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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5328 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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Jacobin: Instead of Taking Trump Off the Ballot, Democrats Should Run a Better Candidate

Liberals have taken to saying that “democracy is on the ballot.” There’s a grain of truth there. There’s a powerful strain of authoritarianism on the Right, manifesting in contexts ranging from January 6 to the laws in various red states that make it harder to vote. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, for example, engaged in a truly grotesque and disturbing crackdown on ex-felons who registered to vote. But the complicated truth is that, even if they aren’t nearly as bad in important ways, liberal technocrats harbor their own kind of deep distaste for the unpredictable messiness of democracy.

Some liberals may feel that the Trumpist version of authoritarianism justifies trying to take the man who is, unfortunately, currently the leading candidate for the presidency off the ballot. In effect, they think democracy needs to be saved from itself.

But this is misguided for several reasons. First, as mentioned, it’s extremely likely to backfire in the 2024 election. Second, even if the Supreme Court overturns the Colorado ruling — and any that may be coming down the pike in other states — and it thus sets no legal precedent, the attempt to simply exclude a popular opponent from the election entirely may well set an informal political precedent right-wing authoritarians will follow in the future.

Finally and most importantly, this is all a huge distraction from a point that should be blindingly obvious. Is Joe Biden a deeply unpopular incumbent? Are his wars unpopular? Are voters dissatisfied with his economy? Would they prefer someone younger, whose cognitive condition is in less doubt? Is there a significant danger that Donald Trump will beat him next fall if the two men have a rematch?

If anyone's been following the leftier side of American Twitter recently, there's been a lot of squabbling and sniping between liberals and lefties lately, with main topics being "Is the Biden economy actually good?" (which, of course, also serves as a proxy for whether Biden is good or not) and "Is Trump such a threat that the left just has to grin and swallow everything Biden admin has to offer, including lockstep support for Israel, compromises of immigration etc". Both can be clearly seen in this article, even if it has also received a lot of pushback, mainly from those saying that the Dems should, in fact, push for both, ie. Trump off the ballot and a better candidate than Biden.

There’s a powerful strain of authoritarianism on the Right, manifesting in contexts ranging from January 6 to the laws in various red states that make it harder to vote.

This stuff is genuinely infuriating. Say what I will about the J6 rioters, they weren't driven by "authoritarianism", they literally just thought they won and were being cheated. Likewise, say whatever anyone else will about telling people to bring their ID when they go to the polls, it's not "authoritarian".

In Britain, voter ID backfired on the conservatives because all young people had ID but old people (who are always more conservative) didn’t always. I don’t think it’s a good move for the US right to push, penniless Guatemalan illegals aren’t voting in any numbers, why would they?

When you create a system that it is hard to know whether person X voted, how we can make definitive statements about the propensity of group Y to vote?

It's impossible to know which candidate person X voted for, but it's easy to find out whether or not person X voted.

In America, at least.

Well it’s possible to know that person X was recorded as voting. That is different from knowing they voted.

I think it's a holdover from the old reality that Republican voters had a higher propensity to vote, so lower turnout advantaged them. That seems to have flipped on its head in the Trump era, so now low turnout helps Democrats. But the policy preferences of the two parties have not yet adjusted to reflect their narrow self-interest.

It's also an outgrowth of the specific dynamics of southern politics.

In at least some circumstances it can probably long-term engineer the electorate in a more conservative direction; adults with no drivers license probably do skew liberal because they're urban, and it does serve to prevent voting by out of state students(although what level of concern that is I don't know).

People in the hood have a drivers license, though, so do hispanic migrants in Queens. The kind of affluent Manhattan libs who don’t have licenses have passports anyway. So do almost all naturalized immigrants since they usually travel abroad to see family at least occasionally.

Plenty of the underclass gets their license yanked because they can't stay sober or won't pay their tickets IMO; to the extent these people vote they're not partisan republicans. One of these days I'm going to write a lengthy post on my time among the underclass, but my recollections include an absolutely huge number of underclass males whose dui's and unwillingness to pay traffic fines lost them their licenses and who hated the Texas GOP but were inconsistent voters and didn't necessarily trust the democrats either. Suppressing these people from voting is probably a positive for the Texas GOP. So is preventing out of state students from declaring themselves Texas residents to vote in Texas elections.

Of course I don't support the franchise for students or the underclass anyways, but I'd imagine the median Texan adult who doesn't have a license doesn't have one because they lost it, not because they don't want one. This is a population with voting patterns that lean blue but are easy to suppress.

Does the median adult with a revoked license really vote? The things that correlate with a revoked license like being young, male and underclass also mean a very low voting propensity.

And AFAIK most voter ID rules would accept a license that was revoked as a still-valid document for identification purposes, even if not for driving ones.

Median is less important than marginal if you're trying to nudge elections. If there are 100k low propensity voters that theoretically would support my opponent, shifting the number who actually vote from 25k to 12.5k is still a win even though the median group member was staying home either way.

Whether or not this is decisive or who it actually favors in practice: v0v

No, but when they do vote they don't vote R because petty criminals(which these people are) don't like republicans for obvious reasons. And they're not necessarily going to hold on to their licenses, or readily have access to them, because they're driving around without one anyways. Yes, you need an ID, but this is a group that's selected for being not very good at managing their lives and making long term plans, otherwise they'd be normal working class people. They also move a lot, and you can't get a license reflecting your new address(and it has to match) if it's suspended.

Texas has the lowest voter turnout rate in the country. Nobody really knows what a Texas with above-average or even average voter turnout would look like, politically, but best guess is it would be light blue- although that's not certain. It could be California, it could be North Dakota. The Texas GOP is basically guaranteed a trifecta under the current system, so they're loathe to allow it to change unless they know for a fact it would improve their odds(eg expanding rural early voting), and we don't have direct democracy without going through the state legislature first. Turning Texas blue hinges on raising voter turnout(probably selectively) and cutting off an avenue to do that is worth the political cost.

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