Republican Voter Suppression Efforts

Yep. Republicans focus on voter IDs because they make a lot of sense in a vacuum. But they’re also purging voter rolls to add another layer of bureaucracy and discourage new voters. Also voter registration should be regarded as stopping fraud yet Republicans are against automatic registration, allowing 17 year olds to register for the next election in which they turn 18.

And there is an entire history of their conservative forefathers using ridiculous laws and violence to stop Black people from voting. We can’t ignore that to just look at IDs in a vacuum. Because we have to look at the rationale. Republicans lose when the racial composition of voters looks more like the racial composition of citizens. Republicans want voters to be disproportionately white. Otherwise they lose. Voting behavior within racial groups is very stable. Turnout changes from election to election. Republicans need to keep Black turnout down in order to win elections.

Take Mississippi for example. Exit polls in 2020 indicate white voters were 69% of voters and supported Trump 81-18. Black voters were 29% of voters and supported Biden 94-5.

Trump won 57.6 to 41.1%.

Mississippi has the largest Black population by percentage at 39%. White people make up 59% of the population.

If the voting population looked like the actual population and voting within race stayed the same, Trump would have won 49.7% to 47.3%.

Trump wouldn’t even break 50% in what we consider a completely safe red state. That is why Republicans make it harder for Black people to vote by design.

73deac said:

I think people are going to have to actually try to see why the other side thinks like they do. I will be honest and say I feel like if it’s possible for either party to commit voter fraud then why not require a photo Id? I realize that lower income population may not be as likely to have a photo id but in most states you can get a photo id issued on line through the DMV or the department of public health. If some members of the Republican Party want to require photo id just to hinder the minority vote then that is wrong and I don’t agree with that at all. My only reason for wanting the photo id is to prevent fraud, not to suppress a minority vote. I think liberals would see me as only wanting to suppress a minority vote that will likely go to a democrat instead of just wanting an even playing field. If a liberal beats a conservative through a fair election then so be it but I just see it as trying to make the vote as legal as possible? I do see how liberals could see me as wanting to increase my advantage when in reality I’m not.

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Think of it as a trade off. You are risking disenfranchising millions of low income or minority voters in an effort to stop a few dozen fraudulent votes. I think the millions out weigh the dozen. At the very least there needs to be some evidence of significant levels of voter fraud, not just the possibility it might be happening, before we put impediment in place for millions of people.

birdman said:

Think of it as a trade off. You are risking disenfranchising millions of low income or minority voters in an effort to stop a few dozen fraudulent votes. I think the millions out weigh the dozen. At the very least there needs to be some evidence of significant levels of voter fraud, not just the possibility it might be happening, before we put impediment in place for millions of people.

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There are two approaches:
1) Ignore the problem of "millions of low income or minority voters" not having ids on election day.
2) Solve it for that day and the other 364 days of the year, at no cost to them.

Are you sure the people impacted are better off under approach #1?

"no cost"

I think we should require all gun owners to drive to the state capitol once a year to receive their FREE gun owners license! It's free to them and it will stop illegal gun purchases.

WFFaithful said:

"no cost"

I think we should require all gun owners to drive to the state capitol once a year to receive their FREE gun owners license! It's free to them and it will stop illegal gun purchases.

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Exactly. It’s as though some don’t realize it would be essentially impossible to get these “free IDs” to people without a stable address, not to mention keeping the ID updated based on moves and new addresses. I’m pretty sure most Republican
political leaders do get this, though, which is why they are pushing so hard for it.

WokeandBroke said:

There are two approaches:
1) Ignore the problem of "millions of low income or minority voters" not having ids on election day.
2) Solve it for that day and the other 364 days of the year, at no cost to them.

Are you sure the people impacted are better off under approach #1?

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Can you explain how these Republican voting laws are doing #2? Can you also explain how taking over local election boards in response to the big lie helps with #2?

WokeandBroke said:

There are two approaches:
1) Ignore the problem of "millions of low income or minority voters" not having ids on election day.
2) Solve it for that day and the other 364 days of the year, at no cost to them.

Are you sure the people impacted are better off under approach #1?

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Are you sure you want to create a large Government ID Bureaucracy to solve a nonexistent voter fraud problem?

PhDeac said:

Can you explain how these Republican voting laws are doing #2? Can you also explain how taking over local election boards in response to the big lie helps with #2?

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I'll be glad to answer your two questions, in reverse order. I don't agree that centralizing control over the local boards is a good policy. I think it is a bad policy (previously said so in this thread, but I understand it's hard to keep track of everyone's positions on an 1,100 post topic). We can of course have a voter ID rule without that bothersome aspect (like we did in North Carolina, which passed easily).

As to your first question, the policy has to be coupled with access to IDs. If the problem is as bad as you all are sure it is, then we (both the system and people following its rules) can pull this off with 18 months notice. We developed a formula for a vaccine with 95% effectiveness for a novel virus in basically 90 days. I think we're up to getting people IDs for free (and much, much more). You can get a copy of your birth certificate for $10.00 at the Register of Deeds without an appointment (no matter what NC County you were born in). Assume 10% of the population doesn't an ID (crazy high but let's get wild). Let's wave the ten bucks for those people. That amount of money is a fraction of what we spend on a single election as a State, and then the problem is solved forever. If the Democrats that are concerned about this problem want it solved, there will never be more bipartisan political will and funding to solve it than after a big Democrat electoral win; which brings me back to my question: are we going to solve it or not?

You didn’t answer either question. I didn’t ask about your opinion. I asked about what Republicans are actually doing.

WokeandBroke said:

I'll be glad to answer your two questions, in reverse order. I don't agree that centralizing control over the local boards is a good policy. I think it is a bad policy (previously said so in this thread, but I understand it's hard to keep track of everyone's positions on an 1,100 post topic). We can of course have a voter ID rule without that bothersome aspect (like we did in North Carolina, which passed easily).

As to your first question, the policy has to be coupled with access to IDs. If the problem is as bad as you all are sure it is, then we (both the system and people following its rules) can pull this off with 18 months notice. We developed a formula for a vaccine with 95% effectiveness for a novel virus in basically 90 days. I think we're up to getting people IDs for free (and much, much more). You can get a copy of your birth certificate for $10.00 at the Register of Deeds without an appointment (no matter what NC County you were born in). Assume 10% of the population doesn't an ID (crazy high but let's get wild). Let's wave the ten bucks for those people. That amount of money is a fraction of what we spend on a single election as a State, and then the problem is solved forever. If the Democrats that are concerned about this problem want it solved, there will never be more bipartisan political will and funding to solve it than after a big Democrat electoral win; which brings me back to my question: are we going to solve it or not?

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You say the policy has to be coupled with access to IDs, which is correct. Unfortunately, none of the Voter ID bills being presented are doing so, to my knowledge. You can't pass Voter ID laws and then say you will get to the access later, because that never happens. Conservatives like to push for the restrictive part of laws without addressing the underlying issues all the time (ETA: unless it is about guns). Also, equating this to the vaccine work is ridiculous, since everyone working on the vaccine wanted to succeed. A good portion of those who make laws do not want to enable more people to vote.

PhDeac said:

You didn’t answer either question. I didn’t ask about your opinion. I asked about what Republicans are actually doing.

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I don't know what else to tell you, beyond trying to agree with you on #2 and telling you that we can do #1 if we want to. "We" evidently don't want to.

Given that this discussion is about Republican legislatures, your “we” is Republicans. That’s the point. Republicans want to require IDs to vote without making IDs easier to get. And that doesn’t even get into Republicans picking and choosing which IDs work for voting.

Let’s be accurate and not say things like “several dozen” cases of voter fraud if there aren’t hard unbiased numbers presented. And please don’t say every court ruled there was not enough evidence of voter fraud to hear the cases. Some cases were not heard by the courts because states like Texas couldn’t sue on behalf of 4 other states. Let’s say there were only a few dozen cases of voter fraud, would it make sense to enact a free id to be distributed by the states just to be able to move past this issue? Also, I don’t claim to know the numbers because I haven’t researched, but how many citizens that don’t have a valid id are actually voting?

73deac said:

Let’s be accurate and not say things like “several dozen” cases of voter fraud if there aren’t hard unbiased numbers presented. And please don’t say every court ruled there was not enough evidence of voter fraud to hear the cases. Some cases were not heard by the courts because states like Texas couldn’t sue on behalf of 4 other states. Let’s say there were only a few dozen cases of voter fraud, would it make sense to enact a free id to be distributed by the states just to be able to move past this issue? Also, I don’t claim to know the numbers because I haven’t researched, but how many citizens that don’t have a valid id are actually voting?

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“Your numbers aren’t true and I don’t know the real numbers” is a pretty good argument structure. You can’t lose with that positioning.

PhDeac said:

Given that this discussion is about Republican legislatures, your “we” is Republicans. That’s the point. Republicans want to require IDs to vote without making IDs easier to get. And that doesn’t even get into Republicans picking and choosing which IDs work for voting.

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So you want to help these people, but only if the Republicans do it all by themselves. Your passion for solving this problem is whelming.

Fortunately for you, we have co-equal branches of government in North Carolina. I've been getting government issued photo IDs at regular intervals from our State's government. The agency responsible for issuing those ids falls under the Executive branch. As has been the case for seven of the last eight quadrennial terms (a/k/a our adult lives), that agency has been headed by a political appointee selected by our State's Democrat Governor, who has served at his or her pleasure. If the NC DMV wanted to issue a no-cost photo ID they could start this afternoon and the legislature couldn't stop them if they wanted to. For some reason, they haven't. With friends like these...

Old habits die hard, but everything isn't always the fault of the Republican boogeyman.

WokeandBroke said:

So you want to help these people, but only if the Republicans do it all by themselves. Your passion for solving this problem is whelming.

Fortunately for you, we have co-equal branches of government in North Carolina. I've been getting government issued photo IDs at regular intervals from our State's government. The agency responsible for issuing those ids falls under the Executive branch. As has been the case for seven of the last eight quadrennial terms (a/k/a our adult lives), that agency has been headed by a political appointee selected by our State's Democrat Governor, who has served at his or her pleasure. If the NC DMV wanted to issue a no-cost photo ID they could start this afternoon and the legislature couldn't stop them if they wanted to. For some reason, they haven't. With friends like these...

Old habits die hard, but everything isn't always the fault of the Republican boogeyman.

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Republicans offer up an incomplete solution to a made up problem but you want us to blame the democrats.

I don't think it is surprising that our returning 'pub defender is much more interested in having discussions about hypothetical laws that might be passed and implemented instead of the actual ones that are being passed and implemented. Mainly because the actual laws focus on the stuff he has already disavowed.

Just to be clear, its fairly obvious that the legislatures in Georgia and Arizona, among other places, don't have the same altruistic motives that you are espousing on this thread. Acknowledging that fact will not kill you.

birdman said:

Republicans offer up an incomplete solution to a made up problem but you want us to blame the democrats.

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Democrats are the only people who believe that other Democrats are uniquely incapable getting an ID (a task routinely mastered by nervous 15 year olds throughout the State). There are hundreds of them open at this very moment.

Map here:
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/offices-services/locate-dmv-office/Pages/dmv-offices.aspx

Remind me who is "making up this problem"?

Just a reminder that it’s not about getting an ID. It’s about Republicans choosing IDs Black people are less likely to have.

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/01/north-carolina-voter-id-law-blocked-discriminatory

“This iteration of the North Carolina law required voters to present one of 10 forms of acceptable identification, such as a driver’s license, passport, or military ID in order to vote. But Biggs noted that minority voters in the state were less likely to possess an acceptable form of ID. She also noted that African American voters were more likely to have public assistance and government IDs – both of which were largely not considered an acceptable form of voter ID under the law.
“The evidence suggests that minority voters are not just less likely to have an acceptable form of ID, but that the legislature excluded photographic ID that could have greatly reduced that discrepancy,” she wrote.”

Welcome back, jhmd. It’s like having our own Ted Cruz.