+1

No, I'm saying that any change to voting requirements, regardless of how trivial, would get decried by someone. The comment was pretty str8 forward and it was independent everything else I'd argued in this thread.

Regardless, I think you're overestimating the intelligence level and reasoning capabilities of the average state/local politician by a wide margin. Especially when it comes to enacting legislation that has popular support from their even less intelligent constituents. Take Alabama, it's a state that's full of bigots who are obsessed with making sure illegal immigrants don't take over their state and make everyone have to choose whether they want their automated phone prompts in English or Spanish. It's completely plausible that they could enact legislation there designed to assuage concerns over illegal immigrants voting in elections, despite the fact that Hispanics in general have extremely low voter turn out, without any kind of greater GOP voter suppression strategy conspiracy coming into play. I'm not saying this is for sure the case, I just don't think voter suppression is nearly as obvious an explanation as Phill et al were saying and I think when those types of accusations are frivolously made it is distracting and damaging in the greater scheme of things for a number of reasons. I certainly don't think the fact that allegations of voter fraud turned out to be inaccurate is nearly the damning piece of evidence many of you guys seem to think it is.

When states arent taking university IDs and are banning voting on a Sunday, exactly what conclusion should be drawn other than manipulation of voting demographics?

Semi-relevant but my student ID in New Zealand couldn't be used to buy alcohol (on or off campus).

There are probably going to be fringe examples where some IDs arent acceptable identification for various things. However to take a "principled" cutoff against any student IDs tells you all you need to know.

Up untill my last year or so @ UF our student IDs were little more than a higher quality laminated printout. Not exactly the hardest thing to forge and certainly worthy of concern if you were a partisan follower of a political party who *believe* their opposition spends tons of time and money gerrymandering districts and trying to think up all sorts of ways to tilt elections in their favor including getting as many ineligible voters to vote illegally as possible.

This undoubtedly is an attempt to alter the voter base, disenfranchising a part of the electorate in the process.

The funny part is people somehow think the Democrats don't engage in similar tactics when convenient.

Lol.... guess you can make this accusation without any evidence at all. But if somebody wants to claim something about the republicans they better have a rigorous proof that could stand up in a court of law. Nice consistency. But I'm thinking I've also reached the Suzzer point in this conversation and doubt you are being serious so I'll end it here.

There's no question that when liberals are in charge they do stuff like allowing more time for early voting. So yeah, both sides are aware of which side of the turnout bread they want buttered...


but one side is "disenfranchising people" and the other is "making it easy for people to exercise a fundamental right." I'm comfortable making a moral judgment call there

Democrats have never hesitated to disenfranchise when it suited them.

Military personnel for example.

It just so happens there aren't a lot of Republican voting blocs that's easy to target. But then I am sure someone is trying to figure out how to make it harder for evangelicals to vote.

Is there actually any hard evidence supporting the disenfranchisment theory? (That is, beyond a handful of anecdotes). I mean, it's a sensible conjecture but unless there is, it's hypocritical to attack a policy with unproven benefits with a claim of unproven costs.

Yeah dude, because a flippant remark saying *someone* would decry it is the same thing as saying there's a massive coordinated effort.

Are you asking us if there's hard evidence that the reforms instituted by Republicans in 2010 disenfranchised people in the 2012 election? Because I'm gonna be honest, I'll have to get back to you on that.

Yeah, lets wait and see how stopping 75 year old institutions that register voters due to making it a felony to turn in registration sheets more than 48 hours after they are filled in, stopping students voting in entire states using their student IDs and hundreds of thousands of ex cons stripped of their vote makes a difference

Took awhile, but glad this was pointed out. To Fly's point though, better to be on the good side for the wrong reasons I guess.

But at the end of the day, this is simply politicians gonna politician.

........

On a more theoretical note, let's think about how you might design a voting system if you were starting a new society today. Would having some sort of check on who voted be a criteria? Would an ID be a very simple way of handling that?

Like others itt have pointed out, you need ID to do a lot of things, most of them less important than voting (as far as most people are concerned). Something about that seems off to me.