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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
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On April 05 2021 06:19 StasisField wrote:Exactly. Which is why we shouldn't be patting these corporations on the back for doing the bare minimum after the people of Georgia's freedoms have been chipped away. Sure, it's bad PR for the Republicans in Georgia, but they're restricting voting rights. If they restricted them enough to win back the Senate, then the blowback doesn't matter. They achieved what they sought out to achieve.
Yeah it is important to remember the whole point of PR is to win elections. When bad PR doesn't mean you lose the election, it was just a good strategy. Winning the senate is basically all that matters. If Republicans don't take the senate in 2022, their party will have a really hard time in 2024.
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I’m so glad the corporations are once again joining the bandwagon after it became politically expedient. Nike better keep lobbying to water down stuff like the Uyghur Labor Act. Good company, good product, and goodest labor.
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Anyone else agree there is a 0% chance people are paying student loans prior to midterm elections?
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I’m not sure I agree as a matter of probability, but I certainly hope you’re right as a personal matter
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On April 06 2021 04:51 Mohdoo wrote: Anyone else agree there is a 0% chance people are paying student loans prior to midterm elections? Unless Democrats want to lose on purpose.
Most likely they plan on running on the fear of Republicans letting things Democrats intentionally made temporary expire. That's almost certain to include student loan forbearance and the child tax credit boost.
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On April 06 2021 05:06 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 04:51 Mohdoo wrote: Anyone else agree there is a 0% chance people are paying student loans prior to midterm elections? Unless Democrats want to lose on purpose. Most likely they plan on running on the fear of Republicans letting things Democrats intentionally made temporary expire. That's almost certain to include student loan forbearance and the child tax credit boost.
Yup, agreed. And even looking beyond midterms, I think Biden 100% loses if people pay student loans before 2024.
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On April 06 2021 05:16 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 05:06 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 06 2021 04:51 Mohdoo wrote: Anyone else agree there is a 0% chance people are paying student loans prior to midterm elections? Unless Democrats want to lose on purpose. Most likely they plan on running on the fear of Republicans letting things Democrats intentionally made temporary expire. That's almost certain to include student loan forbearance and the child tax credit boost. Yup, agreed. And even looking beyond midterms, I think Biden 100% loses if people pay student loans before 2024. Yup. Right now his issue is that Republicans are working furiously to disenfranchise people and he's talking about negotiating an infrastructure/jobs plan with them for the next several months. This is with HR1 just sitting and waiting and no sensible way to blame McConnell for not putting it to a vote.
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On April 06 2021 05:33 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 05:16 Mohdoo wrote:On April 06 2021 05:06 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 06 2021 04:51 Mohdoo wrote: Anyone else agree there is a 0% chance people are paying student loans prior to midterm elections? Unless Democrats want to lose on purpose. Most likely they plan on running on the fear of Republicans letting things Democrats intentionally made temporary expire. That's almost certain to include student loan forbearance and the child tax credit boost. Yup, agreed. And even looking beyond midterms, I think Biden 100% loses if people pay student loans before 2024. Yup. Right now his issue is that Republicans are working furiously to disenfranchise people and he's talking about negotiating an infrastructure/jobs plan with them for the next several months. This is with HR1 just sitting and waiting and no sensible way to blame McConnell for not putting it to a vote.
After the stimulus talks, I'm just waiting and seeing. After all the bluster and whatnot from Manchin, we basically got most of what we wanted. I imagine the same will be true of everything else we see. Instead of 2T it'll be 1.3T or something.
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United States42738 Posts
On April 06 2021 05:06 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 04:51 Mohdoo wrote: Anyone else agree there is a 0% chance people are paying student loans prior to midterm elections? Unless Democrats want to lose on purpose. Most likely they plan on running on the fear of Republicans letting things Democrats intentionally made temporary expire. That's almost certain to include student loan forbearance and the child tax credit boost. One cool thing about the new child tax credit is that it’s now only loosely connected with taxation. They’re making monthly payments to families and saying that it’s really an advance on a tax credit that you’d claim the following April but they’re giving it out early, just as they did with the pandemic stimulus. We’ve seen the mechanism of the IRS converted for use as UBI with tax filing acting as an annual benefits true up. I think that’s an interesting development, especially given the control the executive wields over the IRS.
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On April 06 2021 06:40 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 05:06 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 06 2021 04:51 Mohdoo wrote: Anyone else agree there is a 0% chance people are paying student loans prior to midterm elections? Unless Democrats want to lose on purpose. Most likely they plan on running on the fear of Republicans letting things Democrats intentionally made temporary expire. That's almost certain to include student loan forbearance and the child tax credit boost. One cool thing about the new child tax credit is that it’s now only loosely connected with taxation. They’re making monthly payments to families and saying that it’s really an advance on a tax credit that you’d claim the following April but they’re giving it out early, just as they did with the pandemic stimulus. We’ve seen the mechanism of the IRS converted for use as UBI with tax filing acting as an annual benefits true up. I think that’s an interesting development, especially given the control the executive wields over the IRS. Given that the IRS was originally the enforcement arm of Prohibition, back when it was the Bureau of Internal Revenue, it’s somehow fitting that it is now being turned into a benefits distribution platform. It’s either the Service or Social Security, no other agency has anywhere close to the know how or infrastructure.
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Can anyone ELI5 how the Georgia bill disenfranchises so many voters? From what I've read on the bill and about the bill, the only thing that makes it harder to vote would be requiring an ID, which, considering how ubiquitous IDs are an how many things require an ID, I don't particularly think is unreasonable.
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United States42738 Posts
On April 06 2021 06:58 Cbole wrote: Can anyone ELI5 how the Georgia bill disenfranchises so many voters? From what I've read on the bill and about the bill, the only thing that makes it harder to vote would be requiring an ID, which, considering how ubiquitous IDs are an how many things require an ID, I don't particularly think is unreasonable. A lot of people don’t have IDs and can’t get them. Homelessness, poverty, prison, difficult family backgrounds, and those with immigrant family backgrounds are factors. Let’s say you end up in jail pending a hearing for jaywalking or something. You can’t afford bail, you miss work, lose your apartment, your landlord throws out your stuff. How do you reset from zero documents? Let’s say your parents were hear illegally, or perhaps legally but didn’t trust the authorities, and never registered your birth. You were born here, but can you prove it? Let’s say your parents were shitty people and you have no contact with them but they never gave you your social security card and birth certificate when they kicked you out at 16. Let’s say you’re homeless. Where do you even keep these documents that prove who you are? How do you prove your address for a state ID? How do you look up the requirements and go to the various offices? How do you fax the agencies needed for replacement documents? Where do you tell them to mail them to?
What all this amounts to is that it’s pretty simple for an in group to get an ID and very difficult for an out group to get one which is exactly why they want it to be a requirement for voting. They want the in group to vote and they don’t want the out group to. In a way it’s reminiscent of landowner requirements to vote, and for the exact same reasons.
Part of the issue in my opinion is that privileged people tend to overlook how difficult many systems they take for granted are. If you look or sound a certain way the system is easier to operate. If you developed a certain skill set the system is easier to operate. If you have access to certain resources the system is easier to operate.
A few years ago I helped a homeless guy get documented. He’d been undocumented for a few years and didn’t have much to start with. It wasn’t actually that difficult for me. I opened with calling MVD Express (private for profit DMV) and asking them what they recommended. I got the DoD to fax his military separation docs. I wrote up a lease saying he lived with me (he’d been on my sofa for a few days), printed it, and signed it. I paid the fee and they gave a state ID. Once we had that we could go by the state welfare office, get in Medicare etc. Once that was done we could get bank accounts etc.
Does that mean he was lying when he told me he had difficulties getting all of that? I don’t think it does. Tasks are not equally easy for all people. People with socially undesirable accents, people whose parents didn’t apply for or keep the paperwork they should have after they were born, people who can’t take time off work, people who can’t pay fees, people who can’t drive around town, and so on all face additional barriers. More so if the local institutions are trying to stop them and, to be clear, many of these institutions were deliberately designed with disenfranchisement in mind. Local registrars in Felon Disenfranchisement states, for example, were open about how they intended to exploit the rules under the constitution to prevent African Americans from voting. The cynicism people have regarding this being about disenfranchisement rather than election security isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s built on a very long, very open, very established history of it always being about disenfranchisement. They’ve done this so many times before in so many different ways that you would have to be impossibly naive or ignorant to say it’s about security.
I recently listened to a British barrister who came to England as a child refugee from Somalia who spoke about his experiences code switching and how barriers his peers faced dropped away the moment they passed the phone to him. With an affected Etonian accent and the mannerisms of higher education people were only too happy to help him after stonewalling his mother. And because of his inclusion within the system he acquired the experience in operating it and developed the skills to overcome obstacles where others would simply get frustrated. Race, class, social economic background, education, genetic ability, and so forth all impacted what should have been a universally even handed service. People who benefit from these advantages don’t always see that their experience is not universal.
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On April 06 2021 07:07 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 06:58 Cbole wrote: Can anyone ELI5 how the Georgia bill disenfranchises so many voters? From what I've read on the bill and about the bill, the only thing that makes it harder to vote would be requiring an ID, which, considering how ubiquitous IDs are an how many things require an ID, I don't particularly think is unreasonable. A lot of people don’t have IDs and can’t get them. Homelessness, poverty, prison, difficult family backgrounds, and those with immigrant family backgrounds are factors. Let’s say you end up in jail pending a hearing for jaywalking or something. You can’t afford bail, you miss work, lose your apartment, your landlord throws out your stuff. How do you reset from zero documents? Let’s say your parents were hear illegally, or perhaps legally but didn’t trust the authorities, and never registered your birth. You were born here, but can you prove it? Let’s say your parents were shitty people and you have no contact with them but they never gave you your social security card and birth certificate when they kicked you out at 16. Let’s say you’re homeless. Where do you even keep these documents that prove who you are? How do you prove your address for a state ID? How do you look up the requirements and go to the various offices? How do you fax the agencies needed for replacement documents? Where do you tell them to mail them to? What all this amounts to is that it’s pretty simple for an in group to get an ID and very difficult for an out group to get one which is exactly why they want it to be a requirement for voting. They want the in group to vote and they don’t want the out group to. In a way it’s reminiscent of landowner requirements to vote, and for the exact same reasons. Part of the issue in my opinion is that privileged people tend to overlook how difficult many systems they take for granted are. If you look or sound a certain way the system is easier to operate. If you developed a certain skill set the system is easier to operate. If you have access to certain resources the system is easier to operate. A few years ago I helped a homeless guy get documented. He’d been undocumented for a few years and didn’t have much to start with. It wasn’t actually that difficult for me. I opened with calling MVD Express (private for profit DMV) and asking them what they recommended. I got the DoD to fax his military separation docs. I wrote up a lease saying he lived with me (he’d been on my sofa for a few days), printed it, and signed it. I paid the fee and they gave a state ID. Once we had that we could go by the state welfare office, get in Medicare etc. Once that was done we could get bank accounts etc. Does that mean he was lying when he told me he had difficulties getting all of that? I don’t think it does. Tasks are not equally easy for all people. People with socially undesirable accents, people whose parents didn’t apply for or keep the paperwork they should have after they were born, people who can’t take time off work, people who can’t pay fees, people who can’t drive around town, and so on all face additional barriers. More so if the local institutions are trying to stop them and, to be clear, many of these institutions were deliberately designed with disenfranchisement in mind. Local registrars in Felon Disenfranchisement states, for example, were open about how they intended to exploit the rules under the constitution to prevent African Americans from voting. The cynicism people have regarding this being about disenfranchisement rather than election security isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s built on a very long, very open, very established history of it always being about disenfranchisement. They’ve done this so many times before in so many different ways that you would have to be impossibly naive or ignorant to say it’s about security. I recently listened to a British barrister who came to England as a child refugee from Somalia who spoke about his experiences code switching and how barriers his peers faced dropped away the moment they passed the phone to him. With an affected Etonian accent and the mannerisms of higher education people were only too happy to help him after stonewalling his mother. And because of his inclusion within the system he acquired the experience in operating it and developed the skills to overcome obstacles where others would simply get frustrated. Race, class, social economic background, education, genetic ability, and so forth all impacted what should have been a universally even handed service. People who benefit from these advantages don’t always see that their experience is not universal.
Sounds to me like the problem is the US's inability to provide easy documentation. There are plenty of poorer countries with more deficient burocracies that are capable of issuing a government ID and requiring it to vote.
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United States42738 Posts
When I first came to the US and tried to get a drivers license I printed out the requirements ahead of time from the DMV website, brought in what I needed and expected to get it pretty simply. I ran into the following hurdles.
1) My lease paperwork was 28 days old. The requirement said a lease signed within the last 90 days. The lady told me that it had to be older than 30 days. I showed her their internal requirements and that it just said less than 90. She said that the requirement wasn’t specific about the age but that she knew it was greater than 30. I pointed out that it was specific, it was specifically less than 90, but she wouldn’t take it.
2) My bank statement was deemed unacceptable as proof of address. They hadn’t yet mailed me one because I’d just come to the US so I went to the bank and explained and they were nice enough to print one out for me on bank letterhead paper and put a business card from the branch manager on it. This was not good enough. It had my address at the top, it was a statement of my account, and I got it from the bank but apparently it wasn’t a bank statement showing my address.
3) I was told I needed an authorized translation of my British drivers license so that they could read it. I asked her which language they needed it translated to and she said English. I told her that in England we speak English and asked which part of the license she was unable to read. She pointed at the expiration date which was in DD/MM/YYYY format. However given it was something like 03/04/2016 she couldn’t have known it wasn’t MM/DD/YYYY. In any case I told her those were numerals and that I couldn’t translate those. She wouldn’t accept that explanation. In retrospect I’m lucky I didn’t say they were Arabic numerals, I’d have ended up in Gitmo.
I then drove to a business called MVD Express, gave them the same documents, paid $70, and got my US license. The secret ingredient to getting documented was money.
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United States42738 Posts
On April 06 2021 07:21 Sbrubbles wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 07:07 KwarK wrote:On April 06 2021 06:58 Cbole wrote: Can anyone ELI5 how the Georgia bill disenfranchises so many voters? From what I've read on the bill and about the bill, the only thing that makes it harder to vote would be requiring an ID, which, considering how ubiquitous IDs are an how many things require an ID, I don't particularly think is unreasonable. A lot of people don’t have IDs and can’t get them. Homelessness, poverty, prison, difficult family backgrounds, and those with immigrant family backgrounds are factors. Let’s say you end up in jail pending a hearing for jaywalking or something. You can’t afford bail, you miss work, lose your apartment, your landlord throws out your stuff. How do you reset from zero documents? Let’s say your parents were hear illegally, or perhaps legally but didn’t trust the authorities, and never registered your birth. You were born here, but can you prove it? Let’s say your parents were shitty people and you have no contact with them but they never gave you your social security card and birth certificate when they kicked you out at 16. Let’s say you’re homeless. Where do you even keep these documents that prove who you are? How do you prove your address for a state ID? How do you look up the requirements and go to the various offices? How do you fax the agencies needed for replacement documents? Where do you tell them to mail them to? What all this amounts to is that it’s pretty simple for an in group to get an ID and very difficult for an out group to get one which is exactly why they want it to be a requirement for voting. They want the in group to vote and they don’t want the out group to. In a way it’s reminiscent of landowner requirements to vote, and for the exact same reasons. Part of the issue in my opinion is that privileged people tend to overlook how difficult many systems they take for granted are. If you look or sound a certain way the system is easier to operate. If you developed a certain skill set the system is easier to operate. If you have access to certain resources the system is easier to operate. A few years ago I helped a homeless guy get documented. He’d been undocumented for a few years and didn’t have much to start with. It wasn’t actually that difficult for me. I opened with calling MVD Express (private for profit DMV) and asking them what they recommended. I got the DoD to fax his military separation docs. I wrote up a lease saying he lived with me (he’d been on my sofa for a few days), printed it, and signed it. I paid the fee and they gave a state ID. Once we had that we could go by the state welfare office, get in Medicare etc. Once that was done we could get bank accounts etc. Does that mean he was lying when he told me he had difficulties getting all of that? I don’t think it does. Tasks are not equally easy for all people. People with socially undesirable accents, people whose parents didn’t apply for or keep the paperwork they should have after they were born, people who can’t take time off work, people who can’t pay fees, people who can’t drive around town, and so on all face additional barriers. More so if the local institutions are trying to stop them and, to be clear, many of these institutions were deliberately designed with disenfranchisement in mind. Local registrars in Felon Disenfranchisement states, for example, were open about how they intended to exploit the rules under the constitution to prevent African Americans from voting. The cynicism people have regarding this being about disenfranchisement rather than election security isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s built on a very long, very open, very established history of it always being about disenfranchisement. They’ve done this so many times before in so many different ways that you would have to be impossibly naive or ignorant to say it’s about security. I recently listened to a British barrister who came to England as a child refugee from Somalia who spoke about his experiences code switching and how barriers his peers faced dropped away the moment they passed the phone to him. With an affected Etonian accent and the mannerisms of higher education people were only too happy to help him after stonewalling his mother. And because of his inclusion within the system he acquired the experience in operating it and developed the skills to overcome obstacles where others would simply get frustrated. Race, class, social economic background, education, genetic ability, and so forth all impacted what should have been a universally even handed service. People who benefit from these advantages don’t always see that their experience is not universal. Sounds to me like the problem is the US's inability to provide easy documentation. There are plenty of poorer countries with more deficient burocracies that are capable of issuing a government ID and requiring it to vote. This is the solution that the left keep offering. Making it easy and free for people to get documented. The right insist that if they do that we’ll all get microchipped by Bill Gates.
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On April 06 2021 07:21 Sbrubbles wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 07:07 KwarK wrote:On April 06 2021 06:58 Cbole wrote: Can anyone ELI5 how the Georgia bill disenfranchises so many voters? From what I've read on the bill and about the bill, the only thing that makes it harder to vote would be requiring an ID, which, considering how ubiquitous IDs are an how many things require an ID, I don't particularly think is unreasonable. A lot of people don’t have IDs and can’t get them. Homelessness, poverty, prison, difficult family backgrounds, and those with immigrant family backgrounds are factors. Let’s say you end up in jail pending a hearing for jaywalking or something. You can’t afford bail, you miss work, lose your apartment, your landlord throws out your stuff. How do you reset from zero documents? Let’s say your parents were hear illegally, or perhaps legally but didn’t trust the authorities, and never registered your birth. You were born here, but can you prove it? Let’s say your parents were shitty people and you have no contact with them but they never gave you your social security card and birth certificate when they kicked you out at 16. Let’s say you’re homeless. Where do you even keep these documents that prove who you are? How do you prove your address for a state ID? How do you look up the requirements and go to the various offices? How do you fax the agencies needed for replacement documents? Where do you tell them to mail them to? What all this amounts to is that it’s pretty simple for an in group to get an ID and very difficult for an out group to get one which is exactly why they want it to be a requirement for voting. They want the in group to vote and they don’t want the out group to. In a way it’s reminiscent of landowner requirements to vote, and for the exact same reasons. Part of the issue in my opinion is that privileged people tend to overlook how difficult many systems they take for granted are. If you look or sound a certain way the system is easier to operate. If you developed a certain skill set the system is easier to operate. If you have access to certain resources the system is easier to operate. A few years ago I helped a homeless guy get documented. He’d been undocumented for a few years and didn’t have much to start with. It wasn’t actually that difficult for me. I opened with calling MVD Express (private for profit DMV) and asking them what they recommended. I got the DoD to fax his military separation docs. I wrote up a lease saying he lived with me (he’d been on my sofa for a few days), printed it, and signed it. I paid the fee and they gave a state ID. Once we had that we could go by the state welfare office, get in Medicare etc. Once that was done we could get bank accounts etc. Does that mean he was lying when he told me he had difficulties getting all of that? I don’t think it does. Tasks are not equally easy for all people. People with socially undesirable accents, people whose parents didn’t apply for or keep the paperwork they should have after they were born, people who can’t take time off work, people who can’t pay fees, people who can’t drive around town, and so on all face additional barriers. More so if the local institutions are trying to stop them and, to be clear, many of these institutions were deliberately designed with disenfranchisement in mind. Local registrars in Felon Disenfranchisement states, for example, were open about how they intended to exploit the rules under the constitution to prevent African Americans from voting. The cynicism people have regarding this being about disenfranchisement rather than election security isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s built on a very long, very open, very established history of it always being about disenfranchisement. They’ve done this so many times before in so many different ways that you would have to be impossibly naive or ignorant to say it’s about security. I recently listened to a British barrister who came to England as a child refugee from Somalia who spoke about his experiences code switching and how barriers his peers faced dropped away the moment they passed the phone to him. With an affected Etonian accent and the mannerisms of higher education people were only too happy to help him after stonewalling his mother. And because of his inclusion within the system he acquired the experience in operating it and developed the skills to overcome obstacles where others would simply get frustrated. Race, class, social economic background, education, genetic ability, and so forth all impacted what should have been a universally even handed service. People who benefit from these advantages don’t always see that their experience is not universal. Sounds to me like the problem is the US's inability to provide easy documentation. There are plenty of poorer countries with more deficient burocracies that are capable of issuing a government ID and requiring it to vote.
Many people on the right see widespread national ID with enforcement as an enormous invasion of privacy. People on the left have been on board with standardized identification provided by the government free of charge for billions of years.
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On April 06 2021 07:21 Sbrubbles wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2021 07:07 KwarK wrote:On April 06 2021 06:58 Cbole wrote: Can anyone ELI5 how the Georgia bill disenfranchises so many voters? From what I've read on the bill and about the bill, the only thing that makes it harder to vote would be requiring an ID, which, considering how ubiquitous IDs are an how many things require an ID, I don't particularly think is unreasonable. A lot of people don’t have IDs and can’t get them. Homelessness, poverty, prison, difficult family backgrounds, and those with immigrant family backgrounds are factors. Let’s say you end up in jail pending a hearing for jaywalking or something. You can’t afford bail, you miss work, lose your apartment, your landlord throws out your stuff. How do you reset from zero documents? Let’s say your parents were hear illegally, or perhaps legally but didn’t trust the authorities, and never registered your birth. You were born here, but can you prove it? Let’s say your parents were shitty people and you have no contact with them but they never gave you your social security card and birth certificate when they kicked you out at 16. Let’s say you’re homeless. Where do you even keep these documents that prove who you are? How do you prove your address for a state ID? How do you look up the requirements and go to the various offices? How do you fax the agencies needed for replacement documents? Where do you tell them to mail them to? What all this amounts to is that it’s pretty simple for an in group to get an ID and very difficult for an out group to get one which is exactly why they want it to be a requirement for voting. They want the in group to vote and they don’t want the out group to. In a way it’s reminiscent of landowner requirements to vote, and for the exact same reasons. Part of the issue in my opinion is that privileged people tend to overlook how difficult many systems they take for granted are. If you look or sound a certain way the system is easier to operate. If you developed a certain skill set the system is easier to operate. If you have access to certain resources the system is easier to operate. A few years ago I helped a homeless guy get documented. He’d been undocumented for a few years and didn’t have much to start with. It wasn’t actually that difficult for me. I opened with calling MVD Express (private for profit DMV) and asking them what they recommended. I got the DoD to fax his military separation docs. I wrote up a lease saying he lived with me (he’d been on my sofa for a few days), printed it, and signed it. I paid the fee and they gave a state ID. Once we had that we could go by the state welfare office, get in Medicare etc. Once that was done we could get bank accounts etc. Does that mean he was lying when he told me he had difficulties getting all of that? I don’t think it does. Tasks are not equally easy for all people. People with socially undesirable accents, people whose parents didn’t apply for or keep the paperwork they should have after they were born, people who can’t take time off work, people who can’t pay fees, people who can’t drive around town, and so on all face additional barriers. More so if the local institutions are trying to stop them and, to be clear, many of these institutions were deliberately designed with disenfranchisement in mind. Local registrars in Felon Disenfranchisement states, for example, were open about how they intended to exploit the rules under the constitution to prevent African Americans from voting. The cynicism people have regarding this being about disenfranchisement rather than election security isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s built on a very long, very open, very established history of it always being about disenfranchisement. They’ve done this so many times before in so many different ways that you would have to be impossibly naive or ignorant to say it’s about security. I recently listened to a British barrister who came to England as a child refugee from Somalia who spoke about his experiences code switching and how barriers his peers faced dropped away the moment they passed the phone to him. With an affected Etonian accent and the mannerisms of higher education people were only too happy to help him after stonewalling his mother. And because of his inclusion within the system he acquired the experience in operating it and developed the skills to overcome obstacles where others would simply get frustrated. Race, class, social economic background, education, genetic ability, and so forth all impacted what should have been a universally even handed service. People who benefit from these advantages don’t always see that their experience is not universal. Sounds to me like the problem is the US's inability to provide easy documentation. There are plenty of poorer countries with more deficient burocracies that are capable of issuing a government ID and requiring it to vote. Yes, the point is that it is purposely difficult for certain people to get IDs. One party in the the US had made it that way. They then want to require those IDs, that they have denied to certain groups, before someone can vote. If IDs were easy to obtain for everyone, voter ID laws would be fine. But that’s not the system we have and Republicans don’t seem interested in making sure everyone has an ID.
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But in reading the bill it also allows for the contingency that someone doesn't have a driver's license or state issue identification card. From the bill,
If the elector has affirmed on the envelope that he or she does not have a Georgia 1581 driver's license or state identification card issued pursuant to Article 5 of Chapter 5 of 1582 Title 40, the registrar or clerk shall compare the last four digits of the elector's social 1583 security number and date of birth entered on the envelope with the same information 1584 contained in the elector's voter registration records.
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United States42738 Posts
On April 06 2021 07:49 Cbole wrote:But in reading the bill it also allows for the contingency that someone doesn't have a driver's license or state issue identification card. From the bill, Show nested quote +If the elector has affirmed on the envelope that he or she does not have a Georgia 1581 driver's license or state identification card issued pursuant to Article 5 of Chapter 5 of 1582 Title 40, the registrar or clerk shall compare the last four digits of the elector's social 1583 security number and date of birth entered on the envelope with the same information 1584 contained in the elector's voter registration records. Would these be the electoral rolls that they just purged?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/politics/georgia-voter-rolls-report/index.html
This is literally how the system is designed. The whole point is to put a locally appointed good old boy between you and voting. It’s no different than 150 years ago when they bragged about using this one trick against African Americans trying to vote. You’re assuming good faith but they’ve been doing this for decades and if you look back far enough you’ll see they never used to lie about why they did it. A hundred years ago they said they were doing it to control “the negro menace”. They won’t say that anymore but they still insist that the rules their Klan grandfathers enacted have to be enforced.
If the local clerk won’t let you vote then you really have very little recourse. Make a fuss and he’ll call the sheriff. Hell, they want you to make a fuss, they can disenfranchise you for life if you assault the canine officer by bleeding on his teeth.
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