Voter ID laws offer a classic case of Republican win-win for Republicans in that they both help the party win elections and they hurt minorities. Now insofar as it reflects basic machiavellian calculation you can sort of understand the GOP trying to tip the rules of the game in their favor. On the other hand raw fear and hate of different people is just shameful and self-destructive.
Fortunately social science has a great protocol for testing a large group for different kinds of bias. Take for example gender bias in science. Everyone knows that women have a harder time getting high-profile postdocs, securing faculty positions and winning grants but nobody had a solid handle on why. To resolve that a research team sent one identical resumé to over a hundred different research faculty and asked them to rank the candidate on various metrics. The one and only difference on the applications was the name – half had a male name on the top and the other half was female.
Responses showed a startling and highly significant disparity. On average the female candidate scored lower in competence. Faculty ranked the identical female application as less hireable, they were less interested in mentoring her and they proposed paying her an average of $4,000 less*. Female faculty showed just as much bias as men.
The scientific sting works well because it is easy and cheap. It works because people have no idea they are even taking part in a study so you can’t just lie like people do to a phone survey. You can never point a finger at any one single person since it only studies how a group behaves, but in a number of ways that works out for the better. You know that good feeling that you get when someone singles out a bad actor? That feels good because it lets people tell themselves the problem is over there, in those bad people. A study is a lot more effective when it speaks for everyone. In the study I linked science collectively fell on its face. I can tell you that study shook a lot of us quite deeply. Making us all second guess our own snap judgment will ultimately do a lot more good than it does to put any person in the pillory and hand the rest of us rotten fruit.
Group data also matters a lot more to the person who does not have power. More than any single bad actor a young scientist or a black/hispanic person voting mostly wants to knwo what kind of headwind he or she will face when they apply for a job, give an interview or show up to vote (bolding mine).
USC researchers developed a novel real-world field experiment to test bias among state legislators. In the two weeks prior to the 2012 election, they sent e-mail correspondence to a total of 1,871 state legislators in 14 states.
[…] One group of legislators received e-mail from a voter who identified himself as “Jacob Smith.” The other received email from “Santiago Rodriguez.” […] Crucially, in each state in the study, legislators really could have simply responded with a “yes” — drivers’ licenses were not required in any of the states in order to vote…[L]egislators who had supported voter ID laws were much more likely to respond to “Jacob Smith” than to “Santiago Rodriguez.”Hello (Representative/Senator NAME),
My name is (voter NAME) and I have heard a lot in the news lately about identification being required at the polls. I do not have
driver’s license. Can I still vote in November? Thank you for your help.Sincerely,
(voter NAME)
It should come as zero surprise that Republicans were a lot more motivated to help Mr. Smith vote. The Washington Post breaks down the data in graph form, but they do it in a weird way.
People who did not co-sponsor voter ID laws answered Santiago Rodriguez more often than sponsors did, but that list includes both Republicans and Democrats. If you take those black bars representing the disparity between answering Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Smith and split up the data like the original authors did, the data makes a bit more sense.
Shockingly, Republicans who sponsored voter ID laws really do not want hispanic people to vote. Republicans who did not sponsor the laws still feel a little oogy about hispanics but much less so and Democrats showed no bias at all (actually 1.8% in favor of Mr. Santiago, but far within the margin of error).
Consider this another edition of things we already know, proved by science.
(*) This last point is a really big deal. I have worked in science for those salaries, and a person can at least make do on the average salary proposed for a male applicant. The proposed female salary was on par with what graduate students make, which is pretty close to starvation wages for a young professional. I would have considered walking away from science if that was the best I could get.
aimai
I’m graphically impaired but I still think both graphics are awful. I also think that sociologists have been demonstrating bias against women and minorities for years and it doesn’t make a dent in the real world. Only when you put into place strict protocols for obscuring gender or race –as in those orchestras where the auditions are held blind or behind curtains–can you get beyond racism/sexism in hiring. And at the top level, where the candidates are known, you simply can’t get past it.
Eric U.
the argument that you need an ID to drive/get a library book/fly seems to be really effective with weak-minded “liberals.” Even after you point out that most people that don’t have ID’s don’t need an id for anything and in a lot of cases it may take thousands of dollars and many hours to rectify the situation. And even after you point out that the reason a large number of people can’t get ID’s is because they were intentionally kept from getting the documents needed because of racist policies in the south
Woodrowfan
And a loy@Eric U.: and many of the examples they use are false (IOW, they LIE). For example, you do not need a driver’s license to cash a check. I use the ATM at a 7/11 near me and I noticed that it also cashes checks. I’ve never tried it; I imagine the fees are a bitch, but clearly all you need is an ATM card.
Betty Cracker
So true it should be committed to needlepoint and applicable to so many controversial scenarios. Self-righteousness is a dangerous enemy.
@aimai: I read an interview with Justice Ginsburg recently where she referenced the orchestra auditions and pointed out that not only did the auditions have to take place behind a curtain, the musicians had to remove their shoes so the panel couldn’t hear heels clicking across the stage and assume a woman was auditioning!
Belafon
I work at a defense contractor, and one of the things that helps here is that we go through gender and race sensitivity training every year. It’s not going to fix those who don’t believe that they are being biased, but for those that care, it’s a good reminder of the consequences of discrimination.
Tenar Darell
More evidence. Thank you. You saw Posner’s recent dissent or BradBlog’s summary? I have this faint hope that there must be a way to help people listen to the studies, and stop.
Unfortunately, I’m feeling down about that possibility lately. I had a big argument within the past week and a half about the Voter ID topic. Evidence and proof doesn’t seem to change people’s minds; in fact, I had someone argue that they wanted ID just to make the GOP stop arguing for it, even though they were fully aware “Voter Fraud” was a non-existent problem.
Baud
I still see no difference between the two parties.
Belafon
@Tenar Darell: That wouldn’t stop Republicans. They would just require the next thing, like an ID generated by a central office that required you to wait a couple of days between submitting the paperwork and getting the actual license. You know, one that only people who can afford to take a couple of days off of work could acquire.
burnspbesq
The District Court in the Texas voter ID case made exhaustively detailed findings of fact on both discriminatory motive and discriminatory impact, and DOJ in its opposition to the state’s request for a stay pending appeal immediately reminded the Fifth Circuit that the standard of review in VRA Section 2 cases is that it can only reverse if those findings of fact were clearly erroneous.
We’ll see.
Tenar Darell
@Belafon: Yep. The lack of comprehension of what it might actually take to get to a DMV during business hours if you don’t have a car in a rural state, and you work retail or shift work! The assumption that everyone gets to 16 to 18 properly documented in the first place! I head-desk, a lot.
Tenar Darell
OT But can anyone confirm that the comment editor doesn’t work on iOS in Chrome or Safari?
tsquared2001
@Eric U.: I wouldn’t call my nephew a liberal by any stretch of the imagination but he did buy into whole “modern life requires an ID” ethos until I pointed out that Grandma stopped driving and had no ID so a member of the Greatest Generation (TM) would lose her vote.
His wife referenced the same for his Father-in-Law who was in the same situation.
It is unfortunate that one has to use anectdata to prove a point that real world data has made quite fucking clear – the GOP is playing CalvinBall.
Tim F.
@Tenar Darell: Checking.
Works for me.
Pen
Seeing as these voter ID issues are being used to influence who can, or can’t, vote for elected officials to federal positions I’m completely in favor of a free federally provided national ID. Of course the very proponents of voter ID requirements are likely to be the largest detractors of such a move, but given their obsession with proof of ID and voter fraud I really think they’ve boxed themselves into a corner on the issue.
Betty Cracker
@Eric U.: I’ve had some success countering that narrative by pointing out that politicians who push for voter ID laws are wasting time on a non-existent problem. It is hard for some folks to understand that it can be an insurmountable hassle to get a state ID card, but almost everyone understands demagoguery, and most people dislike being manipulated.
Tenar Darell
@Tim F.: Hmm… Can you edit a comment that’s already been published? (I jus t get sent back to the homepage lately).
Frankensteinbeck
The whole Republican asshole schtick all ties together. Racism, misogyny, chickenhawking, homophobia, putting partisanship so far before country that country doesn’t matter, Cleek’s Law, paranoia, fundamentalism – they’re just different expressions of lizard brain asshole ‘fuck you’ mentality. Some people have it worse than others, some are smarter, some have reasons to be good on some issues or let their assholism hang out on others. Racism proved to be a vastly bigger element than I ever dreamed. You still can’t cleanly tell them apart.
This surprises me, because it’s so hard to see our own prejudices. The reminder that if we work at it we can overcome them is welcome.
burnspbesq
My favorite part of the District Court opinion in the Texas case is where the judge signals that she plans to hold a hearing on whether Texas should be put back into pre-clearance.
Uncle Cosmo
In the opinion of this retired research statistician, the voter-ID study if anything underestimates the effect found. Because a “Jacob Smith” is as likely African-American as white.
Change “Smith” to a surname pretty unambiguously Caucasian, of an ethnicity that doesn’t lean drastically toward either party, & I’d bet you’d find the Thugs falling all over themselves to answer that e-mail. Something like “Wittelsbach” or “Wockenfuss” would do it.
Wonder why that never occurred to the study designers.
Karen in GA
@Betty Cracker:
But what do you do with people who think Fox News is telling the truth, and that by giving them facts you’re the one attempting to manipulate them?
wooflikeabear
I’ve worked in science while still in college and brown guys still get paid less than white guys. When I graduated I got more than double the money to work as a banyan engineer (based on part time work experience doing that in college and being the defacto computer guy in my lab) than in an actual science field despite my major having nothing to do with computers. I don’t doubt that I was still getting paid less than a white guy in the same job would but fuck that research assistant salary for paying off a college loan.
gene108
@Eric U.:
Checking out books is not a constitutionally protected right. There are 4 amendments to the constitution that specifically address people’s right to vote not be infringed upon.
Tells you something about American history and our attitudes towards universal suffrage that we have a need to have more amendments dedicated to voting rights than we do pretty much any other issue in our society.
Villago Delenda Est
To quote my main man Vizzini, “Inconceivable!’
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker:
Then again there are the natural serfs…the fundies, the teabaggers, the Faux News and Noismax target audiences….who are too fucking stupid to be aware that they’re being manipulated
Betty Cracker
@Karen in GA: Ask them to name a voting fraud incident that justifies the current spate of voter ID laws — and emphasize the time, money and opportunity cost associated with pursuing a solution to a non-existent problem when there are so damn many real problems to address. I’m not saying it’s a fool-proof approach. Some people can’t be reached. But I’ve seen this technique work in real life, at least to give people pause, if not to change their mind completely. I’ve never once seen a voter ID supporter change his/her mind when informed that voter ID laws are racist, even though that’s absolutely true.
Violet
@Karen in GA: I point out that cable news is not in the business of news–they are in the business of selling things. They sell the books, films and other products of their guests, hosts and pundits, they sell whatever is on the commercials and they want to do whatever it takes to keep you watching. If that means creating controversy, using flashy graphics and making people afraid so they’ll keep watching to find out what to do about their fear, then that is what cable news will do. Fear is profitable.
? Martin
@Uncle Cosmo:
The whole way its presented suggests they were aware that they would unearth a clear case for calling the GOP racist, which is why the Washington Post went to lengths to cover that up in how they presented the data. Even with hard data in hand, you can’t do that – it’s just too blunt to get through to the people that really need to understand the result.
tsquared2001
@Betty Cracker: Exactly. The US sees what – a 55% voter participation rate in even a Presidential year? Who exactly are these people who risk serious federale jail time for an illegal vote?
No one, that’s who. And even if there were hordes of illegal voters, even at there most hordeness, there are simply not enough to swing an election.
Seanly
NPR talked about this today. They kept chiming about how it was unconscious bias. I know that it’s because some of these Republicans are racists f**ks. To be fair to NPR, they did talk about the numbers as presented by the original author.
Unconscious bias – the poor Republican f**ktards writing these terrible laws have no idea they’re being terribly racist!
Villago Delenda Est
@tsquared2001: And yet in wingtard circles there are still wild tales of bus convoys of “illegals” being taken to the polls to insure that John McCain or Mitt Romney can’t win a Presidential election in this country.
It’s just not possible that the ni*CLANG* could have been voted into office legitimately.
The projection, it’s killing me!
Villago Delenda Est
@Seanly: NPR….more Villager scum who need to being given one way tumbrel rides.
tsquared2001
@Pen: I used to be in the camp that a federal ID was TYRANNY. That was until the “papers please” laws started getting passed all over country. Quit a shame how shitty laws can get you to change your mind over a least shitty law.
PurpleGirl
@Woodrowfan: I initially got my non-driver ID because I needed it to pay by check at certain stores. This was BEFORE there were ATM cards and money machines all over. I’ve kept updating the card because it is a good ID for times when I currently need one, such as visiting a friend at her office building and they ask for a picture ID.
Tommy
@tsquared2001:
Well I am a liberal and when this topic first started coming up, having a state issued ID, I have to admit I had to “check” myself and take a step back. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how you could live in 2014 and not have an ID.
Then I went and looked at the numbers and I was floored how many African Americans and Latinos don’t have them.
Clearly I knew these were laws with the goal of trying to lower the vote of minorities, but when I looked at the stats of those w/o IDs it became clear it was an even more evil and straight-up in your face attempt to do this them I had even realized.
Now with that said, my gosh I wish somebody smarter than myself could figure out a way for EVERY American to have a “official” ID. I have to think not having an ID for those that don’t, at times can be a scary thing. Maybe why so many lower income people use check cashing places (and get totally ripped off), because they can’t open a bank account. How to you get utilities set-up?
I am sure not having an ID there are many other stressful situations, but alas hard for me to list them, since I don’t know what it is like. But it seems to me we ought to be able to figure something out.
Howard Beale IV
@tsquared2001: That’s why I’d love to see an Australia-style requirement for 100% voter participation.
Eric U.
the whole thing with the villagers ignoring the fact that the republicans are batshit insane is wearing on my nerves
@Tommy: the fact that you live at a location carries a lot of weight with utility companies. I don’t recall needing ID for much. It’s funny when someone wants to see your id and then they realize it basically doesn’t tell you anything about you
rikyrah
OF COURSE these ID laws are racist…
that’s the entire phucking point.
SatanicPanic
Fuck it, let’s beat them at their own game. We take it a step farther and argue that everyone should be implanted with microchips at birth like dogs. Rural voting would virtually disappear.
Gex
It seems to me that all the Ds have to do to take all the fun out of their thinly veiled racism is to demand that these bills include sufficient funding to provide transportation, compensation, and assistance for those without IDs to get them,seeing as to how voting is a fundamental part of a democracy and is a citizen’s right.
They can either have their voter ID laws AND pay the costs associated, or they have to start complaining about the costs associated with their solution and then scrap it. Amend those bills, Dems, and put the GOP on the spot.
tsquared2001
@Villago Delenda Est: The killer for me was the Maine election where a guy who lost was blaming the loss on black people being shipped into Maine to vote illegally. Okay then, buddy.
Projection is so right – every time there is an illegal vote prosecution, it is a Republican voter.
If we had a better mental health program in this country, these poor, deluded, psychotic folks might get the help they need.
I won’t hold my breath.
Villago Delenda Est
@Gex:
Say what? Take into account the externalities? GOP don’t play that game!
Baud
@Tommy:
The thing is, it’s not just the requirement to have an ID to vote. It’s also the significant hurdles that these states impose on people who want to get an acceptable ID.
Belafon
@Tommy: The give away that the Texas law was about limiting voting was that they closed DMVs near the border with Mexico (strongly Latino there), making it harder to acquire an ID; making it so that your school ID could not be used as a valid id; but your Concealed Handgun License could be used as valid ID.
If this was truly about IDing the voter, they would make it easy to get an ID.
Frankensteinbeck
@Seanly:
‘Unconscious bias’ and ‘racist fucks’ is a huge overlap. Most racists don’t talk about white power. They just feel, and I mean ‘feel’, that Obama is weak and untrustworthy and must be acting against them.
Baud
@Gex:
If Dems were in a position to amend those bills, those bills wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Eric U.
@Gex: I know someone that tried to get their housekeeper set up to vote in Georgia. They drove her quite a few places and finally gave up. The Republicans knew what they were doing when they set this up, they knew what they were doing back in the day when they refused to recognize minority births the same way they do for white babies.
@Belafon: they have always made majority white precincts smaller so the lines are shorter. Never figured out how that is even legal. Pennsylvania closed DMV’s in Philly along with their voter id laws, they always have their reasons
tsquared2001
@Uncle Cosmo: In Minnesota, they would have used Jorgenson or Jorgensen or Olson or Olsen. The E or the O be letting you know – these are my peoples!
Violet
@Gex: Tax and spend Democrats want to spend your hard earned tax dollars on Those People who should be paying for their own IDs. You are a responsible hard-working Real American and you pay to get your own ID, as you should. Why do liberals keep wanting to spend tax money to help people that should be helping themselves?
I think that about covers the basic wingnut arguments against paying for the costs of helping people get their IDs. That’s why Democrats don’t do add stuff like that to the bills.
Tommy
@Belafon:
I knew about using your Concealed Handgun License as a “formal” ID, which is just fucked up on so many levels, but didn’t realize they had closed all or a lot of the DMV locations. WTF.
Kay
Judge Posner now recognizes he was fooled:
I do think we have to ask ourselves why so many judges and so many media people were so willing to believe that black people were violating the law with absolutely NO evidence that they were.
None. The voter fraud people never had any evidence. In fact, “voter impersonation fraud” doesn’t make any fucking sense, and anyone who has ever voted should know that. The claim is people who cannot vote for one reason or another are walking into polling places and impersonating other people. It’s an OUTLANDISH claim. It doesn’t even add a vote (net). It just replaces one vote with another.
Yet, judges went along and media went along when Indiana and Georgia started this and the US Supreme Court gave it their blessing.
What’s that about, I wonder? How did this happen? Wouldn’t you think one of these people would have asked to see something to back up the accusation of a felony? None of them did.
Roger Moore
@Gex:
Unfortunately, it won’t work. The Republicans will turn around and come up with some stupid justification for why they can’t do that and it should be up to the individual to get their own ID, and their water carriers in the media will eat it up. Just as ID requirements are all about voter suppression rather than fraud, their reply will be nonsense that’s just made to play well with typical Republican constituencies. It will be all about how people need to prove their commitment to voting by getting off their duffs and getting their own ID, or how the Democrats’ political operatives will take advantage to make fake IDs to facilitate voter fraud, or some such bullshit.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay:
There you go again, bringing facts, reason, and logic into an argument that is primarily about hatred, fear, and ignorance.
Tommy
@Baud: Yeah I hear that. I often note my state isn’t perfect, and neither is my county. But I live in a pretty rural area and I can think of 4 DMVs locations off-the-top-of-my-head. Two right off of our Metro Link system (the largest in the area across the street). It costs $10 for a State ID. A little more for a License. I don’t know the entire list of documents they will take, but it is pretty amazing list. A check. Military ID. ID from another state (I think). Utility bill. Employee check. The list goes on and on.
Sure there are still hurdles (like taking off work), but I think we’ve made it about as easy as possible. But then again, my state requires no ID to vote. Heck in November we have a non-binding resolution on the ballot that basically reinforces our right to vote WITHOUT an ID.
tsquared2001
@Tommy: I have been riding dirty for nearly ten years but have found that not having a picture ID doesn’t affect my life in the least.
When you kick around a small city or have established your identity previous to losing the proof, nobody cares. Well, except for voting but even that doesn’t count in Minnesota. The same nephew was living with me on election day once and I made him get up and vote. He was all “I don’t have ID”- no problem, son, I am a registered voter and I will vouch for you. Unfortunately, it was 2004 so that Kerry vote was wasted.
Kay
@Villago Delenda Est:
They were halfway to believing it at the outset, or they would have noticed the voter fraud people had nothing. No one even asked!
The fact that it got this far is their fault. It’s their bias. They failed. Unless they examine how that happened they will believe the next completely unsupported allegation, too.
Linnaeus
@Uncle Cosmo:
I was thinking that, too. Based on my own experience, for what it’s worth, if I were to see a name like “Jacob Smith” I’d be likely to think that that person could be black or white. Maybe even slightly more likely to be black.
I wonder if the study’s designers considered a surname whose origin was not from the British Isles, but were concerned that some kind of residual ethnic bias might confound the results. Just a thought.
tsquared2001
@Howard Beale IV: For real. Screw that health insurance mandate – let us fine somebody for not voting.
If the GOP put that plan in effect, they might win nationwide elections. The voter participation rate in their so-called strongholds is pathetic.
Belafon
@Uncle Cosmo:
@Linnaeus:
I don’t think it’s as big a concern as you think. “Jacob Smith” is not a black name to those who think blacks are buying t-bone steaks with food stamps. If they hear the name “Jacob Smith” they are going to assume the person is white, and then be surprised that he’s not.
Howard Beale IV
@Villago Delenda Est: When I moved to MN they had same day voting registration as long as you had proof of residency (utility bill, drivers license)-I got stopped by some poll watcher (in retrospect obvoiulsy some GOP stooge) and I was told I couldn’t vote-turned out it was the Obama campaign who stepped in and made it possible for me to vote in 2008.
Tommy
@tsquared2001: Well I think what you said works for a “small” town. After I wrote what I first wrote, I thought for a bit. Now I no longer live in DC (where I used my ID all the time BTW) and now have lived almost 8 years in this small town, as you said I have established myself nobody at the bank asks for one. They know me by name. Same if I want to write a check. At first they asked, but now they know me.
Not so sure that works in a larger metro area.
BTW: Now I think about it more, I think the only time I needed an ID in the last year was to get on a plane.
Violet
@Linnaeus: The “Jacob” part is a consideration as well. That name probably indicates the person is under 40, given when it started to become popular again. If they’d gone with “Bob Smith” there would be a higher likelihood the person is older. And probably more likely to be white. Older, white male? Definitely a Republican.
tsquared2001
@Baud: An excellent point. Rig the franchise with the added bonus of hoops to jump through.
Belafon
@Tommy:
Which might be pretty easy for people like you and me, but not for the poor. It really shouldn’t cost anything for something you are required to have to participate in government. There’s a reason we have a constitutional amendment against poll taxes.
tsquared2001
@Kay: A day late and a dollar short for Judge Posner. Fuck that guy.
Uncle Cosmo
@tsquared2001: Bjorn the Swede & Ole the Norwegian were neighbors with homes on the waterfront of a small lake in northern MN.
One afternoon Ole was out on his pier when he saw Bjorn in his fishing boat puttputting back to his. He called out, Hey Bjorn, how many fish you catch today?
Bjorn replied, Well, I tell ya Ole, if you can guess how many I caught you can have them both.
Ole said, Why that’s very generous, Bjorn! I guess 5.
(Rumor hath it that the author of this drollery was Danish…:D)
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@PurpleGirl:
Same here. And since Tennessee at the time did not put photos on their drivers licenses and IDs, I still couldn’t use it to cash a check in Hawai’i while on a school band trip.
Howard Beale IV
@tsquared2001: Still better late than never.
Tommy
It is at this point I note something I often say here. I can vote almost as fast as I can order a Big Mac. On election day when I see the lines in Ohio or Flordia that go out the door tears come to my eyes. I wish those people could come vote with me. I know many in those states want and/or are working for changes, but I am still sure if they could see how easy we have made it they would break down and cry (and we still use paper for everything BTW).
My mom, not a liberal I might add, runs elections in her district across the state from me. That it is easy to vote isn’t something that just happened. In fact, I think today she and a rep from the State are doing training. We work at it and it pains her more than myself (and that means a lot) more people don’t vote (and she could care less who you vote for).
Now I realize I live in a rural area. Not nearly as many people, so not as many vote. I vote in the gym of my town’s primary school. We are set-up to handle maybe 20, 30 times the number that vote. The voting stands are there. The poll workers are there. Normally one or two people walk in and are voting at the same time. More than a 100 could, even more and we could handle it in about the same timely fashion.
I wish all my fellow Americans had the same thing!!!!!!!
Hungry Joe
If you think for about one minute — a large hurdle for some, obviously — in-person voter fraud makes no sense. Just run a thought experiment: I want to commit voter fraud so that my (evil Democratic) candidate will win. I have to walk into the polls in a precinct not my own and declare that I’m So-and-So, who does live in that precinct. I have to hope that 1) he/she hasn’t voted yet — they keep track — and 2) none of the poll watchers knows the person I’m impersonating. If I get away with it, I’ve voted instead of him/her … though that person might have voted for my candidate anyway, so there’s only about a 50/50 chance that I’ve made any difference. Now I have to trundle over to another precinct and try it again, with another name, and again, not get caught. For this I risk a felony?
pseudonymous in nc
@Kay:
While voter suppression has a massive multiplier effect, prosecutions are rare, and punishments are relatively slight.
Why were judges and media people hoodwinked? Because they vote absentee in a nice (white) precinct, or they show up on Election Day in a nice (white) precinct. Voting is easy for them. They have no reason to believe from their own experience that voting is made hard in other places.
As I’ve said here repeatedly, there are large parts of the US with a deeply-embedded cultural opposition to free and fair elections.
Seanly
@Tommy:
There’s so many problems with almost every aspect of these voter ID restrictions:
Let’s just look at going to DMV to get even a free ID card. Many states have significantly cut back on hours & days of operation of the DMV. Many people will have trouble arranging to get the time off work or being able to call and get records from another state agency. Then the list of what constitutes proof of identity can be heavily biased in favor of the ‘correct’ voters. In addition, many elderly and people in the lower socio-economic rungs of society don’t have even the most rudimentary proof. Another item is that while many of these barriers aren’t completely onerous, taken as a whole they make the entire process burdensome precisely to keep some people from voting.
EDIT: RE: lines to vote. This is also by design. Make the voting process too lengthy & people will forgo voting. There are people who don’t want the public to vote. They are liars & hate democracy. They put up road blocks to register to vote, they put up road blocks to allowing the votes to occur and they put up road blocks to counting the votes.
Tommy
@Hungry Joe: Agreed. I am not an election law expert, but although my state doesn’t require any ID, they do in fact kind of verify I am who I say I am. When I vote I am asked for my name. They have these flip books with my voter ID card and my signature. Carbon copies. I am asked to sign my name.
Never really thought about it until this second, but isn’t that a good way to verify I am who I say I am? I take a step to the right, handed a ballot by a person that initials the top right. Off to the voting booth.
I complete the ballot, into an optical scanner it goes, which I do myself of course.
Done.
tsquared2001
@Tommy: I live in Minneapolis (Motto: We Ain’t Huge But We Ain’t No Omaha) and finally had to get an ID in order to fly to Vegas. Used my expired and the yellow piece of paper.
An interesting survey would be to ask how often do these election officials pushing voter ID actually used their own ID for any interaction. I am gonna take the under.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
Oh, I think we all know why. But you’ll never be able to convince people who aren’t consciously racist that they were acting on racist assumptions.
skerry
@Tommy: My parents live in Indiana. Have since 1965. Both have always had a valid Indiana driver’s license. But they had the old licenses – not the new SecureID licenses. When they moved (1000 yards down the road from a house they had lived in since 1973), they went to get ID with current address on it. My dad – no problem. He had his current driver’s license, utility bills, social security card and birth certificate. My mom – well, the name on her birth certificate didn’t match the name on her license. The utility bills weren’t in her name. So she had to make an additional trip after she obtained a new copy of her marriage certificate (had to wait to get it from Nebraska and pay for it) and bring a bank statement that had her name on it. All of this while she had a valid driver’s license.
I’ve told my girls not to change their names when they marry.
tsquared2001
@Uncle Cosmo: Thought I had heard every Norskie/Swede joke ever but that was a new one and hella funny.
And of course it was a Dane – tricky sonsabitches.
lol
@Eric U.:
The other problem is that the list of IDs that will help you get through “modern life” is much much larger than the list of IDs that will allow you to vote. Checking cashing? Just need a photo id. Could be a school id, a work id, whatever. Don’t need to show ID if the bartender/shopkeeper personally knows you’re over 21 as well.
And then, even if you have a driver’s license, it won’t be sufficient to vote if the address printed on the card isn’t also up to date.
Tommy
@tsquared2001: When I moved to DC, I kid you not, it took me two full days to get a License, and I was waiting in line before the place open each day. The DMV in DC is such you have to go to this window, then this window, then another, and another. Often I was told I had to go back to the previous window. So complex they have a “help desk” which I had to use.
English is my first language and I am upper middle class with all the documentation needed. I saw lower income people. Others where English was not their first language that might still be there trying to get a license.
When I went to get a License here in Illinois I had like 5-7 different forms of ID (cause of my DC experience). I start to lay them out asking what they needed and if it was enough and the lady looked at me like I had a third hand growing out of my forehead.
She was like these two will be fine. I was in and out of the place, and it was packed, in under an hour.
pseudonymous in nc
@Tommy:
It’s worth looking into how ID started. It was as letters of introduction, saying “I vouch for this person”. As time went on, this became formalized. What ID does is replace personal trust, then willingness to vouch for people, with tokens from an institution.
America, being a big sparsely-populated country, made it very easy for people to move to another state and create a whole new identity for themselves. In many cases, that was a good thing, because it meant they could have a new start away from a troubled past. In other cases, it allowed people to flee their criminal pasts.
There are lots of parts of America where people were born and have lived in the same county their entire lives. There are still lots of people in America who never got birth certificates. There are lots of people in America who don’t have a canonical birth record on file because it was stored at a county courthouse that burnt down in 1950-something before states began to consolidate vital records.
(The argument about the validity of a concealed weapon permit actually makes sense from a strictly technical standpoint where there’s a legal requirement to produce “higher-value” ID in order to get it. However, the optics and underlying intentions are more than shitty.)
Hungry Joe
@Tommy: I usually vote by mail, but when I don’t I walk into the polls in my mostly white, upper-middle-class San Diego neighborhood, wait in line anywhere from not-at-all to two minutes, and vote. When I see those long lines in the inner cities, my mind, it is boggled. Those lines are intentional, they’re anti-democratic, they’re racist, and they’re an outrage. The Feds should have put a stop to it four decades before yesterday.
burnspbesq
@Kay:
Cmon. You know the answer. That’s inherent in facial, pre-enforcement challenges to newly enacted statutes. There are no data. Each side makes up a bunch of shit about what’s going to happen if the statute is allowed to go into effect, and the court chooses between plaintiff’s dystopian fantasy and defendant’s utopian fantasy.
Now that there is eight years of actual data about disparate impact, DOJ and the NAACP should file a new action under Section 2. Res judicata won’t apply because Crawford was strictly a 14th Amendment case.
aimai
Maybe someone has said this upthread but the Republican goals of limiting the franchise is materially helped by the fact that voter ID and voting itself is expensive–in terms of time, money, lost work hours. Every voter ID law is only racist because ID itself (and the country as a whole) is classist. Everything that is easy, or unnoticed, for middle class people (birth certificates, passports, driver’s lisences, proof of residence, stamps, cars, transit, computer connections) is expensive for problematic for people who are working class, laborers, poor, and/or transient in terms of living arrangements. For example a person who is poor and who moves frequently is at high risk for losing important documents, and the system makes them re-register every time they move anyway.
Having a birth certificate in the first place doesn’t make that document acceptable in a new state, anyway. We went through a very costly process of getting a new birth certficate for our daughter when we got her her first passport. We had legal copies, straight from her birth city, but these were no longer acceptable to the passport agency. We needed to get an entirely new one issued from the State Level.
This is all a long winded way of saying that I think the next round of voter legislation should focus on punishing counties and states that have high numbers of unregistered or non voting citizens. If you aren’t registering people to vote and they aren’t going to the polls that should be proof positive that you, as a state, are hindering the voters. A quick survey of voting practices every four years should be the test: non voting citizens should be counted against the State or County (whichever we feel is at fault) in some way that costs money.
Tommy
@Tommy: Oh I should note if you have to wait in line at a help desk when you walk into a DMV to figure out where to actually start the process, your process is FUBAR at levels I can’t put to words! This was 1995 in NE DC. I hope it has gotten better, but I bet it hasn’t.
Hungry Joe
@Tommy: The “DMV sucks” meme is, I believe, out of date in a lot of cases; it’s become kind of an urban legend. The last three times I’ve been in there (in California) the process has been a little slow, sure, but also easy, smooth, and non-brutalizing. Clerks were friendly, too.
boatboy_srq
@tsquared2001: Mum had the same problem in a different area: non-renewable DL meant state ID card, which (together with replacement birth certificate – courthouse burned when she was little and all originals were lost) meant that instead of the standard 10-year passport she could only get a 1-year “provisional” document. The additional steps State Dept required her to take (an affidavit from an older relative confirming the accuracy of her birth certificate and avowing her citizenship? when she’s 80-something and has outlived nearly all her high school classmates, her husband, her in-laws and most of her cousins? Really?) were gobsmacking. There are hurdles for each and every type of ID, and it’s amazing who can get snagged in the process.
blueskies
@Tommy: Oh, it’s much more insidious than rural vs urban. In my very liberal and urban county in a very red state, my polling place in my white, semi-affluent neighborhood is as you describe – 100s could vote without a line ever being longer than a dozen.
When I drive older folks from the retirement homes and the projects to THEIR polling places, in neighborhoods where people have darker skin and fewer dollars, it might take a couple of hours to help ONE of them sit/stand through the lines.
Tell me there isn’t a plan there.
Tommy
@Hungry Joe: I have to check myself and think because I live in a middle class (or upper middle class) mostly white town. 97.8% white (2010 Census), so I guess more than “mostly.” Is it so easy for me to vote because of this? People here mention this to me all the time when I talk about this topic or others race related (and they have a point of course).
But East St. Louis is only about 20 miles from me. Not a “white” nor “middle class” community (part of my district I might add). No lines there either.
I could be wrong and a more informed person will soon educate me, but I like to think in IL we have made it easy to vote for everybody. Not just somebody like me.
tsquared2001
@skerry: Geez Louise that is a lot to go through. Mostly, I have been perturbed by these idiotic voter ID laws in light of youngsters and POC but I hadn’t thought much of the impact upon women re voting rights.
Although, I should have.
After the, divorce, Mom had to establish a new credit history, change her car into her name, etc but the ability to vote was never in jeopardy.
tsquared2001
@Tommy: Good Lord. I couldn’t even imagine that nonsense.
Good government – how the fuck does it work?
skerry
@tsquared2001: Yeah, it pushed me to obtain a copy of my marriage certificate from PA. I had shredded the original following the divorce.
Point is, the cost of the ID is just the beginning. Getting all the supporting documents has a cost both in time and money.
tsquared2001
@pseudonymous in nc:
It’s worth looking into how ID started. It was as letters of introduction, saying “I vouch for this person”. As time went on, this became formalized. What ID does is replace personal trust, then willingness to vouch for people, with tokens from an institution.
I liked this point very much.
bemused
@Eric U.:
My circle of Republican relatives, friends and neighbors, quite sensible and decent people in general, ignoring the fact the GOP and the people they keep voting for are batshit insane is definitely wearing on my nerves and seriously eroding my level of respect for them.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, about the whinging from the Reichwing about “national ID cards” not so very long ago. IIRC the Godwin-triggering blowhards were painting any attempt at this as The Coming of the Great Satan™ and the End of the World™ and insisting that they’d be Raptured™ before they would evah consent to carrying such an evil document. The interesting corollary here is that they never seemed to have a problem with passports (even the DL-sized card ones for Canada) – just with the identification card type of document. At the time I remember the noise being associated with what was perceived as the less-racist parts of “federalism” and “states’ rights”; now I wonder whether it was all part of the whole toxic package of Othering in the guise of local(ish) accountability.
boatboy_srq
@tsquared2001: Move to any REAL ID state, or to any state not REAL ID compliant while carrying a REAL ID, and you’ll hit the same barriers. Moving from FL (REAL ID) to VA (not REAL ID) meant having to jump through all the hoops Tommy describes – twice in four years. For me it took birth certificate, passport, Social Security card, current property records, current utility bills (plural), bank statements, and auto insurance documents – both times. I have to wonder what the point of REAL ID was if half the country doesn’t recognize it.
Tommy
@tsquared2001: I kept my IL license as long as I could. As you might guess, many in DC have licenses (and plates) from other states. I could wait no longer.
I vividly recall, and they had benches you could sit on in the darn place, next to a lady from Brazil asking me WTF was going on. I told her I didn’t know. I was just trying to get out of the place. She laughed and she was as well.
Welcome to America.
skerry
@tsquared2001: Re: the story about my mother’s problem with getting new ID. She knew most of the people working in the license branch. She is friends with the branch manager. She had worked in the high school and is quite active in the town. This fact meant nothing since her birth certificate didn’t match her current name, and had not since 1958.
gvg
I don’t mean to change the subject but how do you get an ATM card without a picture ID? How do you establish a bank account? Obviously if you live in a small enough town, you may be known by sight and that is more reliable than an ID anyway but I’ve never lived anyplace that was true. I do have to use ID on a regular basis. Everytime I go to the bank to deal with the latest data breech time to change my ATM or credit card. Transfer money. Get a Florida resident Disney ticket price (this weekend). Clerks that read the instructions on taking a credit card ask for ID (intermittant and unpredictable).
This isn’t to say the poor and minorities should therefore get ID’s. I am not inclined to give in to the bullies on that. It’s that I have read about the problems and monetary costs that not having ID’s and banking accounts put on those groups and think that that is also a problem that needs a solution. Very often the minorities and sometimes even the poor whites were put in a situation where they didn’t have standard birth certificates from the begining. They were pushed into a shadow economy. Do you realize this may mean their earnings and withholdings from wages going towards SS may not be credited to them? That they have to pay every paycheck to get their wages for years adding up to lots of lost income? Their are apparently a lot of little nickle and dime ways that not being ID’ed makes their pay stretch less far, not to mention good money management not turning into good credit ratings.
Its not just a matter of we need to pay to get them ID (not for voting, for making it cheaper for them to live) apparently the actual source documents birth certificates are the problem and we can’t go back in time and make them have been issued and recorded. How do we fix that? Hopefully not with impossible hoops, but really there needs to be some method. Winesses? School records? Multiple methods because the circumstances vary.
Also is the modern process actually fixed so their aren’t more being born right now that are going to be the same kind of problem in the future?
I hate to bring it up because I know the GOP tribe will want to misuse any mention of it but from what I understand its like a tax on poor people. Also homeless people have these problems. Maybe its better stratagy to wait till more sane Democrats hold state offices but every year it’s unfixed costs people a lot of money.
Trollhattan
Maybe scientists are too men-ish but that’s still not good enough for Darrell Issa. Shut up, Darrell.
What a waste of human flesh.
Punchy
Can we get an open thread up in this mothra fugger?
tsquared2001
@aimai:
voting itself is expensive
And there lies the problem. In this modern age, when I can have a face to face phone conversation with Vegas nephew, get my paycheck deposited without going to the bank, pay the huge cable bill without getting my fat ass off the couch there is NO excuse for making voting expensive or harder.
Swear to Dog, we should have dumped those Tories when we had the chance.
Mike J
Why do Republicans want to force the number of the beast on all Americans?
boatboy_srq
@gvg: Bank accounts, and the related documents including ATM and debit cards, can be obtained in a branch where the customer is “known” to the bank officer opening the account or requesting the additional items. Consumer banking is still a fairly informal business if you have the time and resources to visit a bank branch. For most of the rest, proof of residency can be a utility bill (cellphone bill is enough), rental or lease agreement, or other ppwk where one’s address is preprinted. Credit cards in particular are tricky: cards are supposed to be verified against ID at the point of purchase by the business (this is a creditor requirement, intended to reduce fraud, not a legal requirement to accept the purchase), but nearly no place seems to go to that length. You’re absolutely right, though, that the process is skewed in favor of the unimpoverished and permanently domiciled, and that doing without photo ID blocks all manner of means of doing business.
Mike in NC
Clearly not a Real American name, so why is he trying to vote?
Roger Moore
@tsquared2001:
Considering that there are still court cases on this- his turn around comes in a new ruling- it’s not too late for him to do some good by changing his mind.
ahabig
I just ask the ID supporters if they would accept military ID cards as proof for voting – then point out that many members of our forces are _not_ US citizens. I seems to short circuit the brains of the Tea Party types. In fact many places do accept military ID for voting. Proof that it’s not about fraud, it’s about discouraging the ‘wrong type’ of people from voting.
tsquared2001
@boatboy_srq: That makes no sense. There would be no way I could pass that test. My license is expired, along with my passport and I lost my original social security card a long time ago. I only have my baptismal certificate and the priest spelled my name incorrectly. Plus, all the bills are in my Mom’s name.
Is REAL ID (forgive me) a real thing? I have never heard of that classification.
raven
@tsquared2001:
wiki
tsquared2001
@Mike J: LMAO. I remember the whole 666 imbroglio about a national ID standard.
Roger Moore
@Hungry Joe:
This. The long lines at inner city voting places have been specifically engineered to make voting as onerous as possible in the hopes that people there will give up and go home. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were Republican operatives around at the scheduled closing time to lie to the voters by telling them that the polls are now closed and they can’t vote.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai:
I really like this idea. Libertarians and survivalists won’t, but, you know, fuck ’em.
StringOnAStick
This will be the first election in CO where all the ballots are mail-in; my husband and I have voted absentee for years due to the low hassle factor, plus there were no onerous qualifications and once you signed up for it, you always get a mail-in ballot for every subsequent election. How we managed to pass an all mail-in ballot rule has everything to do with Democrats being in charge in the state house, senate (barely) and governorship.
I am wondering too just how this new system will affect the outcome of the election, and if it is impacting the reliability of local polling data, since obviously the model(s) of prior voting behavior will be affected by this new expansion of voting ease. I’m also expecting a big turn-out here in Jefferson County (most populous county in the state) because of the crazystorm created by the 3 wingers on the school board deciding to go after AP high school history classes for being insufficiently “patriotic” (read: winger revisionist unfriendly w/o enough flag waving). No one on the school board is up for election, but people around here are pissed off and very, very motivated. It may be the margin that re-elects Senator Udall, because his opponent is a supporter of the 3 school board wingers.
Roger Moore
@Tommy:
That’s the benefit of putting Democrats in charge. If you were in a Red state, or a purple one where the Republicans were currently in charge of running elections, you might find things very different.
IMO, this whole thread is an example of why a much more comprehensive VRA should be near the top of the Democrats’ to-do list if/when they get control of Congress again. Real protection of voting rights is good for democracy, and real democracy is good for the Democratic party.
boatboy_srq
@tsquared2001: It’s real. Mind you, only about half the states have signed on, and the ones that haven’t don’t buy into the idea that the ones that have are doing all the legwork already.
tsquared2001
@raven: Went to Wiki after your link and couldn’t help but notice the huge population swaths of non compliance with that act.
No Cali? No Texas? No Illinois and it that rectangle thing Pennsylvania?
A fad like the hula hoop. And TV. Plus, get off my yard.
Kay
@burnspbesq:
Yeah, and look which one they chose. Politically and as public policy it’s always been extraordinary to me, and I think it has to do with race and also class. Think how odd it is for politicians to go after voters. It’s political leaders pointing at voters and saying “I think many of you are committing felonies every election”. They don’t even do that with union members. They say “union bosses”.
We went from voting being like going to the public library, wholesome, encouraged, a presumptively Good Thing, to this weird paranoid mass hysteria about voter fraud. I expect judges to resist that, not fall for it. I don’t think it would have happened without race and class being underneath it.
Ruckus
@Tommy:
When I moved back to CA I registered to vote. I’m white, was born here, had photo ID for over 40 yrs, first registered to vote in CA in 1971. But I lived at my work, a non residence area, and they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t want to register me. I had to insist, and got to the point that I asked them what a homeless person does, they have the right to vote but no address. Because I live in a reasonable state they have vote by mail and were able to register me that way. But notice I was the one to have to make it work, I never did get an answer to my homeless person question. It isn’t always easy, sometimes the answer is not the regular one. And it shouldn’t be hard, it’s not a privilege to vote it’s a right. You been breathing long enough, you get to vote. Same for Pen who said we should just have a national ID. Once again why should we have to go through all the extra steps and bullshit just to do what we have a right to do, as adults? Remember I don’t have the right to drive, to cash checks, etc. But I do have that right to vote. And so does everyone else. I think some of the apathy comes from making this harder. Making it harder does disenfranchise people, there is no other reason for doing so.
rikyrah
@Tommy:
And IL voting has expanded.
Grace Period voting up to and including Election Day.
Grace Period is when you can register to vote and vote at the same time. You do need two pieces of ID, but only one has to be a picture, and it doesn’t have to have your current address on it.
boatboy_srq
@tsquared2001: Yep. One of Shrub’s great boondoggles. Funny how a Teahadist could get away with that particular piece of legislation. Interesting too the states that refused to sign on.
Violet
Here’s an outside the box way to encourage people to vote–maybe some rich person or SuperPAC could set up a contest. The precinct that increases voting by the biggest percentage gets X amount of money donated to a local school in that precinct. It’s not on total voters, it’s on voting increase.
People like contests, it’s novel and would get publicity. People like money for their schools.
tsquared2001
I have Columbus day off and normally I just lurk on these threads as a time suck at work, but damn, if this hasn’t been an eye opener. The picayune bullshit you commentators deal with on the regular just gives me a massive sad.
Tommy
@Violet: Yeah I get where you are coming from. People have told me here how hard or the restrictions on getting ID. I don’t disagree. I’ve said how easy it is to vote in my state. Others have said yes, but.
We have to figure out how to make it easier to vote. Register.
Just as an aside, I was registered to vote in TWO states for almost two decades. I only voted in one state, it was something I learned only later, DC and Illinois, but that is something we ought to get onto.
tsquared2001
@Ruckus:
“And it shouldn’t be hard, it’s not a privilege to vote it’s a right. You been breathing long enough, you get to vote.”
The lack of a penis, or the hue of your skin or lack of your property should mean fuck all when it comes to voting. I feel ya, bro
Botsplainer
@Kay:
Posner would make a damn fine SCOTUS pick for Obama. He knows he was suckered, is pissed off and clearly delivering payback.
tsquared2001
@Kay:
We went from voting being like going to the public library, wholesome, encouraged, a presumptively Good Thing
First, they came for the librarians, and I said nothing.
Then they went for the public schools, and I said nothing.
You all know how the rest of it goes.
Gravenstone
@Kay: As I recall, when Indiana was setting up their voter ID laws, the courts asked them point blank for evidence of voter impersonation fraud. And they were conspicuously unable to provide any. Didn’t stop the courts from letting the process move forward, unfortunately.
Kay
@burnspbesq:
And it isn’t just me, burns:
Hey, good question! I wonder why it took ten years for one of them to ask it? They just had a full-blown trial in Texas. Is there some reason we have to pretend this is about something other than suppression?
Kay
@gvg:
You could put in a national ID but conservatives would yell louder than anyone if you did.
Mexico revamped their whole election process. They spent a ton of money, got everyone an official ID, have a system like our jury duty for pollworkers, and the moment the votes were counted in the last election there were accusations of voter fraud.
burnspbesq
@Trollhattan:
Oddly enough, Issa doesn’t seem to have any problem when those most directly affected by the agency’s regulatory agenda cozy up to the SEC, the FDA, the shriveled husk that is all that remains of the IRS, or any other agency.
Thoughtcrime
How did this Republic ever survive before Louis Daguerre?
And do the mouthbreathers know that their precious voter ID relies upon the invention of a cheese-eating surrender monkey?
vheidi
@PurpleGirl: Hah, long time nyc resident here. Got so annoyed with this silly security theatre I now give my food co-op id, doesn’t even have my legal name.
Nitwits.
Roger Moore
@gvg:
You did it a long time ago and haven’t closed your accounts. Maybe you had ID back then but don’t today, or maybe you didn’t need an ID back then. Maybe your parents opened an account for you while you were a minor and you’re still using the same accounts as an adult. The bank doesn’t care about picture ID once you have an account; they care about whether you know your account or card number. If they need to establish that you are who you claim, they do it by asking questions about your banking history that are harder for a fraudster to know about than your birth date and SSN.
For example, I had a problem with identity theft about a year ago. When I discovered that somebody had taken over my on-line account- I got a series of emails telling me that my account name and password had been changed- I called the bank and they established my identity over the phone. They asked a series of questions about what bank held my mortgage, what the principal was, where I had lived two residences ago, and the like. When I needed to go in and do some stuff in person, they asked me for the security word I had set up. They never felt the need for a picture ID to establish my identity.
This is because they are willing to make some mistakes in the name of efficiency and convenience. If they let a fraudster get access to my account, they can theoretically make me whole by refunding anything that was stolen. Any time they decide about adding a new service (like ATMs) or a new security measure (like requiring picture ID) they can do a cost/benefit analysis and make a decision based purely on monetary considerations.
Ruckus
@tsquared2001:
It pisses me off from so many directions. The constitutional one probably gets me the most. It’s wrong on so many levels but damn it, lots of people worked hard and many died to protect those rights, many of them the very people who are being denied. I enlisted in the military, and I’m not going to lie about it, mostly to avoid the draft during Vietnam. But enlisting wasn’t the only option. I also did it because I thought that I was helping to protect the constitution and our freedom. Looking where we are now, the trip we’ve taken to get here, I’m pretty sure that idealism is/was wildly mistaken. Each of us voting and demanding to vote and be heard is the only thing that protects us.
Kay
@Botsplainer:
It’s a horrible legacy for him, so he better fix it. In 2004, I was going from polling place to polling place in this county and I knew Bush was turning out his voters and we were going to lose. My response to that wasn’t “we have to find a way to stop these women in the minivans with the Christian radio station sticker on the back window from voting!” It would never occur to me. It’s not within the realm of my possible reactions. It isn’t behavior that should be acceptable, to anyone.
burnspbesq
@Kay:
Which of the facts that the Texas court found were in the record in the Indiana case eight years ago? I believe the answer is “none.”
What you’re arguing for without doing it explicitly is pre-clearance everywhere. If any state or municipality wants to make any material changes in voting rules, make them put together a case (somehow, with some combination of data from other states and expert testimony) to show the absence of discriminatory impact. I’m fine with that–if you can get the necessary amendment to the Voting Rights Act through Congress.
burnspbesq
@Botsplainer:
I am a huge Posner fanboi, but his age would be an issue. He’s 75.
Joel
Not surprising, but a little depressing.
Also depressing that the democrats were nonresponsive to 50% of constituents regardless of race. One way to make up the difference would be a work a little harder on that front, non?
Woodrowfan
why don’t we just do the “purple finger” thing. You vote, you dip your finger in purple ink that can’t easily be washed off until the election is over.
burnspbesq
@Woodrowfan:
The purple finger thing was designed to keep eligible voters whose identity couldn’t be verified (because you couldn’t ask them to un-veil) from voting twice. The Republicans want to keep eligible voters from voting once.
Kay
@Woodrowfan:
We could have had a rational discussion about voter ID where a whole range of ID’s could be acceptable (like in Ohio right now) but Republicans tighten the requirements every year because they hope to suppress voting so now that discussion is impossible.
No one mentions that part. They went from “voter ID” to photo ID. The laws are worse than the first round, ten years ago.
Nothing happened to justify the first round, let alone the second round of more restrictive laws. They slid that right by the media. When this started it wasn’t even photo ID. It was just ID.
Villago Delenda Est
@Trollhattan: More projection.
It’s what these foul creatures do.
Xenos
@Hungry Joe: not just a felony, but for a green-card holder an offense that will categorically block them from citizenship and can make them subject to deportation. Must be very tempting.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay:
No, but the vermin of the Village will insist that we must pretend, because reasons, or civility, or some other pathetic hand wave that would cause Qui-Gon Jinn to blush.
Mnemosyne
@Thoughtcrime:
They just didn’t let the blahs vote at all. Problem solved!
pseudonymous in nc
@burnspbesq:
C’mon, burnsy, you know that elections are a lot like abortion cases with regard to facial vs as-applied challenges. The clock’s ticking. What’s done can’t be easily undone.
Illegally-cast votes can be removed from the total after the election. Suppressed votes won’t be added. That’s what makes voter suppression especially insidious: there’s no record of votes that were never cast due to obstacles deliberately placed in the way of voters, whether physical, human, institutional or legal.
boatboy_srq
@Kay:
That’s what makes us different from them: to us there are no different, more-equal-than-others types of
humancitizen.rikyrah
when people talk about getting picture ID, I have to come back and remind people of scores of elderly Black people, born at home, in the rural South because they simply were NOT ALLOWED IN WHITE HOSPITALS. Born to a midwife, and they were poor, and good luck with finding the original birth certificate. It’s but another way where my elders are being punished for Jim Crow TO THIS VERY DAY IN 2014.
rikyrah
It is not just a matter of picture ID. or even state-issued ID. The problem is that for a lot of these states, the Photo Issues State ID must match their current address. Our poor are very transient…they move often. Do you know how much the state ID’s would cost, not only in terms of money and time?
Woodrowfan
@rikyrah: both good points.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah:
As you know, this is a feature, not a bug.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I think a big reason that people are willing to buy the idea of voter ID is because people forget that the really stringent checking of voters is supposed to happen when they register. Registration takes place well before voting, so it gives officials a chance to stringently check to make sure that people who are registered really have the right to vote, they aren’t registered in multiple locations, etc. It makes some sense to follow that up with a check at the poll to make sure that the person voting matches the person on the rolls. But that check can be pretty perfunctory because it’s only checking that the person is who they claim to be; the hard work of confirming their voting eligibility has already been done.
What the Republicans are doing is deliberately conflating the two issues. Rather than having a strict registration and a relatively lax voting ID requirement, they’re trying to change the rules to require ID at the time of voting that would be good enough to establish eligibility to vote. They won’t say so directly, but the big reason they’re doing so is to impose stricter real voting requirements than they’re allowed to have for registration under Motor Voter.
burnspbesq
@pseudonymous in nc:
Well, there’s your irreparable harm, and balance of hardship, for purposes of getting your TRO and preliminary injunction. Still gotta come up with something that looks like probable success on the merits. Outside North Carolna where there is a string of smoking-gun emails, and Texas where there was a shit-ton of data showing discriminatory impact under the prior, less restrictive statute, it’s not easy. The state of the law sucks. That’s why I’m an easy sell on pre-clearance for all.
JR in WV
Here in rural West Virginia we have voted in the same school house since 4 or 6 years after we moved here. The first election or two we voted in a closed school still being used.
The only requirement usually is to tell the poll workers your name and address, they look you up in a big book (more recently there was also a laptop in play, otherwise same process) and then you sign twice on paper/digital pad like at the store. The only time they asked for my voter’s registration card was in one recent election when they had readjusted precincts to equalize voter populations.
In the last election, for the first time that I recall, we had to wait, maybe the better part of an hour. There was a bottom seat of the bleachers in the gym where the voting was going on. New voters sat down on the near end of the bench, and voters at the head of the line got up from the far end of the bench, and everyone slid to their left a place or two.
So everyone was indoors, dry, seated, and could see the “line” progressing pretty well. Not like urban voting, is it? Wondering is any voting is still going on late in the evening…
This year, for the first time, I plan to vote a straight Demo ticket. This means you vote one time – Democratic, and all of the races go to the Demo candidate… Quicker, harder to Futx with my vote. In the primaries this won’t work, and they also throw the non-… what’s the word? non-partisan Board of Ed type votes at voters in the primary.
There are some third-party candidates, the green Mountain Party, some libertarians, but I’m just not going there. Dems will get my votes, all of them.
I agree that any voting region that requires any sort of ID needs to be required to make the required IDs free to get, and to only require one visit to a state office, with other requirements dealt with by mail or online.
The Democratic party needs to do grass-roots work to provide assistance to anyone qualified to be a voter, all citizens not disqualified by serious felony, which list of violations needs to be identical across all states, territories, and tie District of Columbia. By this, I mean counseling, travel to the appropriate state offices, help with making sure that people have all the required BS to get an ID that satisfies the state requirements.
And States who change their ID requirements should be required by the judiciary to provide new required ID[2] to everyone who has ever had old ID[1] ever, in the past, regardless of address changes and sh1t like that.
Tommy, when you were voting in DC, you weren’t voting in a state, and your votes were significantly less important the votes in any state. That may be because the Constitution requires different status for the District where the Federal government operates, or it may be because voters in DC are mostly not white-bread guys like you and me.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I don’t really understand “forgetting” that, but okay. People. What’s the excuse for media people who were supposed to be covering this and CONTINUALLY claimed “voter fraud” every time anyone filled out a voter reg card with Mickey Mouse on it? They never once thought that thru? They never said “well, Mickey Mouse isn’t VOTING”.
And, worse, judges! It’s terrifying that judges bought this. They’re the most cynical people in the world. EVERYONE lies to them. They’re lied to constantly so they believe NOTHING without proof. Yet. They swallowed this ridiculous fairy tale. Why?
Uncle Cosmo
@tsquared2001: Same little village in northern MN, with a couple hundred Swedes & a dozen Norskies. The latter have their own Sons of Norway lodge but have never been able to raise enough money for a lodge hall, so every meeting (rotating amongst the members’ rec rooms) most of the time is spent trying to figure out how.
One meeting night Ole bursts in late, shouting, I have it! I have the solution! I know how we can raise the money to buy a hall! All we have to do is change the name of the organization!
How’s that supposed to get us the money? someone asks, and Ole replies,
It’s brilliant! We just change our name from Sons of Norway to Sons of Bitches, all the Swedes will want to join & we’ll have enough members to buy a hall!
:p