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Republican Anti-Democracy and Voter Disenfranchisement


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1 minute ago, DevoHusker said:

For you and @knapplc to remember, this is more than one 4 hour ballgame. This is a weeklong event, with people filling motels/restaurants/bars etc. 

 

 

Is that a greater or worse harm than the decades of misrepresentation caused by the republicans' voter disenfranchisement bill?

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1 minute ago, DevoHusker said:

 

I am not a boycott person either. I think it is stupid to believe that me not buying/attending/endorsing something is going to "hit em where it counts". Most mega corps could not give one sh*t about what I think or do. I have never bought into the stupid right wing boycotts starting with Kaepernick, and continue to watch what I want to watch, attend what I want to attend, and buy whatever products I want to buy. 

 

For you and @knapplc to remember, this is more than one 4 hour ballgame. This is a weeklong event, with people filling motels/restaurants/bars etc. 

 

I do agree with your stance on separating Manfred's personal membership from that at the MLB helm. But, I thought the jab from Rubio more than scored a few points. 

Everyone gets that.  I don't think anyone has claimed there won't be "casualties" because of this.  Again, that's the point.  Much like Rubio's Tweet, it's all to make a statement.  MLB is making that statement in a calculated way I'm sure.

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4 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

Is that a greater or worse harm than the decades of misrepresentation caused by the republicans' voter disenfranchisement bill?

 

(According to the democrats)

 

And, I think that at this stage of the entire argument, it is worse than any perceived/unproven slights you think might be incurred. 

 

It amazes me that the left doesn't think that blacks in Atlanta can manage to follow the same rules as EVERY other voter in Georgia. Kinda racist if you ask me. 

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15 minutes ago, DevoHusker said:

 

(According to the democrats)

 

And, I think that at this stage of the entire argument, it is worse than any perceived/unproven slights you think might be incurred. 

 

It amazes me that the left doesn't think that blacks in Atlanta can manage to follow the same rules as EVERY other voter in Georgia. Kinda racist if you ask me. 

 

Do they not teach people about Jim Crow anymore? "Perceived/unproven?"  That's a bit sad. 

 

 

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33 minutes ago, DevoHusker said:

 

I am not a boycott person either. I think it is stupid to believe that me not buying/attending/endorsing something is going to "hit em where it counts". Most mega corps could not give one sh*t about what I think or do. I have never bought into the stupid right wing boycotts starting with Kaepernick, and continue to watch what I want to watch, attend what I want to attend, and buy whatever products I want to buy. 

 

 

Boycotts can work, though. 

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47 minutes ago, knapplc said:

 

Do they not teach people about Jim Crow anymore? "Perceived/unproven?"  That's a bit sad. 

 

 

This is not retroactive and removes votes from past elections asfaik, so "perceived" with regards to future elections is accurate 

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We don't need a crystal ball to determine the impact of this law. Let's stop kidding ourselves. This is an unnecessary law - voting was working fine in Georgia - until the party currently in power didn't like the changing tides and tried to rig it.  Some fun highlights for those who refuse to believe this is a bad law:

 

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For example, a primary reason why Georgia turned blue was the large amount of mail in voting - a method that was overwhelmingly used by Democrats and captured many who would not or could not stand in line to vote. Due to the current situation but also due to the way that many poorer and majority minority districts had fewer voting machines and to travel further to reach them. The changes mean that mail in voting is now a much more difficult and onerous task for people to do -

  • it limits the amount of time people have to request a ballot went from 6 months before the election to eleven weeks. You also must return it 2 Fridays before the election, not the Friday before which also stops those late voters that campaigns like Stacey Abrams was able to drum up in the weeks leading up to the run off election.

  • Ballots are now being mailed out only 4 weeks before the election which is 3 weeks later than previously. As we saw, thanks to people like Postmaster De Joy, even a few days of slowing down the mail might hamper thousands of votes being turned in, and because of the tight time frame people have to turn around their ballots, there's much less flexibility in that.

  • There will be less time allowed before run off elections are held. As in the case this time, no candidate won majority in 2 races and so there was time for Georgia campaigners to effectively run a second campaign and round up even more voters, especially since they knew the outcome of the presidential race. Now, there could be as little as five working days and no weekend voting. Again, for minority majority districts, and those who don't have the ability to take time off of work to vote in lines up to eleven hours long, their vote is now automatically discounted.

  • Drop boxes are now being moved inside and are now only accessible during the opening ours of the building. Obviously, for those who work long hours during regular business hours or who travel for a living, this signficantly reduces access to them being able to drop off a ballot.

  • Instead of providing a signature for verification, ID requirements are much much stricter requiring a driver's license, state ID, or other acceptable form of ID, and poll workers are required to verify you using more details. Many people of colour lack state ID, and the process to get it is often very difficult. John Oliver did a good segment on this but it boiled down to very simple things such as the government closing down state offices where you can obtain an ID to opening as little as once or twice a month. If you work full time to support your family, your ability to get that ID would be severely jeopardised.

  • Georgia also has an extremely bad history with purging voter lists of 'inactive' voters who turn out to not be inactive at all, and again, many of those voters who are struck are democrats, living in minority majority districts, and urban areas. You add in the fact that in order to get back on the rolls, there's additional steps, and there's a recipe there for disaster.

  • Unsolicited ballots are not allowed so each individual voter must request an absentee or mail in ballot and the local government can't send them out pre-emptively, even to vulnerable groups such as carehomes. Third party groups have strict criteria as to when and how they can send things out and will be fined for sending duplicate applications to people who have already requested ballots, meaning that mass drops will be discouraged which means again, those straggler voters will not be picked up.

  • They also have made Sunday voting optional, which will no doubt encourage those who want to suppress votes to not open polls, particularly in largely democratic areas. One of the biggest drives in places like Georgia is the 'souls to the poll' drive, where preachers encourage people to vote on Sundays and have community drives organised to help that happen such as driving those who don't have cars to the places where they can register their votes etc, or do group community projects around voting and encouraging it. As many minority communities are still centered around churches and church life (even if you don't attend, grandma does, and so do all of her friends, and you help out grandma and the Sunday school, which gets the Sunday school parents, and then their friends, and the old people's home where grandma lives, and then their sons and daughters...) It can start a cascade effect.

  • With no food and water in line, many districts that will be affected by this are yet again minority majority districts. Some of them had lines up to eleven hours, and people were queuing from the moment they opened to the moment they closed. Without being able to supply food and water, people who can't stay in line will leave. Remember, in races like this, republicans aren't looking for 100,000 votes to stay in the lead. In many cases, it came down to just a few thousand between them. If you turn away 1000 people on the day across the state, and lose another 4,000 absentee voters by removing them from the rolls, making it difficult to drop off a ballot, or closing sunday polls, you've won.

All in all, Georgia knew they lost because of people like Stacey Abrams and her get out and vote campaigns that relied on picking up every mail in ballot they could to prevent disasters at the polls, such as voters being shut out, polling station break down, bad weather or covid panic keeping people inside. Republicans are a minority vote in many districts, but still manage to keep their majority in government due to extensive and deep schemes like this law.

 

 

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1 hour ago, DevoHusker said:

 

(According to the democrats)

 

And, I think that at this stage of the entire argument, it is worse than any perceived/unproven slights you think might be incurred. 

 

It amazes me that the left doesn't think that blacks in Atlanta can manage to follow the same rules as EVERY other voter in Georgia. Kinda racist if you ask me. 

 

 

Have you heard of disparate impact?

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You know what?  f#&% it....

 

Let's just have the polls open nationwide from noon to 1pm on the first Tuesday in November.  It would be cheaper and easy to find volunteers if they are only asked to give up an hour.  To make things even easier, lets stick to one polling place per county. All people will be under the same laws so it shouldn't make a difference.  If I can make it there during my lunch, you can too.

 

Please forgive the, hopefully, obvious hyperbole.  But I keep seeing people defend these laws by saying something like, "well, it affects all voters equally..."  So does my ridiculous idea of 1-hour voting window.  The 2020 election was one of the most participated in elections in recent history and it was one of the most secure.  We should be finding ways to not only make sure this happens again in 2024 but to also see if we can increase voter turnout even more. 

 

The Georgia law and others like it coming out across the country are doing the opposite.  Why?  Is it because higher turnout tends to favor one party over the other?  Yes.  Instead of saying "Dems have the same opportunities to vote as Repubs with these restricted measures"  maybe we should say "Repubs will have even MORE opportunities to vote under the previous law".  Why are these states scared to increase voter turnout?

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5 minutes ago, funhusker said:

You know what?  f#&% it....

 

Let's just have the polls open nationwide from noon to 1pm on the first Tuesday in November.  It would be cheaper and easy to find volunteers if they are only asked to give up an hour.  To make things even easier, lets stick to one polling place per county. All people will be under the same laws so it shouldn't make a difference.  If I can make it there during my lunch, you can too.

 

Please forgive the, hopefully, obvious hyperbole.  But I keep seeing people defend these laws by saying something like, "well, it affects all voters equally..."  So does my ridiculous idea of 1-hour voting window.  The 2020 election was one of the most participated in elections in recent history and it was one of the most secure.  We should be finding ways to not only make sure this happens again in 2024 but to also see if we can increase voter turnout even more. 

 

The Georgia law and others like it coming out across the country are doing the opposite.  Why?  Is it because higher turnout tends to favor one party over the other?  Yes.  Instead of saying "Dems have the same opportunities to vote as Repubs with these restricted measures"  maybe we should say "Repubs will have even MORE opportunities to vote under the previous law".  Why are these states scared to increase voter turnout?

 

 

And you have to show a valid ID, and it'll be free, but you can only get it in the district you're registered in, and the office you have to go to is closed more days than it's open. But in other districts it's open more days, and longer hours. 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Cdog923 said:

 

Boycotts can work, though. 

 

They CAN work. But do they work in this instance. It takes a certain level of self awareness for an entity be it person, business, or state to be the subject of a boycott and recognize it is the issue and needs to make a change. When it comes to the far right, and by extension entities ran by the far right, that self-awareness doesn't seem to exist. In this instance I believe it is far more likely the right leaning voters of Georgia will see this as an attack and will see this as validation and vindication pushing them even farther right. 

 

 

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