Restricting voting to in-person is a solution to a problem that for all practical purposes doesn’t exist and it unfairly risks disenfranchising millions of eligible, legal voters in effort to solve the non-existent problem.
I’d like to see the gun rights crowd go ape-shit about similar methods if they were used to restrict access to and ownership of firearms in an effort to combat gun crimes or straw purchases of firearms or something. They’d be screaming bloody murder at the infringement of their constitutional rights; but sure, let’s severely infringe the constitutional voting rights of millions of people in an attempt to solve an imaginary problem. Makes a lot of sense. Utter BS.
How do those laws impact minorities unless you think the color of a person’s skin dictate their inability to get an ID. Are blacks too stupid or too lazy to get an ID? They can buy liquor, get on an airplane, but cigarettes, but houses, get jobs, but somehow can’t get an ID? Blacks can only vote on Sundays? Minorities must mail in their ballots? I am able to drive a few blocks to vote, but minorities are in capable? They are able to drive to grocery stores, but not voting booths? How racist are you to think that little of minorities?
The laws being proposed are bringing methods that were in place for 200 years. Gun laws are laws restricting rights that have been in place for 200 years. You are incapable of comprehending all of this?
How do they impact minorities? Negatively. Very negatively. If you’re gonna require strict voter ID, then you’re gonna make it a pain in the ass for everyone who moves frequently. What population is gonna move frequently? The urban poor, the urban minorities, and, to a lesser extent, most people living in a city. They don’t have to make it impossible to get an ID and I’m not saying anyone’s incapable of getting one; they just have to make it a big enough pain in the ass so that people get discouraged from doing so.
And mind you: Requiring ID at the poll is only ever gonna stop someone from impersonating another voter and that never happens. And then there’s the issue with closing down government offices where ID’s are issued in urban and minority areas– which many GOP-led states did. And then there’s the issue of not accepting certain government-issued ID’s that minorities are more likely to have, like welfare department ID’s or other assistance ID’s. Mind you– there is no contention anywhere that anybody is impersonating another voter or that people attempting to vote are not who they purport to be because they’re showing a student ID (which is unacceptable under most of these laws) or showing military ID (which might also be unacceptable). It’s throwing up pointless roadblocks for no good reason; there’s no good reason for it because the rate of in-person voter fraud (the only thing that strict voter ID laws are gonna stop) is like one-in-a-bazillion and risking disenfranchising millions to try to stop it is amputating an arm to get rid of a hangnail.
And we’re not just talking ID. What is the point of reducing early voting? What is the point of ending ballot drop-boxes? What’s the point of restricting absentee voting and voting by mail? The point is that Republicans just want as few people voting as possible, and they only want the “right kind” of people voting. There’s not really any other plausible rationale for it. The stated rationale– we wanna reduce voting fraud”– is complete BS because, for all practical purposes, there is no voting fraud: it simply doesn’t happen at a rate that would justify any of these things to try to stop it.
And saying “it’s the way things have been done for 200 years” is a garbage rationale. The world and society has changed in those 200 years, like it or not. How about you go to your doctor for your next appointment and tell them that you wanna be treated with only the medical care that they had 200 years ago? You’d be told you’re an idiot.
And here’s the analogy you’re obviously missing with my gun analogy: if some jurisdiction somewhere decided they wanted to combat straw purchases of guns (or some other such problem) and imposed a bevy of similar requirements– like you have to give a DNA sample to get a gun, or your ID has to be issued within the last 20 days, or gun stores can only sell things from like Noon-2:00PM, or that no gun store can be within 200 miles of another gun store– people would rightly be saying this is an overkill response for an actual, real problem (unlike voter fraud which is mostly a non-issue) and it would unfairly risk depriving tons of people of their Second Amendment rights. But impose those same kinds of things with respect to voting rights and that’s no big deal? Total. Effin’. BS.
So minorities move alot. That might be true. When you move, you’re required to get an updated driver license (assuming you have one). The same driver license that is required to fly on a plane, buy liquor, buy cigarettes, open up a checking account. Are you saying that they move, but do not update their driver license? You believe their is a problem and are trying to solve that problem – a problem which does not exist. This makes you feel good. You’re virtuous.
Straw purchases are against the law. I’m for enforcing those laws. I have not problem with the current mandatory, federal wait on purchasing a gun. I have no problem showing my ID to buy a gun. I didn’t know that there are laws stating that blacks (and only blacks) can vote from noon – 2:00. ALL PEOPLE can vote on the SAME day. It is equally punitive.
I’m saying that the problem is that if the urban minority and poor move more often than most other populations– and they do– then creating more roadblocks to having “proper” ID is gonna keep more of them from voting. And, again, there’s no question that they show up to the polls and they are who they’re claiming to be: a less-than-up-to-date license still has a picture of you on it and still verifies your identity. Yeah, you should update your stuff when you move, but the penalty for failure to do so isn’t that you don’t get to vote.
You seem to be under the mistaken or idiotic belief that unless the law explicitly says it applies or affects based on race, then it can’t be racially-motivated or have the intent to disparately impact a racial subset. I can assure you that’s not the state of the law. But OK, fine, have it your way: it’s equally-punitive, even though there’s ample evidence that GOP-led states have in the past and are poised to again in the future cut down on the number of polling locations and other related services in areas where they want to cut down on the number of voters, resulting in long lines and extra hassle which, predictably, lead to less people being willing or able to endure the hassles, and just by sheer coinky-dink those areas are full of the urban poor and minorities… whatever you wanna tell yourself… But it still doesn’t answer the question: why is any of that a good idea at all? Voting ain’t ‘sposed to be some frikkin’ punishment or ordeal, you know. There is absolutely no harm to be done if you make participation in the election system convenient and easy.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that if there is a correlation, then there is a causation and mal intent. The GOP’s perspective is that Dems don’t care about who votes. You don’t care about security.
Voting should be something special. It should be one day and if it’s important, you’ll do the work to make it happen. I don’t want somebody who isn’t invested in the process to vote. I don’t want ignorant people voting. If you are up on issues, you’ll find a way to vote. If you don’t know any of the issues, you have the right to vote, but are only a useful idiot. We don’t need those people (left or right) voting for somebody that way. If you cannot make your way to register, you’re likely a useful idiot. It’s a very tiny inconvenience for something that is very important. There is harm. Low information voters do harm. Get informed. You’ll do the work to get registered.
So a minority isn’t able to change their address? That takes about 1/2 an hour each time you move. If voting is important to you, do the work to ensure your voice is heard.
Tim,
John said:
“There is absolutely no harm to be done if you make participation in the election system convenient and easy.”
Tim, are you for or against making it easy and convenient to vote?
Tim: “You don’t care about security.”
Also Tim: “Voting should be something special. It should be one day and if it’s important, you’ll do the work to make it happen. I don’t want somebody who isn’t invested in the process to vote. I don’t want ignorant people voting. If you are up on issues, you’ll find a way to vote. If you don’t know any of the issues, you have the right to vote, but are only a useful idiot. We don’t need those people (left or right) voting for somebody that way. If you cannot make your way to register, you’re likely a useful idiot. It’s a very tiny inconvenience for something that is very important. There is harm. Low information voters do harm. Get informed. You’ll do the work to get registered.
_____________________________________________________
As I’ve repeatedly said, there’s no real reason to care about voting security: The rate of it is like one-in-a-bazillion. Throwing up roadblocks to voting to stop an imaginary “security” problem is idiotic. The GOP doesn’t care about security either; their only interest in this is to suppress the populations where they don’t get enough votes.
OK, I don’t see the logic in “It’s special, so it should be 1 day.” That makes no sense at all. The Stanley Cup is special and it takes weeks to win it. But to a larger point: These people who you unfairly dismiss as “low information” or “not invested in the process” voters are just as deserving of a good government of their choosing as your entitled ass is.
Furthermore, I don’t like the idea of playing shenanigans (in fact, it’s pretty illegal) with the franchise of millions of Americans in some misguided attempt to make sure only the “right people” vote or to make sure the “right peoples'” votes count more than anyone else’s. We don’t have nobility in the country and your vote counts just as much as the back-alley bum’s does, pal; suck it up. Further-, further-, more: The fact that you’re defending this crap by advocating that it’s a good idea to not have people you don’t consider worthy enough to vote is a horrifying slippery slope that you shouldn’t wanna go down.
John, you’re confusing the Stanley Cup Playoffs with the actual cup winning which comes down to two teams. One is a sport (important to those who follow that sport). The other is about laws and the direction the most powerful nation on earth heads. Far more important. Not many would consider those too similar.
Whoever said that low information voters don’t deserve a good government? Please show me where somebody on this thread said that. Anybody. Especially me, but anybody.
For 200 years we played shenanigans by requiring people to vote on one day?
Where was the supreme court on that. Please show me.
Bander, I am for making it as difficult to vote as it had been up to about 20 years ago. I am for allowing ALL people to vote. Register ahead of time. Walk up with an ID and vote. There’s nothing radical about that. That is pretty traditional.
Mail out ballots to every “citizen” is pretty radical.
What it so special about limiting voting to 1 effin’ day? It makes no sense at all. Why 1 day? Why not 6 hours? Why not 30 seconds? Why is it some magic time frame for you?
OK, you didn’t say that the voters you don’t want voting don’t deserve good government. But you’re unfairly dismissive of them and you correlate for some reason on their ability to vote in person on election day. Since when is the ability to go in person to the poll some kinda measure of intelligence or aptitude or anything? And I said they deserve “a good government of their own choosing.” You don’t like that they get to vote, so, necessarily, you don’t want them choosing.
Playing games like these which, again, target a certain demographic because the GOP isn’t happy about the numbers of people within that demographic is changing the rules of the game when you think you’re gonna lose. That’s fundamentally wrong and against the rule of law. The GOP didn’t used to do that– at least not so blatantly– until after the Voting Rights Act got struck down.
Tim,
By “ALL people,” which one?
(A) All who show up on time, who are 18 years of age, legally registered to vote.
(B) All, who can fill out a ballot, including children.
(C) Everybody regardless of citizenship, age, and current registration.
There are a few kinds of ALLs that exist.
Thanks for answering.