REPUBLICANS ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS STUFF

I mean seriously, if every politician who thought they got cheated and their aggrieved supporters count as disenfranchised, then I guess we haul Diebold into court on a Civil Rights Act violation for disenfranchising Democrats in 2004 or something? Hey, we can't like prove anything happened, but lots of people thought it!

I want a full explanation of this "well, if you feel cheated, you're disenfranchised" conception of disenfranchisement. I mean I know the classical definition involves actual evidence of having your suffrage removed, I'm more interested in how the new modern vision of disenfranchisement based on thoughts, beliefs and feeling operates. Conservatives, please explain this for me, I think it may become quite useful to understand this since it's probably the hawt new argument in favor of voting IDs or grandfather clauses or poll taxes or whatever you guys will want after Obama wins.

You realize disenfranchisement is not a legal cause of action? Even your "classical definition" is not a legal cause of action. But the vast majority of the voter Id laws have been up held as a legitimate means for a State to verify a person is eligible to vote.

Just curious if the liberals believe all these laws are so bad, and have challenged every other voter id law, why was there no up roar and legal challenge to the Rhode Island law? Why do you continue to address conservatives when the article and my statement only cited democrats who also believe this.

Oh and pretty sure Dems have also defined disenfranchisement as ballot box stuffing.

"Direct" disenfranchisement refers to actions that explicitly prevent people from voting or having their votes counted, as opposed to "indirect" techniques, which attempt to prevent people's votes from having an impact on political outcomes (e.g., gerrymandering, ballot box stuffing, stripping elected officials of their powers).

http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/disenfranchise1.htm

I'm not arguing ballot box stuffing isn't disenfranchisement. I'm criticizing *your* proposed standard: it doesn't matter if ballot box stuffing happened or not, disenfranchisement happens if people believe it did:

Disenfranchisement isn't if sore losers and brigades of moronic malcontents who support them believing in fairy tales. Disenfranchisement is when the actual act of revoking someone's right to vote happens. There's this matter of empiricism that I know modern right-wingers would prefer to ignore (empiricism: "did the thing actually happen vs. not just mass hysteria among tards") but it is actually, you know, incredibly important to determining whether actual disenfranchisement happened on the real planet Earth.

To put it a straight-forwardly as possible: right-wingers believing blacks and illegal Mexicans stole the election isn't disenfranchisement. That's just standard stupid. You actually have to prove it.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/in...s-okeefe-sting

I thought somebody posted something about this ITT but maybe not.

The ACORN video guys tried to "sting" SEIU busing people to the polls because they assumed there were shenigans:
And so they did that sting. And never released any of the video.

They really can't imagine that people might be beating them honestly.

I think it would be fascinating to find out why right-wing fantasies of voter fraud involve bussing people around. It's like, seriously, the stupidest and most inefficient and costly way to steal an election. There's gotta be some Fruedian lizard brain stuff about fears about public transportation and racial minorities or something motivating those kinds of nonsensical fears about buses. Blacks ruin everything -- elections, their suburban enclaves, their kids schools -- always with their buses. I mean they clearly get why the whole thing is ******ed -- "though I don't know the mechanics of that" -- and yet the mystical quest to find busloads of browns voting at dozens of polling places continues.

itt people wondering why irrational fears are not rational

I don't need to pile on Ogalala too much after a solid DVowning, but I'm still loling at the fact that he thinks that if enough people believe in a fairy tale, that's just cause for disenfranchising thousands of people. I mean, I know he can't assert that if a lot of people believe in a fairy tale, then the government should do an investigation. The government has done the investigation, and we know the fairy tale is a fairy tale. But yeah, rather than take his licks and go home, no, the existence of a fairy tale that people believe is now grounds for any sort of government action. Hey, I believe there are roving bands of black teens running around with AIDS-infected needles pricking white people! Who's with me? Let's get the government to lock up black teens.

So basically the anti gay marriage crowd

Sure, but it can be instructive to discover why irrationality manifests the way it does. Lots of people think the UFO obsession in the west was a response to Cold War fears. Unknown scary objects in the sky were basically a proxy for Cold War anxieties about Soviet nukes and the like, an airborne menace just over the horizon. That a cultural hysteria involved scanning the skies for mysterious and frightening objects and then seeing them makes sense given the context.

So we get to this question about white racial anxiety. I think it's interesting that right-wing fears about racial minorities engaged in nefarious schemes to **** over white people curiously often involve buses. I suspect, though, that it's more that the purveyors of the fantasy know that blacks and buses have a long history of conjuring up fearful and angry emotions among white America and so it's sort of the go-to "this is how they steal elections, with the buses" meme implants itself: it's easier to seep into the brain if there's been 40-50 years of priming the fear of black people on buses coming into their school districts, so the pushers of the VOTER IDS NOW policies want to quickly hit the fear and emotion-charged buttons in the hoi polloi to get them angry and they know a mythology of buses full of brown people hits the right chords to motivate.

O'Keefe admits he can't even imagine the mechanics of how it works, but he wants this story badly, because he knows, subconsciously or not, a bus full of brown people on video like going to vote playing around the clock on FNC is going to move the needle on voter IDs. There's a million ways the Democrats could conceivably steal an election that they could pour their energy into investigating, but buses full of brown people voting is the fastest and easiest way to get their end result of frightening white people, so it's the undying focus of the right to find and film these things.

As I said, that these myths occur again and again is interesting, you might be able to go one-level deeper and say some interesting stuff about whites and their fears about large groups of mobile blacks. This all of course pop psych conjecture but there's no way the reoccurring fantasies of transient blacks causing mischief and stress for whites is an accident. O'Keefe et al probably know pedestrian election stealing schemes Democrats try are probably not worth bothering about for many whites, but if they conjure up images of large groups of racial minorities moving about, and now you've got something to give a **** about.

Coming full circle, then, I'm not convinced right-wing fears about buses full of blacks is like irrational as much as it can be explained by your standard tribal impulses. It's irrational because it doesn't happen, of course, but rumors of the 'other tribe' quickly and expeditiously moving about where they don't belong and maybe causing a threat to your tribes' power would be a cause for stress for humans for probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of years prior to the dawn of agriculture and civilization. That the myth of blacks and illegals stealing elections inevitably involves large groups of the competing tribe on the move makes sense in context. It's obviously not rational but it's a conditioned response due to millions of years of evolution where those kinds of rumors would understandably be stressful.

and, to add a touch more irony to a situation already bloated with it:

source

source

and, of course

source

The GOP just passed a number of restrictive measures on registration including penalties and felony charges. It was overturned by the FL Supreme Court. So, maybe they decided **** it. If you can't beat the fictional rampant fraudulent registrations, you may as well join them.

Most lulz for source

dear god lol gop, what a disaster of a political party

Oh god, the only way that ironing could get more delicious is if their fake voter was named Tony Romo.

CALL EMERGENCY SESSION OF CONGRESS TO DEFUND ALL REPUBLICAN PARTY ACTIVITIES AND ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH IT, FAKE VOTER REGISTRATION WILL NOT STAND

good idea lol

source

So some Dems and some Reps believe X is happening. (did not say I did)

Currently nothing would show if X is happening or not

But There is a simple solution to X, that unlike the far left Libs opn this board most peolp do not believe it would disenfranchise anyone. Which a lot of libs agree with.

In addition the voting rolls are a mess and it is clear people are voting who should not be but the far left does not want to change any controls to voting. Wonder why.

A bipartisan commission study this, most experts in the area of voting and recomended the above. But keeping f@@@@@ that chicken that are voting system is perfect and requirning people to get Id's is somehow beyond the ability of the minorities. Not sure how they will be able to get health insurance if they can not even figure out to get an Id.

In the case of vote fraud, this is false. It is possible to tell if it is happening. People have gone looking for it. They've found only a tiny bit.

false

Logically fallacious appeal to popularity. People are stupid.
false

Very, very few.

We've been very clear why.

false

OK bro!

You sir, are going to hell.

1. Find every case of voter fraud you can, and turn your propaganda machine on full blast to erode confidence in the system.

2. Get called out on fairy tales like El Macho, and the fact that none of the fraud you uncovered would be prevented by voter ID laws.

3. Pivot to claim it's not about any actual fraud - but restoring the "confidence in the system" that you damaged in step #1.


I know we bag on Republican leadership a lot around here, but I have to admit this is pretty ****ing brilliant.

Any individual who accepts any kind of government welfare should lose their right to vote.

I don't think you want to go too far down that road, but thanks for participating!

Sweet. Voting for nobody!

I get food stamps, I give up my vote, a conservative vote.

I think we need to give ogallalabob a hand for making what has to be the worst post of 2012.