I did not equate anything, I just mentioned that those were primary strategies of the two parties.
I absolutely agree with your premise. I do not agree that everyone deserves their vote. For instance, I do not believe that citizens of foreign countries should get to vote in US elections. Children should not get to vote. People who have already voted should not get to vote. The dead should not be discovered to have voted. In my state, felons do not get to vote, until after they have served their sentence.
I understand that both parties have mantras about illegal voting. Democrats always say that there is not, and never has been, voter fraud. Republicans always say that voter fraud is completely out of control, and must be dealt with immediately. I personally suspect that neither party is particularly truthful.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379414000973
This is a strawman of his comment. He’s saying that “everyone that is part of the franchise–meaning adult citizens of the country–should be able to vote,” not “let’s artificially inflate the voting rolls with people that aren’t part of the voting franchise”, which is what your statement more or less accuses him of supporting.
This is then followed by a balance fallacy of “both sides do it”. Meanwhile, actual measured statistics show that illegal voting rates are literally 4-5 orders of magnitude less than voter disenfranchisement rates (less than 100 cases versus hundreds of thousands, per region). One is not equal to the other.
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Linking a study with all its methods and data behind a paywall is not particularly convincing, especially when the studies whose methods and data are available say the opposite.
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Uh … if you’re going to tell porkies, you might want to go back and edit the thing you’re denying first
Otherwise someone might call out your attempted retcon.
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It’s important to note that these studies tend to be about the sort of in person vote fraud the voter ID laws are claimed to counter. Even if that did exist (and accusers can seldom identity a single real world case) it’s an incredibly inefficient way to swing an election and even relatively high occurance is unlikely to have any effect.
But election fraud does exist. But it tends to take the form of corrupt officials manipulating counts and ballots, and the sort of voter suppression tactics the GOP is engaged in. The voter ID laws won’t have any effect on non-existant in person fraud. But they do (and are intended to) cause exactly the sort of voter manipulation that does exist.
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I guess I need to be more specific. I don’t see where people of color in contemporary American society are starting their own franchise or system. They’re still subject to the white privileged society laws that are enforced upon them. The closest I could see is anti-police individuals shooting police officers as a perceived effort to reject their authority (and abuse), but I don’t see any actual systems being put in place.
Are you saying you have first hand knowledge of such underground systems being created? Your statements are a little too abstract for me to understand what you’re getting at.
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The most comforting theory I’ve heard is that the Supreme Court has recognized that legislatures can be mendacious.
. And while the judges clearly took their cue from the Supreme Court, the decision that appears to have freed them from accepting legislative lies doesn’t deal with voting rights at all. It is, rather, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt—an abortion case that is really also about the judiciary’s responsibility to reject legislators’ fraudulent pretenses when a state curbs constitutional rights.
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I was replying to “Everyone”, which was not followed by a qualification. If Nytespryte had said something like “every eligible voter should have the opportunity to vote”, I would have agreed.
This is the fallacy of equivocation–i.e. the substitution of one meaning for a given word in one particular context for another meaning of that word in an alternate context in order to make the argument.
In the context of “voter disenfranchisement” saying that you want “everyone to be able to vote” is clearly addressed as being in contextual reference to the “everyone able to vote”, i.e. people who are being disenfranchised; the fallacy came into play by instead interpreting the statement in a different context, specifically that of being a desire to commit voter fraud by adding people from outside the franchise.
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There are plenty of people support the idea that every person should be able to vote, without all the qualifiers that you assume Nytespryte means. And there are plenty of examples of movements to expand voting rights to currently prohibited persons. When the Governor of Virginia speaks about people who should be able to vote, he clearly includes felons, otherwise he would not have signed that executive order. Others have made the case that noncitizen residents should be able to vote as well. I understand that the remark might well have been intended to mean only those eligible. but that is a stretch from making the assertion that they could only have meant all currently eligible voters.
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Yeah that one’s interesting. That case seems to have pulled together a lot of existing tradition and precedent on not buying specious arguments for mechanical/legal grounds. So lower courts have this one big, clean precedent to cite when they discard horse shit.
A lot of things have come together really coincidentally. A court with a pathway for progressive goals bursts into existence, decisions like Whole Women’s Health, and pretty clear evidence that certain other decisions ( like citizens United and invalidating parts of the voting rights act) have had hugely negative consequences and need to be tempered or reverse.
My feeling that Scalia’s death is key is because it seemed like there were minimal challenges while it was unclear the court would defeat them. No-one wanted to bring the case if it was just going to further entrench these laws.
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I know - you already said as much.
How do you figure? I have asked you about how/why this would be, but you have declined to clarify how this works.
You seem to be trying to turn a question into a different statement. I already told you that I do so. And that it is an obvious development from the scenario people are outlining here, so there are almost certainly others.
I very much doubt that. My “first hand knowledge” is the systems I implement with those who I know, there is not anything especially abstract about this. Rather than engaging me with regards to the questions I asked you, you seem to be obsessed by what you do/don’t “see”. What reason would there be for you to know the specifics of economic and policy decisions made by other networks of friends, families, communities, etc? That’s outside the scope of what I was discussing.
It feels more like you find something about my questions disagreeable and instead prefer to counter them with tangential questions, rather than that you do not understand.
His statement was, and I quote:
And we are in a topic regarding voter disenfranchisement.
In this context, your strawman and equivocation fallacies in response to that statement are still fallacious. Furthermore, they also require the fallacy of quoting out of context, especially since the previous comments in the chain are all in regards to the topic of voter disenfranchisement, with the exception of your own, which are the ones projecting the issue of “voter inflation” (weasel word fallacy) into a topic on voter disenfranchisement. And this is in the context of an article regarding conservative politicians openly admitting that the purposes of voter ID laws being for the purposes of disenfranchising people that may not vote for their ideology. So the only reason you can even attempt to claim that your interpretation on the contextual meaning of @nytespryte’s statement is because you say so, and because you keep saying so (fallacy of argument by assertion).
Meanwhile, you are also now instead attempting to induce both the moral equivalence fallacy (i.e. “This [other thing] is just as bad as [this thing]”) and the tu quoque fallacy (“both sides do it!”). However, your various fallacies in the appeal to “there are plenty of movements to expand voting rights to prohibited persons” are both off-topic in this context (feel free to start a topic on “people that shouldn’t be allowed to vote and here’s why” if you’re so passionate about it), and also smacks of deliberate obfuscation of the topic.
This is because, at the end of the day, UFO sightings and getting hit by lightning are both more common than voter fraud, much less voter “inflation”–there have been 42 new voter restriction bills passed in just the last 3 years–the franchise is being chopped away at relentlessly, and, as this topic shows, with a deliberate strategy and intent of disenfranchisement, not “inflated”.
Maybe in 15 years, if the political pendulum swings the other way, your boogeyman will be an actual concern, but, for now, it’s a distraction from discussion of the real-and-actual cases of politically motivated disenfranchisement by an organization that can accurately be described as having picked a neo-fascist as their potential leader.
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The picture in the article is of Glenn Grothman, an embarassment to Wisconsin. He was elected state senator because the previous senator in his district, Mary Panser, didn’t push TABOR or Concealed Carry through. After Walker and the GOP majority were elected in 2011. Grothman helped push through Concealed Carry and tax reforms. He also said that Kwanzaa was only practiced by white liberals and not by blacks. He called protesters at the Capitol dirty slobs. He had a bill that would have criminalized single mothers. When the head of one of the native american tribes took him to the house of some people who lived next to the then proposed iron mine in the Penokee Hills, Grothman told the people they could use caulk to plug leaks in the mine that could lead to contamination of their well water.
Grothman is now a congressman, and has a democrat opponent, Sarah Lloyd. Please help out her candidacy.
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Your interpretation was ungenerous, if I had meant to expand the topic I would have more clearly done so. I did in fact assume that it was understood that the discussion was of eligible voters. When unclear it is better to ask than assume the most extreme position.
One can only disenfranchise an eligible voter, using the word as a verb as we were.
Who should be eligible in the first place is a different issue.
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You know what really bugs me about this? Not so much that it happens at all, though it’s sad to be so… cynical about it. It’s pretty much the nature of those in power to gather more power for themselves (something something power corrupts…) Part of what bothers me is how these politicians are being so open about it. They admit, loud and proud, that they’re trying to take away people’s ability to vote. They’re not ashamed of it. They don’t even bother to try to hide it any more.
Why? Because they feel they can get away with it. That they have already gotten away with it, and they can continue to get away with it. They think they can tell us to our faces and there won’t be a thing we can do about it. So why hide it? They think they’ve already won.
The question that scares me most: are they right?
They’ve gerrymandered the districts to stack the deck in their favor. They use their wealth to lobby and outright buy the votes they need. They enact law after law to chip away at our rights, take away our votes, even our bodily autonomy.
Appeals are good, and I’m glad to see so many unfair laws overturned… but too many of these people behind it are still in power, and they will keep at it. It’s difficult if not impossible for the average Joe or Jen to get elected without barrels of cash and the help of the powerful… who expect much in return. And it’s all well and good that we’ve got a few candidates who promise to buck the system… but the system is stacked against them too. (And yes, as a Bernie girl I am biased. It’s damn hard not to be.)
I don’t want to make it sound hopeless. I desperately don’t want it to be hopeless. I really, truly want to believe that the tide is turning, and time will see a profound change in our government at all levels. But it’s hard to see the path ahead to that bright new future. And seeing how overt and brazen these lovely “operators” have become is chilling. Maybe that’s their purpose: to intimidate their opposition into backing down. They risk much by that strategy. They’re essentially daring the public: "Yeah, we rule you, what are you gonna do about it?’
Hopefully, people are going to get mad enough to fight… and win. With the voter ID laws getting overturned in state after state, I’m hoping the backlash has already begun. And that it’s only just beginning…
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Maybe I’m not even wrong. You’re getting even more abstract in your answers so I’m not even sure where to start.
People of color are are subject to white privileged society laws that are enforced upon them because cops have guns and can use force to make minorities comply with their orders. Businesses and municipalities can use laws to bankrupt people who don’t comply with the established rules of patriarchal white society. The only non-society society I can imagine is people who live off the grid, but that means they still have to avoid society and police if they’re to maintain their independence from society.
What scenario are people outlining here that you’re referring to? It seems like you’re not responding to my original comments so I don’t know what you’re saying.
While I can accept that there are things that exist that I don’t see, it’s hard to understand how they operate if I don’t see them in enough detail, which is why I’m asking for more information. I’m saying that if such systems exist, then I’m curious what they are and how they exist and how they skirt mainstream society successfully.
If you’re not inclined to provide details and are only saying “stuff you don’t see exists,” then that’s just not very helpful. You’re not communicating anything other than to say that the unseen is unseen.
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Comparing attempts to prevent specific groups from voting to attempts to encourage people to vote has absolutely nothing to do with phrasing. One of these things is supposed to happen in a democracy, while the other is completely unconstitutional.
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