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'17 Specials & '18 Midterms Thread

tiltdeac said:
Just got harder for Heitkamp in North Dakota, as the Supreme Court upheld their obvious voter suppression law that will keep many of the Native Americans who live on tribal lands from voting. Do any of the "reasonable" republicans defend these practices? I know people pretend they are to stop voter fraud, but it's just so transparent.
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First I heard of this. What exactly is keeping the NAs on tribal lands from voting? Do they not get some type of Fed or State ID? That is ridiculous if true.
 
saltydeac said:
First I heard of this. What exactly is keeping the NAs on tribal lands from voting? Do they not get some type of Fed or State ID? That is ridiculous if true.
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Without looking up the article I read, it has to do with not being allowed to vote if your ID has a PO Box listed as your address. But since USPS doesn't deliver onto reservations, many Native Americans use PO Boxes as their addresses.
 
saltydeac said:
First I heard of this. What exactly is keeping the NAs on tribal lands from voting? Do they not get some type of Fed or State ID? That is ridiculous if true.
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Voters are required to have a physical address. NAs on reservations have PO Boxes. Such requirements punish homeless or transient people as well. It’s way too close to only allowing landowners to vote.
 
LadyDeac03 said:
Without looking up the article I read, it has to do with not being allowed to vote if your ID has a PO Box listed as your address. But since USPS doesn't deliver onto reservations, many Native Americans use PO Boxes as their addresses.
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http://inthesetimes.com/rural-ameri...kota-voter-suppression-native-american-issues

In my curiousity on the issue I found the following article. Good news is it appears they have found a solution that will work for the 20k Indians.
 
saltydeac said:
First I heard of this. What exactly is keeping the NAs on tribal lands from voting? Do they not get some type of Fed or State ID? That is ridiculous if true.
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The new law requires a current "residential" street address in order to vote. The USPS doesn't provide residential delivery to the rural tribal lands, and instead assigns them PO boxes. The new law prevents them from voting.
 
tiltdeac said:
The new law requires a current "residential" street address in order to vote. The USPS doesn't provide residential delivery to the rural tribal lands, and instead assigns them PO boxes. The new law prevents them from voting.
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When was the new law passed that requires a residential street address in order to vote?
 
LadyDeac03 said:
The news from ND and from GA in the last few days on voter suppression (recognizing that it is also a big problem elsewhere) is just so insane. I have a hard time understanding how people who support these things can sleep at night and defend what they are doing.
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I colleague of mine told me he was not registered because he had moved and had not reported it. So, I checked the SOS website just in cae. I wasn't registered either because of a "change in address." I've lived in the same house for 11 years. WTF Texas?
 
tiltdeac said:
The new law requires a current "residential" street address in order to vote. The USPS doesn't provide residential delivery to the rural tribal lands, and instead assigns them PO boxes. The new law prevents them from voting.
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It's been a while since I took Con Law, but this feels like a pretty slam dunk case of applying strict scrutiny. I'd love to hear ND's governmental interest that is advanced by this law.
 
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PhDeac said:
No doubt somewhere a Republican operative is coming up with either a false equivalence to something Democrats did do or making up something in order to justify this.
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I'm sure they can find a direct equivalence if they look hard enough. The thing is, this particular president's followers believe wholeheartedly that he is rooting out this exact sort of thing. They bring up that "drain the swamp" mess whenever it's convenient, i.e. when he fires someone/they quit, but when something truly dirty like this happens the narrative immediately shifts to "the swamp is the swamp and everybody does it so might as well just have Trump running it."
 
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The more people whose right to vote the Republicans can steal. The better chance they have. The GOP wants a dictatorship where only white guys can vote.

They wrap themselves in the wrong flag. It should be the North Korean flag or the Soviet flag.
 
LadyDeac03 said:
The news from ND and from GA in the last few days on voter suppression (recognizing that it is also a big problem elsewhere) is just so insane. I have a hard time understanding how people who support these things can sleep at night and defend what they are doing.
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They are #winning. AKA sticking it to the dims.
 
PhDeac said:
No doubt somewhere a Republican operative is coming up with either a false equivalence to something Democrats did do or making up something in order to justify this.
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Interesting how the GOP is attempting to trap Democrats into accepting money from communists while they have actual nazis on the ballot.
 
My GOP dominated local county commission tried to shut down a polling location in a rural, majority black part of the county just 28 days before the election. Said they would post notices in the news paper and at the polling location with information on where to go to vote. There was a literal shouting match between between the commission chair and two dudes in the audience. It is against state laws to move or close polling locations less than 90 days prior to an election. The commission chair basically told the men to sit down and shut up and then moved to close the station despite their objections. They feel confident that they will see no repercussions from the illegal move, especially because it will help them win the election.
 
WakeForestRanger said:
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I'd like to make a civility joke but this is actually unhinged.

Back to the Jon Stewart quote: "Please understand that a lot of what the right does, and it’s maybe their greatest genius, is they’ve created a code of conduct that they police, that they themselves don’t have to, in any way, abide”
 
birdman said:
My GOP dominated local county commission tried to shut down a polling location in a rural, majority black part of the county just 28 days before the election. Said they would post notices in the news paper and at the polling location with information on where to go to vote. There was a literal shouting match between between the commission chair and two dudes in the audience. It is against state laws to move or close polling locations less than 90 days prior to an election. The commission chair basically told the men to sit down and shut up and then moved to close the station despite their objections. They feel confident that they will see no repercussions from the illegal move, especially because it will help them win the election.
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One of the main reasons the GOP is so obsessed with packing the courts with right-wing judges is that the courts are one of the last obstacles left to them being able to do whatever the hell they want. Once they control the courts, they could literally go back to poll taxes and literacy tests and no one will be able to stop them. I doubt they would go that far, as it would almost certainly lead to massive violence, but they certainly will be able to continue extreme gerrymandering, where the Democrats could win over 55% of the vote in a state and still not win a majority on state legislatures and the House of Representatives, and pass voter restriction laws like voter IDs and so forth. This happened once before, during Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, where whites who felt threatened by newly freed blacks simply made it nearly impossible for them to vote or hold public office. They appear to be on the same path again, this time under the guise of "originalist, strict interpretation/construction" judges, and laws to "prevent vote fraud" that has been repeatedly proven to not exist, and certainly not in the numbers that the GOP claims. If this continues, you could be looking at near-permanent GOP majorities in many state legislatures (like here in NC), that may be virtually impossible to dislodge, without unrealistically high victory margins for Democrats statewide (like 20 or more percentage points). True minority rule, for perhaps decades. Dark times for democracy.
 
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Republicans would certainly restrict civil rights in a way that would provoke violence and then they would say “See? Look at those violent liberals. They hate freedom and the Constitution.”

Who would stop them?
 
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