Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/04/racism-by-the-numbers.html
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Across all registered voters in Texas, the researchers found 4.5 percent lack proper identification. For registered voters who actually showed up at the polls in 2012, it’s 1.5 percent.
What a surprise, that seems to imply voter ID laws depress voter turnout. A brilliant deduction, Professor Tautology!
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Shouldn’t they just, somehow, subpoena the studies that the GOP (or its minions) have already performed? They already know the demographic effects of voter ID laws. That’s why they push them with such alacrity in the first place.
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In many contexts a 1.5% failure rate is considered unacceptable: transit related fatalities, food safety, grocery-store checkout, toilet flushes. It’s worth noting that voter fraud is measured between 0.0003% and 0.00025% (Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth)
1.5% is a small percentage of the population, but unacceptable if you believe that all men are created equal.
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1.5 percentage points is easily enough to swing many elections.
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That’s precisely what happened in that North Carolina case. Where the judge stated that they’d “targeted black voters with surgical precision”. They’d actually commissioned studies on which forms of ID blacks have most access to. Then excluded them from the law.
I would assume that since that headline grabbing event the GOP has endeavored to cover its tracks better. But there should be easily discoverable documents and records. These people need to figure out how to suppress opposition demographics some how. And there’s already plenty out there where they openly discuss voter ID as a strategy for winning.
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With a two party system 1.5% is also a massive swing in your chances of winning an election. It doesn’t matter how small the number is if it’s enough to win.
In the third world, they just pour acid in the ballot boxes.
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We would have a different president if we could alter the presidential votes in 3 states by 1.5%…
…or maybe that already happened.
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Cooperation from Republicans?
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These two statiticians didn’t ‘come to the conclusion’ that data can be manipulated to produce wanted means of effecting suppression… They developed a means of demonstrating to our legal system that it IS real… If you reread the article you’ll see that past arguments in front of SCOTUS were turned away as allegorical… This is demonstrable fact.
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thats enough to prevent a president Trump - I’ll take it
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Quite the opposite, I’m afraid.
Already answered before you commented
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What is more discriminating are the voting hours, especially in todays’ work environment where you are expected to work overtime and can’t get to the polling place on time. I’ve missed several elections because the voting booths close so early. I bet I am not the only one. That means voting is biased toward people who have more leisure time instead of toward people who lead professional lives.
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Do you know that we used to not have to be citizens to vote? Did you know that non-citizens are human beings? Clearly not.
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It’s not one or the other. Voting day should be a holiday. We should do all we can to get as many people as we can to vote.
But we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a country that pretends to be a democracy, for the ratings.
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In practice, it’s more that voting is biased towards people with sufficient wealth and privilege to afford the time off. Living somewhere other than an urban Black neighbourhood with six-hour voting queues helps, too.
The working class, who are the least-White segment of American society, are functionally disenfranchised by workday voting.
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It is where I live.
By the way, I’m a little surprised at the flagging of @Nunyo_Bidness, seems harsh.
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I think the a post making the same point that was:
- Less hostile, mocking and dismissive; OR
- Written by someone who had been on the BBS for more than a few minutes
Probably wouldn’t have gotten the flags.
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It’s not here. It seems like the civilized thing to do, which is why civilized countries do it!
I flagged him for stealth racism, because pretty much whenever anyone invokes government benefits when talking about ID issues, they usually mean “those” people.
Honestly, we should be calling out this sort of racism as much as the overt racism.
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