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why not?
Igno-rant, you have no shame (aka, any right winger), spouting the Repug Lie that "voter suppression" is actually "voter protection".
why not?
12 reasons Texas’ new voter ID law is racist
1. This was a dispute about facts not fears. Unlike many other voting rights lawsuits, civil rights attorneys in this case did not sue without showing that there were real victims and harm. Ginsburg noted that important distinction writing that there had been a “full trial and resting on an extensive record from which the District Court found ballot-access discrimination by the State.”
2. But the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court
3. Texas’ previous voter ID requirements are ample. Ginsburg noted that the state would not be left without any legal means to ensure eligible voters were getting ballots at polling places. “Texas need only reinstate the voter identification procedures it employed for 10 years (from 2003 to 2013) and in five federal elections.”
4. Texas officials have not informed the public about the new law. There have been a lack of public education about the new law, which will lead to confusion at the polls as it is implemented, Ginsburg noted. “The District Court found “woefully lacking” and “grossly” underfunded the State’s efforts to familiarize the public and poll workers regarding the new identification requirements.”
5. The state is to blame for confusion at the polls. Ginsburg said the state, which claims it needs the stricter photo ID laws to protect the process’ integrity, will instead be to blame for creating chaos and confusion. “In short, any voter confusion or lack of public confidence in Texas’ electoral process is in this case largely attributable to the State itself.”
6. The law concerns only polling place voting. This is an easily overlooked point, because the stricter voter ID laws do not effect people who vote by mail—which often is the way the Republican Party tries to turn out its base—but only people who show up at polling places. “The bill requires in-person voting to present one of a limited number of government-issued photo identification do ents,” she wrote, noting that this list is narrower than what is accepted in other states, citing Wisconsin.
7. Hundreds of thousands of Texans will have a hard time getting the ID. The ID law says that Texans can get a state-issued photo ID from police, but only in certain locations. “Those who lack the approved forms of identification may obtain an “election identification certificate” from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), but more than 400,000 eligible voters face round-trip travel times of three hours or more.”
8. The trial court found that impact racist and discriminatory. “On an extensive factual record developed in the course of a nine-day trial, the District Court found Senate Bill 14 [the voter ID law] irreconcilable with Section 2 of the [federal] Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose and would yield a prohibited discriminatory result.”
9. Texas Republicans have a reason to stop minority voting. Ginsburg noted the motive behind the tougher ID law, which is that the state’s ruling class of mostly white Republicans is less and less representative of the state’s population as a whole. “In light of the “seismic demographic shift” in Texas between 2000 and 2010, making Texas a “majority-minority state,” the District Court observed that the Texas Legislature and Governor had an evident incentive to “gain partisan advantage by suppressing” the “votes of African-Americans and Latinos.”
10. Voter in-person fraud—the law’s rationale—is almost non-existent. The Republicans have been able to pass tougher voter ID laws because they cite a fear that people are showing up and the polls and voting more than once. Ginsburg noted that very claim was utterly exaggerated, saying, “Between 2002 and 2011, there were only two in-person voter fraud cases prosecuted to conviction in Texas.”
11. There is no reasonable basis for a tougher voter ID law. Ginsburg noted that the law is a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, saying, “Texas did not begin to demonstrate that the Bill’s discriminatory features were necessary to prevent fraud or to increase public confidence in the electoral process.”
12. The law is correctly called a poll tax. That term is from the Jim Crow era, where white southerners imposed unreasonable hurdles and costs on minorities to prevent them from voting. “Under Senate Bill 14, a cost attends every form of qualified indentification available to the general public,” Ginsburg wrote. “Senate Bill 14 may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5 percent of all registered voters) from voting in person for lack of compliant identification. A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic.”
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/21/12_r...acist_partner/
wow, that's how a brilliant, dedicated jurist works and produces, not like the lazy, slimy, activist, stare decisis-killing SCOTUS5 of Repug/VRWC political hacks.
Texas Just Won the Right to Disenfranchise 600,000 People. It's Not the First Time.
1865: Voter intimidation. Beginning with emancipation, African Americans in Texas were regularly denied the right to vote, through intimidation and violence, including lynching.
1895: The first all-white primaries begin. In the mid-1890s, Texas legislators pushed a law requiring political parties to hold primaries and allowing those political parties to set racist qualifications for who could participate.
1902: The poll tax. The Legislature added a poll tax to Texas' cons ution in 1902, requiring voters to pay a fee to register to vote and to show their receipt of payment in order to cast a ballot. The poll tax was equivalent to most of a day's wage for many black and Mexican workers—roughly $15.48 in today's dollars.
1905: Texas formalizes its all-white primary system. The Terrell Election Law of 1905 made official the all-white primary system, encouraging both main political parties and county election officials to adopt voting requirements that explicitly banned minorities from voting in primaries. The stated purpose of the law? Preventing voter fraud.
1918: Texas enacts an anti-immigrant voting law. The legislation banned interpreters at the polls and forbade naturalized citizens from receiving assistance from election judges unless they had been citizens for 21 years.
1922: Texas tries a new type of all-white primary. In 1918, black voters in Texas successfully challenged a nonpartisan all-white primary system in Waco. The state Legislature got around this snag by enacting a law banning blacks from all Democratic primaries. Because the Democratic Party was dominant in the South at the time, the candidate it selected through its primary would inevitably win the general election. Anyone voting in the party's primary had to prove "I am white and I am a Democrat."
1927: Texas tries a third type of all-white primary. After the Supreme Courtstruck down Texas' all-white Democratic primaries, the Legislature got crafty again, passing a new law that allowed political parties—instead of the state government—to determine who could vote in party primaries. The Texas Democratic Party promptly adopted a resolution that only whites could vote.
1932: Texas tries again. In 1932, the Supreme Court struck down Texas' white primaries once more. In response, the Democratic state convention adopted a rule keeping nonwhites out of primaries. The high court initially upheld the new system.
1944: And again. The high court eventually overturned the convention-based white primary system in 1944, but party leaders could still ensure that county officials were elected by whites. A nonparty county political organization called the Jaybird Democratic Association had for decades screened candidates for nomination without allowing nonwhites to participate. The Supreme Court only invalidated the practice in 1953.
1963: Long live the poll tax! In the middle of the civil rights era, Texans rejected a cons utional amendment that would have ended the poll tax. Efforts to repeal the tax were labeled a communist plot by mainstream Texas pols and newspapers. The tax remained in place until 1966. Research shows it dampened minority turnout until 1980.
1966: Texas implements a strict new voter registration system. After the Supreme Court invalidated Texas' poll tax, the state Legislature enacted a restrictive registration system requiring voters to reregister annually during a four-month time period that ended nearly eight months before the general election. The high courtruled the voter registration regime uncons utional in 1971.
1970: Texas draws discriminatory districts. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973that the state's 1970 redistricting lines were intentionally discriminatory. In each redistricting cycle since then, Texas has been found by federal courts to have violated the US Cons ution or the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
1971: The state attempts to keep black students from the ballot box. Once 18-year-olds got the right to vote in 1971, Texas' Waller County became a majority black county. To stave off the wave of new African American votes, county officials fought for years to keep students at the county's mostly black Prairie View A&M University from accessing the polls.
1981: Texas draws discriminatory districts again. After the state redistricted a decade later, the attorney general found that two of the new districts were discriminatory and violated the Voting Rights Act. (Since 1976, the Justice Department has issued 201 objections to proposed electoral changes in Texas due to the expected discriminatory effects of the measures.)
2003: And again. In a 2006 ruling, the Supreme Court found that one of Texas' recently redrawn counties violated the VRA.
2011: And again. A year later, a three-judge federal court ruled in Texas v. United States that the state's local and congressional redistricting maps showed evidence of deliberate discrimination.
2011: Texas enacts its infamous voter ID law. The state's voter ID law is the harshest of its kind in the country. Poll workers will accept fewer forms of identification than in any other state with a similar law. Earlier this month, a federal trial court struck down the law, ruling that it overly burdened minority voters. The Supreme Court reversed that court's ruling this past weekend.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...id-law-history
IIRC, TX enacted something 7000 state felony laws after the unCivil War aimed primarily at blacks and Mexicans.
Why is Texas so racist?
Now they want people to carry a photo ID to vote?! What normal person has one of those???
a lot of people don't, actually.
A photo ID to vote? What is this? Nazi Germany?
yep, UNDUE BURDEN for the 600K people in TX w/o the voter ID, just like the UNDUE BURDEN requiring ladies to travel 100s of miles for an abortion (or even perinatal care). voting and abortion are legal rights, just not for everybody in Texas.
As one comment pointed out, easier to buy gun in TX than it is to vote.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-21-2014 at 03:20 PM.
Yep, those two things are exactly alike.
Funny how getting a photo ID is
the are exactly alike in that TX Repugs try to block voting and abortions for blacks, browns. Rich white es can easily vote and get abortions.Yep, those two things are exactly alike.
Funny how getting a photo ID is
Given that an individual can vote in Texas without an ID, one wonders precisely which boogeyman this law is actually intended to conquer.
the FALSE boogeyman that makes blacks and latinos vote 100s of times to throw elections. Is why TX is a deeply blue state
So then why are you upset? Seems like you two are worried about losing 100s of illegal votes, tbh.
My guess would be that there are more polling places than locations where one can obtain a photo ID.Funny how getting a photo ID is
And appearing physically in a particular location to obtain a photo ID depends upon a number of things beyond mileage. A person who is distant from a place that peddles photo IDs must be able to get there, and when the office is distant from the person, that usually requires driving (which is, of course, illegal without a driver's license). Even if you assume that all those who want to obtain IDs are able to get to the required locations without regard to distances (I would tend to think the number of people who are without ID as a matter of sheer distance from the requisite state office is a fairly small number), there are other issues that can make that harder than one might think. For instance, those offices are only open during particular hours and days. If I'm barely scraping by and can't afford to risk my job (which may be in jeopardy if I'm absent or late), my opportunities to get the ID that I now must have in order to exercise a fundamental right depend on my schedule and the hours of the state office being congruous; even then, if I encounter the delays that are so often part of the process in those sorts of offices during the narrow window of time that I'm able to visit the office, I may have to choose between my job and the exercise of my right to vote. No doubt those are extreme cir stances in each regard, but a law of this sort shouldn't fail to account for those extreme cir stances.
You could counter by saying that if those things are true, I won't be able to vote for the same reasons. That's likely true on election day itself, but during early voting periods, the wait to vote in any place I've ever cast a ballot has been short and would accommodate those who have practical impediments to spending occasionally extended periods of time at a state office like DPS.
And even if I can get to an office and have the time to wait for that process to play itself out, I'm also obligated to have a variety of additional do ents available to prove that I am who I say I am. The administrative hoops one must jump through to get that do entation can be both time-consuming and confusing. For some who are deeply impoverished, paying even nominal fees for those sorts of things can be quite burdensome.
I could see the need for voter ID laws if there was some sort of widespread proof of voter fraud that needs to be curbed to ensure endemic fraud can be prevented. But there is no empirical proof to support that sort of claim and the impediments the law creates for some, ostensibly in the name of ridding the state of a problem that doesn't actually exist, seems ridiculously overbroad and potentially disenfranchising. I'm not sure why anyone other than an ideologue would be okay with a law that has the potential effect of denying even some people their right to vote.
It's particularly funny to hear avowed "cons utionalists" express no question about a law that is likely to deny to some the most fundamental right our cons ution provides.
Eh, the cons ution was written by slave owners, so fundamental rights mean jack in it.
If that's true, the Bill of Rights is entirely worthless.
I doubt that those who scream about their fundamental right to bear arms under the Second Amendment anytime someone starts talking about gun regulation would buy that argument.
Why are Dems so eager for brown people to have abortions?
but, by Cons utional means, the USA has defined new rights, and expanded "white Euro-American slave owner" rights to all Americans (but not to any other humans)
Seems this whole "distance" issue would disproportionately affect people in rural "fly over" country.
As for the "widespread proof of voter fraud" argument, I would agree that the amount of fraud in undetected voter fraud is very near zero. Likewise, the amount of undetected tax fraud is very near zero. Hence "undetected".
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact...r-turnout-eve/
Black voter turnout exceeds white voter turnout, even in states with strict ID laws, pundit claims
By Linda Qiu on Thursday, July 17th, 2014 at 12:45 p.m.
Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent suggestion of a "racial animus" fueling Obama’s critics is no more than political posturing, said Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley.
Some GOP politicians and conservative media objected to Holder’s comments on ABC’s This Week on July 13, 2014. Riley, dubbed by Salon magazine as "the right’s favorite new race guru," dismissed Holder’s claims as fear-mongering a day later on Fox News’ The Kelly File.
"This is about Democrats concerned about minority turnout in November, and they have nothing to offer these cons uents," Riley said. "It’s motivating them by scaring them, telling them that voter ID laws suppress the black vote, even though black voter turnout in 2012 exceeded the rate of white voter turnout, even in the states with the strictest voter ID laws."
The political and racial motivations and effects behind voter ID laws have been debated for quite some time. We wondered, how did voter ID laws impact voter turnout across the board?
The phantom poll booth
Riley told us he got the statistic from the U.S. Census Bureau. The federal data agency indicated in a 2013 report that the black voting rate (66.2 percent) indeed surpassed the white voting rate (64.1 percent) by 2.1 percentage points in the 2012 elections.
According to experts, the strictest voter ID laws are when voters are required to present a photo ID when casting a ballot, and if they don't, are required to take additional steps before their vote can be counted. If a voter can’t present an ID, he or she is issued a provisional ballot and must submit an ID within a certain amount of time (usually 2 to 6 days). The Census reports that in these states, black voter rates in the 2012 elections were just as high if not higher than white voter rates:
- Missouri: Black voter turnout higher by more than 6.0 percent*
- Tennessee: Black voter turnout higher by more than 6.0 percent
- Georgia: Black voter turnout higher by 0 to 5.9 percent
- Indiana: Black voter turnout higher by 0 to 5.9 percent
- Virginia: Black voter turnout higher by 0 to 5.9 percent*
- Arkansas: Voter turnout not statistically different*
- Kansas: Voter turnout not statistically different
- Texas: Voter turnout not statistically different*
(* indicates that voter ID laws were not in effect in 2012)
So even with the voter ID laws, black voter turnout was higher than white voter turnout nationally and in the states with the strictest voting laws. But experts say that doesn’t necessarily mean that voter ID laws don’t suppress -- or, at the very least, attempt to suppress -- the minority vote.
The jury is still out
The impact of stricter voter ID laws is difficult to gauge because there are many factors determining voter turnout overall. It may be easy to tally the people who are turned away at the polls, but tracking why someone didn’t show up at the polls is another question, said Alex Keyssar, a political scientist at Harvard University.
"It’s safe to say there will be consequences (because of the voter ID laws), but measuring them is extremely difficult," he said.
The newness of the legislation makes the impact of the voter ID laws that much more difficult to determine. In fact, many of the laws weren’t even in place in the 2012 elections. (Virginia's law goes into effect in 2014, Arkansas' went into effect in 2013 and Texas' went into effect in 2013.)
"One election doesn’t make a pattern," said John Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. "We have a distance to go before we can measure the impact of these laws."
So what accounted for the high turnout of black voters in 2012? Barack Obama, Hansen and Keyssar said. In this year’s midterm elections and in 2016’s presidential race, when Obama’s name won’t appear on the ballot and the laws are in place, the rates may tell a different story.
And the increased black voter rates in 2012 could also be interpreted as an unintended consequence or a "backlash effect," according to Erin O’Brien. a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The stricter voter ID laws may have actually motivated the minorities the laws were trying to suppress. That motivation, unlike its effects, is backed by pretty strong evidence.
"There’s an old quote by David Henry Thoreau. He said, ‘Some cir stantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk,’ there’s some trout in this milk," Hansen said.
After Obama’s 2008 victory, the wave of passing new laws on voter access -- including photo ID restrictions as well as proof of citizenship requirements, registration restrictions, and absentee and early voting restrictions -- had a couple of things in common, according to O’Brien’s widely cited 2013 report. The laws were proposed and enacted in states considered to be swing states, where Republicans controlled the government in both chambers, and where minority populations are having more impact on election results.
"Historically, the group that has to fight the hardest are communities of color. This legislation has been forwarded at the exact time that we’re becoming more and more demographically diverse," O’Brien said. "These laws were passed in states where minority voter turnout was higher in 2008 and with larger proportions of African-Americans. So they can be seen as ways to clear these (demographic) hurdles."
The ruling
Riley said "black voter turnout in 2012 exceeded the rate of white voter turnout, even in the states with the strictest voter ID laws," despite the Democrats claiming the voter ID laws suppress the black vote.
While there is debate about the reasons why -- and if the phenomenon will last -- Riley's statistic checks out. Census data shows that indeed, for the first time ever, black voter turnout was higher nationally than white voter turnout, and at least just as high in the states with strict voter ID laws.
We rate this claim True.
duh, 2008/2012 blacks turned out to vote for their n!gg@
voter ID laws DO suppress the brown, black vote, which is exactly why the Repug states and Repugs in purple states reacted so quickly when their SCOTUS5 assholes gutted the VRA.
Now that m>s is banned you have taken over the top spot of using the word ni99er.
Dubya US atty's searched for YEARS for the horrible, election-perverting voting fraud, and "detected" one case, ONE vote.
Repugs have cut $100Ms from IRS so your tax evasion "detection" will remained undetected.
Get back to us when the Repugs are single-mindedly SCREAMING for VOTE COUNTING to 100% transparent and OPEN to the public view, verification.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-22-2014 at 11:22 AM.
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