What I like about it (and what bums me out at the same time) is the disconnect between what an utterly trivial amount of money this was to enfranchise (re-enfranchise?) so many people, while at the same time being such an insurmountable hurdle to the thousands of people affected.
I guarantee that Bloomberg’s net worth has increased an average of significantly more than $17mil per DAY in the last five years. It’s not even a rounding error for a quarterly report for these people, and it has the power to give the vote back to thousands who had it wrongfully taken.
It is and in a decade or two the courts will meaningfully clamp down on it. Unfortunately it will do tremendous damage along the way and they’ll have moved on to their next few rounds of voter suppression.
The point is they haven’t really been handed any kind of defeat, not even a small one. There’s a poll tax, it’s been paid for some people, but there’s still a poll tax, and it had to be paid. A few more people get to vote because of the indulgence of some wealthy people. That’s not really a victory. That’s still basically serfdom.
Honestly even if it was coordinated with a campaign I think it would be fine. For bribery the gift has to be contingent on extracting a promise of the vote, which is basically impossible because of the secret ballot.
If a political campaign decided that instead of advertising it was going to delivery groceries to food insecure people, it would be up to those people to decide whether that was the sort of person they wanted to vote for. Did it show they have the right priorities, or was it just crass to think that votes could be bought on the cheap? Does it show the candidate will continue to look after people after being elected or does it suggest they think that’s a one time payment and they’ll ignore you in the future?
Besides which providing people with things of monetary value is totally allowed. What campaigns do all the time is drive people to the polls without charging them for gas. And they don’t make a secret of which nominee is responsible for it.
I don’t think bribing of individual voters is even a thing to worry about.
The thing is, that would never even occur to them because it involves helping people as opposed to terrifying them. To Republicans, voter fidelity is contingent upon voters feeling unsettled, disenfranchised and in some form of constant deprivation. Even if they have to fabricate that unease out of whole cloth, it’s their only method.
ETA: Of course, this doesn’t apply to the wealthy Republicans and corporations this is all designed to benefit. They know exactly how the hand feeds them.
I think you are probably right when it comes to the “bribery” aspect. I think it would be a dicey issue for campaign finance regulation, though, but definitely not under the present facts.
Presumably, with enough Democratic voters thus enfranchised, they will vote in legislators who will do away with this new poll tax. Problem (eventually) solved.
This is great, but I thought a big part of the problem was that people don’t know what (if anything) they owe and the state can’t or won’t tell them, making the whole thing considerably more Kafkaesque.
I thought the problem in Florida was that the system was so complex that it was impossible to be sure how much an ex felon might own. Has that been solved, because otherwise it will be hard to pay off any fines.
