All Votes Matter

[Deleted]

Perfect illustration of how b.s. this whole voter fraud argument is.

"Kemp’s office has cancelled over 1.4m voter registrations since 2012. Nearly 670k registrations were cancelled in 2017 alone... Georgia's population is approximately 32% black, but the voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office are nearly 70% black."

It seems bad that the guy running for governor in Georgia is also in charge of who gets to vote in Georgia: slate.trib.al/dqYj3mL

Seems like the whole voter fraud hysteria was just a way to use Voter suppression as a campaign tool...

[Deleted]

"Voter purges on the thinnest of pretexts"

[SSHoya]

Oct 12, 2018 10:14:19 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

"Voter purges on the thinnest of pretexts"

GOPers win by cheating. If you ain't cheatin' you ain't trying!

[EtomicB]

Oct 12, 2018 10:14:19 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

"Voter purges on the thinnest of pretexts"

Ridiculously sobering & sad article, smh...

[SSHoya]

Keep up the good work, Republicans. And you wonder why many people think the GOP is racist.

Nine months after President Trump was forced to dissolve a panel charged with investigating voter fraud, GOP officials across the country are cracking down on what they describe as threats to voting integrity — moves that critics see as attempts to keep some Americans from casting ballots in November’s elections.

Voting rights advocates said Republicans are seizing on sporadic voting problems in an effort to disenfranchise voters of color.

Numerous studies have found no evidence of large-scale voter fraud in the United States. But the specter of fraud was raised repeatedly by Trump after the 2016 election, when he claimed without evidence that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/crackdowns-on-potential-voter-fraud-fuel-worries-about-ballot-access-in-november/2018/10/13/764db388-c0cd-11e8-be77-516336a26305_story.html?utm_term=.36c0e76efc61

[Deleted]

"A review by The Beast found at least 5 voter-suppression practices in active use today. All are led by Republicans, all have disproportionate effects on non-white populations, and all are rationalized by bogus claims of voter fraud."

thebea.st/2PsBg24

The simplest way to stop people from voting is to make it harder for them to vote, and the easiest way to do that is to close polling places. And since 2013, more than 1,000 polling places have been closed in nine Republican-dominated states alone.

2013 was pivotal for two reasons. First, it came after President Obama’s re-election, which shocked many Republicans and which depended—like Trump’s victory four years later—on new blocs of voters turning out in record numbers. According to Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: The Impact of Voter Suppression in America, the Obama coalition brought in 15 million new voters, mostly young people and people of color. 2012 was when the demographic writing was on the wall.

Second, 2013 is when the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and made it much easier for states and municipalities to enact discriminatory measures. Prior to Shelby County, states with a history of racial discrimination had to secure advance clearance from the federal government before changing voting processes. But Shelby County did away with those requirements, opening the floodgates to voter suppression. In the case of polling places specifically, pre-Shelby County, states had to notify voters if their polling places had changed, but that requirement was removed in 2013.

There’s no doubt as to why Kemp is doing this. In a closed-door session of Republican politicians last July, Kemp said, “The Democrats are working hard. There have been these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines. If they can do that, they can win these elections in November.”

Kemp cited the risk of voter fraud, but his own office’s investigation in 2014 found only a few dozen potentially fraudulent voter applications among tens of thousands that were investigated. While voter fraud is fake, voter suppression is very real.

With Georgia’s population of 10.4 million and an estimated 50 percent voting rate, those 53,000 purged votes represent a full percentage point of voters, enough to swing this close an election.

"The voter fraud/voter suppression debate is one of those frustrating “partisan” issues that we can answer with data. It’s not partisan to show that, empirically, voter suppression often influences the outcome of US elections; voter fraud does not."

Any Republican on the board wish to challenge that assertion?

[Elvado]

Oct 14, 2018 11:15:53 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

"A review by The Beast found at least 5 voter-suppression practices in active use today. All are led by Republicans, all have disproportionate effects on non-white populations, and all are rationalized by bogus claims of voter fraud."

thebea.st/2PsBg24

The simplest way to stop people from voting is to make it harder for them to vote, and the easiest way to do that is to close polling places. And since 2013, more than 1,000 polling places have been closed in nine Republican-dominated states alone.

2013 was pivotal for two reasons. First, it came after President Obama’s re-election, which shocked many Republicans and which depended—like Trump’s victory four years later—on new blocs of voters turning out in record numbers. According to Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: The Impact of Voter Suppression in America, the Obama coalition brought in 15 million new voters, mostly young people and people of color. 2012 was when the demographic writing was on the wall.

Second, 2013 is when the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and made it much easier for states and municipalities to enact discriminatory measures. Prior to Shelby County, states with a history of racial discrimination had to secure advance clearance from the federal government before changing voting processes. But Shelby County did away with those requirements, opening the floodgates to voter suppression. In the case of polling places specifically, pre-Shelby County, states had to notify voters if their polling places had changed, but that requirement was removed in 2013.

There’s no doubt as to why Kemp is doing this. In a closed-door session of Republican politicians last July, Kemp said, “The Democrats are working hard. There have been these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines. If they can do that, they can win these elections in November.”

Kemp cited the risk of voter fraud, but his own office’s investigation in 2014 found only a few dozen potentially fraudulent voter applications among tens of thousands that were investigated. While voter fraud is fake, voter suppression is very real.

With Georgia’s population of 10.4 million and an estimated 50 percent voting rate, those 53,000 purged votes represent a full percentage point of voters, enough to swing this close an election.

"The voter fraud/voter suppression debate is one of those frustrating “partisan” issues that we can answer with data. It’s not partisan to show that, empirically, voter suppression often influences the outcome of US elections; voter fraud does not."

Any Republican on the board wish to challenge that assertion?

Voter fraud is an irrational fear. Those irrational fears are stoked when candidates say things like the “Blue Wave...includes the undocumented”

However, your point is well taken. Voter fraud is virtually non-existent. Cries about it are empty.

Not quite as empty are the cross of voter suppression which are more real but also well-exaggerated for partisan purposes.

[Deleted]

Oct 14, 2018 11:22:13 GMT -5 Elvado said:

Oct 14, 2018 11:15:53 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

"A review by The Beast found at least 5 voter-suppression practices in active use today. All are led by Republicans, all have disproportionate effects on non-white populations, and all are rationalized by bogus claims of voter fraud."

thebea.st/2PsBg24

"The voter fraud/voter suppression debate is one of those frustrating “partisan” issues that we can answer with data. It’s not partisan to show that, empirically, voter suppression often influences the outcome of US elections; voter fraud does not."

Any Republican on the board wish to challenge that assertion?

Voter fraud is an irrational fear. Those irrational fears are stoked when candidates say things like the “Blue Wave...includes the undocumented”

However, your point is well taken. Voter fraud is virtually non-existent. Cries about it are empty.

Not quite as empty are the cross of voter suppression which are more real but also well-exaggerated for partisan purposes.

Understand the point you're trying to make but this Voter fraud push wasn't really a response to inarticulate comments. Since most of this stuff happened after 2008, don't you think It was more about responding to Obama winning the Presidency?

Can you provide examples of your last point?

[Elvado]

I think the entire voter fraud push has roots that go back further than Mr Obama. There is a long held belief on the right that Democrat Machine cities like Chicago (Vote early and often) provide many mystery votes for Democrat candidates. These claims are more urban legend than actual fraud.

As to the second point, not all voting regulations are the big bad bogeyman of voter suppression. Are there insidious attempts to suppress? I am quite sure there are. Is asking someone for ID out of line? Not in my world.

We may not agree and that is okay.

[SSHoya]

Voter suppression almost certainly helped Donald Trump win the presidency. Multiple academic studies and court rulings indicate that racially biased election laws, such as voter-ID legislation in places like Wisconsin, favored Republican candidates in 2016. Like most other elections in American history, this one wasn’t a fair fight.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-prri-voter-suppression/565355/

Republicans took to heart the words of Paul Weyrich, the conservative founder of the Heritage Foundation. In a 1980 speech, he opined: “I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-voter-suppression-threatens-our-democracy/2018/09/20/c1dd3b8a-aad3-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html?utm_term=.f8aaad62636a

Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise minority communities.
Fraga and Miller found that black voters constituted 11.4 percent of those voting in Texas in 2016 with ID but 16.1 percent of those voting without ID, which shows clear evidence of a disparate racial impact. Likewise, Latino voters made up 19.8 percent of those voting with an ID but 20.7 percent of those voting without an ID. So even if voter ID laws haven’t swung election outcomes, they can deny thousands of people their right to vote — denials that fall disproportionately on black and Latino citizens. Whether voter ID laws swing elections is far from their only important consequence.

Those disparate impacts are clear from a second newly released study, too, which also used individual-level records to provide a more granular view of precisely who is affected by voter ID policies. In Michigan’s 2016 general election, voters who arrived at the polls without ID were able to vote after they signed an affidavit. Researchers Phoebe Henninger, Marc Meredith and Michael Morse2 collected these affidavits to identify a set of voters who would have been turned away under a stricter policy, like the laws in Georgia, Virginia and Wisconsin. By their calculation, about 28,000 voters — or 0.6 percent of 2016 Michigan voters — lacked photo identification.

Those 28,000 voters were more nonwhite and more Democratic than the Michigan electorate overall. Henninger and her co-authors estimated that nonwhite voters were between 2.5 and 6 times as likely as white voters to lack voter ID. And while Michigan doesn’t record partisan registration, the researchers’ model-based estimates suggest that more than 70 percent of those filing affidavits would be Democratic primary voters.

fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-we-know-about-voter-id-laws/


www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/11/08/voter-suppression-in-u-s-elections/

[Deleted]

Oct 14, 2018 11:52:05 GMT -5 Elvado said:

I think the entire voter fraud push has roots that go back further than Mr Obama. There is a long held belief on the right that Democrat Machine cities like Chicago (Vote early and often) provide many mystery votes for Democrat candidates. These claims are more urban legend than actual fraud.

As to the second point, not all voting regulations are the big bad bogeyman of voter suppression. Are there insidious attempts to suppress? I am quite sure there are. Is asking someone for ID out of line? Not in my world.

We may not agree and that is okay.

Not saying it did start with him but this fervent push is a result of his election. There wasn't this much focus on it during the Bush years, would you agree?

I don't think the question is "Is it out of line?" I think the question is "Is it necessary?" The data provided above would suggest it's not necessary. It's a solution to a problem that you acknowledge does not really exist.

There also seems to be inconsistency on what forms of ID's are acceptable.

[Elvado]

Oct 14, 2018 12:08:11 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

Oct 14, 2018 11:52:05 GMT -5 Elvado said:

I think the entire voter fraud push has roots that go back further than Mr Obama. There is a long held belief on the right that Democrat Machine cities like Chicago (Vote early and often) provide many mystery votes for Democrat candidates. These claims are more urban legend than actual fraud.

As to the second point, not all voting regulations are the big bad bogeyman of voter suppression. Are there insidious attempts to suppress? I am quite sure there are. Is asking someone for ID out of line? Not in my world.

We may not agree and that is okay.

Not saying it did start with him but this fervent push is a result of his election. There wasn't this much focus on it during the Bush years, would you agree?

I don't think the question is "Is it out of line?" I think the question is "Is it necessary?" The data would suggest it's not necessary.

There also seems to be inconsistency on what forms of ID's are acceptable.

I do agree it geared up after the Obama election. The suspicion onthe right was not helped by the massive influx of new urban voters and the suspicion that machine politicians play very fast and ooose with voter rolls.

As for “is it necessary to show ID to vote”, count me as a yes. It is just not that big a burden to prove one’s identity. That said, where any reasonable form is presented, it should be accepted.

[Deleted]

Oct 14, 2018 12:18:26 GMT -5 Elvado said:

Oct 14, 2018 12:08:11 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

Not saying it did start with him but this fervent push is a result of his election. There wasn't this much focus on it during the Bush years, would you agree?

I don't think the question is "Is it out of line?" I think the question is "Is it necessary?" The data would suggest it's not necessary.

There also seems to be inconsistency on what forms of ID's are acceptable.

I do agree it geared up after the Obama election. The suspicion onthe right was not helped by the massive influx of new urban voters and the suspicion that machine politicians play very fast and ooose with voter rolls.

As for “is it necessary to show ID to vote”, count me as a yes. It is just not that big a burden to prove one’s identity. That said, where any reasonable form is presented, it should be accepted.

But you said voter fraud doesn't really exist so what problem is it solving?


How about auto registration? Since you have to prove your identity when you get an ID why not make auto registration part of that process?

[SSHoya]

Oct 14, 2018 12:21:31 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

Oct 14, 2018 12:18:26 GMT -5 Elvado said:

I do agree it geared up after the Obama election. The suspicion onthe right was not helped by the massive influx of new urban voters and the suspicion that machine politicians play very fast and ooose with voter rolls.

As for “is it necessary to show ID to vote”, count me as a yes. It is just not that big a burden to prove one’s identity. That said, where any reasonable form is presented, it should be accepted.

But you said voter fraud doesn't really exist so what problem is it solving?


How about auto registration? Since you have to prove your identity when you get an ID why not make auto registration part of that process?

A solution in search of a problem. Paul Weyrich's statement in 1980 still applies. It is not a good faith effort to encourage election security. If you thought the GOP gave a damn about election security you'd think the Russian interference might be more of priority with them -- they'd rather suppress voters/disenfranchise them in keeping with Weyrich's analysis.

Republicans took to heart the words of Paul Weyrich, the conservative founder of the Heritage Foundation. In a 1980 speech, he opined: “I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

[Deleted]

Awesome.... Go GOP...

According to the AP, fully 70 percent of the voter applications that are being held up by Kemp’s office are from black people." talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/brian-kemp-is-blocking-53k-applicants-from-registering-to-vote-most-of-them-black …

[Deleted]

[hoyarooter]

Oct 17, 2018 5:23:16 GMT -5 @yaboynyp said:

Awesome.... Go GOP...

According to the AP, fully 70 percent of the voter applications that are being held up by Kemp’s office are from black people." talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/brian-kemp-is-blocking-53k-applicants-from-registering-to-vote-most-of-them-black …

Undoubtedly another coincidence. Who could have imagined that blacks would constitute ONLY 70% of the voter applications being held up?

[tashoya]

Take away all of the other stuff that we've seen over the past 2 years. This is enough reason to vote these people out. Absolutely disgusting.

[Deleted]

This is mainstream Republican stuff now. Throwing out bogus allegations about election integrity that this congressman knows is 100% untrue but is 100% part of their election strategy.

Oddly the Democrats plan seems to be to allow everyone who is eligible to vote quick and easy access to the polls..

[EtomicB]

www.hutchnews.com/news/20181014/aclu-dodge-city-polling-site-limits-voter-access


Smh...