I call complete and utter BS. Literally no boss on earth would do this. She might ask why you couldn't go before or after work, but if you had a good reason why you had to leave during work I'm sure that either your boss would be fine with it, or you work in a sweatshop hell hole for a complete bitch.

1. No one is turned away from voting. If they do not have ID then there is a period of time they can show the documentation and their vote counts. So those that want to vote and are turned away are 0%

2. well I at least your down to 2 or 3 levels of magnitude rather then 10.

3. The number W/O ID is prior to the law. Surely your not going to contend that all 100% or even a majority will not or can not get id to vote. At which point it is not going to be close to "Millions". I would contend the number is lower then 1% and those would not vote anyway.

Never heard of the group or of Weyrich. But your story is a liberal opinion piece that qoutes this weyrich and attaches his statement to the rest of the GOP.

I liked the 1st paragraph that some measures could prevent ex cons and immigrants from voting. Wow lets stop someone from voting who should not be voting.

It also talks about a lot of things that are outside voter id. laws. Some seem to go a little over board.

You don't think any ex cons should be allowed to vote?

Nope

1. Oh great! Even more bureaucratic hoops for the poor to jump through, and they have to do it before a certain time and at a certain place.

2. I never said 10 orders of magnitude. Maybe you don't understand what an order of magnitude is? It's a factor of ten. A million = 10⁶ = 6 orders of magnitude. There aren't even 10 orders of magnitude worth of people on the planet yet.

3. OK, let's say that 90% of that 0.5% of the voting population without ID now who want to vote go and get it. That is a high estimate imo. Now you're merely advocating for disenfranchising 10 people to stop 1 illegitimate voter instead of disenfranchising 100. That is still blatantly unjust, even by your own standards.

Of course not. We can't have the brown people who disproportionately get hit with felony drug convictions start voting against the drug war or something. They might even start voting against raising taxes on the poor! Or in favor of affirmative action! One sufficiently bad pot bust and your rights go out the window.

Why?

It would be a hoop for a voter some are going to be mid class.

Not sure 90% is high, I would have it very low. But I may have a higher opinion of the Dem base then you do.

You're deliberately missing or ignoring the point that this is a concerted, coordinated effort by republicans to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote democrat. That on it's face throws into question their supposed primary motivation of stopping voter fraud, which you still chose to believe, despite incredibly obvious evidence to the contrary.

I'm no fan of the GOP or their policies but you will not convince me that asking someone to identify themselves to vote is unreasonable. It is not hard to get an ID. My grandfather didn't drive during his last 3 years but he still had an ID. Sometimes you have to identify yourself and I have no problem with making sure everyone that votes is who they say they are.

And we've come back to "I'm white middle class and don't have problems getting an ID" argument for the 128878th time.

Social Security somehow has my birthday wrong. It's the 28th and they have the 20th. Obvious typo somewhere along the line. This causes problems every now and then and my biggest fear is it will cause some major identity issue somewhere down the line.

I went down to the SS office 4 times to try to change it but got tired of waiting the first three times. When I finally stuck it out, I was told my city certified birth certificate wasn't good enough, I need a state certified birth certificate. They gave me a packet for getting a new state-certified birth certificate from Missouri, and it looked like a giant pain, especially since I am in CA. So for now I just said screw it.

How many people who have been voting for 60 years and may not even know what hospital they were born in are going to want to go through all that just to vote? How does an 85-year-old mostly shutin born in extreme poor rural south even go about proving their identity?

But hey, my Momma took me to the DMV to get my license when I was 16. So I don't get what all the fuss is about.

:drudgesiren:
Man who used to have a driver's license and a car found it very easy to get an ID card even after he stopped driving!

Developing...

Wow, this thread keeps on giving. I mean this info was posted like two days ago and bob's still off by a staggering amount! You can't make up the **** these people believe.

Lol she is kind of a bitch, it's by no means a hell hole though.

I find it interesting that you can't comprehend that some employers (especially those with client driven work with tight deadlines like mine) wouldn't automatically be ok with me peacing out for an hour and half to go vote. I don't even work that much; I can imagine how much laughter I would get from my friends in finance/I-banking/hedge funds if I asked them if their boss lets them leave work in the middle of the day to go vote -- they sleep under their desks sometimes for ****'s sake.

I'm sure if I gave my boss a weeks notice and said I had to go vote or go to the doctor's office or whatever I could make it work (and have in the past), but my point was more that rjoe's attitude of "IT'S THE LAW YOU CAN'T STOP ME FROM GOING TO VOTE" is the sort of attitude that I find really annoying. That I wouldn't have a problem myself with letting people go (and in fact didn't at my last job when I was supervising 8 people) is immaterial; I also understand her mentality and don't take offense because she expects me to be working and earning during business hours. She's the boss and that's her right.

You're not okay with my attitude of saying 'Hey, I have a right to vote and you can't punish me for exercising it' but you're okay with your bosses attitude of '**** your rights and do what I tell you'?

I know you have no idea what the laws say so I'll help you out here. Most states say that if you don't have 2-3 hours off during the time the polls are open then you can have time off (enough to give you that 2-3 hour window) so it doesn't even come up in most 9-5 jobs. Even if you work 9-8 and polls close at 9 you're only getting 1-2 hours off to go vote, how onerous is that really?

If you live in a state with such a law I highly doubt your boss would tell you to **** off when asking for time since they could face a criminal felony offense for doing so.

But absolute worst case scenario, once every 2-4 years his boss might lose a couple billable hours. Unacceptable!

Let me be more clear: I don't give a **** what the laws say. I'm a working professional, and my job comes first for me during the hours I'm expected to be working. Sure, I could be a total pain in the ass and schedule my voting/doctor/dentist/furniture deliveries during work hours, but I don't unless there's no other option (and there usually is).

Having previously worked at a company where part of the work force was unionized, I completely understand someone who's in a union having your sort of attitude (even if it's not the one I personally have). I'm not a giant fan of unions in general, but I understand that they exist, and that they have served a valuable purpose in leveling the playing field for labor through collective bargaining, blah blah blah. It literally boggles my mind that you can't at least understand my attitude, even if you obviously don't practice it yourself.

I'm not in any of the following professions, but do you seriously think hedge fund managers/doctors/lawyers etc who work 100 hour weeks can just go to their boss and say "THE LAW SAYS YOU HAVE TO LET ME GO VOTE FOR UP TO 3 HOURS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BUSINESS DAY LICK MY BALLS IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT I AM EMPOWERED"? I know that "the law" says your employer can't legally discriminate against you for that, but hey, suddenly you have less billable hours, and you're being a whiny pain in the ass! That counts for something during bonus/raise time, even if you think it shouldn't.

What exactly do you do for a living? (Feel free to be general if you'd like -- I'm genuinely curious, no malice or anything intended in the question.)

lol democracy

For someone who I'm assuming thinks of himself as liberal and open-minded, you are being awfully stubborn about simply conceding a point about my own working environment. Just because you or I or rjoe or most of the other posters in this thread think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to take off for an hour to go run an errand, doesn't mean the entire country thinks like that; a non-trivial number of people in this country don't/can't operate like that with respect to their employment. I have a certain amount that I'm expected to produce every day/week/month/year -- is that really so foreign of a concept?

If I can take 2 hours off for voting, what about doctor and dentist visits for me, and my kids if I eventually have them, or any other of the various daily errands where it would be much more convenient for me to do during the day? Eventually that stuff adds up, and in some jobs doing that is frowned upon --whether or not you think that's stupid/unfair/illegal doesn't matter. It happens and some of us deal with it. It's not my employer's job to make my life easier; it's their job to compensate me for my performance.

I run a business, and I also try and discourage my staff from voting during working hours, or voting at all, really. That keeps them from voting for people who will pass laws that force me to do expensive things like create safe working conditions and offer benefit packages.

You realize that sort of business is not at all what I'm talking about, right? Can we stop the strawmanning? You've got to be trolling me now, right?

And you realize that the people in the professions I mentioned are probably statistically more likely to be Republican, right? Seems like a win-win for you!

You sure do like to twist the issue into weird hypotheticals that no one else is talking about. I'm not entirely sure what unions have to do with this either...

If I have the right to vote I'll do it. For the vast majority of people this law will never even come up as polls are often open 14ish hours and absentee/early voting is possible in most states (where the GOP hasn't ended it that is).

At no point in my simple explanation of what the law was to you did I advocate telling your boss to suck your dick and let you go vote whenever you wanted. FWIW I don't think the law would cover you telling your boss to suck your dick cause you're going to go vote whether they like it or not but it'd be an interesting case I'm sure.

It must suck to work in a place where going to vote once a year results in your boss hating you and trying to figure out how to screw you down the road.

If we're going to play that game, I never advocated telling someone's boss to suck one's dick, I said lick one's balls. That's an important semantic difference that I feel we should agree on, mostly so I can avoid actually answering your question while appearing to score an important point for myself.

I'm sorry, I associate stridently citing what particular laws entitle one to in the workplace more with union than non-union people; I have worked in both environments and that has been my experience. Feel free to tell me how wrong I am in your next response.

What did I say that was hypothetical? I have friends whose working situations are exactly as I described (mine certainly is not, 60 hrs/wk is a big week for me, thank god). And are you stating that, were you an owner of a business that requires work to be performed and billed in order to get paid, that you wouldn't look more favorably on someone who handled their own **** on their own time and didn't bother you about it unless absolutely necessary? I know for enlightened liberals such things aren't a problem, but some of us work for meanies that care about promoting people who make them the most money and not who raised the most money for United Way.

Nowhere in what I posted did I state or imply that '1 hour off/yr' = 'boss trys to destroy your career'. I simply noted that the kind of person who is more likely to vote at 2 in the afternoon is more likely to do a lot of different things during the workday, and be absent more than I (and many employers) consider to be optimal in the sort of business I'm in. Such a thing certainly has the potential to affect one's career, and it's naive to think otherwise.

You never answered me about what you did for a living. Through lurking the Wisconsin thread I thought it had something, directly or indirectly, to do with unions, but I didn't remember for sure and didn't want to misstate something. I work in healthcare consulting FWIW.