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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   36023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Most of the world lets current and former criminals vote,

But most of the world seems to function OK despite letting criminals vote,

Among comparable countries, voter ID and mandatory registration are common, but considered by many to be immoral in the US.

I concede it's a slightly stronger argument, but I'm not convinced the justification isn't used as a pretextual excuse to tip the scales in some political party's favour. The state's governor, James Vardaman, said outright in 1903 the restrictions were imposed "for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics".

Reading the minds of today's political enemies by assigning them dimmest motives using more than a hundred year old example would disprove a lot more than merely felon disenfranchisement. It also an example of a genetic fallacy.

As for the bureaucracy point, any further restrictions (such as age or citizenship) than allowing any person that comes to the polls to vote, but purple-thumbing them, requires some sort of updatable database necessitating a state with a higher capacity than a mere bulk-purchaser of paper, and two kinds of ink.

Would be interesting to see if there is a correlation internationally between prisoner voting rights and demographic skew of the prison relative to the general population.

I'm in one such 'comparable' country, Australia, and voter ID is not mandatory (you don't need an ID to board a domestic flight either, which is nice).

One aspect in which the Australian political system is more unique, however, is the fact that everyone is obliged to vote in each federal, state, and local election. There are many benefits to this (overall it lowers the temperature and mitigates extremism while making mandates meaningful), but institutionally, one of the biggest is that the corrosive debate over who should be 'entitled' to vote does not exist. The vote should be sacralised to be beyond base, Machiavellian partisan machinations.

Reading the minds of today's political enemies by assigning them dimmest motives using more than a hundred year old example

Well it keeps happening:

Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. 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. In response to claims that intentional racial discrimination animated its action, the State offered only meager justifications. Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist. Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.

Well what keeps happening? Passing laws which disproportionately affect African Americans? There is long list of laws which disproportionately affect African Americans from laws against theft to laws against murder.

So are we to impute those laws were enacted for racist reasons? Or only if there is an anecdote from centuries ago of a person claiming the reason for enacting something similar is for racist reasons?

Well what keeps happening?

People keep trying to disenfranchise African Americans.

So are we to impute those laws were enacted for racist reasons?

There's no imputation required in this case - the disparate impact was very much by design.

How can you tell it was racist?

Because there is a disparate impact.

Why does disparate impact prove racism?

Because it was by design.

How can you tell it was racist?

Because disparate impact.

Did you pay any attention to the details of the case? Because this response makes me think you didn't and are just resorting to pattern matching against a strawman. The NC state government did not pass some facially neutral policy which had disparate impact:

the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. 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.

All this right after having a consent decree originally imposed for racist electoral policy lifted. The "golly gee, how did that happen" doesn't fly. If you ask for racial data and then immediately use it to enact policies which are de facto racially discriminatory, the most likely explanation is that it was deliberately discriminatory.

these aren't "details of the case," they're an argument

the NC state government explicitly passed a facially neutral policy which mentioned nothing about racial discrimination whatsoever

that's what "facially neutral" means

the response under VRA 1965 jurisprudence is that even though it's facially neutral, it's racially discriminatory because it was passed with racist intent because of the disparate impact of facially neutral laws

why? well a few judges in the 4th Cir declared the NC legislature is racist because they enacted outrageous voter laws like not allowing same day registration, requiring voter ID, and others which are already used around the USA (and still are to this day), because a member of the legislature requested data and the legislature passed the law after data was produced showing some of the restrictions would impact the way blacks vote more than nonblacks

Did you read this case or an article about it? If the later, why not link the article that you read instead of the case you didn't?

"The legislature" doesn't request data. Someone in the legislature did, according to some procedure, which is not set forth in the quoted section. Later in the opinion (pgs. 13-15) the language is changed to "legislators requested," which could mean that individual lawmakers asked for the data, but isn't dispositive. I do not know, but suspect, that the data would have been added to the record by progressives explicitly for the purpose of teeing up this challenge - it's not exactly a new position that the left regards Voter ID and anything but the most cursory controls on absentee- and early balloting as racist, nor is it a new charge that the GOP rejects this characterization and claims to support these policies on their own merits and for race-neutral reasons. This, obviously, would throw some water on the "those racists investigated just how they could screw over the blacks and then went and did it" narrative.

Moreover, the discontinuance of methods one group disproportionately uses is not evidence of discriminatory intent so long as adequate and facially race-neutral mechanisms of voting exist which are open to all. There is no general right to a long pre-election early-balloting window, whatever the color of one's skin, nor is there a requirement that outside organizations be allowed to do the thing that (likely) killed Edgar Allen Poe and conduct prospective voter cattle-drives. Nor is there a racial component to Voter ID requirements (provided that the Government also has race-neutral methods of distributing government-issued ID) - as has been stated many times, both here and many other places, just about every developed (and most developing) nations have some sort of Voter ID requirement, and do not regard the matter as particularly controversial.

Among comparable countries, voter ID and mandatory registration are common, but considered by many to be immoral in the US.

Maybe I'm thinking of something else, but who thinks mandatory registration is immoral? I don't think either policy is immoral, but I do question the utility of voter ID. I think the fears about voter suppression from requiring people to get an ID are severely overblown, but I can't say they're zero in a country where ID cards are not mandatory. Voter ID policy can only help mitigate against "impersonation fraud" (and not completely, since fake IDs exist) and I'm not sure how much of a problem that is. The effects one way or another seem slight, so I don't really have a strong opinion on voter ID.

Reading the minds of today's political enemies by assigning them dimmest motives using more than a hundred year old example would disprove a lot more than merely felon disenfranchisement. It also an example of a genetic fallacy.

That's not what I intended to communicate, all I said is that pretextual excuses have been used before to suppress the vote. Whether or not pretextual excuses are used now is a different analysis and I explained why I'm suspicious of some efforts.

Is anyone arguing disenfranchising people explicitly isn't suppressing the vote? It is by design suppressing the vote.

Your claim is then to undermine any argument in favor of banning felons from voting by saying there may be a pretextual reasons for the people advocating for it, but that criticism would be possible for the people arguing against it as well.

Because of that, it looks like you're just trying to smear people by association who argue for something similar as being racist because people in the past who passed the law said it was for racist reasons.

Is anyone arguing disenfranchising people explicitly isn't suppressing the vote?

Yes, I would. The question of "what are the criteria to be in the electorate" is prior to the question of suppression - i.e., whether qualified electors are being prevented from voting.

Fair enough. I would argue explicitly in favor of "suppressing the vote" as well as vastly reducing the number of people who are a qualified elector. To me this seems like splitting hairs to avoid the negative connotations of the phrase "suppressing the vote," but if that were a serious hurdle itself then there is no chance one gets to implementing it anyway.

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