7 ms·

Wow are you implying Im racist? Im pro voter id because its sensible, you need an id to drive, rent a home, buy large goods, get a bank account, and even a nat

Wow are you implying Im racist? Im pro voter id because its sensible, you need an id to drive, rent a home, buy large goods, get a bank account, and even a nation with a billion people has voter ids. Both parties have exhibited enormous distrust in the current process, and we need solutions. Im also pro having a paper trail, and neutral observers.

paulmd 10y ago
Black people are measurably less likely to own a car or have a bank account. You do not need an ID to rent a house or buy large goods. People are perfectly free to sell/rent to you without them. So your claim here is totally false. It's also totally irrelevant because none of those are Constitutionally-defined rights of citizens. Of course states have the ability to make up arbitrarily-defined rules that "just happen" to cut however they want - like "failure to pass poll test" (black), "failure to pay poll tax" (black), banning felons (7-10 times more likely to be black), "unable to provide ID" (4 times more likely to be black), etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St... http://www.dailywire.com/news/7441/7-statistics-you-need-know-about-black-black-crime-aaron-bandler http://www.dailywire.com/news/7441/7-statistics-you-need-kno... https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/10/09/report-voter-id-laws-reduce-turnout-more-among-african-american-and-younger-voters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/10/09/r... You can see the racist history there. Every single time poll restrictions have been proposed it's been for racist causes. So yes, if you're pushing for voter ID laws and not pushing for a uniform, Federally-administered form of identification that is freely and easily available at no cost to the individual, and universally accepted, you're pushing for racist ends. You yourself may not be a hooded member of the KKK, but you are pushing for the same things, and that's all that matters. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That's why "disparate impact" type laws are so important. In 2010, North Carolina literally reviewed racial maps to help their attempt maximize the disenfranchisement of black people. Shocker here: the South didn't suddenly become Not Racist in the past 5 years, it's a continual fight against those same states that has been repeated over and over again every couple years over a 200 year timeframe. http://www.wral.com/federal-judges-racially-tainted-general-assembly-districts-must-be-redrawn/15920846/ http://www.wral.com/federal-judges-racially-tainted-general-... You can see the voting bloc for yourself right here, Lee Atwater's Solid South, or the "Dixiecrats" as they used to be known before they defected to the Republican party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South Ask yourself: do you want someone who is eligible to be denied their vote? Do you actually want to discriminate on racial grounds? Do you want other people to be discriminated against on racial grounds because they happen to live in other states? Because you know that there are states that are pushing for the latest refresh that they think will juuuuust pass Supreme Court review right now, just like they did 5 years ago. That's why Disparate Impact-type laws are so important. If you answered "no" to those questions then at the end of the day we're on the same page here. I don't think there's anything wrong with having to show an ID to vote. I think everyone should be able to have one in case they want to drive or get a bank account too. But a huge number of people don't have those IDs, and face huge barriers that are deliberately elected to keep them from getting them. And that's where the Constitutional foot comes down, because there's no enumerated right to get a bank account or drive a car. The only way that such justice has been delivered, historically, is when the Federal government puts its boot down on the throat of certain states and forces them to recognize the rights of their citizens. And golly those states that keep trying these things also just happen to be the same states that seceded to protect their right to own black people, were forced to recognize their citizens as people when Sherman burned them to the ground, and have been trying to kill and disenfranchise black people ever since. A shocking and doubtlessly entirely unrelated coincidence, I should think /s. If you want an example of how "observers" play out in practice, you can just look at the (still-extant) consent decree forbidding the Republican Party to send any more "observers" after they were hiring off-duty cops in armbands to intimidate voters in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the 1981 election. If you support armbanded thugs with state-granted police powers going around and intimidating legitimate black/hispanic voters living in minority-heavy areas? Yeah, you're racist. That's a thing that happened not too long ago, easily within memory of someone who might be reading and posting here right now, in fact. That's what "observers" means and has always meant. Back in the day it was the White Citizens' Councils who handled those duties. Farther back, it was just the Klan and they'd just lynch any black person who tried to vote. Maybe you get your ballot in, maybe you don't (usually "not" thanks to poll tests/poll taxes), but either way they get you on the way out, and you're not coming back to cast any other votes. Electoral integrity assured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Councils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Councils "Neutral" observers are fine. But by "neutral" I mean like from the EU or some other allied-but-disinterested party, not someone who stands to win or lose in (or even simply gain or lose from) the election. And again, that's not how the issue has ever played out in practice. "Poll watching" and "integrity assurance" have always meant "suppressing minority votes". Remember in Florida 2000 when the Republicans ""erroneously"" purged hundreds of thousands of black people from the voter rolls to ""protect the integrity of the vote"", but it turned out that less than 5% of those people were actually invalid voters? Golly, oops!!! (and by the way: we win, no do-overs.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File The reality is that voter fraud is an utterly insignificant problem that's not really worth considering - until it happens to benefit one of the parties to mount a voter-suppression effort. If you wanted to rig the election you would do it at the level of voting machines or tally systems, not the voters. Paper trails are all well and good, but a backup system is worthless if you don't actually know if it can be successfully recovered back to production. Most places can't even handle county-level recounts, let alone multiple states that were won within a 0.1% margin. We need a certain percent of counties (say 25%) to be randomly selected after the fact for a recount with Federal oversight (or even better: here's where we can pull in those international observers!), so that every county is ready for it. Can't do it before the deadline? A vote count for any candidate exceeds a 0.1% error margin? Your whole state gets recounted because you're obviously either too incompetent to run an election or trying to pull something.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  i have more faith in black people than you i guess, and think they are perfectly capable of getting an id.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    So you're saying there's no such thing as institutional barriers and people just need to bootstrap their way out of a catch-22 style situation regarding their lack of documentation? Because that's how it works: you go to the clerk, they tell you you need a photo ID to get your birth certificate pulled (random people can't pull your birth certificate). Then you go to the Secretary of State and they tell you you need a birth certificate to prove citizenship, and to go back to the clerk and get it. At this point you then have to go try and fight it in courts and track down the doctor who birthed you to file an affadavit that you are who you say you are and were born in the country, and god help you if you have been uninsured/out of the medical system for a prolonged period of time, the doctor is dead or out of the country, etc. I'm not sure the privileged HN crowd understands how this works for regular workers who do retail or whatever: you ask for the day off, they say "sure you can go ahead and take it off, and if you do then don't bother coming back the next day, because you'll be fired. And don't try to collect unemployment either because it'll be for-cause". We have a lot of leverage and flexibility allowed because we are skilled workers. Regular people don't have that. Regular people can't afford to spend weeks and weeks bouncing between government offices and fighting it in courts. They just don't vote because they don't have the documentation. Which is the whole point of the voter restriction laws in the first place.
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      thank you, you taught me something today. instead of saying i want to require people to have an id card, i'm going to start saying i want to restrict the vote from people who can't figure out how to get an id, just so that there's no ambiguity in my position.
  - darpa_escapee 10y ago
    Then you are basing your opinion on a feeling or your reasoning doesn't reflect reality [0] [1] [2] [3]. According to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 20th, 2016 with regards to Texas' voter ID initiative (SB 14) [1]: > Some of the dissenting opinions argue that the majority opinion holds the Legislature “liable for racial disparities [it] did not create” by failing to show that the statistical disparity in ID possession among different races is caused by a State policy, as opposed to socioeconomic and historical conditions. In fact, as discussed above, the district court found that SB 14 creates a racial disparity by requiring the use of certain IDs to vote that minorities disproportionately lack. Certainly the passage of SB 14 did not cause fewer minorities to possess certain IDs (like driver’s licenses or concealed handgun licenses). Rather, the district court found that socioeconomic and historical conditions contributed to this disparity in ID possession, which demonstrates why historical evidence of racism is relevant to the Section 2 analysis. > But SB 14 itself caused minorities to disproportionately lack the documentation that is required to vote by dictating that the documents and IDs required would be those that minorities disproportionately lack. We cannot ignore that in passing SB 14, the Legislature carefully selected the types of IDs that would be required to vote. In doing so, the Legislature selected IDs that minorities disproportionately do not possess and excluded IDs that minorities possess in greater numbers, without providing sufficient justification for those choices. > The fact that this occurred on a landscape where minorities are less likely to possess certain forms of ID or be able to obtain those IDs, at least in part as a result of past instances of State-sponsored discrimination, does not absolve the Legislature of responsibility. Accordingly, the district court’s conclusion that SB 14 created racial disparities in the possession of IDs required to vote is supported by the record. It's a little odd how, when voter ID laws are passed in certain states, 31 DMV locations are immediately closed[0]. It's almost as if those pushing for the policy don't want people to get an ID and vote, because people without ID tend to be in a certain demographic that doesn't vote for your party. [0] "Planned DMV closures in Alabama adds urgency to push to restore the Voting Rights Act" - https://www.splcenter.org/news/2015/10/02/planned-dmv-closures-alabama-adds-urgency-push-restore-voting-rights-act https://www.splcenter.org/news/2015/10/02/planned-dmv-closur... [1] "Why Voter ID Is Racial Discrimination, for the Record Republican supporters of voter ID laws have been more than candid about how they help their political chances." - http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/07/why-voter-id-is-racial-discrimination-on-the-record/492347/?utm_source=nl__link6_072216 http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/07/why-voter-id-is-raci... [2] "Court: North Carolina Voter ID Law Targeted Black Voters" - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/court-north-carolina-voter-id-law-targeted-black-voters/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/court-north-caroli... [3] "Getting a photo ID so you can vote is easy. Unless you’re poor, black, Latino or elderly." - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a-photo-id-so-you-can-vote-is-easy-unless-youre-poor-black-latino-or-elderly/2016/05/23/8d5474ec-20f0-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...

paulmd 10y ago

Black people are measurably less likely to own a car or have a bank account. You do not need an ID to rent a house or buy large goods. People are perfectly free to sell/rent to you without them. So your claim here is totally false. It's also totally irrelevant because none of those are Constitutionally-defined rights of citizens. Of course states have the ability to make up arbitrarily-defined rules that "just happen" to cut however they want - like "failure to pass poll test" (black), "failure to pay poll tax" (black), banning felons (7-10 times more likely to be black), "unable to provide ID" (4 times more likely to be black), etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St... http://www.dailywire.com/news/7441/7-statistics-you-need-know-about-black-black-crime-aaron-bandler http://www.dailywire.com/news/7441/7-statistics-you-need-kno... https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/10/09/report-voter-id-laws-reduce-turnout-more-among-african-american-and-younger-voters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/10/09/r... You can see the racist history there. Every single time poll restrictions have been proposed it's been for racist causes. So yes, if you're pushing for voter ID laws and not pushing for a uniform, Federally-administered form of identification that is freely and easily available at no cost to the individual, and universally accepted, you're pushing for racist ends. You yourself may not be a hooded member of the KKK, but you are pushing for the same things, and that's all that matters. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That's why "disparate impact" type laws are so important. In 2010, North Carolina literally reviewed racial maps to help their attempt maximize the disenfranchisement of black people. Shocker here: the South didn't suddenly become Not Racist in the past 5 years, it's a continual fight against those same states that has been repeated over and over again every couple years over a 200 year timeframe. http://www.wral.com/federal-judges-racially-tainted-general-assembly-districts-must-be-redrawn/15920846/ http://www.wral.com/federal-judges-racially-tainted-general-... You can see the voting bloc for yourself right here, Lee Atwater's Solid South, or the "Dixiecrats" as they used to be known before they defected to the Republican party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_South Ask yourself: do you want someone who is eligible to be denied their vote? Do you actually want to discriminate on racial grounds? Do you want other people to be discriminated against on racial grounds because they happen to live in other states? Because you know that there are states that are pushing for the latest refresh that they think will juuuuust pass Supreme Court review right now, just like they did 5 years ago. That's why Disparate Impact-type laws are so important. If you answered "no" to those questions then at the end of the day we're on the same page here. I don't think there's anything wrong with having to show an ID to vote. I think everyone should be able to have one in case they want to drive or get a bank account too. But a huge number of people don't have those IDs, and face huge barriers that are deliberately elected to keep them from getting them. And that's where the Constitutional foot comes down, because there's no enumerated right to get a bank account or drive a car. The only way that such justice has been delivered, historically, is when the Federal government puts its boot down on the throat of certain states and forces them to recognize the rights of their citizens. And golly those states that keep trying these things also just happen to be the same states that seceded to protect their right to own black people, were forced to recognize their citizens as people when Sherman burned them to the ground, and have been trying to kill and disenfranchise black people ever since. A shocking and doubtlessly entirely unrelated coincidence, I should think /s. If you want an example of how "observers" play out in practice, you can just look at the (still-extant) consent decree forbidding the Republican Party to send any more "observers" after they were hiring off-duty cops in armbands to intimidate voters in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the 1981 election. If you support armbanded thugs with state-granted police powers going around and intimidating legitimate black/hispanic voters living in minority-heavy areas? Yeah, you're racist. That's a thing that happened not too long ago, easily within memory of someone who might be reading and posting here right now, in fact. That's what "observers" means and has always meant. Back in the day it was the White Citizens' Councils who handled those duties. Farther back, it was just the Klan and they'd just lynch any black person who tried to vote. Maybe you get your ballot in, maybe you don't (usually "not" thanks to poll tests/poll taxes), but either way they get you on the way out, and you're not coming back to cast any other votes. Electoral integrity assured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Councils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Councils "Neutral" observers are fine. But by "neutral" I mean like from the EU or some other allied-but-disinterested party, not someone who stands to win or lose in (or even simply gain or lose from) the election. And again, that's not how the issue has ever played out in practice. "Poll watching" and "integrity assurance" have always meant "suppressing minority votes". Remember in Florida 2000 when the Republicans ""erroneously"" purged hundreds of thousands of black people from the voter rolls to ""protect the integrity of the vote"", but it turned out that less than 5% of those people were actually invalid voters? Golly, oops!!! (and by the way: we win, no do-overs.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File The reality is that voter fraud is an utterly insignificant problem that's not really worth considering - until it happens to benefit one of the parties to mount a voter-suppression effort. If you wanted to rig the election you would do it at the level of voting machines or tally systems, not the voters. Paper trails are all well and good, but a backup system is worthless if you don't actually know if it can be successfully recovered back to production. Most places can't even handle county-level recounts, let alone multiple states that were won within a 0.1% margin. We need a certain percent of counties (say 25%) to be randomly selected after the fact for a recount with Federal oversight (or even better: here's where we can pull in those international observers!), so that every county is ready for it. Can't do it before the deadline? A vote count for any candidate exceeds a 0.1% error margin? Your whole state gets recounted because you're obviously either too incompetent to run an election or trying to pull something.

beachstartup 10y ago
i have more faith in black people than you i guess, and think they are perfectly capable of getting an id.
- paulmd 10y ago
  So you're saying there's no such thing as institutional barriers and people just need to bootstrap their way out of a catch-22 style situation regarding their lack of documentation? Because that's how it works: you go to the clerk, they tell you you need a photo ID to get your birth certificate pulled (random people can't pull your birth certificate). Then you go to the Secretary of State and they tell you you need a birth certificate to prove citizenship, and to go back to the clerk and get it. At this point you then have to go try and fight it in courts and track down the doctor who birthed you to file an affadavit that you are who you say you are and were born in the country, and god help you if you have been uninsured/out of the medical system for a prolonged period of time, the doctor is dead or out of the country, etc. I'm not sure the privileged HN crowd understands how this works for regular workers who do retail or whatever: you ask for the day off, they say "sure you can go ahead and take it off, and if you do then don't bother coming back the next day, because you'll be fired. And don't try to collect unemployment either because it'll be for-cause". We have a lot of leverage and flexibility allowed because we are skilled workers. Regular people don't have that. Regular people can't afford to spend weeks and weeks bouncing between government offices and fighting it in courts. They just don't vote because they don't have the documentation. Which is the whole point of the voter restriction laws in the first place.
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    thank you, you taught me something today. instead of saying i want to require people to have an id card, i'm going to start saying i want to restrict the vote from people who can't figure out how to get an id, just so that there's no ambiguity in my position.
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  Then you are basing your opinion on a feeling or your reasoning doesn't reflect reality [0] [1] [2] [3]. According to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 20th, 2016 with regards to Texas' voter ID initiative (SB 14) [1]: > Some of the dissenting opinions argue that the majority opinion holds the Legislature “liable for racial disparities [it] did not create” by failing to show that the statistical disparity in ID possession among different races is caused by a State policy, as opposed to socioeconomic and historical conditions. In fact, as discussed above, the district court found that SB 14 creates a racial disparity by requiring the use of certain IDs to vote that minorities disproportionately lack. Certainly the passage of SB 14 did not cause fewer minorities to possess certain IDs (like driver’s licenses or concealed handgun licenses). Rather, the district court found that socioeconomic and historical conditions contributed to this disparity in ID possession, which demonstrates why historical evidence of racism is relevant to the Section 2 analysis. > But SB 14 itself caused minorities to disproportionately lack the documentation that is required to vote by dictating that the documents and IDs required would be those that minorities disproportionately lack. We cannot ignore that in passing SB 14, the Legislature carefully selected the types of IDs that would be required to vote. In doing so, the Legislature selected IDs that minorities disproportionately do not possess and excluded IDs that minorities possess in greater numbers, without providing sufficient justification for those choices. > The fact that this occurred on a landscape where minorities are less likely to possess certain forms of ID or be able to obtain those IDs, at least in part as a result of past instances of State-sponsored discrimination, does not absolve the Legislature of responsibility. Accordingly, the district court’s conclusion that SB 14 created racial disparities in the possession of IDs required to vote is supported by the record. It's a little odd how, when voter ID laws are passed in certain states, 31 DMV locations are immediately closed[0]. It's almost as if those pushing for the policy don't want people to get an ID and vote, because people without ID tend to be in a certain demographic that doesn't vote for your party. [0] "Planned DMV closures in Alabama adds urgency to push to restore the Voting Rights Act" - https://www.splcenter.org/news/2015/10/02/planned-dmv-closures-alabama-adds-urgency-push-restore-voting-rights-act https://www.splcenter.org/news/2015/10/02/planned-dmv-closur... [1] "Why Voter ID Is Racial Discrimination, for the Record Republican supporters of voter ID laws have been more than candid about how they help their political chances." - http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/07/why-voter-id-is-racial-discrimination-on-the-record/492347/?utm_source=nl__link6_072216 http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/07/why-voter-id-is-raci... [2] "Court: North Carolina Voter ID Law Targeted Black Voters" - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/court-north-carolina-voter-id-law-targeted-black-voters/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/court-north-caroli... [3] "Getting a photo ID so you can vote is easy. Unless you’re poor, black, Latino or elderly." - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a-photo-id-so-you-can-vote-is-easy-unless-youre-poor-black-latino-or-elderly/2016/05/23/8d5474ec-20f0-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...