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Is it factually accurate? Is it giving a full picture of voter suppression, or do you believe that Democrats engage in the practice and this fact is being omitt

Is it factually accurate? Is it giving a full picture of voter suppression, or do you believe that Democrats engage in the practice and this fact is being omitted? IMO complaining about partisanship is just dodging a conversation on the merits, if in fact the objective truth is partisan. Back when Republicans were the Party of Lincoln it would have been both factual and partisan of me to say they were the political party of abolition, and the Democrats were the party of plantation owners.

ones_and_zeros 10y ago
The DNC are no saints[0]. "Others complained about long lines, shuttered polling locations and inexperienced polling-place employees. Entire blocks and buildings of voters in some districts were purged from the voter rolls, de Blasio said." [0] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/officials-investigating-why-126000-voters-were-purged-from-ny-rolls/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/officials-investigating-...
- lambda 10y ago
  That's not the DNC, that's the New York Board of Elections. The DNC doesn't run the actual voting of the primaries, that's done by the local election commissions, just like for the general elections. This varies by state, it's generally the state parties that decide how primaries are run in their state, not the DNC.
- travmatt 10y ago
  I can't tell if you're alleging something or simply raising some spectre of bad behavior as proof of some type of equivalency. If you are alleging something, your theory runs into some problems: 1. The DNC doesn't run the elections, as another commenter posited. 2. The voters who were purged were disproportionately Spanish, and minority & Spanish voters have disproportionately voted for Clinton and against Sanders [0]. Are you suggesting that the DNC secretly coordinated with an outside body to purge voters to hurt their presumptive nominee? Personally, I tend to assume bureaucratic incompetency quicker than I do a conspiracy. In any case, to avoid a false equivalency, these are the facts: Democrats may be associated with a voter purge (itself a legal and routine occurrence) which took some voters out of rolls who, based on their demographics, broke disproportionately for their nominee. Republicans have mounted a coordinated and sustained assault on the franchisement of minorities in America. This includes the encouragement of voter intimidation, and: """ A review of these documents shows that North Carolina GOP leaders launched a meticulous and coordinated effort to deter black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. The law, created and passed entirely by white legislators, evoked the state’s ugly history of blocking African Americans from voting — practices that had taken a civil rights movement and extensive federal intervention to stop. Last month, a three-judge federal appeals panel struck down the North Carolina law, calling it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.” Drawing from the emails and other evidence, the 83-page ruling charged that Republican lawmakers had targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” """[1] [0]http://time.com/4301762/new-york-voting-problems-hillary-clinton/ http://time.com/4301762/new-york-voting-problems-hillary-cli... [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/inside-the-republican-creation-of-the-north-carolina-voting-bill-dubbed-the-monster-law/2016/09/01/79162398-6adf-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/inside-th...
  - ones_and_zeros 10y ago
    More the later than the former. My point in both of my comments is both parties/any party operates in its self interest. The GOP do what they need to do and the Democrats do what they need to do. I don't see the democrats as some white light in a world of evil, I see a political organization that is willing to do whatever it needs to do for self preservation. To use your words, I think there is bureaucratic incompetency on both sides, yet people spent time and money to take a really good idea and use it to smear one side. I say this as someone who has not ever and probably never will vote republican. I'm not sure if you played the game but it associated long lines, reduced polling locations and clueless polling employees with GOP tactics when those same exact issues cropped up in the democratic primary. My point is why say GOP and just say these things happen in all polls? The game didn't even touch on the North Carolina law. It's the Republicans doing it now but let's not forget the role Democrats had in overseeing Jim Crow laws.
    - travmatt 10y ago
      Honestly, I can't see how your response is anything but preaching a false equivalency. >My point in both of my comments is both parties/any party operates in its self interest. The GOP do what they need to do and the Democrats do what they need to do. I don't see the democrats as some white light in a world of evil, I see a political organization that is willing to do whatever it needs to do for self preservation. To use your words, I think there is bureaucratic incompetency on both sides, yet people spent time and money to take a really good idea and use it to smear one side. Expect the issue at hand is one group is being proven to engineer voter suppression, which is a specific claim that rises above mere bureaucratic incompetence. The fact that these actions can be shown to be more than bureaucratic incompetence is the entire crux of the discussion. This is comparable to a zero tolerance policy saying that someone bringing a pocketknife to school is exactly as guilty as someone who brought a ka-bar into school with the intent of killing his teacher. >It's the Republicans doing it now but let's not forget the role Democrats had in overseeing Jim Crow laws. I'm pretty sure this is the definition of false equivalency. FWIW, Jim Crow laws were perpetuated by a coalition of Southern Conservative Democrats and Mid-western Repbulicans. The Democrats on their own didn't have enough numbers to survive the attacks by Northern Liberal Democrats.
AdamN 10y ago
@ones_and_zeros is right, it's hyper partisan. The content (as thin as it is), is true ... but for the NYTimes to use a game produced by GOP Games, who only produce satire of Trump, is really less than ideal. Secondly, it creates a real division between, white, Latina (which remember is an ethnic group, not a racial group ... many Latinos in the US self-identify as white in addition to their ethnicity), and of course black. Thirdly, it doesn't really hammer home the right issues. The Latina woman's son gets dysentery a few minutes in and then there's a statement about paid time off. Those things have nothing to do with each other. There's more to it but this game simply plays into the Trump camp thinking that the media is soft on rational thinking ... which unfortunately this game confirms. I'm with her and will be voting in Brooklyn fwiw
- travmatt 10y ago
  >@ones_and_zeros is right, it's hyper partisan Again, calling something partisan is the intellectually lazy way of trying to dodge an argument. It imparts no new information, and tries to establish a false equivalency between two parties for no reason other than 'fairness'. Again, you can't dismiss the civil war as 'partisan' because one political party wanted slaves and the other did not. >Secondly, it creates a real division between, white, Latina (which remember is an ethnic group, not a racial group ... many Latinos in the US self-identify as white in addition to their ethnicity), and of course black. In a country where a state GOP party researched the ways that blacks voted specifically to find the ways to best disenfranchise them, it's pretty safe to say these battles have been fought over racial lines for a long time. Trying to pretend these fights aren't over racial lines is again trying to establish some sort of false equivalency. >Thirdly, it doesn't really hammer home the right issues. The Latina woman's son gets dysentery a few minutes in and then there's a statement about paid time off. Those things have nothing to do with each other. You're incorrect. Minority voters are disproportionately affected by curtailing early voting because of precisely the situations you just mentioned, which is presumably why the game raised those issues. People who work hourly jobs have a harder time taking time off in large numbers to vote, and especially if those voters can't afford to stand in a line for hours at a time. The game is showing precisely why those long lines are intended to hurt those voters.

ones_and_zeros 10y ago

The DNC are no saints[0]. "Others complained about long lines, shuttered polling locations and inexperienced polling-place employees. Entire blocks and buildings of voters in some districts were purged from the voter rolls, de Blasio said." [0] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/officials-investigating-why-126000-voters-were-purged-from-ny-rolls/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/officials-investigating-...

lambda 10y ago
That's not the DNC, that's the New York Board of Elections. The DNC doesn't run the actual voting of the primaries, that's done by the local election commissions, just like for the general elections. This varies by state, it's generally the state parties that decide how primaries are run in their state, not the DNC.
travmatt 10y ago
I can't tell if you're alleging something or simply raising some spectre of bad behavior as proof of some type of equivalency. If you are alleging something, your theory runs into some problems: 1. The DNC doesn't run the elections, as another commenter posited. 2. The voters who were purged were disproportionately Spanish, and minority & Spanish voters have disproportionately voted for Clinton and against Sanders [0]. Are you suggesting that the DNC secretly coordinated with an outside body to purge voters to hurt their presumptive nominee? Personally, I tend to assume bureaucratic incompetency quicker than I do a conspiracy. In any case, to avoid a false equivalency, these are the facts: Democrats may be associated with a voter purge (itself a legal and routine occurrence) which took some voters out of rolls who, based on their demographics, broke disproportionately for their nominee. Republicans have mounted a coordinated and sustained assault on the franchisement of minorities in America. This includes the encouragement of voter intimidation, and: """ A review of these documents shows that North Carolina GOP leaders launched a meticulous and coordinated effort to deter black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. The law, created and passed entirely by white legislators, evoked the state’s ugly history of blocking African Americans from voting — practices that had taken a civil rights movement and extensive federal intervention to stop. Last month, a three-judge federal appeals panel struck down the North Carolina law, calling it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.” Drawing from the emails and other evidence, the 83-page ruling charged that Republican lawmakers had targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” """[1] [0]http://time.com/4301762/new-york-voting-problems-hillary-clinton/ http://time.com/4301762/new-york-voting-problems-hillary-cli... [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/inside-the-republican-creation-of-the-north-carolina-voting-bill-dubbed-the-monster-law/2016/09/01/79162398-6adf-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/inside-th...
- ones_and_zeros 10y ago
  More the later than the former. My point in both of my comments is both parties/any party operates in its self interest. The GOP do what they need to do and the Democrats do what they need to do. I don't see the democrats as some white light in a world of evil, I see a political organization that is willing to do whatever it needs to do for self preservation. To use your words, I think there is bureaucratic incompetency on both sides, yet people spent time and money to take a really good idea and use it to smear one side. I say this as someone who has not ever and probably never will vote republican. I'm not sure if you played the game but it associated long lines, reduced polling locations and clueless polling employees with GOP tactics when those same exact issues cropped up in the democratic primary. My point is why say GOP and just say these things happen in all polls? The game didn't even touch on the North Carolina law. It's the Republicans doing it now but let's not forget the role Democrats had in overseeing Jim Crow laws.
  - travmatt 10y ago
    Honestly, I can't see how your response is anything but preaching a false equivalency. >My point in both of my comments is both parties/any party operates in its self interest. The GOP do what they need to do and the Democrats do what they need to do. I don't see the democrats as some white light in a world of evil, I see a political organization that is willing to do whatever it needs to do for self preservation. To use your words, I think there is bureaucratic incompetency on both sides, yet people spent time and money to take a really good idea and use it to smear one side. Expect the issue at hand is one group is being proven to engineer voter suppression, which is a specific claim that rises above mere bureaucratic incompetence. The fact that these actions can be shown to be more than bureaucratic incompetence is the entire crux of the discussion. This is comparable to a zero tolerance policy saying that someone bringing a pocketknife to school is exactly as guilty as someone who brought a ka-bar into school with the intent of killing his teacher. >It's the Republicans doing it now but let's not forget the role Democrats had in overseeing Jim Crow laws. I'm pretty sure this is the definition of false equivalency. FWIW, Jim Crow laws were perpetuated by a coalition of Southern Conservative Democrats and Mid-western Repbulicans. The Democrats on their own didn't have enough numbers to survive the attacks by Northern Liberal Democrats.

AdamN 10y ago

@ones_and_zeros is right, it's hyper partisan. The content (as thin as it is), is true ... but for the NYTimes to use a game produced by GOP Games, who only produce satire of Trump, is really less than ideal. Secondly, it creates a real division between, white, Latina (which remember is an ethnic group, not a racial group ... many Latinos in the US self-identify as white in addition to their ethnicity), and of course black. Thirdly, it doesn't really hammer home the right issues. The Latina woman's son gets dysentery a few minutes in and then there's a statement about paid time off. Those things have nothing to do with each other. There's more to it but this game simply plays into the Trump camp thinking that the media is soft on rational thinking ... which unfortunately this game confirms. I'm with her and will be voting in Brooklyn fwiw

travmatt 10y ago
>@ones_and_zeros is right, it's hyper partisan Again, calling something partisan is the intellectually lazy way of trying to dodge an argument. It imparts no new information, and tries to establish a false equivalency between two parties for no reason other than 'fairness'. Again, you can't dismiss the civil war as 'partisan' because one political party wanted slaves and the other did not. >Secondly, it creates a real division between, white, Latina (which remember is an ethnic group, not a racial group ... many Latinos in the US self-identify as white in addition to their ethnicity), and of course black. In a country where a state GOP party researched the ways that blacks voted specifically to find the ways to best disenfranchise them, it's pretty safe to say these battles have been fought over racial lines for a long time. Trying to pretend these fights aren't over racial lines is again trying to establish some sort of false equivalency. >Thirdly, it doesn't really hammer home the right issues. The Latina woman's son gets dysentery a few minutes in and then there's a statement about paid time off. Those things have nothing to do with each other. You're incorrect. Minority voters are disproportionately affected by curtailing early voting because of precisely the situations you just mentioned, which is presumably why the game raised those issues. People who work hourly jobs have a harder time taking time off in large numbers to vote, and especially if those voters can't afford to stand in a line for hours at a time. The game is showing precisely why those long lines are intended to hurt those voters.