Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Disenfranchise?

 

"Inconvenience"

 

Except the argument isn't why won't the legislator provide more early voting locations or more hours, it's why are they taking away locations and shortening hours. If no one used early voting and this turned into a cost vs the actual value that would be one thing. But this is being used and taken away in the name of protecting from voter fraud that doesn't exist in numbers that even come close to mattering.

 

Quoting the judge in the North Carolina voting laws decision:

“The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.”

The panel seemed to say it found the equivalent of a smoking gun. “Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices,” Motz wrote. “Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.”

The panel found the law was passed with racially discriminatory intent, violating the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. It said that “intentionally targeting a particular race’s access to the franchise because its members vote for a particular party, in a predictable manner, constitutes discriminatory purpose.”

 

Why would we want to, as a country, "inconvenience" any voter? It should be as easy as possible for everyone.

 

Check out @franticscribe's comment re: this, and pay particular attention to his use of the phrase "there is nothing."

 

Sorry for the late response -- been away from the computer most of the day today.

The dirty little secret about Obama's "clinging to guns and religion" gaffe from 2008 is that he was, in many respects, right. I've seen a lot of it growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and spending the first eight years of my career there. As the article that started this discussion states, much of the 'recovery' of the 2010s has been in white-collar jobs in and around cities. So the kids who have the life flexibility to do it leave to chase those, leaving a base that is getting smaller, less educated and poorer. A much higher percentage of the employment base is now in the service/tourism industry, which typically pays worse, has worse schedules and fewer benefits.

Many of them find themselves losing the culture war. They're more religious than average but not everyone's a zealot. The larger issue is that in a small community, "diversity" is at best a myth and at worst a means of screwing them out of their opportunities (for example, affirmative action). In the U.P., a 'minority' is more likely to be native than black. The only gay person you might know is the high school drama teacher (and he's probably not all the way 'out' for fear of retribution). Trans? Ha. So the voices they hear are the zealots. When they hear a Black Lives Matter activist tying up a freeway and saying the cops are racist, they have no frame of reference, because they know all the cops in town by name, so they just look like agitators and rioters. It's not that they're deliberately racist people, it's that these are issues they don't have to confront in their everyday lives.

My part of the U.P. has a significant history of union membership, so a Democrat can win an election here. Bart Stupak, who was at the center of the Obamacare debate, represented this district as a Democrat for about 15 years. The 21st century Democratic Party contains vocal identity interests that are entirely foreign to the experience of a lot of my neighbors, and in some cases directly opposed. Example: Though the environment is a huge part of what makes the U.P. a great place to be, the environmental lobby's willingness to fight development on several fronts (particularly mining) has cost the region jobs and development a lot of people think it really needs. Micro example: A lot of U.P. people are convinced that the region has a significant problem with wolves. At the state level, they were finally able to (through rather nefarious means) set up a wolf hunting season for a year to try and trim back the numbers (which was ineffective because of a ton of early snow), only for it to be wiped out because an environmental lobbying group (from nowhere near here) got a federal judge to put wolves back on the Endangered Species List.

Basically, because of the state of the economy and the centralization of power and development in and around cities, rural folks feel more alienated than they have in the past. I wouldn't get my hopes up, but I hope more effort is put in to making life better in those places.

 

I used to have to make a right turn into my polling place. Then they moved it, so now I have to make a left turn against traffic. I feel disenfranchised.

 

States with mail-in vote inconvenience no one and also have higher participation rates. Why drive at all? The government trusts the people to mail in their tax returns. Why not votes? For the record, tomorrow is the first day Mass. has had early voting. I will go to town hall and vote. Let's get this over with, shall we?

 

Right next to the taco trucks?

 

If it was done because they wanted to discourage PhDs from voting, I would believe you.

 

I'm an aesthete when it comes to this -- I think pretty much everyone who's going to vote should do so on Election Day as something of a shared civic ritual -- but that has little do with my quibble here. The argument that people are disenfranchised because their preferred time/place isn't made available is, to me, utter nonsense. This is true even if it's the case that the removal of preferred time/place was for less-than-savory reasons.