US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9494

On December 12 2017 23:40 Mohdoo wrote:
Jones should have just said fuck abortions and walked into the Senate.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The Senate election in Alabama on Tuesday is not just about the choice between Doug Jones and Roy Moore. It’s also about a voter suppression campaign that may well sway the result of a close race.

In 2011, Alabama lawmakers passed a photo ID law, ostensibly to combat voter fraud. But “voter impersonation” at polling places virtually never happens. The truth is that the lawmakers wanted to keep black and Latino voters from the ballot box. We know this because they’ve always been clear about their intentions.

A state senator who had tried for over a decade to get the bill into law, told The Huntsville Times that a photo ID law would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure.” In The Montgomery Advertiser, he said that the absence of an ID law “benefits black elected leaders.”

The bill’s sponsors were even caught on tape devising a plan to depress the turnout of black voters — whom they called “aborigines” and “illiterates” who would ride “H.U.D.-financed buses” to the polls — in the 2010 midterm election by keeping a gambling referendum off the ballot. Gambling is popular among black voters in Alabama, so they thought if it had remained on the ballot, black voters would show up to vote in droves.

Photo ID laws may seem innocuous. For many of us, it might be easy to take a few hours off from work, drive to the nearest department of motor vehicles office, wait in line, take some tests, hand over $40 and leave with a driver’s license that we can use to vote. But this requires resources that many rural, low-income people around the country simply do not have.

I work with poor, black Alabamians. Many of them don’t have cars or driver’s licenses and make under $10,000 a year. They cannot afford to pay someone to drive them to the motor vehicles or registrar’s office, which is often miles away.

Photo ID laws are written to make it difficult for people like them to vote. And that’s exactly what happens. A study by Zoltan Hajnal, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, comparing the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, found that the voter ID law kept black voters from the polls. After Alabama implemented its strict voter ID law, turnout in its most racially diverse counties declined by almost 5 percentage points, which is even more than the drop in diverse counties in other states.

The study controls for numerous factors that might otherwise affect an election: how much money was spent on the races; the state’s partisan makeup; changes in electoral laws like early voting and day-of registration; and shifts in incentives to vote, like which party controls the state legislature.

In Alabama, an estimated 118,000 registered voters do not have a photo ID they can use to vote. Black and Latino voters are nearly twice as likely as white voters to lack such documentation.

In other words, Alabama’s law is nothing but a naked attempt to suppress the voting rights of people of color. That’s why my organization, Greater Birmingham Ministries, with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, has sued the state to block the photo ID law. The case will go to trial in February.

When the law was passed in 2011, it so reeked of discrimination that state politicians didn’t bother to submit it to the federal government for approval, as Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required. For decades, Section 5 had acted as a crucial prophylactic, stopping discriminatory voting laws before any election. Instead the ID law remained dormant until June 2013, when the Supreme Court’s devastating ruling in Shelby County v. Holder suspended Section 5’s preclearance requirement.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a United States senator, applauded the ruling as “good news” for the South. For Mr. Sessions, who called the Voting Rights Act an “intrusive” piece of legislation, it was a victory. But for voters in Alabama and the rest of the South, it was terrible news.

It left states like Alabama, Texas and North Carolina free to test the limits of voter suppression. Indeed, after the decision, Alabama announced the photo ID law would go into effect without federal approval.

The photo ID law isn’t the only obstacle in front of Alabama voters. My organization is also challenging the state’s felon disfranchisement law, which affects an estimated 250,000 people here — 15 percent of Alabama’s black voting age population, but fewer than five percent of whites.

The law bars people with felonies of “moral turpitude” from voting. For decades such crimes were ill defined, but once included things like miscegenation. A new law narrowed the list of disfranchising crimes, but a federal judge ruled this summer that the state is not required to inform people with convictions who couldn’t vote under the old law that they may now register to vote.

Sadly, on Tuesday, many of the voters who would most benefit from picking lawmakers who will represent their interests in the Senate will be kept away from the polls. Those voters are disparaged for their purported disengagement with the election, while the state’s voter suppression campaign is largely ignored.

We’ve made too much progress to tolerate this. Federal courts must reject the voter ID law. Congress needs to restore the Voting Rights Act to its full strength. Nothing less than our democracy is at stake.

On December 13 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:


I mean he publicly said he was uninterested in implementing changes to abortion legislation in an interview in November after the wild inflation of his abortion stance from an interview question about federal legislation passed by the House restricting abortion before the third trimester.

It literally didn't matter, the MSNBC interview was enough to convince people that he has a psychotic stance on "late-term" or "full-birth" abortion, complete with a "rich history" of support, because the right-wing mediasphere is a monster and one interview is enough to damn you.

On December 13 2017 01:18 mahrgell wrote:


You say "We should allow more black people to vote" convinces a Moore voter to change his vote for you?

I'm not convinced.

Requiring a photo ID to vote seems perfectly reasonable to me. It is a useful document in other situations such as bank visits or any other occasions requiring personal verification on the spot. Though here it is getting less useful as we move more services online that used to require it.

If the problem is cost then have one weekend day a month and one late evening a week where offices are required to be open. Then add a refund when you register for the cost of it and public transport there and back if you are already on subsidies due to low income.

You should make your elections easy like that. Have them on a sunday or make election day a holiday.

On December 13 2017 01:22 Logo wrote:


You don't need to frame it that way and it wasn't specific to this election.

As far as I can tell it's not inherently a racial issue insofar as the laws target a specific demographic set. It *is* a racial issue because that specific demographic set is specifically disproportionately black (and intentionally so). But you don't have to fight it on that front if you think it will alienate white voters you need.

The same way Republicans don't always blast out the fact that these laws are designed to suppress minority votes (except when they do) a Democrat wouldn't need to frame it as about race so much as a basic reasonable thing that's good for a healthy democracy.



And what about when you're working double jobs, have kids, and/or don't own a car and the office is far way? Even if you get compensated for the drive that doesn't necessarily make the hour trip + time at the DMV easier to manage.

You should make your elections easy like that. Have them on a sunday or make election day a holiday.

On December 13 2017 01:28 TheTenthDoc wrote:


Even if you campaign on it, you won't be able to stop it from happening though, so you end up looking ineffectual. Bar another SCOTUS injunction, it often takes too much time for court cases to be tried or laws to be found illegal, and the impacts can happen before that with pretty much no repercussions. And new and shinier ways with new and shiny "justifications" to drag out that process will be found ad infinitum.

Like, if NC suddenly closes early voting in a federal election selectively across counties citing "budgetary concerns" and they coincidentally all happen to be majority African-American counties, the effect is already felt the first day. No federal intervention will stop that.

On December 13 2017 01:38 Liquid`Jinro wrote:

I really don't understand how this is not mandatory, is there some interesting reason behind it? Like does it favour one side or the other or what's up?

Seems like such a trivial thing. A national day off to vote seems like a super patriotic and democratic idea.

On December 13 2017 01:43 Logo wrote:


Democrats run for state seats too, and their complete failing at the state level is a big part of why we're in this mess to begin with.

On December 13 2017 01:51 IyMoon wrote:


The US voting system is on tuesday only because it is old as fuck and never updated.

Works like this (The idea behind it was actually decent, it just does not apply anymore)

Sunday was the day of worship so you can't have it that day
It would take farmers + rural folks sometimes a day to reach their nearest voting place so it could not be on a monday
So that is why it is on a tuesday. To allow people to go to church on sunday, and then take a day off so they could get to a voting place and vote.

It really really really needs to be changed to a Saturday