North Carolina's voter suppression law struck down as "racist"

boing
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Michael, what people are telling you is that the facts your argument’s built on seem shaky. They’re skeptical. If you don’t feel like showing them where they can find the facts you insist are true, it doesn’t make them lazy if they don’t do so themselves. It just means that they’ve shrugged their shoulders and decided you’re winging it.

Besides, the court didn’t find simply that requiring ID was inherently racist. It nailed an explicitly racist plan in which the specifics of ID requirements were one part of a voter suppression scheme.

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No need to be so snarky. I was merely pointing out that there are credible sources that find that voter fraud is not as rare as some suggest. It’s a debatable subject.

Now, if you want to widening the subject to include election fraud by talking about people out to “rig elections”, you are on shaky ground if you suggest that doesn’t happen. There are countless people serving jail time for it.

Here is an article from Salon that recounts some small part of the history of Cook county were the old joke is " bury me in Cook County so I can continue to vote Democratic for eternity"

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Or Diebold electronic voting machines.

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86

I had a daughter who did this: had to bring all her vital records (etc.) documentation to the polling station. If anything, she had done MORE to prove she was herself than someone who showed up and just signed their name. Really, it’s not an actual problem in the U.S. The only problem is that non-white citizens and Democrats in general all want to exercise their civic duty to vote, and apparently that must be discouraged.

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87

So you’re a Chicagoan? :wink:

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There are 50 states, plus DC. The rules are different on a state-by-state basis.

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Did you know that not everyone has a checking account? Or flies in an airplane? Or uses a credit card?

Did you know that there are people in the U.S. who don’t even have the official vital record of a birth certificate to use to get photo ID?

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Correct in Texas voter ID has keep the elections safe and secure from
illegal voting yet throughout the northeast there have been numerous
illegal voters like in the precincts where there are more people
voting then registered to vote (Chicago).

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You do know that’s ancient history in Chicago, right? I mean, we still joke about it, but it’s not actually happening in this century.

Edited to add: you think we’re in the northeast? We’re Midwesterners, and damned proud of it.

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How weird that you got no reply.

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[citation needed]

Also, “numerous” is an extremely vague value to use as evidence that voter ID is necessary. How about evidence that there have been significant numbers, and that those numbers would be stopped by voter ID laws without also stopping an equal or larger number of otherwise legal voters (and, that other less restrictive methods would be incapable of doing so)?

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It happened in the last election and there is no reason to believe it
will not happen in this upcoming one. While I understand the press did
not cover it very well I remember the cases coming across my desk with
the information that I wanted not to believe but proved true.

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Sorry but that’s your opinion, which you are entitled to but as I’m
entitled to mine, numerous is more than one and as such too many.

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Any people denied their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote, is too many.

Anything below significant numbers of people improperly voting? By definition, that’s statistical noise.

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Correct and who is Constitutionally allowed to vote? As I see it, citizens.
So one should have to prove they are who they say they are and that they
are a citizen and thus have that Constitutional right to vote.

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Unless you can actually show that requiring such a thing does more good than harm, I’m not sure why you think anyone should listen to what you think people “should” have to do in order to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Especially when it’s been legally decided in several cases so far that there was more harm done than good.

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I’d kinda like to refer you to the Blackstone ratio here. Might’ve heard of the guy, really popular among the founding fathers: it’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than wrongly punish an innocent one. Ben Franklin pushed it up to 100, and growing up near Philadelphia I have to say I’m a bit of a fan of him myself.

Would you concede that whatever plan you have for this will wrongly be denied their constitutionally guaranteed the right to vote? How many bad guys is your plan going to catch per perfectly legal citizen denied their right?

For what it’s worth, as an NC resident the issue, as I recall, isn’t quite so much in the lack of people getting IDs, I could concede perhaps that $10 is not a totally unreasonable sum (although it still amounts to a poll tax.) The issue is in the manipulation of DMV locations, where you can get these IDs: stuff like closing down locations which are too easy to reach when you don’t own a car, limiting DMV hours so that if you work then you simply can’t get there before they close even if you do have a car.

What’s more I’ll just go ahead and reject your claim that this law will help with voter fraud, because quite simply it’s a non problem: in the last 7 years, there have been a whopping 2 confirmed cases of voter fraud which would be mitigated by a voter ID law like you propose and which my state enacted. I’d actually encourage you to read the document as a whole there because it actually addresses one of your concerns: yes, you need an ID to cash a check, to enter some buildings, to fly on an airplane, but we do not have a constitutional right to do any of these things.

The fact is that either these politicians were so concerned with those 2 cases of voter fraud (or we can be generous and say 49 cases, because there was some absentee fraud which wouldn’t be fixed by this law,) that they’ve opted to render 300,000 citizens of my state ineligible to vote without jumping through new hoops. Granted, only about 138,000 of them voted in 2012, but for some reason I think Hillary v Trump is going to be a lot scarier and a lot more interesting a race than Obama v Romney, don’t you think? The Republican government, in terms of equivalence, passed a law requiring that the entire asian population of my state now has to pay an extra tax to be able to vote this year, even ignoring the problems of accessibility which place an extra burden on the population, where that population just happens to disproportionately vote Democrat.

EDIT: With respect to the car stuff, I’m trying to find the news article I saw about it; it was some months ago though, chronicling how much stuff a woman had to get through in order to get a voting-usable ID.

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Okay I’ll prove that Photo ID does more good then harm. See in America the
right to vote is sacred and it perhaps the most important thing we do to
keep America consistently the most important nation in the world. I take my
voting right seriously and as such why should my vote be cancelled out by
fraudulent votes from those who do not have that right? Voter ID can
significantly defeat and deter impersonation fraud at the polls, voting
under fictitious names or in the names of dead voters, double-voting by
individuals registered in more than one state, and voting by individuals
who are in the United States illegally. While I’m not claim that there is
voter fraud in every election as the Supreme Court said, “not only is the
risk of voter fraud real,” but “it could affect the outcome of a close
election.” And it wasn’t too long ago that we had a presidential election
decided by only about 500 votes. Voter ID also increases the public’s
confidence in election results, an essential element in a stable democracy.

Opponents are wrong that voter ID will depress turnout or prevent large
number of individuals from voting. ID laws have been in place in Texas,
Georgia and Indiana for more than five years, and there has been no
decrease in the turnout of minority, poor, and elderly voters. That is
because Americans of every background overwhelmingly have photo ID. And the
few who do not can easily obtain a free one in the states that have
implemented such laws.

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Found it! An 86 year old woman over in Asheville was found unable to get a voter ID because she was unable to prove that the M in her name stood for Miller, and this was only fixed when she became a state-wide news story. We also had a doctor who was forced to hold up the line and spell out his rather long, complicated (South Asian I believe,) name while everyone else went along just fine in the other lines. He also complained about having to give his address, but at least up here where I live that was required of everyone, so I won’t hold it against the state.

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I do hate to be annoyed by childishness