Quote:
Originally Posted by
walrus
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kirkland Laing
Texas AG Ken Paxton's office spent 22,000 hours looking for voter fraud and uncovered just 16 cases of false addresses on registration forms, according to The Houston Chronicle. Nearly 17M voters are registered in Texas.
No voter fraud in Texas then. And Texas is using their bullshit claims about voter fraud to :
Texas GOP launches avalanche of bills to curtail voting
Lawmakers are seeking to limit early voting and tighten ID requirements, among other restrictive measures.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...m_npd_nn_tw_ma
Show ID restrictive, I needed to show ID for my covid shot. How restrictive. If you buy alcohol or go to see your congressmen you show ID. If you don’t have ID in the US the police can detain you until they ascertain your identity, wtf is restrictive “ie racist” about ID
You already had this explained to you relatively recently. Miles you may have missed it. The bottom line is that these voter ID laws are relatively new, at the turn of the century they were almost nonexistent in America. The first voter ID law that required a photograph was passed in 2004 in Indiana if I remember correctly. Since then they've gone nationwide due to the GOP increasingly struggling to win the popular vote.
Here's a quick recap to refresh your memories:
In 2000, four states--Arkansas, Georgia, Michigan and North Dakota--had enacted ID laws, none of them photo-based; they aimed to clarify voting rules, part of a trend that led to the Help America Vote Act, which was passed by a bipartisan vote in Congress in 2002. At the time, the idea of straightening out confusing differences in voting rules was noncontroversial: “why would any member of Congress oppose helping Americans vote?” the authors ask.
The atmosphere soon changed. In 2001, only 14 states required identification to vote, of which only four specified photo IDs; by 2014, 34 states had ID laws, including 17 photo ID laws. In 2011 alone, six states added a photo ID requirement.
What happened? The GOP, they say, recognized that its homogeneous white, male, older and Southern electoral base was competing against “a racially and ethnically diverse, younger, secular, liberal, and Northern-based Democratic Party.” Moreover, the demographic changes bringing more Latinos, African Americans, and Asians into the voting population were working strongly against the GOP and strengthening the Democratic coalition.
The GOP could have evolved to meet these voters on their turf, but chose not to. “Rather than altering issue positions as a means to attract new supporters, the GOP has turned to restrictive voter ID laws to disproportionately deter the participation of current Democratic Party supporters,” the researchers write.
In other words, appealing to a racial coalition was beyond the GOP’s capacity, so the party chose instead to disenfranchise the members of that coalition.
The researchers acknowledge that playing with voter turnout is traditional electoral strategy in both parties. But that doesn’t make suppression equivalent to getting out the vote. Voting is a constitutional right, and artificially restricting it is unconstitutional (as some federal judges have ruled).
To vote-suppressors in the Republican Party, photo ID laws are preferable to other restrictive rules in a couple of ways. One is that, in contrast to other suppressive rules, they appear to have a logical, neutral rationale.
Efforts to “cut back on early voting days, Election Day registration, or reducing the amount of time for completing voter registration drives...are easily viewed as blatant partisan power plays,” the researchers observed. By contrast, “restrictive voter ID legislation at least holds the appearance of ensuring the integrity of the voting process.”
These laws are found acceptable by a majority of voters, in part because unwarranted fears of voter fraud have been stoked successfully by their proponents--even though “there simply is no widespread, concerted and systematic evidence that some voters go to the polls impersonating someone else.” Moreover, the cost of photo ID for many people isn’t understood by the average voter who has a driver’s license, and the partisan goals of the proponents hasn’t been widely understood--yet.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hil...20-column.html
This one is good. You'll remember that Trump made a big thing about absentee voting -- mail in ballots -- in the last election. This was the first time ever that the GOP have ever taken action against mail in ballots because during every previous election they've been a net plus for them. In 2020 the fact that many Democrats didn't want to risk catching the virus meant that they'd be a net benefit for Democrats so for the first time ever the GOP started bullshitting about mail in ballots instead of their usual bullshit about in person voter fraud:
In North Carolina, the legislature requested racial data on the use of electoral mechanisms, then restricted all those disproportionately used by blacks, such as early voting, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. Absentee ballots, disproportionately used by white voters, were exempted from the voter ID requirement. The legislative record actually justified the elimination of one of the two days of Sunday voting because “counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.”
The documents acceptable for proving voters’ identity in North Carolina were the ones disproportionately held by whites, such as driver’s licenses, U.S. passports, and veteran and military IDs, and the ones that were left out were the ones often held by poor minority voters, such as student IDs, government employee IDs and public assistance IDs. The Texas voter ID law was designed the same way: There, officials accepted concealed-weapon licenses but not student or state employee IDs. The Texas legislature was repeatedly advised of the likely effect on minority voters but rebuffed nearly all amendments that would have eased its harsh impact.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...voter-id-laws/
And so on and so on.
Occasionally Republican officials even come out and admit the truth behind their actions:
https://www.kaporcenter.org/florida-...nd-voter-laws/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/u...ical-gain.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republ...ocratic-voters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT2q7cKB-4g
You need to watch at least until you hear "you know that we can hear you, right?"