The General Election

[BigRedBuster]

 

Show me a law the "Republicans" passed to disenfranchise voters.

 

 

Okay, but you can see it in either of the articles I was replying to, and see evidence of it in the map that was posted. Also, I didn't say passed.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/25/supreme-court-strikes-down-key-part-voting-rights-act.html

 

 

What they struck down made it so changes can be made with permission and if any of those changes turn out to be illegal, it will already be too late to fix them because the vote has already happened. This disenfranchises voters because all of the changes they're making have a huge, lopsided effect on one group of people, and there's no evidence that any of the changes were for any other purpose. There's a quote in a post from yesterday where the North Carolina (governor I think?) politician actually came right out and said that the voting window was reduced because too many Blacks were voting on those days.

 

If you want you can argue that part of the law being struck down wasn't partisan but that'd be pretty amusing.

 

If people are so upset about this disenfranchising voters....why aren't they even more upset at bigger and more obvious issues that do the exact same thing that got us in this pathetic mess to begin with?

 

What you say about this may very well be true. But, I'm sick and tired of people crying about things like this when even bigger issues slap them right in the face and they don't even acknowledge it.

[Moiraine]

 

 

Show me a law the "Republicans" passed to disenfranchise voters.

 

 

Okay, but you can see it in either of the articles I was replying to, and see evidence of it in the map that was posted. Also, I didn't say passed.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/25/supreme-court-strikes-down-key-part-voting-rights-act.html

 

 

What they struck down made it so changes can be made with permission and if any of those changes turn out to be illegal, it will already be too late to fix them because the vote has already happened. This disenfranchises voters because all of the changes they're making have a huge, lopsided effect on one group of people, and there's no evidence that any of the changes were for any other purpose. There's a quote in a post from yesterday where the North Carolina (governor I think?) politician actually came right out and said that the voting window was reduced because too many Blacks were voting on those days.

 

If you want you can argue that part of the law being struck down wasn't partisan but that'd be pretty amusing.

 

If people are so upset about this disenfranchising voters....why aren't they even more upset at bigger and more obvious issues that do the exact same thing that got us in this pathetic mess to begin with?

 

What you say about this may very well be true. But, I'm sick and tired of people crying about things like this when even bigger issues slap them right in the face and they don't even acknowledge it.

 

 

It might be slapping me in the face but I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking specifically about ways to try to stop select groups of people from voting.

 

I'll talk about what upsets me though: money in politics. Only the Republicans and Democrats get attention from the media because they're the ones with the money. Corporations can get policy passed that makes their CEOs more money because they can buy off politicians.

 

I wouldn't call that disenfranchising voters, though, so I still don't know what you're talking about. There's gerrymandering, but I've already posted about that and I doubt it's what you're talking about.

[Moiraine]

 

 

Show me a law the "Republicans" passed to disenfranchise voters.

 

 

Okay, but you can see it in either of the articles I was replying to, and see evidence of it in the map that was posted. Also, I didn't say passed.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/25/supreme-court-strikes-down-key-part-voting-rights-act.html

 

 

What they struck down made it so changes can be made with permission and if any of those changes turn out to be illegal, it will already be too late to fix them because the vote has already happened. This disenfranchises voters because all of the changes they're making have a huge, lopsided effect on one group of people, and there's no evidence that any of the changes were for any other purpose. There's a quote in a post from yesterday where the North Carolina (governor I think?) politician actually came right out and said that the voting window was reduced because too many Blacks were voting on those days.

 

If you want you can argue that part of the law being struck down wasn't partisan but that'd be pretty amusing.

 

I'd like to see that quote.

 

Republicans scream voter fraud. Dems scream voter disenfranchisement.

 

 

 

 

It's in this topic I think, in the past 2 pages... why am I doing all the work here? Also, it's already been posted that Arizona's most populated county reduced the number of polling places from 200 to 60. That should make EVERYONE here mad.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-smoking-gun-proving-north-carolina-republicans-tried-to-disenfranchise-black-voters/

 

Most strikingly, the judges point to a "smoking gun" in North Carolina's justification for the law, proving discriminatory intent. The state argued in court that "counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black" and "disproportionately Democratic," and said it did away with Sunday voting as a result.

[Moiraine]

 

Just noticed this topic has 1 star and since I created it and I'm very fragile I implore all of you to give it 100 stars!

I believe I did that. I was trying to click back to the forum homepage and missed, hitting the one star right below my intended link. I really didn't think anyone would notice.

 

 

Reported

[Danny Bateman]

 

 

 

Show me a law the "Republicans" passed to disenfranchise voters.

 

 

Okay, but you can see it in either of the articles I was replying to, and see evidence of it in the map that was posted. Also, I didn't say passed.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/25/supreme-court-strikes-down-key-part-voting-rights-act.html

 

 

What they struck down made it so changes can be made with permission and if any of those changes turn out to be illegal, it will already be too late to fix them because the vote has already happened. This disenfranchises voters because all of the changes they're making have a huge, lopsided effect on one group of people, and there's no evidence that any of the changes were for any other purpose. There's a quote in a post from yesterday where the North Carolina (governor I think?) politician actually came right out and said that the voting window was reduced because too many Blacks were voting on those days.

 

If you want you can argue that part of the law being struck down wasn't partisan but that'd be pretty amusing.

 

I'd like to see that quote.

 

Republicans scream voter fraud. Dems scream voter disenfranchisement.

 

 

 

 

It's in this topic I think, in the past 2 pages... why am I doing all the work here? Also, it's already been posted that Arizona's most populated county reduced the number of polling places from 200 to 60. That should make EVERYONE here mad.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-smoking-gun-proving-north-carolina-republicans-tried-to-disenfranchise-black-voters/

 

Most strikingly, the judges point to a "smoking gun" in North Carolina's justification for the law, proving discriminatory intent. The state argued in court that "counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black" and "disproportionately Democratic," and said it did away with Sunday voting as a result.

 

 

The legal document in question:

 

[BigRedBuster]

It might be slapping me in the face but I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking specifically about ways to try to stop select groups of people from voting.

 

The primary system disenfranchises more people than any of these rules ever even dreamed of but it is never discussed.

 

Being the most conservative on this estimate as possible, everyone who had a primary after Cruz dropped out in the Republican primary was disenfranchised by the schedule. That includes Nebraska, West Virginia, Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota.

 

Those states make up roughly 65,300,000 people. Now, let's say 40% of those are Republican. That means 26,120,000 people had absolutely NO WAY of having a say in who our Republican nominee is. Now.....there were many more who were in this same predicament simply because it was pretty much decided long before May 3rd when Cruz dropped out that the village idiot is the nominee.

 

That is done explicitly to allow candidates to campaign in as few of states as possible to get the nomination. They can't care what someone in Nebraska, New Mexico or Oregon really has to say and nor do they even care if they vote.

 

So......then, we can talk about Caucuses. In my opinion, these disenfranchise more voters in those states than any rule that you have mentioned. Look at the numbers that turn out for a caucus compared to a primary.

 

Iowa is a state of 3,000,000 people. They were bragging about getting 180,000 people to come out for the Republican caucus and 260,000 for the Democrats. That's a whopping 14.6% of the population. Now, let's look at New Hampshire primaries. With 1,300,000 population, they had 535,103 votes for both parties. That's 41.1% of the vote.

 

I lived in Iowa for 15 years and not once was I able to take an entire evening and devote that to going and debating with other voters on who we should all vote for. It wasn't that i didn't want to. When they came up, I simply could not do that. This year, if Iowa had the same type of turnout for a primary as New Hampshire, they would have had 1,230,000 voters in their primaries compared to 440,000 that showed up for their caucuses (and they were so proud). That's 790,000 voters that were disenfranchised just in the one state of Iowa.

 

There were 10 states that held Republican caucuses this year instead of primaries.

 

You think well over 34,020,000 people being disenfranchised isn't important?

 

 

I am 49 years old and have voted in every Presidential election since I was 18. Not once have I had the ability to have any say in who any party's nominee is.

[Moiraine]

 

It might be slapping me in the face but I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking specifically about ways to try to stop select groups of people from voting.

 

The primary system disenfranchises more people than any of these rules ever even dreamed of but it is never discussed.

 

Being the most conservative on this estimate as possible, everyone who had a primary after Cruz dropped out in the Republican primary was disenfranchised by the schedule. That includes Nebraska, West Virginia, Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota.

 

Those states make up roughly 65,300,000 people. Now, let's say 40% of those are Republican. That means 26,120,000 people had absolutely NO WAY of having a say in who our Republican nominee is. Now.....there were many more who were in this same predicament simply because it was pretty much decided long before May 3rd when Cruz dropped out that the village idiot is the nominee.

 

That is done explicitly to allow candidates to campaign in as few of states as possible to get the nomination. They can't care what someone in Nebraska, New Mexico or Oregon really has to say and nor do they even care if they vote.

 

So......then, we can talk about Caucuses. In my opinion, these disenfranchise more voters in those states than any rule that you have mentioned. Look at the numbers that turn out for a caucus compared to a primary.

 

Iowa is a state of 3,000,000 people. They were bragging about getting 180,000 people to come out for the Republican caucus and 260,000 for the Democrats. That's a whopping 14.6% of the population. Now, let's look at New Hampshire primaries. With 1,300,000 population, they had 535,103 votes for both parties. That's 41.1% of the vote.

 

I lived in Iowa for 15 years and not once was I able to take an entire evening and devote that to going and debating with other voters on who we should all vote for. It wasn't that i didn't want to. When they came up, I simply could not do that. This year, if Iowa had the same type of turnout for a primary as New Hampshire, they would have had 1,230,000 voters in their primaries compared to 440,000 that showed up for their caucuses (and they were so proud). That's 790,000 voters that were disenfranchised just in the one state of Iowa.

 

There were 10 states that held Republican caucuses this year instead of primaries.

 

You think well over 34,020,000 people being disenfranchised isn't important?

 

 

I am 49 years old and have voted in every Presidential election since I was 18. Not once have I had the ability to have any say in who any party's nominee is.

 

 

 

To the bold: having no idea what you were referring to doesn't mean I think 34mil being disenfranchised is unimportant. So that's a weird question to ask me.

 

To the rest, I don't agree that all of it is what you're saying it is. For the first part I think you're saying because some states have their primaries late, when the winner is already decided, they're disenfranchised. Maybe that's the case, but it's not even close to being as important as the vote for the actual election, and it's decided within parties so it's not really similar to the rest of the discussion. The Democratic party doesn't decide how the Republicans do their primary/caucus voting, and the Republican party doesn't decide how the Democrats do their primary/caucus voting. Each party within each state makes that decision, I believe.

 

This is however related to what I said in my post about the two party system.

[BigRedBuster]

 

 

It might be slapping me in the face but I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking specifically about ways to try to stop select groups of people from voting.

 

The primary system disenfranchises more people than any of these rules ever even dreamed of but it is never discussed.

 

Being the most conservative on this estimate as possible, everyone who had a primary after Cruz dropped out in the Republican primary was disenfranchised by the schedule. That includes Nebraska, West Virginia, Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota.

 

Those states make up roughly 65,300,000 people. Now, let's say 40% of those are Republican. That means 26,120,000 people had absolutely NO WAY of having a say in who our Republican nominee is. Now.....there were many more who were in this same predicament simply because it was pretty much decided long before May 3rd when Cruz dropped out that the village idiot is the nominee.

 

That is done explicitly to allow candidates to campaign in as few of states as possible to get the nomination. They can't care what someone in Nebraska, New Mexico or Oregon really has to say and nor do they even care if they vote.

 

So......then, we can talk about Caucuses. In my opinion, these disenfranchise more voters in those states than any rule that you have mentioned. Look at the numbers that turn out for a caucus compared to a primary.

 

Iowa is a state of 3,000,000 people. They were bragging about getting 180,000 people to come out for the Republican caucus and 260,000 for the Democrats. That's a whopping 14.6% of the population. Now, let's look at New Hampshire primaries. With 1,300,000 population, they had 535,103 votes for both parties. That's 41.1% of the vote.

 

I lived in Iowa for 15 years and not once was I able to take an entire evening and devote that to going and debating with other voters on who we should all vote for. It wasn't that i didn't want to. When they came up, I simply could not do that. This year, if Iowa had the same type of turnout for a primary as New Hampshire, they would have had 1,230,000 voters in their primaries compared to 440,000 that showed up for their caucuses (and they were so proud). That's 790,000 voters that were disenfranchised just in the one state of Iowa.

 

There were 10 states that held Republican caucuses this year instead of primaries.

 

You think well over 34,020,000 people being disenfranchised isn't important?

 

 

I am 49 years old and have voted in every Presidential election since I was 18. Not once have I had the ability to have any say in who any party's nominee is.

 

 

 

To the bold: having no idea what you were referring to doesn't mean I think 34mil being disenfranchised is unimportant. So that's a weird question to ask me.

 

To the rest, I don't agree that all of it is what you're saying it is. For the first part I think you're saying because some states have their primaries late, when the winner is already decided, they're disenfranchised. Maybe that's the case, but it's not even close to being as important as the vote for the actual election, and it's decided within parties so it's not really similar to the rest of the discussion. The Democratic party doesn't decide how the Republicans do their primary/caucus voting, and the Republican party doesn't decide how the Democrats do their primary/caucus voting. Each party within each state makes that decision, I believe.

 

This is however related to what I said in my post about the two party system.

 

And the bolded is why this very important issue is swept under the rug. It's like being pissed at a football team's results and not looking at recruiting as possible problem.

 

We are in this exact situation BECAUSE OF THE PRIMARIES!!!!! It is very possible that if those 26,000,000 people had been able to vote in those later states that maybe someone else would have been the Republican nominee. Heck....I don't even think Colorado even had a primary this year because it would have been a total waste of time and money.

 

That is absolutely no different than saying someone is disenfranchised because now they are being required to drive 10 more miles to the polling place or stand in line for 4 hours.

[knapplc]

You're talking about two different things, BRB.

 

Disenfranchisement is when Republicans close polling sites in Democratic areas to hinder or prevent people from voting for Democrat candidates. It's one party influencing another's vote.

 

What you're talking about is the Republican party setting up Republican primaries for Republican voters. If the Democrats exerted influence on Republican primaries that'd be disenfranchisement. What you're talking about is internal to each party. Further, just because some candidates drop out doesn't mean their names aren't on the ballot, or that you can't write them in. If Ted Cruz had gotten enough write-ins to win a few states, even Nebraska, he'd have stayed in. What's more, Ted Cruz hadn't even dropped out - he had "paused" his campaign.

[BigRedBuster]

You're talking about two different things, BRB.

 

Disenfranchisement is when Republicans close polling sites in Democratic areas to hinder or prevent people from voting for Democrat candidates. It's one party influencing another's vote.

 

What you're talking about is the Republican party setting up Republican primaries for Republican voters. If the Democrats exerted influence on Republican primaries that'd be disenfranchisement. What you're talking about is internal to each party. Further, just because some candidates drop out doesn't mean their names aren't on the ballot, or that you can't write them in. If Ted Cruz had gotten enough write-ins to win a few states, even Nebraska, he'd have stayed in. What's more, Ted Cruz hadn't even dropped out - he had "paused" his campaign.

Oh...I completely understand that it is designed by the individual parties and what was being discussed earlier was one party trying to screw the other one out of votes.

BUT, both situations prevent a legal and registered voter from having a vote in the process. But, one is looked at like it's the most horrible thing that has ever happened and the other one is....meh.....so what?

[knapplc]

 

You're talking about two different things, BRB.

 

Disenfranchisement is when Republicans close polling sites in Democratic areas to hinder or prevent people from voting for Democrat candidates. It's one party influencing another's vote.

 

What you're talking about is the Republican party setting up Republican primaries for Republican voters. If the Democrats exerted influence on Republican primaries that'd be disenfranchisement. What you're talking about is internal to each party. Further, just because some candidates drop out doesn't mean their names aren't on the ballot, or that you can't write them in. If Ted Cruz had gotten enough write-ins to win a few states, even Nebraska, he'd have stayed in. What's more, Ted Cruz hadn't even dropped out - he had "paused" his campaign.

Oh...I completely understand that it is designed by the individual parties and what was being discussed earlier was one party trying to screw the other one out of votes.

 

BUT, both situations prevent a legal and registered voter from having a vote in the process. But, one is looked at like it's the most horrible thing that has ever happened and the other one is....meh.....so what?

 

 

 

You are choosing not to see the obvious.

 

You are not a victim. You should stop equating these things. It's not a good look.

[BigRedBuster]

One situation is easy to pick on and point fingers and make a huge political fire storm. The other is easy to sweep under the rug.

[knapplc]

One situation is criminal. One is a matter of scheduling.

 

Seriously. Stop.

[BigRedBuster]

 

 

You're talking about two different things, BRB.

 

Disenfranchisement is when Republicans close polling sites in Democratic areas to hinder or prevent people from voting for Democrat candidates. It's one party influencing another's vote.

 

What you're talking about is the Republican party setting up Republican primaries for Republican voters. If the Democrats exerted influence on Republican primaries that'd be disenfranchisement. What you're talking about is internal to each party. Further, just because some candidates drop out doesn't mean their names aren't on the ballot, or that you can't write them in. If Ted Cruz had gotten enough write-ins to win a few states, even Nebraska, he'd have stayed in. What's more, Ted Cruz hadn't even dropped out - he had "paused" his campaign.

Oh...I completely understand that it is designed by the individual parties and what was being discussed earlier was one party trying to screw the other one out of votes.

 

BUT, both situations prevent a legal and registered voter from having a vote in the process. But, one is looked at like it's the most horrible thing that has ever happened and the other one is....meh.....so what?

 

 

 

You are choosing not to see the obvious.

 

You are not a victim. You should stop equating these things. It's not a good look.

 

I'm not playing down the importance of the issues that were originally being discussed. That needs to be confronted and stopped. But, to dismiss the other issues as...."so what" is not being fair to the people who have no say in the process.

[knapplc]

By equating a party's scheduling choice with intentional voter disenfranchisement, you most certainly are playing down its importance. It's a ridiculous comparison.