U.S. Politics- This Is Us, Basically Fascists

[James Arryn]

40 minutes ago, Suttree said:

1. There is not now, nor has there ever been evidence of wide scale, in person, voter fraud which is what an ID would stop.  As noted above, the task force Trump put together failed miserably and Kris Kobach who is the foremost "expert" leading the charge was unable to prove it existed in court. This has happened literally every time the topic has gone to trial. 

More importantly, you can not use a link from FAIR when discussing immigration or voter ID. It was started by white supremacists and eugenicists and it's rather telling this is even a source you would look to. If folks on the right are so upset about being called nazis and the like...then they should stop referencing pseudo research papers from "organizations" that were literally started by white supremacists.

2. You clearly haven't been following the topic or you would know the Old Dominion study mentioned in the quote you provided fails on two levels. First the author has disavowed the way his data is being used by both the Trump administration and FAIR. 

Second, in the actual lawsuit that Kobach was a part of the court found:

 

So, to be fair...heh...in terms of the significance of the choice of links, the whole bubble thing probably often leads to people reading/citing/quoting extremists without even being aware of the fact they are extremist. And therein see their understanding of ‘the middle ground’ unwittingly inched towards that extreme. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you know that think about ‘How to Boil a Frog’...

 

[Ice Queen]

3 hours ago, Frog Eater said:

And what about this very special case, that no one has ever heard of, until I just made it up of a very special class of persons who arent allowed in a hospital, but somehow is still a citizen of the United States. Who dont understand American society, but somehow still citizens. 

Shouldnt we place the integrity of our elections at risk for the sake of these special persons that I just made up?

Yeah, that's how your post reads

Back in the day, many babies were born at home and never issued a birth certificate. My father was one of them. So among older generations, it might well indeed be a hassle. And these are generations that traditionally DO turn out to vote. 

 

 

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Frog Eater said:

In 2014, a study released by a team of professors from Old Dominion University and George Mason University estimated that approximately 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted In the 2008 presidential election. They also surmised that 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm election.²⁰ In addition, the study estimated that 80 percent of noncitizens who appeared to have voted cast their ballots in favor of one party. Noncitizens are believed to have voted in these elections in numbers great enough to have affected the outcome.

 

This is an awesome one, because even the creators of this study don't think that what they said implies this, and are now horrified to see that this is how their study is being used.

Quote

"Trump and others have been misreading our research and exaggerating our results to make claims we don't think our research supports," Richman says. "I'm not sure why they continue to do it, but there’s not much I can do about that aside from set the record straight."

 

[maarsen]

The framers of the US Constitution put into it that only citizens could vote. I have yet to see any reference to proper ID being required in the aforesaid Constitution. Since the Constitution is next to holy writ to the silly right, one would suppose that voter ID laws would be anathema to them. 

[Gertrude]

4 hours ago, Frog Eater said:

I believe he is talking about closed primaries, wherein you have to register as a Republican or Democrat to vote in their primaries. Then he is insinuating that the Republicans would then target Democratic voting blocks to register them as Republicans to prevent them from voting in the Democratic primary. 

I worked my first election this year during the primaries. Something I learned was that you don't have to pre-register as rep or dem (or whatever) to vote in a specific primary. Once you request a specific ballot, you are automatically registered to that party. Switching registration back is as simple as going on-line and doing so the next day. At least in Iowa, there's really nothing blocking an essentially 'open' primary. If anyone is really interested in voting across party lines in primaries, check your state laws to see how they handle this.

To weigh in on voter IDs, I am torn as well. I am not unsympathetic to the arguments of voter suppression and the difficulty for some to get ID. I don't believe it would stop in-person voter fraud to any measurable degree. What I did see, however, is that scanning an ID speeds up the process immensely at point of contact with the poll workers. It's not an important point when talking about voter accessibility, but it would go a long way to cut down on wait times that we always see stories about in big elections. 

I guess I'm curious to know how many states have the option to show ID, but don't require it. Like I said, I'm in Iowa and we passed a voter ID law that was in the process of phasing in during the primaries. I would like to see some data in these situations - how many don't have or refuse to show ID? What kind of confusion and information is out there about the laws that people are trying to process and may be misinformed about, etc. In our district, every single person showed an ID, but I know that this is an extremely small sample size from a middle-class, urban area. I'd genuinely be interested in seeing this kind of information about other districts around the country. I'm in my little bubble and have zero idea of what the realities on the ground are in more rural or economically diverse areas other than the propaganda both sides throw out.

 I'd like to see politicians have an actual conversation about overcoming obstacles to voter ID rather than just shouting their opinions at each other. I'd be for voter ID in a heartbeat if we could ensure all eligible voters could access the proper ID. 

[Mudguard]

6 hours ago, S John said:

I have mixed feelings about voter ID laws. 

I get that most of this is in response to trumped up charges of widespread voter fraud that is not actually widespread.  I also get how it can be used to disenfranchise voters.  But... using my own state of residence as an example, a state that has voter ID laws, I don't find it unreasonable.

The rule is as follows:

The second item on that list, the one in bold, is specifically a voter ID for people who don't have any of the other ID's and it is available free of charge.  That combined with the other forms of acceptable ID up to and including a freakin' utility bill adds up to 14 different acceptable ways to prove who you are and everyone has access to at least one of those things, and according to the last bit there, it can even be expired! 

I do not think that this amounts to placing unreasonable obstacles.  At some point, if you are responsible enough to cast a vote, you should be responsible for figuring out how to do it -and in this case it really is not difficult.  If you're voting, that means you're an adult and expecting some level of personal agency is not unreasonable, imo.  Somewhere in there, I would agree that there's a line where you cross from a reasonable law into unreasonable disenfranchisement but I don't think the statute in Texas approaches that line.  Though I can see where that could easily be the case elsewhere.  

I completely agree with your view.  I recognize that a restrictive voter ID law would be problematic, but I don't have a problem with a fairly enacted voter ID law that makes it easy for a voter to obtain a valid voter ID.  The Texas law doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and I'm very skeptical that anyone that wants to vote is going to be unable to get a valid voter ID. 

The data whether recently enacted voter ID laws actually suppress minority turnout is disputed.  The one study that asserted that voter ID laws suppressed minority turnout was based on the same CCES study that DMC has claimed was debunked, and the conclusions of this study has been challenged by academics from Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and Tufts.  Link to a prior version of the full journal article is here.

Quote

We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson’s 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted between 2006 and 2014. We show that the results of their article are a product of data inaccuracies, the presented evidence does not support the stated conclusion, and alternative model specifications produce highly variable results. When errors are corrected, one can recover positive, negative, or null estimates of the effect of voter ID laws on turnout, precluding firm conclusions.

I see a lot of posts claiming that thousands or even millions have been disenfranchised, but where is the evidence that currently enacted voter ID laws that have passed constitutional scrutiny have actually prevented people from voting?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

48 minutes ago, maarsen said:

The framers of the US Constitution put into it that only citizens could vote. I have yet to see any reference to proper ID being required in the aforesaid Constitution. Since the Constitution is next to holy writ to the silly right, one would suppose that voter ID laws would be anathema to them. 

Your line of thought would assume that principles matter. They do not. This is entirely about the preservation of power and the realization that it's slowly slipping away.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

37 minutes ago, Mudguard said:

I see a lot of posts claiming that thousands or even millions have been disenfranchised, but where is the evidence that currently enacted voter ID laws that have passed constitutional scrutiny have actually prevented people from voting?

I was the one that cited it was in the millions, but it's important to note that I was discussing voter suppression tactics, not just voter ID laws. That includes things like voter roll purges without notifications in states without same day registration. People show up thinking they're eligible to vote only to be turned away with little recourse the remedy the situation in the moment. Hence why I stated that everyone should be automatically registered to vote upon their 18th birthday, though it should be their responsibility to notify the office of SoS if and when they move so they can be reassigned to the appropriate polling station. 

[Suttree]

47 minutes ago, Mudguard said:

I see a lot of posts claiming that thousands or even millions have been disenfranchised, but where is the evidence that currently enacted voter ID laws that have passed constitutional scrutiny have actually prevented people from voting?

The problem of course is you're jumping ahead. Why ask if laws that were passed with the intent to discriminate actually worked?

Way before you get there one needs to ask why ID's would ever be necessary given the fact that in person voter fraud is almost non-existent.  The evidence that it exists needs to be provided before even considering an ID law. Once again from NC:

Quote

That was the case, the court said, even though the state had “failed to identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud in North Carolina.” But it did find that there was evidence of fraud in absentee voting by mail, a method used disproportionately by white voters. The Legislature, however, exempted absentee voting from the photo ID requirement.

In terms of data, people are just starting to work out how to get at the impact of these types of laws.

Quote

Still, while the percentages may sound small, that 4.5 percent still represents 608,470 Texas citizens who could potentially be disenfranchised.

Hersh says he agrees the public ought to be outraged by racially motivated attempts to suppress the vote, and that courts ought to crack down on the practice. But he cautions against Democrats artificially inflating the impact of voter ID laws in their messaging...

"It ... can be dangerous to sow doubt in the integrity of the election system with these big claims," Hersh says. Besides, the raw data is bad enough.

And Hersh's findings are limited to Texas. In other states with less of a car culture and more densely populated cities, the number of people who lack ID may be as high as 10 percent, MIT's Stewart explains

 

[Martell Spy]

Manafort Trial Day 2: Fake bills, a banned word and a Rick Gates surprise
A parade of luxury vendors testify for the prosecution.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/01/paul-manafort-trial-testimony-day-2-756749

Quote

Wednesday's testimony from the parade of high-end suit sellers and contractors produced an intriguing revelation: in order to get Manafort's bills paid, someone repeatedly forged invoices. Real bills sent to Manafort were at some point converted to fake ones directed to various shell companies allegedly controlled by the longtime political operative.

 

[Martell Spy]

Yeah, going forward, Democrats will have to assume that the opposing party will actively try to harm Americans by attacking their healthcare, even their own constituents. Any new policies will have to take that into consideration. It's a miracle Obamacare survived all this.

Quote

 

The upshot of all this is roughly the opposite of what conservatives intended: The Republican president has made Obamacare a better program for low-income people (many of whom can now get “bronze” plans for free), and a worse program for the middle-income consumers who earn too much to qualify for subsidies (i.e., the very constituency that Republicans had promised to help by repealing the law) — all while making the ACA more expensive for the federal government.

What’s more, all of this has thoroughly discredited moderate Democrats’ preferred approach to health-care reform. In the Trump era, America’s “big government” health-care programs — Medicaid, Medicare, and CHIP — have held up fine. In fact, the Medicaid expansion is actually growing in size, as more red states warm to the idea of accepting federal “handouts” to prop up their ailing hospitals.

The resiliency of these programs partially reflects the popularity of these programs. But it also reflects the fact that they’re much harder to sabotage than market-centric programs like Obamacare, which rely on good-faith efforts from Executive branch regulators to function fully. The Affordable Care Act has survived in the Trump era, but only in the form of a less-cost-efficient, quasi-Medicaid program.

Many European countries have achieved universal health care (or something close to it) through heavily regulated private insurance markets. Before Trump, it was possible to imagine that Democrats would keep working toward that model, enhancing and expanding the ACA until universal coverage was achieved. But conservative parties in European countries do not typically try to deliberately break their nations’ health-care systems whenever they take power; the conservative party in the United States now does.

 

Trump’s Sabotage of Obamacare Is Backfiring for Conservatives

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/short-term-insurance-rule-trumps-sabotage-of-obamacare-is-backfiring-for-the-gop.html

[LongRider]

2 hours ago, Suttree said:

Way before you get there one needs to ask why ID's would ever be necessary given the fact that in person voter fraud is almost non-existent. 

It does exist tho.

Quote

Des Moines, Iowa (AP) -- An Iowa woman charged with attempting to vote twice for Donald Trump last fall has been sentenced to two years of probation and a $750 fine.

District court Judge Robert Hanson said in a sentencing order posted Tuesday that the felony election misconduct conviction will be expunged from Terri Lynn Rote's record once she completes probation and pays the fine.

Rote, who is 56, pleaded guilty last month.

Rote, a Trump supporter, was arrested Oct. 21 after showing up at a Des Moines early voting site to cast a second ballot for Trump in the Nov. 8 election. She told police she believed Trump's claims that the election was rigged and she feared her first ballot would be changed to a vote for Hillary Clinton.

 

Dumbass.

[Altherion]

19 hours ago, DMC said:

This is perhaps the dumbest thing you have ever asserted.  The right to "bear arms" has one amendment.  The right to vote has at least three amendments:

You said "as long as the government stays clear of this patchwork and does not violate any other Constitutional text (e.g. the Equal Protection Clause), it can restrict voting in a way that it cannot do with the right to bear arms."  This is patently unfounded.  The amendments to the constitution have exactly one vague thing to say about guns.  In contrast, they have all of the above about voting.  Feel free to challenge me with The Federalist.  Because you can't.  They say nothing about guns and a lot about voting.  In conclusion, you're full of shit.

Are you by any chance a search engine bot masquerading as a human? Yes, the Constitution mentions voting a whole lot more than it does the right to bear arms... but the number of occurrences of something in a given text is not, in and of itself, indicative of what said text has to say about the thing -- you have to actually read what all of these occurrences are about. Here are the relevant statements from the three amendments above plus the 24th Amendment (which also addresses voting) with some highlighting to assist in reading comprehension:

Quote

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Compare this to what I said above and you'll see that I got them all except that the one about non-payment of taxes only applies to federal elections. The right to vote can certainly be restricted; in fact, that's where practically all of these Amendments come from: when a state decides to restrict voting rights in a way that doesn't lead the Supreme Court to overrule them, there's not much that can be done about it short of a Constitutional Amendment... and barring something fairly extraordinary, we will soon have a Supreme Court that is far less likely to overrule states on this than any in the past couple of decades.

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, Triskjavikson said:

A few random thoughts stemming from that article from a week ago on whether Warren is the frontrunner:

With the way the Dems are moving left doesn't her anti-big banks background look like a big asset especially compared to people like Booker, Gillebrand, and Patrick who have been cozier with Wall Street than the whole base?  

If people actually hated banks? SURE! No real sign of that, though. Otherwise the tax cuts would have outraged people a lot more than they did. 

Her backing Clinton basically hoses her with that group anyway; she fails the purity test.

5 minutes ago, Triskjavikson said:

And another thing that occurred to me:  I feel like Warren does not come across as a cultural elite the way many of the Dem candidates do.  Now I don't are about this too much, but many of the Obama to Trump voters presumably do.  Do you guys even agree on that point that Warren comes across as more authentic and whatnot?  

Not really. 

5 minutes ago, Triskjavikson said:

 If both of these two points above are true it makes her look even stronger.

And while I know that she's older she seems so much younger than her age.  And she seems positively youthful compared to Biden and Sanders.

I think that she's good as an attack dog, and bad as a front runner for a whole lot of reasons, and Trump would positively salivate to run against her. 

[Jace, Extat]

8 minutes ago, Triskjavikson said:

A few random thoughts stemming from that article from a week ago on whether Warren is the frontrunner:

With the way the Dems are moving left doesn't her anti-big banks background look like a big asset especially compared to people like Booker, Gillebrand, and Patrick who have been cozier with Wall Street than the whole base?  

And another thing that occurred to me:  I feel like Warren does not come across as a cultural elite the way many of the Dem candidates do.  Now I don't are about this too much, but many of the Obama to Trump voters presumably do.  Do you guys even agree on that point that Warren comes across as more authentic and whatnot?  

If both of these two points above are true it makes her look even stronger.

And while I know that she's older she seems so much younger than her age.  And she seems positively youthful compared to Biden and Sanders.

She's a woman, which makes her unelectable.

[mormont]

10 hours ago, Mudguard said:

I completely agree with your view.  I recognize that a restrictive voter ID law would be problematic, but I don't have a problem with a fairly enacted voter ID law that makes it easy for a voter to obtain a valid voter ID.  The Texas law doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and I'm very skeptical that anyone that wants to vote is going to be unable to get a valid voter ID. 

Let me respond with a point that addresses both this and provides the evidence on voters being deterred.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-44197338

The UK ran a trial of voter ID recently. Over a thousand people were turned away because they didn't have the right ID. Two thirds returned with the right ID and voted. A third of them (340 people), however, never came back. 

Why? We don't know, but most likely because they had a limited window to vote, or because they simply didn't own the right ID, rather than because they were not entitled to vote in the first place. In the preceding ten years, the areas participating in this pilot had experienced one allegation of in-person voter fraud (dealt with by a police caution). Against that, we have evidence of hundreds of legitimate voters prevented from voting. And the ID requirements here were not as burdensome as many in the US. 

How many in-person voter fraud attempts were stopped, do you think? Less than 341? Because if it's less than 341, the net effect is a democratically less valid result than if the trial had not been run. And that's scary in all sorts of ways. 

The ID requirement does not have to be unreasonable for this to be true. People are people. They'll forget their ID, and then not have time to come back later, or a dozen other things. And you may say 'well, tough luck on them, they should have been more responsible'. But the harm isn't just on them. Anything that lowers legitimate turnout, harms the legitimacy of the result, harms the democratic mandate, and therefore harms all of us. 

Meantime, the idea that in-person voter fraud is actually taking place on any scale that matters is absurd. The logistics of organising poll fraud in this way are incredibly complex. You need to co-ordinate an army of willing volunteers even to rig a small, close election this way. If you want to rig an election, in-person voter fraud is literally the most complicated, expensive, risky, and least effective possible way to do it, even without voter ID requirements. If someone were to go to these lengths, they undoubtedly have an organisation that can obtain false IDs. (They undoubtedly also have an organisation that can rig the count, so they don't need to go to these lengths.)

So. Until and unless a case is made out that large-scale in-person voter fraud is actually happening, NO voter ID requirement, no matter how reasonable or easy it may seem, is anything but actively harmful to the democratic process and any proposal to that effect should be utterly rejected. 

[Suttree]

On 7/31/2018 at 9:59 PM, Altherion said:

The Constitution says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed and that's that, 

Is it really though?

It wasn't until Printz v. United States that a modern justice even asserted that Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun. That was of course the first step down the road to Heller and people seem to forget how much of a seismic shift that was in how things had traditionally been interpreted through a "collective right" lens. 

[Rippounet]

9 minutes ago, Suttree said:

Is it really though?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's something about "militias" in there.

[aceluby]

12 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's something about "militias" in there.

And "well regulated"....

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 hours ago, Triskjavikson said:

A few random thoughts stemming from that article from a week ago on whether Warren is the frontrunner:

I’d take her just to see what happens when Trump keeps calling her Pocahontas. I think most people would be grossed out by it.

10 hours ago, Kalbear said:

If people actually hated banks? SURE! No real sign of that, though. Otherwise the tax cuts would have outraged people a lot more than they did. 

People do hate the banks, but their individual greed supersedes their hate. David Cross had a great rift about this after the Bush tax cuts. “So you’re saying the millionaires get monster tax cuts, and I get $300? SIGN ME UP!”

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's something about "militias" in there.

I always took that to mean cops can have guns in the modern sense, but what do I know?