Wanted to take a closer look at the Texas voter ID case. I think it’s important to understand that this law has already been determined to be discriminatory, yet Texas is going forward with it anyway.
What follows are portions of the DOJ complaint that was filed on August 22nd:
Passage of SB 14 Was Motivated By Discriminatory Intent
Against a backdrop of dramatic growth in the State’s Hispanic population, the Texas legislature advanced increasingly stringent and burdensome voter ID bills over several legislative sessions beginning in 2005. This process culminated in the enactment of SB 14, a highly restrictive law that—when passed—exceeded the requirements imposed by any other state.
Legislative debate and public statements concerning these voter ID bills contained
anti-immigrant rhetoric. In addition, while the public record contains statements suggesting that voter ID legislation was needed to prevent noncitizens from voting, noncitizens may lawfully possess several of the forms of identification required for in-person voting under SB 14.
The State sought to minimize minority legislators’ effective participation in the debate concerning SB 14. The legislature and Governor implemented a series of unusual procedures including designating SB 14 as emergency legislation, which enabled the Senate to consider the bill on an expedited schedule; amending Senate rules to exempt voter identification legislation from the two-thirds majority tradition usually required for bill consideration; and creating a select House committee, whose members were hand-picked by the Speaker, to consider only SB 14.
While the stated purpose of SB 14 was to ensure the integrity of elections, voter ID proponents cited virtually no evidence during or after enactment of SB 14 that in-person voter impersonation—the only form of election fraud addressed by the identification requirements of SB 14—was a serious problem or that the State’s then-existing identification procedures had failed to prevent in-person voter impersonation.
This is what happened next, when we still had Section 5 the VRA:
SB 14 has not been in effect in any election in Texas. At the time that SB 14 was signed into law—on May 27, 2011—Texas could not implement any changes to its voting procedures without first obtaining preclearance from the U.S. Attorney General or from a three judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, as a result of Texas’s coverage under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (Section 5).
In order to obtain preclearance under Section 5, Texas was required to demonstrate that SB 14 “neither has the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race[,] color[, or membership in a language minority group].”
On March 12, 2012, the Attorney General interposed an objection under Section 5 to Texas’s submission of SB 14 because Texas had failed to show that the law “will not have a retrogressive effect, or that any specific features of [SB 14] will prevent or mitigate that retrogression.” The Attorney General explained that Texas’s own data had shown that Hispanic voters were at least 46.5% more likely (according to the September 2011 data) and potentially up to 120.0% more likely (according to the January 2012 data) than non-Hispanic voters to lack a driver’s license or personal ID card issued by the State. On January 24, 2012, Texas filed a declaratory judgment action seeking judicial preclearance under Section 5 of SB 14 from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
On August 30, 2012, following a weeklong bench trial, the three-judge court issued a unanimous decision denying preclearance under Section 5 to SB 14 and concluding that “record evidence suggests that SB 14, if implemented, would in fact have a retrogressive effect on Hispanic and African American voters.” The three-judge district court concluded that “(1) a substantial subgroup of Texas voters, many of whom are African American or Hispanic, lack photo ID; (2) the burdens associated with obtaining ID will weigh most heavily on the poor; and (3) racial minorities in Texas are disproportionately likely to live in poverty.” Id.
Finally, the three-judge court found that the Texas legislature enacted “the most stringent [voter ID law] in the country” and “ignor[ed] warnings that SB 14, as written, would disenfranchise minorities and the poor” and rejected or tabled potentially ameliorative amendments ..
In other words, Texas lost. Then came the Supreme Court decision on the VRA, a decision that rescued the same Texas law that had been found to be discriminatory:
Within hours after the Shelby County decision, the State of Texas announced its intention to begin enforcing the voter ID requirements of SB 14. On June 27, 2013, in response to Texas’s appeal, the Supreme Court summarily vacated the judgment in Texas v. Holder and remanded for further consideration in light of the decision in Shelby County.
This should be a political issue as well as a legal issue for conservatives. How do they defend this politically? They’re discriminating against Latino and AA voters, they have been told they’re likely to disenfranchise Latino and AA voters, yet they haven’t reconsidered this law or offered anything to mitigate the harm that will result. I anticipate that voting enthusiasts will be sternly lectured on how we can’t use this “politically” but this belongs in the political sphere as well as in a courtroom. Elected conservatives should have to defend this in public, outside legal filings and a courtroom.
They’re politicians. Why would we insulate them from politics, and political accountability? Hell yes, we should and will “use” this politically. Why wouldn’t we?
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. STATE OF TEXAS here (pdf)
karen
The way they’re defending it is by saying it’s not anti-minority. It’s anti-Democrat. I’ve actually heard one of the states’ GOP members use that as a defense.
trollhattan
Could Charlie McCarthy have defended himself without Edgar Bergen in the room? If Goodhair isn’t the paradigm of an empty suit mouthing programmed bromides, I don’t know who would be.
“Your sins are forgiven. Give me three ‘aw shucks’ and ten ‘hail guns.'”
Does this suit have any chance after the SCOTUS ruling? The burden of proof shouldered by the feds seems pretty massive now.
Chris
@karen:
Which should and would in any sane world be just as illegal – you’re basically saying “we’re discriminating against people who don’t vote for us because we want to stay in power.”
I must say, though, their “I’m not a racist!” moments really bring out their inner “dog ate my homework” six year old.
NobodySpecial
I eagerly await their next attempt, where they say everyone can vote, but white votes count as 2. Because mumble mumble Constitution doesn’t say you can’t weight them, and yada yada original intent.
PeakVT
I anticipate that voting enthusiasts will be sternly lectured on how we can’t use this “politically” but this belongs in the political sphere as well as in a courtroom.
This should be left exclusively to the courts at the same time conservatives leave the matter of Roe v. Wade exclusively to the courts.
Speaking of the courts (OT alert), Ginsburg granted an interview to the NYT (via).
Kay
@karen:
Right. That is what they’re saying. Will that fly, politically, though? Can they announce they’re only discriminating against certain Texas citizens because they’ve looked at the numbers and most of them are Democrats?
It just doesn’t seem like they should be able to announce that and then sit back, smugly. These people won’t be able to vote. It’s wonderful that it’s working out for conservative election purposes, but the targeted voters are still not able to vote.
It’s a variation of the conservative nonsense on discrimination. In their hearts, they don’t discriminate. Who gives a shit what’s in their hearts? It isn’t about them.
Patricia Kayden
@karen: Yes, I’ve read that too. Almost makes me wonder if that is a defense. Is it okay to legislate to keep people from voting for a particular party versus keeping people from voting because of their race, religion, sex, etc.?
WereBear
In the meantime, Republicans have put wheels on the goalposts.
rikyrah
Kay, you continue to rock.
Somehow I wish you could sit down and interview State Senator Nina Turner of Ohio. I would love to see you interview her.
And what Karen says is the truth.
That’s their defense.
If these Black and Brown people would just vote ‘ right’, then they wouldn’t be discriminated against.
schrodinger's cat
Kay@top
Did you read Douthat’s op-ed about how Voter ID is not Jim Crow in this morning’s NYT?
Chris
@Kay:
Well, their base pretty overtly believes that we shouldn’t, in fact, be allowed to vote – whether it’s “don’t let Democrats vote because too many of them aren’t white” or “don’t let nonwhites vote because too many of them are Democrats,” at this point it adds up to the same thing, so they’ll love this. Toss in the certainty that the MSM will do its usual “both sides do it” “some people say” “let’s talk about Benghazi and IRSgate like Serious People,” and that’s already a fair amount of cover, though I can’t say how much it’ll amount to.
Kay
@Patricia Kayden:
Exactly. It’s as if they said “we put additional barriers up to make it harder for women to vote, but it’s only because more women vote for Democrats” Women are actually adversely affected by voter ID laws, because lots of women change their name when they marry. I don’t know what the numbers are, but I saw that in OH in ’06 (anecdotally) when the voter ID law went in there. They don’t change the ID until they have to renew it.
What would be the response if they put this forward as a defense on “women”.
Oh, okay. When you put it like that? I don’t think so.
trollhattan
@WereBear:
Hell, I think they strapped it to a Roomba.
Kay
@schrodinger’s cat:
No, and I can’t because I really can’t stand his lecturing tone. Politically that’s good though, because if he’s nervous it must be a problem for them. He’s clueless. If it’s reached his round-table world, it’s mainstream, and a political problem for them.
BruceFromOhio
They’re discriminating against Latino and AA voters, they have been told they’re likely to disenfranchise Latino and AA voters…
… which was the purpose of the Gaia-damned thing in the first place, hello?
Elected conservatives should have to defend this in public…
… which they do, happily, repeatedly, and which does not appear to inhibit the electorate from sending them back to the statehouse. Just because I think your state senator or representative is a fucktwit in no way prohibits you from voting for him or her. Those voters are the only people that can hold these soulless two-bit ratfuck idiots accountable. A quick review of SB14 and its sponsors is pretty damning: they have plenty of cover.
Texans are apparently just fine with this overt act of disenfranchisement: pissing off the DoJ is just icing. Its been written here and elsewhere aplenty, Republicans have been playing the long game for decades, and the fruit of all that labor is ripening all around.
PeakVT
@Patricia Kayden: I believe political parties are not a protected class for this purpose. However, party affiliation may be so strongly correlated with a protected class in certain areas that discriminating against a party may be functionally equivalent to discriminating against a protected class. If that were the case, then I personally would be in favor of ruling against discrimination based on party affiliation. But how that might work out in a courtroom I have no idea.
Kay
@rikyrah:
We’re hosting the Dem candidate for Gov here (in a park, not my house) today at 2. I’ll quiz him on voting rights, although I have to say Ohio Democrats are quite good on voting rights, and have been since the 2004 Prez election. I think I know what he’ll say. We’re hoping for 50 to turn out. I’ll let you know how it goes.
azlib
Taken to it logical conclusion the “this is not racist because it discriminates against Ds” means they should just pass a law to not allow Ds to vote at all. The premise that some Supremes are saying there is no consitutional right to vote would certainly allow this. Of course such a move cuts to the heart of our democracy, but the extremist in the R Party really do not care about democracy. All they care about is retaining power and that goal is becoming more and more transparent.
Roger Moore
I notice that the VRA stuff is litigated in the DC Circuit. Do you think this is related to the Republicans’ refusal to consider any of Obama’s appointments to the DC Circuit?
piratedan
nothing like attempting to legitimize the disenfranchisement of legal citizens and their right to vote simply because you disagree with them politically. Hey Fascism is just a short step further to the right. These people are incredible cowards, how sad it is to have to justify their continued dying grasp of power with so little faith in the very constitution and system that granted them that power.
Roger Moore
@PeakVT:
Which is crazy. Article IV section 4 of the Constitution guarantees each state a republican form of government. Selectively disenfranchising voters because of the way they’re expected to vote is a direct violation of that. I doubt it would do any good, but I’d definitely throw that argument into any litigation on the issue.
WereBear
They are losing their grip. So something must be wrong with the system!
JPL
@piratedan: Hey Fascism is just a short step further to the right. hmm, after Citizens United it won’t be long. First they buy up the media, then fund local candidates, and then fund ALEC… yup they are moving right along. They might not have bought the presidency yet but if states are allowed to restrict voters, they will.
JPL
They might not call it a poll tax but when hourly workers stand in line for several hours, how is it not?
Ash Can
As others have already pointed out, this is a feature, not a bug. The only people they really have to defend this to is their own voter base. And those folks believe, like they do, that voting is a privilege, not a right, and that “those people” don’t deserve the privilege. Couple that with a moral crusade to keep Democrats, people of color, and other nondesirables out of office, reinforce it with gerrymandered voting districts, and the sanctity of democracy goes out the window.
Betty Cracker
@schrodinger’s cat: I did read it, and I share Kay’s pleasure in Douthat’s nervousness about the issue. I also noticed Douthat didn’t bother to explain how voter ID laws are different from voter suppression tactics circa 1963; he just waves it away.
I think I know why he doesn’t go there: When conservatives do try to explain why voter ID laws are totally NOT the new Jim Crow, they end up sounding like lame-ass liars, like this asshole:
Hahahaha! Lying asshole is lying.
schrodinger's cat
What they want is Apartheid America.
piratedan
@JPL: yup, those ALEC fuckers are the political equivalent of the Westboro Baptist folks politically, one stop cookie cutter theocratic oppression that fits any state, any jurisdiction
Tokyokie
I recently had an exchange with a libertarian-leaning friend who posited that if voter-ID could be considered discriminatory because of their greater impact on minorities, then why couldn’t the progressive income-tax system likewise be considered discriminatory because of its greater impact on white people. I don’t know what Reason-affiliated website he picked that up from, but I responded that the 16th Amendment specifically permits the income tax (although I didn’t mention that all taxes, by their nature, discriminate against those who own the asset or participate in the transaction that is being levied, and that the constitutional grant of the taxing power to Congress makes them legally permissible), but that if so framing the issue salves his conscience about his support of the apartheid tactics the GOP has adopted, so be it. He responded with an ad hominem attack on me, accusing me of making an ad hominem attack, and dismissed my response as without legal merit (he’s a lawyer) without really saying why. But mostly he got prickly. Apartheid? The current Republican Party? Racist? Me? Not us! Not me! Yeah, right. If you turn a blind eye to racist tactics in order to maintain political power, then you’re pretty much supporting them, and if you’re pretty much supporting racist tactics, you’re pretty much a racist. Sorry if the association with cross-burnings and lynchings does not conform to your exalted self-image. But you made that choice, and I’m merely telling you the consequences that choice entails.
Cacti
Holder’s DOJ has been extremely vigilant on the subject of voting rights. That’s the biggest reason why the GOPers despise him.
The emo left, on the other hand, is bent out of shape because he has enforced the Controlled Substances Act, which has not been repealed or invalidated by a court, regardless of State laws on decriminalization of marijuana.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Can they show an actual example of a non-citizen voting? Why do I have the feeling that is a product of their fevered imagination and not a reality?
Tommy
These voter ID laws just stun me. I know they shouldn’t but alas they still do. My mother, a Republican I might add, runs a polling station in her rural county in southern IL. A couple points:
1. She calls me after most elections almost in tears that MORE people don’t vote. She could care less who you vote for, just vote. We don’t see how you can call yourself an American and not want your fellow citizens to be able to vote.
2. She thinks voter ID laws are stupid. Her place is staffed with five workers and my mother jokes that given the size of the town, good chance one or even all five folks know everybody, so saying you are somebody else or trying to vote more than once won’t really work.
3. In 2008 she heard there might be “monitors” at some polling stations trying to make it harder for people to vote for Obama. She made sure she knew the election laws like the back of her hand and said she’d call in the State police if anybody violated the law even a fraction. They never showed up BTW.
4. We have figured out how to make voting easy where at least I live in southern Illinois (all the way across the state from my mother). When I see folks waiting for hours and hours to vote on TV it makes me sick of to my stomach. Now I get I don’t live in a large metro area, but in my town of 8,700 we have around 1,000 people vote in Presidental elections. Two polling places. My gut is they are staffed to handle like 5-7 times that. I can vote faster than I can buy a Big Mac at McDonalds.
5. Oh and a happy story. I vote in the gym of a primary school. In many elections teachers bring their classes in, let them sit on the stage at the other end, and conduct a basic Civics lesson. I envision it starting when them saying, “look those people are voting ….. here is why voting is important!”
Oh one other thing as a raging liberal. Do I want to lose elections? Hell no. But my mother is in agreement with me on this, if closer to 100% of folks voted cause we made it easier, and the folks we voted for didn’t win, that is something we might not like but we could deal with!
IowaOldLady
@Tommy: I love stories like this about your mom. The woman’s party is betraying her better instincts.
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
People say that, but it’s not obviously true. There are still undecided voters out there, and I have a hard time believing that they’re really happy with somebody explicitly stating that they’re fine with denying somebody the vote because of who they’re likely to vote for. At some point, the Republican “we only have to please our voters and fuck the rest of you” shtick is going to wear thin, and they’ll discover that they do, in fact, need some uncommitted voters to win.
FlipYrWhig
@Roger Moore:
The concept or the party?
Tommy
@schrodinger’s cat: Nope, they never can. The stat I saw of all the ballots cast in the United States from since 2000 (on Up w/ Chris Hayes), there is .001 percent voter fraud. On MSNBC the lady running to be Secretary of State in Ohio just said more then 9M ballots had been cast in Ohio since 2002 and only 24 cases of voter fraud, although none yet provided in a court of law. Ponder that for a few months.
I mean really, is there any program (public or private) where there is less fraud and abuse?
Davis X. Machina
@Roger Moore: There are 14 undecided undecided voters. Total. Nationwide. I counted them.
The rest are Republicans with sufficient residual self-respect not to hang the label on themselves.
Matt McIrvin
@Tommy: In my district, the polling places are mostly at schools, but Election Day is usually a school holiday (it’s one of the several teacher-training days throughout the year, and it makes it a bit easier to manage the voting in the building) . I do sometimes take my kid with me to vote, though. The poll workers ask where she is if we don’t.
Tokyokie
@schrodinger’s cat: I have for the last couple of months been denouncing this as apartheid — for what was apartheid at its core other than a system of legal disenfranchisement to promote the near congruency of the electorate with the ruling class? — and think all opponents of voter-ID laws should do likewise. Suburban whites don’t like to see themselves as the sort of low-life trash that would join the Klan, and it is up to us to rub their faces in the moral consequences of the choices they’ve made.
Tommy
@IowaOldLady: She voted for Obama last time around. First vote for a Republican for POTUS in her 78 years on this planet. She felt there was a “war on women” and say what you will that she is a Republican, she is a strong willed women and well that was a step too far for her.
Oh and her only grandchild, my brother’s 4 year old daughter, well when I talked politics with my mother I noted did she really want her not to get a sex education at school, have access to birth control, or gosh forbid access to a safe and legal abortion?
She was leaning my way already, but when I mentioned that, well it was over!
Just One More Canuck
@schrodinger’s cat: because it’s a product of their fevered imaginations and not a reality
Trakker
Where is our first black President in all this? I can understand why he had to avoid being the “Angry Black Man” in his first term, but we now have a political party that is blatantly trying to disenfranchise his race, and other minorities. If ever there was a time to blow up and scold the Republicans it is now. Chris Christie would (outrage is the only thing I admire about him). At least Thurgood Marshall understood his opportunity and responsibility when he was appointed to the Supreme Court, and he did it well.
Obama would lose nothing by angrily highlighting what the Republicans are doing and why it is so despicable, unAmerican, and undemocratic (I spent four years of my life serving my country for THIS?) .
Republicans are not going to compromise with him on anything in the future (unless he gives in to all their demands), so stop being nice, Sir.
Preventing American citizens from voting, especially for political gain, should be one of the most vile actions a political party can do, and at most times in our country’s history would be enough to doom that party for decades.
Anyway, it ain’t gonna’ happen so I believe our best bet is to mount a furious, nation-wide campaign 6 months before the 2014 election directed at minority voters and students. It would be along the lines of “Republicans are intentionally trying to block you from voting. Show them you are tougher than them. Find out NOW if you are registered, if not register. Find out where you must go to vote and what will be required of you. If you have questions call our hotline at 866-xxx-xxxx and we can help. Then, VOTE!” With the technology available today we should be able to have all the answers for every precinct, and even provide rides to get ID cards and to the polls come election day.
MomSense
The situation is pretty clear cut. In a free and fair marketplace of ideas, the Republican proposals are inferior-they got nothing. They have therefore determined that the only way to compete is to control the information and to prevent people from voting.
They then try to cover this up by repeating bullshit excuses about voter fraud/impersonation and lying about Democratic proposals knowing that if you repeat lies enough they will become truth to many people. They are assisted by conservative media and by money bags donors who pay for ads that repeat the falsehoods. They also rely on a bunch of enablers (see most guests on the Sunday morning noise shows as examples) who are either just paid shills or in such deep denial that their Grand Ole Party has become so craven that they contort themselves with justifications and illogical explanations in order to explain away the indefensible. Fortunately these enablers are comfortable enough that they are not often directly confronted with the consequences of their actions.
Tommy
@Matt McIrvin: Never a vacation day where I live. I don’t have any kids myself and I could walk into the entrance in the gym where I vote. I always walk into the main entrance at the far, other end of the school. Get to walk past all the classrooms with those young happy faces. See their fingerpainting and art projects on the walls.
And I think I am voting for them!
MomSense
@Trakker:
Blowing up and scolding has never been an effective tactic. It would be cathartic for some but it certainly wouldn’t advance the cause and would likely do more harm than good.
Kay
@Cacti:
The vitriol from the Right on voting rights enforcement was directed at Thomas Perez, who was in the civil rights division but now is the Sec of Labor. They went after Perez immediately. He had to sit thru umpteen ridiculous “hearings” and “inquiries” in 2009 on the New Black Panther hysteria that Fox News cooked up. He hasn’t had an easy time of it.
Davis X. Machina
@Matt McIrvin: You want Norman Rockwell, I got your Norman Rockwell right here.
2004 general election (the “hoodie to the polls” one), I was a poll warden in my small Maine town, where we have same-day registration. Most of the cast and crew from the school musical broke for a half-hour to hit McDonald’s and vote. They came down to the town’s only polling place en block (pop. 6800 or so) and the seniors who weren’t pre-registered registered, ate cheeseburgers, voted, then went back up to school to do Act II. (The bear-baiting referendum was as big a draw as Bush v. Kerry, to tell the truth…)
JW
@Chris: Huh. I never had a dog eat my homework, but I did once have a cat who pissed on my homework. I turned it in anyway.
Tommy
@Davis X. Machina: My problem is I can really only understand what I experience in the “real world” of my life. And the far right “crazy” has not reached where I live yet, even though it is a small rural, farming town.
In 2008, and keep in mind I live in Illinois, but we vote 57% for McCain but 63% to raise our property taxes to build a new $60M high school. Just did about the same in 2010 to build a new $25M primary school.
Now there is a part of me that thinks cause I live in a town that is 98.7% white it is easier to do this for yourselves (other white folks just like you and me), cause those “others” are not getting the money/investment.
But there is also a part of me that thinks many look at a Ted Cruz or Todd Akin and say, wow wait a minute. That dude is in fact crazy. He just went way over-the-line.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
My mom met Nina Turner at a fundraiser last week in Akron. She called me as soon as she got home to tell me about it. She loved her from her tv appearances before meeting her, but after she told me she signed up on the spot to volunteer. My mom is not a radical person although she has found herself in some radical situations over the years but I have never heard her so fired up about anything as she was about voter rights after that event.
On a personal note, they talked together about their moms (my grandmother) as they share a lot in their upbringing and ended up hugging and laughing.
Mark B.
Honestly, this is a somewhat valid legal strategy, and it’s the same strategy they used to defend the redistricting plan they put into place which greatly diluted the ability of Democrats to win seats in the state legislature and congress. Voter discrimination based on race is clearly illegal, but based on political affiliation, not so much … it’s considered to be the privilege of majority party to game the system to minimize the influence of the minority. The intent may be despicable, but it’s not expressly illegal.
The big problem with this is that’s there’s lots of overlap: policies intended to minimize Democratic voting influence tend to have a disproportionate impact on minorities. Even though they’re being honest about their motivations, the real impact of the policy will, in my opinion, end up in the courts finding this law invalid. The big question will be how long Texas drags this out in order to game a few elections in the Republican’s favor and how many millions they will spend on outside counsel trying to fight the case in Federal court.
Churchlady
@trollhattan: The only part struck down – only one – was the pre-emption by federal authorities, and it does not erode the standards by which civil rights on voting are assessed. AG Holder’s suit rests on clear evidence of discrimination not one bit of which was struck down. So it can proceed.
GregB
This gambit by the GOP may really end up being their final undoing. They are actively trampling the rights of young people in particular.
The Democrats and the left had better use this as a way to light a fire under the young people who are in the process of getting pushed out of the system.
If they are motivated to vote in off year elections the GOP is doooooomed I tells ya. Dooooooomed.
JW
@Tommy: Hey there!
Here in Paradise, that’d be Oregon, there are polling places but most folks vote by mail: no muss, no fuss. I wonder why every state doesn’t do this? Perhaps it’s just too easy.
Tommy
@JW: Hey right back. Yeah that would be nice. I wonder the same thing. When I vote, and I like to note this, cause many folks are surprised by how low-tech, yet fast and effective it is for me to vote.
There is a long table. Signs with like A-E, F-N, and O-Z for your last name. They have this little, kind of binder book where they look up your last name and find your card. It has your name and signature. Carbon copy under it. You sign your name. They tear off a copy to hand to a person next to them. They initial the top of your ballet and hand it to you.
You head to a little pop-up voting booth. Complete it. Put it in an optical scanner, and you can get a receipt if you want.
That is it. In and out.
I bet they could scale up to handle like 10,000 voters easy (we have 1,000 at the most any election. Even more. Heck the last few years folks have said a fine tip Sharpie would be easier then pencils, so we went to that.
Super low-tech (and I am a tech nerd), but sometimes low-tech works.
Villago Delenda Est
@FlipYrWhig:
As I believe it is Davis X. Machina often points out, on of the supreme ironies of the early 21st century is that the party that calls itself “Republican” is, in fact and action, Monarchist.
Anybodybuther2016
@Ash Can: yeah but what about drones and NSA and why hasn’t obummer pardoned manning and paid for his sex change operation?
Scott S.
@trollhattan:
Does this suit have any chance after the SCOTUS ruling?
What worries me is that it actually might have a chance. If it goes to the Supreme Court, you’d be guaranteed at least four votes for anything that benefits the GOP, whether or not there’s any serious legal, moral, or ethical basis for the decision.
And once the Supreme Court tells Greg Abbott that it’s legal to discriminate against a political party, there’s absolutely nothing stopping Texas and every other state with a right-leaning legislature and governor from just plain banning people from voting or being elected because of their political party.
SiubhanDuinne
@Trakker:
Don’t write him off or give up too quickly here. I would pay very close attention to his speech this Wednesday from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington strikes me as a perfect opportunity.
GregB
By the way, Rand Paul used the new GOP talking point when addressing a student who asked him about voter disenfranchisement.
Paul said that the questioner was belittling the struggle of civil rights because there used to be lynchings and firehoses and equating the act of showing an ID to such horrible tactics was an outrage.
Paul should be renamed Dick.
Chris
@Tokyokie:
Story of their life. “Don’t call me racist.” Heaven forbid you actually stop and wonder whether or not you’re actually being racist. All that counts is that the other guy stained your honor, and that just can’t stand.
JPL
It’s not just Voter ID that is in danger. It’s the polling places in heavily democratic areas that will be closed.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@GregB:
“Hey, you won your freedom to be citizens!! How dare you cry out against these Poll Taxes, how dare you belittle the struggle of your ancestors to be free from slavery by comparing this minor citizen’s obligation to that!!”
Tommy
@GregB: Look if folks where lynched for dating a “white” women, murdered in their yard for trying to register African American voters, were beat within an inch of their lives ….. if all that happened like 200 years ago I might be able to listen to the Republicans when they say racism isn’t a problem in our nation anymore (doubt I would listen for more then a few seconds).
But when I can see folks live on TV the age of my mom and dad that lived through those things …. I can’t even listen to them for like a spilt second!
Baud
@GregB:
Shorter Rand: We have not yet begun to disenfranchise.
Chris
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
“Also, shooting you down in the streets of Florida is okay. And don’t you dare compare that to the bad old days when shooting you down in the streets of Florida was okay. That’s just belittling to your ancestors who were shot down in the streets of Florida for your freedom.”
Patricia Kayden
@azlib: You’re right. Why not just pass a law at the state level prohibiting Dems from voting? Seems like that would be constitutional.
? Martin
@GregB: Shorter Rand Paul: lynching was too harsh, voting too kind. Surely we can compromise.
IowaOldLady
I find it incredible that it’s legal to pass laws intended to make it harder for any group to vote. I take other people’s word for it that it is, but it’s astounding.
Davis X. Machina
@Villago Delenda Est: Not one of those nice Scandinavian bicycle-riding social-democratic parliamentary monarchies, either….
Think 12th c. northern Europe. There’s no real ‘state’ in the modern sense, but there is a centralized apparatus of violence and coercion available for punishing your enemies, rewarding your friends, extracting wealth from the peasants and providing jobs to your idiot relatives. And for fighting Crusades against the paynims.
? Martin
@IowaOldLady:
It’s not. But this is Texas who believe that only their laws are valid.
geg6
I hate these fuckers with a white hot hate. This is the most important political fight of my life. I can’t think of anything more important than protecting the vote. Everything hangs on this. I’m going all in on this. It’s gotta be all hands on deck and every other cliche you can think of in order to win this fight.
Anybodybuther2016
Too bad the left is too busy flinging shit at PBO over fake media created scandals to give this the exposure it needs. Can you imagine if the professional left was as outraged about voter disenfranchisement as they are about the NSA and drooonz? Can you imagine this real scandal being discussed on every news programs like Benghazi , IRS gate and NSA gate? The left can make this a bigger deal if they wanted to but PBO isn’t involved so that’s probably not going to happen.
Anybodybuther2016
Too bad the left is too busy flinging shit at PBO over fake media created scandals to give this the exposure it needs. Can you imagine if the professional left was as outraged about voter disenfranchisement as they are about the NSA and drooonz? Can you imagine this real scandal being discussed on every news programs like Benghazi , IRS gate and NSA gate? The left can make this a bigger deal if they wanted to but PBO isn’t involved so that’s probably not going to happen.
Mark B.
@Patricia Kayden: You can’t exactly do that, because of the secret ballot, but you could do something similar. Suppose you saw poll data that showed that 70% of the men with moustaches voted democratic. You could pass a law requiring mustachioed voters to provide extra paperwork. I don’t think you could expressly disenfranchise them, but enacting impediments to them voting is probably not forbidden. As far as I know, this would not be disallowed under the Voting Rights Act, since mustache growers are not a protected class. Substitute student to mustache grower in this example, and you have the Texas law.
Of course, if the mustache test ends up having disproportionate impact on a minority that’s protected by the VRA, it’s going to be ruled illegal. Since hispanics seem to wear mustaches more often than Anglos, I think this one is a non-starter.
I think the mustache test might end up being illegal under other law, but as I understand it, the Voting Rights Act does not apply in this case, except if you can prove disproportionate impact to a protected class.
–Mark B., mustachioed.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Wow, that’s incoherent. How do you measure the integrity of the ballot if not by the number of fraudulent votes cast? Of does he somehow think that integrity is a binary thing, so that one illegitimate vote is enough to make the whole thing bad and thus justify more restrictions? If that’s the case, doesn’t denying legitimate voters count as damaging the integrity of the ballot?
bemused
@IowaOldLady:
Not only that but what the R party is doing is demeaning and insulting voters like her.
Botsplainer
Piyush Jindal says that since 50 years have passed since MLK’s speech, racism is over as far as his paymasters and string pullers are concerned.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/the-end-of-race-95875.html
Because it only took a concerted national effort 100 years after the treason of the southern aristocrats to include folks of African heritage in the economic and political life of the communities in which they live.
Stillwater
Kay, someone upthread said you rock. I agree. I don’t comment on too many of your posts but I read them all. Just wanted to let you know this whole series on voting rights and voter suppression has been terrific.
Baud
@Botsplainer:
Wow. The early 90s called. They want their wingnut memes back.
Ruckus
@Trakker:
Maybe this is another strategy that gets people motivated to get out and take back the country. Obama, or any president, can not do this level of house cleaning on his own. And there is plenty of evidence that a problem exists and where the issues need to be discussed. Congress. So that is the place that needs us, all of us to take appropriate action. Find out who is running in your area, get better people to run, hell run yourself, but change congress. Of course also the local and state legislatures. CA has finally done that in our state legislature and the difference is readily apparent.
By his not standing up and shouting he can still make some progress. Standing up and shouting will get him exactly no where.
It is up to us to stand up and shout. It is up to him to govern. And given what that the opposition just keeps throwing their shit and hoping that everyone just runs away, allows them to win.
Anya
Justices Kennedy and Roberts (non crazy wing of the conservative judges) should be ashamed of themselves. They’re legalized voter suppression of people of color.
Ruckus
@GregB:
Paul should be renamed Dick.
By common usage most people already have.
OK some call him douche. And a few shithead. But the sentiment holds.
Patricia Kayden
@Trakker: Eric Holder is fighting against these voter ID laws.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2013/August/13-ag-952.html
I’m sure President Obama is supporting Holder on this.
Tokyokie
@Chris: Exactly. I used to work at a place in the Deep South where most of my co-workers would make offhanded racist remarks as a matter of routine. But they were sure they weren’t racist. The racists were the lower-class types who’d dropped out of high school and joined the Klan, not them. They’d been to college, so they were immune. Similarly, the guy with whom I had the argument, married an Hispanic woman, so he couldn’t possibly be racist. Just ask him.
I regard people like this the same way I regard Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, who, while not necessarily sharing the anti-Slovene, anti-Croat, anti-Bosnian Muslim sentiments of their more belligerent brethren, happily accepted the political spoils of those groups’ disenfranchisement. Which is to say, I consider it a difference without real distinction.
MikeJ
@Botsplainer:
I have never heard one word of complaint about the Norwegian 17th of May celebrations or Scottish highland games. I suppose with the second one it could be a confusion about the meaning of “gathering of the clans”
Davis X. Machina
@Anya: ‘Just win, baby’ is the new ‘E pluribus unum’
Tokyokie
@Anya: You’re assuming facts for which there is no evidence, i.e., Kennedy and Roberts having souls.
Roger Moore
@JW:
It encourages the blahs to vote.
Baud
@MikeJ:
I for one am thrilled that a politician is finally taking a stand against St. Patrick’s Day.
MikeJ
@JW:
We have places where you can drop off your mail-in ballot on election day without mailing it, but it is strictly BYOBallot, and you need to have it filled out before you get there.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@MikeJ:
You know, it might just be me, but I distinctly remember reasons for having “Hypenated-Americans” is because people had a hard time treating those people as actual fucking AMericans. You know, ‘they’re not American, they’re Irish!’ ‘They’re not American, they’re Negroes!’ and the like. The Hypenated Americans stuff, just like Black History Month, are things to CELEBRATE the fact that yes, despite every attempt to marginalize them, they are fucking Americans you fucking douchehats.
schrodinger's cat
Kay@top
Douthat in his op-ed claims
Is that true?
Scott S.
@MikeJ:
Reminds me of this story from the “Not Always Right” website…
rikyrah
@SiubhanDuinne:
Do you honestly believe that the DOJ isn’t acting under what the President wants?
SERIOUSLY?
SERIOUSLY, you doubt that the President isn’t all up in this Voter Suppression stuff?
Keith P
Uhhh, lesse, he’s spoken against it at a couple of press conferences and, oh yeah, he’s got the Attorney General and DOJ filing a federal lawsuit against it.
rikyrah
@Botsplainer:
he chose his name from a tv character.
he turned his back on his
given name
given religion
and he thinks he can open his mouth to lecture someone else about self-respect?
G-T-F-O-H
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
The Manichean Heresy is the basis of their world view.
Shalimar
@BruceFromOhio:
Refusing to leave the court when recess ends because you’re behind and that’s not fair isn’t really playing the long game. Anyone can hold their breath until their face turns blue.
rikyrah
@Kay:
they were also mad that Perez rebuilt the Civil Rights Division with lawyers who were actually interested in CIVIL RIGHTS
Keith G
@Ruckus: We can’t get this done via a Congress first approach. Too many House districts have been gerrymandered to a 70/30 split. By letting the GOP win big in 2010, we allowed them to stack the deck in many states.
We will make progress when the most popular Democrat leads his party in building local efforts to fight the many battles that need to be fought.
Chris
@Botsplainer:
I never quite understood the amount of contempt that people put into words like “scab” and “house n-word” until recently. Herman Cain was probably the first one who made me realize it, but this guy’s up there too.
Shalimar
@schrodinger’s cat:
Since “many” can be as few as 3, “liberal” can include any state that has voted for a Dem for president or governor in the last decade, and “better job” can be measured in any number of ways that give a huge state like Texas an advantage, I’m guessing it’s true.
feebog
@ Anya:
Roberts in particular has been itching to gut the civil rights act for years. They are not ashamed of themselves. They were appointed (in part) to change the direction of voting rights in this country. They are just fine with what Texas and NC are doing to minority voters, and I’m sure they can’t wait until this new series of lawsuits reaches their jurisdiction. They can’t wait to strike down the rest of the law.
MikeJ
@Keith G:
That would be very inefficient gerrymandering. Good gerrymandering is solid 55-45 districts and picking up an extra seat.
Chris
@Tokyokie:
“Distinction without a difference” indeed.
I also love how the Klan has been retconned into just a bunch of “lower class high school dropouts,” as you put it, which no one in their right mind would ever join… considering that for most of its history, the Klan was to Southern high society what Skull and Bones is to Yale.
(I suppose it’s a nice bonus that retconning the Klan into a trailer trash convention allows you to indulge in the same kind of class prejudice that the Klan would have heartily approved of).
Trakker
@rikyrah: I believe you misappropriated the quote which you objected to. I wrote it and stand by it.
I don’t doubt the the administration is working quietly to fight the disenfranchisement, but I think there are lines that no political party should ever cross, and this is one of them. Sometimes a President must lash out and I believe that is what is needed now on this issue.
One reason I feel this way is that one reason I voted for Obama is because I believed he would not let the Republicans beat up on African Americans. I would expect the same of Hillary and women’s issues. After all, Bush bent over backwards to protect and promote his fanatical Christian supporters. Was anyone surprised?
fuckwit
Hmm, there is lots of good stuff to chew on, and some great comments here that point out some things I hadn’t noticed but which should be said more loudly and frequently
@Kay: It’s possible that these voter ID laws also may be designed to disenfranchise women, as well as minorites, students, and the elderly. Women often do change their names upon getting married, and their IDs get invalidated. This would be an even bigger boost to the Rethugs if it had that effect.
@NobodySpecial: They Rethugs DO want rich (white) votes to count more, and they ALREADY DO: it’s called capitalism. In capitalism, it’s one dollar one vote, not one person one vote, so a rich person (or corporation) gets way more votes. Citizens United made this the official law of the land.
@Tokyokie: Libertarians seem to believe in one-dollar-one-vote, so that’d explain why they are making stupid arguments that taxes are discriminatory. They’re only discriminatory if dollars are votes. Dollars should not be, and should not function as, votes. Fix that first.
In other words, in a democracy, power should not be proportioned according to wealth, or race, or gender, or party, it should be proportioned strictly equally among everyone, regardless of anything else. Stick to that, use that test or a bedrock principle, and all the other bullshit should just melt away.
GregB
@feebog:
The scumbag Roberts cited the long period of time between the civil rights acts and the current era in order to indicate that things have gotten better because those remedies have been applied to so long.
Yet he was arguing to get rid of those remedies back in the early 80’s a mere decade and a half after the first of those laws took place.
He’s a scumbags, scumbag.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
Go back and read my comment before you start throwing your all-caps “SERIOUSLY?”s at me. I was quoting, and responding to, trakker.
Yatsuno
@SiubhanDuinne: I think it was an honest mistake. You grabbed and quoted first and it all went sideways from there. I had to look because I couldn’t imagine you saying that, and figured it out. Hopefully it gets less dramatic from here.
realbtl
This reminds me of the “English Only” push in CA a few years ago. I remember thinking “Do the Rs really want to set a precedent of the majority fucking over a minority when the Rs will likely become the minority in the future?”
Burnspbesq
@Roger Moore:
He got one new guy onto the DC Circuit: Sri Sinivastran from the Solicitor General’s office. The guy is really good.
fuckwit
@feebog: Finally, isn’t there a way that a functioning Congress (if we bust our ass to get one in 2014!) could rewrite the CRA and re-pass it in way that’d slide past the SCOTUS?
If I read the description of the ruling correctly, their problem was not with the CRA, but only that it singled out certain states. What if Congress passed a new CRA that treated ALL states equally– basically forbid any discriminatory voting restrictions and gave the federal government power to step in and stop any such restritctions before they take effect?
And what can we do to get Democrats elected in 2014 to take back the House and avoid the danger of losing the Senate, so we can get something like this passed? This really needs to be the focus.
geg6
@fuckwit:
Agreed. We have to quit sitting around moaning about gerrymandering and start working our asses off to change the calculus in Congress. It may not happen in 2014 (and most likely won’t) but it will never happen if we don’t get off our asses and work at it relentlessly until it does. And not even stop then. Because, as we see right now, it’s all too easy for the racists and bigots, plutocrats and warmongers to come back at us, meaner and more vicious than ever.
Mark B.
@schrodinger’s cat: If you compare the best schools in Texas to some of the worst poor urban schools, that may be true. It’s kind of a ‘so what.’
burnspbesq
@Tokyokie:
The answer to your (soon-to-be-ex?) friend’s question is that the difference between intentional discrimination and disparate impact is Constitutionally significant. The income tax falls disproportionately on white folks cuz we have most of the income. In highly technical Con-law jargon, that’s a big fat “so fucking what”. When Texas, for example, sets out to deliberately dilute the voting power of the blahs and browns, the intent is what makes it a problem.
Mnemosyne
@fuckwit:
You are correct. I think a lot of people are despairing of getting it done through that route since Republican shenanigans have set up a Catch-22 through redistricting where in order to make the districts more fair, you have to change who gets elected from those districts, but to me that seems like the more secure route than trying to see what the SC gets up to.
burnspbesq
@Trakker:
Exactly where he needs to be: standing behind the curtain with a big shit-eating grin on his face while his Attorney General kicks ass.
The Ancient Randonneur
So a mad man goes into an elementary school and kills 26 people, most of them are first graders. That isn’t sufficient to do anything about firearms. Imaginary voter fraud runs rampant in the feeble minds of our wingnut brethren therefore the only logical solution is to tamp it down BEFORE it actually occurs. This empire is crumbling. But, hey, the consevative mind does believe that the United States was born perfect and continues to improve when we keep all “those people” from mucking up the real America. Break out the foam fingers. WE’RE NUMBER ONE.
Ruckus
@Keith G:
That’s why I said local and state reps as well.
But the gist was that we all have to stand up and speak out. Wasn’t that the message that MLK and John Lewis talked about? If you want your rights as a citizen, you have to protect the rights of all citizens. The way we do that is to speak out, to vote and to make sure that everyone can speak out and vote. Do you have to wait for a leader to tell you what to do?
This is supposed to be a representative democracy. Do conservatives represent you? They don’t represent me, so I want to replace them. All of them, in every legislative body and office we have.
Ruckus
@schrodinger’s cat:
Is it true?
Look who said it. What are the probabilities that it is true in any sense of the word?
burnspbesq
@Mark B.:
Nagahappen. This is why we have preliminary injunctions: to preserve the status quo while the legality of the changes is litigated.
Chris
@burnspbesq:
Ah, thank you.
I admit I’ve never understood the legal ramifications of progressive income taxes. I’ve just always figured that everyone knows “the market” stacks the deck ludicrously in favor of the people at the top and against the rest of us, that the salary disparity between CEOs and janitors isn’t remotely related to how hard they work, how irreplaceable they are, or (heh) how well they do their jobs (can you say “golden parachute”), and that things are that way not because of an “Invisible Hand” determining the most just wage for everyone but because the CEOs and other people at their level are the ones who get to set wages and prices and generally determine how the money is allocated.
The government can’t set every last price or wage in the entire marketplace, but knowing that the deck is stacked, it can certainly tax the people who’ve stacked it and use the money to alleviate the problems of those against whom it’s stacked.
schrodinger's cat
@Ruckus: This is what he links to
Texas African-American students rank fourth nationally
on eighth-grade science NAEP
Tokyokie
@burnspbesq: Frankly, the language of the 16th Amendment I think provides sufficient constitutional cover for the disproportionate effect of the progressive income tax. I suppose the counterargument is that the 16th Amendment only permits a flat income tax rate and that anything else is a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, but I think taken in conjunction with Article I, Section 8 (the taxing and spending clause), the 16th Amendment allows for progressive income taxation and one doesn’t even need to address the issue of intent.
Of course, despite the legislative record and ex parte remarks demonstrating the discriminatory intent of lawmakers promuilgating voter ID laws, the Supreme Court chose to ignore such intent. And by the Roberts court’s reasoning, we could justifiably lock up all real-estate lawyers on the grounds that such action is needed to protect the country from dragons. And I’m sure my friend would be squawking loudly if such folly were to directly affect him.
TriassicSands
Is that still true? It seems possible that North Carolina has now surpassed Texas as the state most dedicated to winning elections through voter suppression.
Davis do?” And the rest is history.
@JW:
I’ve voted by mail for years now. The voting booth is a thing of the past in Washington State, but don’t expect Republican controlled states to adopt mail-in voting. That would do exactly the opposite of what their voter suppression laws are trying to do now — make it harder for minority voters to vote. Yep, although in hard times main-in voting would save those fiscal conservatives money, one simply can’t put a price tag on the value of making it hard, harder, or impossible for a likely Democratic voter to cast a ballot.
Mark B.
@MikeJ: Yeah, that’s right. Efficient gerrymandering basically involves two strategies. Packing and cracking. Packing involves knowing that you will lose some seats, so you minimize the number of seats by putting as many of the opposition voters into as few districts as possible That’s why Republicans actually love majority-minority seats: if they can pack all of the black voters into a single district that votes 90% Democratic, it’s much better for them than splitting them among two districts that both can be won by Democrats. The other strategy, cracking, involves splitting up natural constituencies into multiple pieces so that the communities influence is diluted. The Texas Legislature split Austin into more pieces than any other Texas city. It’s also one of the most Democratic areas in Texas.
Edit: I made the loose/lose grammatical mistake. I’m so embarrassed.
catclub
@schrodinger’s cat: “Can they show an actual example of a non-citizen voting?”
Ted Cruz? Ann Coulter?
Mark B.
@burnspbesq:Preclearance provided that kind of injunction out of the box. Is there already an injunction in place against the enforcement of the Texas law? I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it would be granted, since preclearance is now dead.
Ruckus
@Chris:
In this one paragraph you have captured progressive taxation and liberal democracy perfectly. Perfectly!
Most rich fuckers don’t want to be equal. They want and like to be “better”. That’s a big part of their hate for progressive taxation and liberal government. Most governments over the centuries have gotten to a point where we are, huge monetary and social inequality. It has usually ended in bloodshed. We have the tools to end it peacefully this time. But we have to use those tools and use them properly.
schrodinger's cat
@catclub: Is Coulter a dual citizen too?
Ruckus
@schrodinger’s cat:
Are these the standardized tests promoted by NCLB? If so are they actually teaching? And if it is true that is great. Hooray for TX.
Now will TX allow them to be real citizens and vote?
Roger Moore
@Baud:
And I’m surprised that the governor of Louisiana is taking a stand against Mardi Gras.
Yatsuno
@schrodinger’s cat: She voted in two states during the same election then bragged about it. I doubt it was ever investigated.
Chris
@Ruckus:
Thus giving an even more ridiculous bent to their faith in American Exceptionalism, since they think the current huge monetary and social inequality is the result of an amazing society that lets Better People get ahead and do whatever the fuck they want… totally unlike every other aristocratic society in the last 5,000 years of human history, somehow.
Roger Moore
@fuckwit:
Only if you assume the SCOTUS cares about facts and legalities. I know burnsbesq will object to us saying it, but it looks more and more as if the Court is willing to overrule things the Republicans don’t like any time they can come up with a vaguely plausible-sounding excuse. If that’s true, then there’s really no way of overcoming the SCOTUS’s ability to overturn stuff; they’ll come up with some excuse to do so no matter how you write it.
Yatsuno
@Roger Moore: In that instance, I would have no objection to Obama getting a couple more justices onto the Supreme Court and changing the number to 11 or something. Nine justices is not a Constitutional requirement, in fact the number was set by Congress IINM. It would bring up the whole packing of the court charges again but the Republicans brought this on themselves by appointing hacks instead of actual law scholars.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris:
Libertarians, and libertarian-leaning conservatives, literally do not know this. They believe that the poor are poor because of a lack of initiative. They talk a lot about how America is supposedly the only society in history in which the rich actually work harder than the poor.
They understand that, even were that true, the work-to-pay function is highly nonlinear, but they seem to figure that the declining marginal value of that money makes that OK: since a dollar is worth less to a rich guy, you need to pay him a hundred times as much to make sure his reward is commensurate with his extra effort.
Cacti
@Botsplainer:
Says the guy who goes by “Bobby”.
Patricia Kayden
@Yatsuno: I can see wingnut heads exploding if President Obama tried to increase the number of SCOTUS judges. Interesting idea though.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
But that’s asking for trouble. If you accept the declining marginal utility of money, you can easily argue that a progressive income tax is not unfair to the ultra-rich, since they’re actually losing a smaller fraction of the utility of their money than poor people are. This is actually a very strong argument for why a progressive income tax is a good idea.
burnspbesq
@Mark B.:
Thought experiment.
You’re Texas. You’ve seen the evidence that DOJ put in in the district court in DC in the Section 5 case. Argue against probable success on the merits.
Also too: DOJ could have filed in any district in Texas. Think it’s an accident it chose Corpus Christi?
Davis X. Machina
@TriassicSands: I think the record of success with postal voting in the Pacific Northwest has a lot to do with it being restricted, for now, to the Pacific Northwest. That’s a part of the country that’s had a long tradition of good government, non-corruptly delivered.
In other words, I bet Texas and Texans could screw it up royally, accidentally and on purpose. The delivery of the ballot in both directions may be pretty airtight, thanks to the USPS, but their completion, and counting, are only as good as your social norms are.
How long would it be before we heard stories about churches having ballot night after Wednesday bible study, when Pastor Bob and the worship team make themselves available to counsel you on the godly performance of your civic duty — not that they would ever fill it in themselves — as well as collect your completed ballots for convenient delivery .to the post office. Oh, and having to explain to Pastor Bob why you don’t have your ballot with you, because you filled it in free-lance, without prayer and reflection, and mailed it in yourself.
There are places where the local norms would support that, and the law wouldn’t even slow them down. It’s certainly the case where public prayer at school graduations and sporting events are still pretty commonplace, statute law be damned.
Mark B.
@burnspbesq: I went to high school in Corpus Christi, although that was a few years ago. As far as I know, it’s a pretty typical medium sized Texas city. What’s special about it? I”m not aware of any reason why Holder chose that jurisdiction. I would have thought San Antonio would have been a more logical choice, since that’s where the state case is being held, and there would be less traveling.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Equal parts national pride (wanting to believe that your country is the only one in which elites actually earned their place), racial/class prejudice (contempt for those poorer than you), and conscience cleansing (if you’re one of the rich) or willful delusion (if you’re one of the middle class trying to convince yourself that one day you, too, can have that mansion).
karen
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Voters will soon have to own property to be able to vote, which is the libertarian dream.
They may not be able to ban women from voting but I’m sure they’ll find a way to state how hormones make women irrational and can not be trusted to make good choices.
I don’t think they can outright say, “Democrats can’t vote” but what they can do is:
Ban people who are not working from voting.
Ban people who are receiving any government funding: social security, disability, unemployment, welfare, etc. from voting.
Jack up the price of the Voter ID and the documents to get that ID so you need to be rich to be able to afford it.
Jack up the age to vote so that problem of young people voting for Democrats won’t be an issue anymore.
Ban anyone without a college degree from being able to vote or if they want to vote, charge a fee.
Are any of those legal?
And who do I blame for all of this? I blame the fuckers who decided to stay home in 2010 because they wanted to teach a lesson. I hate them even more than I hate the GOP. We had our chance. It’s gone now.
SiubhanDuinne
@Yatsuno: And I was less polite to Rikyrah than I would usually be. Apologies all around.
rikyrah
@karen:
they would actually have to change the Constitution for this
Bitter Scribe
Wouldn’t it be ironic if this Republican ratfucking turned out to be the greatest GOTV motivator for Democrats of the 21st century?
Tokyokie
@Mark B.: All I can guess is that Corpus Christi is considered part of the predominantly Hispanic Rio Grande Valley, whereas San Antonio is not. According to Census Bureau figures, Nueces County (Corpus Christi) is about 76% minority (Hispanic and/or nonwhite), compared to Bexar County (San Antonio), which is 82% minority (Hispanic or nonwhite), a difference largely attributable to Bexar’s larger black population.
Mark B.
@Tokyokie: Corpus isn’t part of the RGV. You have to drive through the King Ranch to get there, and it’s 2 hours of complete nothingness. There’s virtually nothing between the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus except a 100 mile long ranch. And a Border Patrol checkpoint. It’s actually a pretty city, which a nice downtown right on the gulf coast. There’s a small class of wealthy people that live downtown, but it’s surrounded by miles and miles of lower middle class suburbs. I went to high school in the goat roper part of town.
Burnspbesq
@Mark B.:
I don’t litigate in Texas (or anywhere else if I can avoid it), but for a long time CC had a reputation as plaintiffs’ paradise. Lot of mass tort and products liability cases go there. I assume that DOJ went looking for a place where they thought judges were familiar and comfortable with complex statistical evidence.
Chris
@karen:
Nah, they’ll write in an exception for Social Security and Medicare recipients (too many teabaggers). Under the common excuse that “well, of course it’s an inefficient program, but they paid for it, they’re entitled to it!”
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Betty Cracker:
That’s one lying asshole.
And here’s some proof from the comments that we’re living in a post-racial society because racism is dead (other than among them darkies):
And:
Not even the least little hint of any disdain for Black people there, no indeedy.
And Something else worth bringing up is the rate of voter fraud. In a country with 300,000,000, there are going to be a few fake votes once in a while. There just are. I went and worked it out a few days ago, but in the last twelve years, there have been in the neighborhood of 770,000,000 votes cast in the U.S. in elections. In truth, that’s conservative; I didn’t bother looking up every municipal election everywhere; only federal general elections, odd yeared state elections and presidential primary voting in contested years. And I rounded every election turnout number below 750,000 to the nearest million, so I think I was being kind to the voter fraud assholes.
To put that in some perspective, that’s more votes than the populations of all the 1222 smallest countries in the world put together.
And I went and looked up the number of charges of voter fraud, which were 2068 in those same twelve years. If you throw out all the dismissed cases or the cases ending in acquittal, and you’re left with about 1300.
All this means that over the last 12 years, there was one case of what somebody could even conceivably call voter fraud for every 592,307 votes cast. This is throwing in even the marginal cases, where we don’t know the outcome. Even if we give them all of those, there was one fake vote for every 592,307 good ones. That’s a rate that’s so small my calculator can’t even work it out. It reads: 1.6883116883116883116883116883117e-6. I don’t even know what that means, other than that this is an astronomically small number.
And they’d have us keep humdreds of thousands of people from the polls over that? In a country of 300,000,000, that kind of fraud rate is perfection. We just aren’t going to do any better than that, unless we strip almost everybody of the right to vote. There’s more of a likelihood that we’ll die in a car wreck on the way to work than that somebody in this country will cast a fraudulent vote, but these assholes drive to work every day. There’s a whole hell of a bigger likelihood that the gun in your house will kill one of your children than that somebody will cast a fraudulent vote in the U.S., but you can’t get these people to give up their guns for love or money.
Look at all the guys let off from death row because we put them there mistakenly. Oh, but that’s a mistake rate we can live with. We’re only messing around with somebody’s life there, not running the risk that our vote might be diluted by one five-hundred-and-ninety-two-thousand-and-three-hundred-and-sevenths. All this “proof” and all these “facts” and shit will never sway those who want to shove these fucking laws through the legislatures, but they might help with people in the middle, who don’t follow this the way we do, and might otherwise find the Republicans’ reasoning [sic] worth listening to.
Chris
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.):
Let’s forget everything for a moment and assume that’s true…
… what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t that make them entrepreneurs and innovators who have found a way to make money? Aren’t there enough people in this country already trying to tear down successful people for being successful? Where is all this petty jealousy for the King family’s accomplishments coming from, anyway? Can’t we just all be appreciative of these courageous risk takers who were rewarded by the Hand of the Market (the Righteous Judge)? I mean, who do you think is paying all these taxes and creating all these jobs? Productive citizens with skin in the game, like the King family, that’s who! And we can only applaud the fact that this business model is based on family, which speaks well of their respect for traditional values in these times of hedonism and moral relativism and political correctness.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Chris:
Well, duh, they’re Black, and, as everybody knows, Black people never make anything on their own; they only steal opportunities from deserving white people™ through Affirmative Action. Needless to say, this never applies to approved Republican Black people like Herman Cain, or even Alan Keyes, who, as far as I can tell, has never done any work in his life.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ruckus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.):
It means there are six(6) zeros in between a decimal point and that leading 1. So it would look like .00000016883 blah, blah, blah percent. Yes, that’s pretty fucking small. That percent of a billion dollars that would be $1.68.
@Chris:
Well of course their answer is that the King family is black. And for black people to earn the right to be rich they have to totally ignore and renounce their “blackness” or be “court jesters”, you know like move stars or athletes, otherwise they must have stolen the money. And those rappers don’t count because they don’t entertain us old white folk.
You can never leave racism out of the equation. Ever.
Chris
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.):
Well, it doesn’t apply to them as long as they don’t set a foot out of line. (And white people will be the judge of what constitutes “setting a foot out of line.”)
If you object to your fellow presidential candidate naming his ranch after a racial epithet, well, that’s just not acceptable. The candidate may or may not be acting in poor taste, but it’s not your place to tell him so. If you think otherwise, you might just be one of those shifty thieving black people after all.
And if word gets around that you’ve been sleeping with white women? Lord help you there!
Ruckus
@Chris:
Thought I should add to my last comment responding to you.
But you knew that.
Nice try, though trying to use logic with conservatives just doesn’t work. Even if you use their logic. Which I generally ask people not to use as it usually gives me a migraine.
Chris
@Ruckus:
I think my favorite example of “using logic on a conservative” was a friend of mine who had a Republican girlfriend who, like most of her party, decided Obama was a failure the minute he was elected, and thought, among other things, that “okay, I agree that we needed a stimulus, just not THAT stimulus.” “Okay. So what would you have done for a stimulus?” She proceeds to outline… basically, all the things the Obama stimulus did. Long silence. “… that WAS the Obama stimulus…” Naturally, that didn’t change her mind; the Obama stimulus is still wrong.
The last few years have taught me not to try the reasoning thing with them. It’s a waste of time.
catclub
@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t think so. I just included her for illegal voting.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: Five zeros actually. (1e-1 is 0.1, 1e-2 is 0.01, and so on; one way to remember how it goes for negative exponents is to write one zero before the decimal point.) So it’d be 0.0000016883 and so on.
This is a calculatory way of writing scientific notation, which in print is written with 10 raised to an exponent.
Matt McIrvin
Also, a thing to keep in mind with those voter-fraud numbers is that, for the purpose of justifying voter ID, even those figures are probably an overestimate: most of those cases are probably not impersonation fraud of the sort that could be prevented with voter ID.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
Sorry.
It has only been a few decades that I’ve had to use eNotation. Got the concept right, fucked up a little on the details. Still the numbers are really damn small and for a human endeavor are pretty amazing. Would we still have hit Mars if off by that percentage? We keep trying to perfect anti-missle defense and miss by far more than that percentage.
Kay
@schrodinger’s cat:
I don’t know if it’s true. If he’s using NAEP scores, I would be very wary. The NYtimes editorial page has a terrible record on interpreting the scores. They’re publicly available. I don’t know why it’s so tough for them, but Bill Keller just makes shit up and even their education reporters spin the scores.
If he’s using JUST 8th grade math scores, I would be doubly wary. One can use scores a lot of ways to push an agenda.
Too, this is a popular talking point on the Right. Conservatives claim liberals are the real racists on education. It’s just another line in the long-running whine of “liberals are the real racists because….”
Kevin Drum knows how to read and interpret NAEP scores. Maybe he’ll take up the claim and verify or debunk it.
lol
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.):
and 99% of those voter fraud cases wouldn’t have been stopped by any of the anti-voter fraud measures being passed. Voter impersonation is practically non-existent.
john b
i can’t stand wrong math to sit un-corrected. the original quote is 1 fraudulent vote of every 592 thousand good ones. how does it make sense that that equates to $1.68 per billion? One mistake is the exponential format being misunderstood. The other is that the original number is not a percent.
Anyway, all you need to do is multiply $1 billion by 1300 / 770 million. You get $1688.
It’s really troubling to me that people living in this day in age where billions and millions and trillions are thrown around in political conversations all the time, that otherwise seemingly well-informed and smart people can’t even do basic math involving these numbers. /rant
tmk
@WereBear: Wheels, my Foot – they’ve put them on a freakin’ hovercraft…