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.

It's not as if there aren't existing Voter ID laws?

It's only a massive coordinated effort in the sense that every political movement is. It's no different than democrats going into the inner cities and registering poor minorities to vote. They are doing that largely because it helps them win elections.

People are going to do things that benefits them... and they will post fit the "principles" after the fact.

Democrats: "We need to make sure that everybody's voice is heard"

Repub: "We need to make sure that elections are free from fraud"

It is totally asinine to think that those parties just randomly take those sides without regards to how it effects their chances of winning.

University IDs aren't good for much. I can remember once having a pay check that I couldn't cash because my license was expired and no bank would take my student ID. I needed to cash the check to renew my driver's license.

No idea about the Sunday voting. Were they paying overtime on Sundays? Another explanation (besides that they are targeting minorities) could be that some people find it offensive to vote on Sunday. I think there would be a huge overlap between racists and people that find it offensive to vote on Sunday (ie The Southern Baptists could oppose voting on Sunday without knowing is disenfranchises minorities, but they would like that it disenfranchises minorities).

Yep, I don't disagree with that. The difference is that you think people's ostensible claims to be concerned with preventing voter fraud necessitate an underlying motive to disenfranchise as many eligible voters as possible. I don't disagree that this is possible, but I don't think the evidence put forward at the beginning ott was enough to say that definitively. Certainly the Karl Roves are likely to have those motives, but I don't think mid-level party people in various states necessarily do.

My big issue is that I think it's unnecessarily divisive to go around making poorly supported accusations the way Phill and Suzzer were at the beginning of the thread over such a trivial issue because there may be a ton of people who are (irrationally) concerned with voter fraud who don't intend to or realize that the policies they support disenfranchise large swaths of voters. These people will be instantly turned off by such accusations and any sort of useful discussion becomes impossible. Even if these types of people don't exist in large numbers as I suspect they do it's easy enough to make a reasonable, non partisan shill sounding case as DVaut did.

Semi-gruniching, as usual.

I'm going to use this thread as an opportunity for me to pimp my 4-point program for curing everything wrong with this country.

1. End gerrymandering, and create system where non-partisan groups define all congressional districts.
2. Provide simple, yet technologically reliable, voting machines in every voting location (machines that also create paper trails).
3. Permit votes to be made in person over the course of several days, preferably on the weekend.
4. Enable on-line voting.

That's it. Do these steps and nirvana will follow.

But fraudulent voting is already illegal, that's the point you seem to be missing.

Like by your logic there's nothing to prevent an organized scheme to kidnap the loved ones of millions of voters and force them to vote a specific way. Except there is, because kidnapping is already a felony. So is voter fraud.

I'm with you except for this one -- we can all see the disastrous effects of online voting as witnessed by Yao Ming's selection to the NBA all-star team. I mean, did he even play a game last season? And that was just an all-star game, just think of the potential for unalloyed evil you'd be opening up by allowing people to vote for POTUS online.

Yeah, not to mention Kris Allen winning American Idol.

Wow these ALEC guys are pretty much everything that's wrong with this country: http://www.google.com/search?q=Ameri...ange%20Council

ahahahahahah

seriously, though, there's nothing in the constitution that specifies that representatives have to be elected by districts. Just get rid of that flawed idea and start over.

I'll admit that it always felt as if WA was trying to ensure my ballot didn't count, but is there any actual evidence of this?

(fwiw, I never received my absentee ballot from Washington on time when I was in the military)

A political party using dubious means to futher their ends? quick! someone alert the media!

Why do you hate free speech?!?

Grrr stupid iPad, the link should actually be: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...change_Council

Hey look, conservatives using taxpayer dollars to fund their vacations, er trips to these conferences.

The military is so overwhelmingly Republican Democrats have consistently fell on whichever side that tended to disenfranchise absentee ballots for a long time.

Anything from not counting their votes at all for local elections if they are stationed overseas (arguing they aren't current local residents essentially), mailing ballots out at last possible moment (even illegally late), earlier deadlines and just about everything else they can come up with to count fewer military votes.

They do this so often it's not even news anymore.

So is terrorism (and for that matter, underage drinking).

Make the election day on a Monday - have it be a national holiday.
Everyone who registered gets mailed a ballot or you can cast your ballot in any Starbucks.

ez game

Am I allowed to agree that intentional Republican voter disenfranchising is horrific and anti-American while at the same time thinking that having to show a government issued ID to vote is a completely reasonable thing to require?

As an aside, are there any hard statistics out there about how many voting age eligible Americans there are, and how many individuals of voting age have government issued IDs? As mentioned earlier in the thread (and by my militant Democratic friends), I realize it can be hard for 96 year olds with no birth certificate to get a government ID, but stating that there is a broad swath of the population that is incapable of getting a DL seems like infantilization to me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/opinion/27wed1.html

All jokes aside, I think it wouldn't be too hard to implement a secure online voting process with multiple forms of verification.