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Banned
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jewels443, pan6467:
....the reaction HERE, to the unprecedented criminality of the Bush administration is to "SIDE" with it accomplishing one of it's core objectives, where ever possible?
Quote:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/reports/u...ory/16115.html
U.S. attorneys
rss
Administration pursued aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout
By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
* Posted on Wednesday, April 18, 2007
<h2>,,,,The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.,,,</h2>
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Originally Posted by loquitur
...There is another aspect to the public policy question that isn't being addressed here much. Voter fraud, or the perception of voter fraud, is corrosive. It's not merely that the elections have to be clean - the process must be seen as being clean. People have to have confidence in it. The FL vote in 2000 did enormous damage to democracy because it caused people to lose confidence in the system - justifiably, because the system was a mess, and sometimes you need a crisis before problems get addressed...
.....The issue is not whether requiring IDs are a good idea - it's whether requiring photo ID is permissible under the constitution.
I will stipulate for purposes of this argument that the law was passed for the purpose of helping Republicans. But that doesn't invalidate the legislation any more than pro-union legislation should be invalidated because it helps Democrats. Political parties want to win elections for a reason, and among the reasons is that they get to reward their friends, punish their enemies, and try to perpetuate themselves in power. Welcome to the real world. <h3>The constitution contemplates political games, and it expects that if people aren't happy with the things their representatives do, that they will toss the bums out in the next election</h3> -- pretty much as they did in November 2006.
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loquitur, a more eloquent opinion, than the one above, has not, to my knowledge, been posted on any thread at TFP politics.
Consider that "the mess" in Florida in the 2000 election would not have deteriorated to the level that it did, if not for the republican party practice of voter "caging", supposedly ceased in 1986 after a republican party consent decree (see below), and the "Felon Voter Purge List", promulgated by Jeb Bush and his Sect'ty of State, Katherine Harris:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...2&postcount=22
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...9&postcount=36
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...68&postcount=3
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...25&postcount=1
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...7&postcount=24
Quote:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/...sometimes.html
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Hans Across America
by digby
Sometimes I feel as if I've been writing about the same things over and over again for years and it never adds up to anything. But in the case of this "voter fraud" issues, I have been concerned about what the Bush administration was up to for some time and it appears to be adding up to something quite huge. (Of course, I'm not the only one who was following this --- many people knew it was happening.)
Today, McClatchy has a <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/reports/usattorneys/story/16115.html">barn burner</a> of an article about the Bush administration's efforts to suppress the vote. It's no longer possible to argue with a straight face that they didn't use the power of the Justice Department for partisan reasons. The Bush administration has been pursuing phony voter fraud like it was a massive scourge, helping states enact all kinds of specious laws that only result in disenfranchising legitimate voters --- the kind who tend to vote Democratic. (I wonder why?)
<b>Read the whole article and then come on back and we'll unpack just a tiny little piece of it, blog style.
Longtime readers will recall that way back when I wrote a bit about "Buckhead" the man who miraculously discovered in a few short moments that the kerning and fonts of the Dan Rather memos were "off" and put his "findings" up on Free Republic. You all know the results of his magnificent bit of internet sleuthing. In researching Buckhead, whose real name is Harry McDougal, I found out that in addition to being a member of the Federalist Society and someone who helped write anti-Clinton briefs for Kenneth Starr, he was a member of the Fulton County elections board which ruled that the extremely dubious Sonny Perdue and Saxby Chambliss wins in 2002 were perfectly a-ok. The guy got around.</b>
It turned out that another interesting Republican fellow had previously been on that elections board by the name of Hans von Spakovsky, whom you just read about in that McClatchy piece. He was hired by the Bush Justice Department's civil right's division shortly after his stint down in Florida during the recount. Anyway, Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the "Voter Integrity Project" (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell. (Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the "purple heart" bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he's actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school "The Leadership Institute" and is even credited with coining the name "Moral Majority." Let's just say he's been a playah in GOP circles for a long time --- and the VIP is one of his projects.
Salon published a piece on the Voter Integrity Project back in 2000:
VIP chairwoman of the board is Helen Blackwell, also the Virginia chairwoman of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, whose husband, Morton, serves as executive director of the conservative Council for National Policy. It took lumps for being partisan earlier this year from Slate writer Jeremy Derfner. "In fact, almost everything about the Voting Integrity Project makes you wonder. Though VIP's members assert that they are both independent and nonpartisan, the organization is essentially a conservative front," Derfner wrote.
VIP has vigorously opposed efforts to liberalize voting procedures -- railing against everything from Internet voting to Oregon's mail-in balloting to the Motor Voter bill. But it is VIP's involvement in partisan political fights that makes Democrats charge the group is a Republican front group.
VIP sent investigators into largely black areas in Louisiana after Mary Landrieu's 1996 U.S. Senate victory over Republican Woody Jenkins.
"The VIP conducted its investigation over a 10-day period from December 26 through January 4, during which time they concentrated on the Orleans Parish voting activities," a VIP release says. "The VIP examined and independently verified substantial amounts of evidence gathered by the Jenkins campaign, as well as gathering its own evidence concerning vote buying, vote hauling and improprieties by elections officials tasked with protecting voting machines."
VIP chairwoman Helen Blackwell told the Senate Rules Committee, "Many claims of the Jenkins campaign have merit and should be investigated to the fullest extent of the law."
In a few short years, former VIP lawyer Von Spakovsky, who had made his name calling for voter roll purges in Georgia, was working in the Justice Department, with the full resources of the federal government behind him.
From the McClatchy article:
In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division's Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.
One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.
Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act's confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.
In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn't impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.
Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors' approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters' rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division's top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.
Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article back in 2004 about this subject which everyone who is following this case should read (or re-read) to see just how pervasive this "voter fraud" initiative was in the Bush Justice department. Karl Rove was almost certainly running it from the white house. But it was being pushed from throughout the Republican establishment that had recognized for years that they couldn't win fair and square. I think 2000 scared the hell out of them. If it hadn't been for Ralph Nader and Jebby and Poppy's political machines they would have lost that one and they had put everything they had into winning it.
So where is our friend Von Spakovsky now?
Saturday, December 17, 2005
President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.
Von Spakovsky and Mason are Republican appointees, while Lenhard and Walther are Democratic picks for the bipartisan six-member commission.
In a letter to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) wrote that he is "extremely troubled" by the von Spakovsky nomination. Kennedy contends that von Spakovsky "may be at the heart of the political interference that is undermining the [Justice] Department's enforcement of federal civil laws."
Career Justice Department lawyers involved in a Georgia case said von Spakovsky pushed strongly for approval of a state program requiring voters to have photo identification. A team of staff lawyers that examined the case recommended 4 to 1 that the Georgia plan should be rejected because it would harm black voters; the recommendation was overruled by von Spakovsky and other senior officials in the Civil Rights Division.
Before working in the Justice Department, von Spakovsky was the Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Ga., and served on the board of the Voter Integrity Project, which advocated regular purging of voter roles to prevent felons from casting ballots.
In a brief telephone interview, von Spakovsky played down his role in policy decisions in the Civil Rights Division. "I'm just a career lawyer who works in the front office of civil rights," he said. He noted that the department has rules against career lawyers talking to reporters.
That takes some gall, don't you think? He actually tried to pass himself off as a career lawyer for the justice department when he was nothing but a political hack from the moment he hit DC. Chutzpah doesn't even begin to describe it.
Bush gave him a recess appointment a month later. A couple of months after that, this came out
I'm sure everyone is aware by now that the recent study by the NY Times pretty much takes voter fraud off the table as anything but a partisan Republican tool for suppressing the Democratic vote:
Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Frankly you had to be something of an historical illiterate not to recognize from the beginning that these folks are up to the same tricks they've been using for decades. They tried mightily, with everything they had, the federal government, the Republican Lawyers Association, the country awash in patriotic paranoia, and they still couldn't prove this case --- even crookedly they couldn't do it. In fact, their insistence on finding it where there was none is what has caused their whole edifice to crumble.
Oh, and by the way, von Spakovsky has now been formally nominated by Bush to the FEC and will have to undergo Senate confirmation. Here's a blistering critique of his performace at the DOJ as well as his predictably awful tenure on the FEC from a former attoreny in the civil rights division. He concludes:
But even putting aside his controversial tenure at DOJ, von Spakovsky’s performance at the FEC over the last year independently raises questions of whether he is worthy of Senate confirmation. His comments at FEC meetings have often been caustic and extraneous to the issue at hand. He has consistently scoffed at the spirit of campaign finance laws, thumbing his nose at the law as he seeks to help create routes of circumvention. He even accuses those reformers who seek regulation of the role of money in our political process as attempting to take us back to the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is an easy accusation to make, and von Spakovsky has employed it a number of times, and it certainly is easier to attack those he disagrees with rather than to explain principled reasons for his own actions.
The Senate Rules Committee hearings will begin soon. When they do, the American people have the right to know all the details of von Spakovsky’s roles in both the Texas and Georgia matters, and his handling of FEC matters as a recess appointee. That record, if compiled, will make the vote on his confirmation quite easy.
Let's hope so.
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Quote:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4591
BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 5/23/2007
Says DAG Paul McNulty Withheld Knowledge of Tim Griffin's Involvement in Challenging Minority Voter Registration in 2004
Former Rove Aide Griffin Posted to U.S. Attorney Position in Arkansas...
From Monica Goodling's <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/goodling-statement/">opening statement</a> to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee this morning [emphasis added]:
<b>Despite my and others' best efforts, [Deputy Attorney General, Paul McNulty]'s public testimony was incomplete or inaccurate in a number of respects. As explained in more detail in my written remarks, I believe that the Deputy was not fully candid about his knowledge of White House involvement in the replacement decision, failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of the White House's interest in selecting Tim Griffin as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, inaccurately described the Department's internal assessment of the Parsky Commission, and failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote "caging" during his work on the President's 2004 campaign.</b>
For the record, it's the practice of sending registered mail to minority voters, asking for a reply, and if one doesn't come back, the voter's right to vote is challenged either at the polls, or attempts are made to remove them from the voter rolls --- usually without their knowledge. Allegations have been made that this was done, based on race, in 2004, when registered letters were sent to the home addresses of African-Americans in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere. Most insidiously, letters were said to have been sent to U.S. troops who were away, serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thus did not (and could not) answer the registered mail. Their registrations were then reportedly challenged.
The RNC agreed to cease the practice in a 1986 consent decree in a court case brought after they had "tried to have 31,000 voters, most of them black, removed from the rolls in Louisiana when a party mailer was returned, " <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html">according to the Washington Post.</a>
"The consent decrees that resulted prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud initiatives that target minorities or conduct mail campaigns to 'compile voter challenge lists.'"
Hopefully one of the Judiciary Committee Members will follow up on this, with either Goodling or in further interviews with McNulty or Griffin, who was Karl Rove's aide at the time, before he was later shoved into Bud Cummins' position as Arkansas U.S. Attorney.
UPDATE 2:45pm PT: The DoJ released a statement this afternoon from McNulty, in response to Goodling's testimony and her claims that his "public testimony was incomplete or inaccurate in a number of respects":
<b>"I testified truthfully at the Feb. 6, 2007,- hearing based on what I knew at that time. Ms. Goodling's characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress."</b>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caging_list">More on Vote Caging Lists at Wikipedia.</a> The key details follow below...
Quote:
Direct Mail
Caging is a term of art in the direct mail industry. After a mailing is sent, caging is when information is processed that can be learned from the returns. A caging list is the compiled information that is transferred to the organization that hired the direct mail firm, in order for them to update their mailing lists and databases.
Voter suppression
Caging has also been used as a form of voter suppression. A political party challenges the validity of a voter's registration; for the voter's ballot to be counted, the voter must prove that their registration is valid.
Voters targeted by caging are often the most vulnerable: those who are unfamiliar with their rights under the law, and those who cannot spare the time, effort, and expense of proving that their registration is valid. Ultimately, caging works by dissuading a voter from casting a ballot, or by ensuring that they cast a provisional ballot, which is less likely to be counted.
With one type of caging, a political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable - because, for example, the voter refuses to sign for it, the voter isn't present for delivery, or the voter is homeless - the party uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent. It is this use of direct mail caging techniques to target voters which probably resulted in the application of the name to the political tactic.
On the day of the election, when the voter arrives at the poll and requests a ballot, an operative of the party challenges the validity of their registration.
While the challenge process is prescribed by law, the use of broad, partisan challenges is controversial. For example, in the United States Presidential Election of 2004, the Republican Party employed this process to challenge the validity of tens of thousands of voter registrations in contested states like Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The Republican Party argued that the challenges were necessary to combat widespread voter fraud. The Democratic Party countered that the challenges were tantamount to voter suppression, and further argued that the Republican Party had targeted voter registrations on the basis of the race of the voter, in violation of federal law.
Examples of political caging
From the Washington Post: "In 1981, the Republican National Committee sent letters to predominantly black neighborhoods in New Jersey, and when 45,000 letters were returned as undeliverable, the committee compiled a challenge list to remove those voters from the rolls. The RNC sent off-duty law enforcement officials to the polls and hung posters in heavily black neighborhoods warning that violating election laws is a crime.
The Washington Post continues: "In 1986, the RNC tried to have 31,000 voters, most of them black, removed from the rolls in Louisiana when a party mailer was returned. The consent decrees that resulted prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud initiatives that target minorities or conduct mail campaigns to 'compile voter challenge lists.'"
In October 2004, the BBC Newsnight program reported on an alleged so-called "caging list" maintained by the George W. Bush campaign that suggested that they may be planning possibly illegal disruption of African American voting in Jacksonville, Florida.
The BBC reports that it has obtained a document from George W. Bush's Florida campaign headquarters, inadvertently e-mailed to the parody website GeorgeWBush.org, containing a list of 1,886 names and addresses of voters in largely African-American and Democratic areas of Jacksonville. Democratic Party officials allege that the document is a "caging list" that the Bush campaign intends to use to issue mass challenges to African-American voters, in violation of federal law.
While Florida statutory law allows the parties to challenge voters at the polls, this practice is not allowed if the challenges appear to be race-based.
<b>The list appears to have come to light because of what appear to be e-mails accidentally addressed by Republican campaigners to the georgewbush.org anti-Bush site instead of the georgewbush.com Bush campaign site. The e-mails had the subject line "Re: Caging" and contained Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file attachments called "Caging.xls" and "Caging-1.xls".</b>
References
1. Palast, Greg (June 2006) African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List, Democracy Now!
2. Emails published on georgewbush.org
Sources
* "10 Most Important Things About Direct Mail"
* Anne-Marie Cusac. "Bullies at the Voting Booth."
* Andrew Welsh-Huggins. "Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio." Associated Press. October 28, 2004.
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Originally Posted by jewels443
Both. Less votes would definitely be counted.
I think the ID is very necessary. <h3>There is so much identity fraud and it grows exponentially each year. The shame is that there are many seniors, especially those born in the south and in other countries, that have difficulty acquiring birth certificates when none were kept.</h3> I always wonder how they got buy for 70 - 90 years without an ID or passport.
I see this on a daily basis as my "clients" are required to have state-issued photo IDs in order to qualify for specific programs. I've seen lots of other makeshift IDs that I will not accept because they don't offer the same safeguards as the state IDs (especially the post 9/11/01 versions).
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jewel, the problem related to new voter I.D. requirements, is the mirror opposite of what you are describing, hence, my opposition to it. If you have any independent reporting of people attempting to vote using phony ID's or of people misrepresenting who there are in attempt to vote illegitimately, please post them, because, this is what I am reading:
Quote:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/wa...ngs/?page=full
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | May 6, 2007
Missouri attorney a focus in firings
<b>Senate bypassed in appointment of Schlozman</b>
...Republicans claimed that ineligible voters were a major problem and pushed for laws to require photo IDs. Democrats said there was no evidence of widespread fraud and that such requirements suppress turnout among legitimate voters who are poor or disabled, and thus less likely to have driver's licenses.
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/wa...9c7d0&ei=5088&
By ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA
Published: April 12, 2007
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, <h3>the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence</h3> of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. <h3>Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules</h3>, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.
In Miami, an assistant United States attorney said many cases there involved what were apparently mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.....
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The Justice Department's voting rights section referees disputes over the fairness of state election requirements. Under federal civil rights law, the section must sign off on redistricting maps and new voting laws in Southern states to ensure that changes will not reduce minority voting power.
Schlozman stepped into this fray in May 2003, when he was promoted to deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division. He supervised several sections, including voting rights. In the fall 2005, he was promoted to acting head of the division.
Schlozman and his team soon came into conflict with veteran voting rights specialists. Career staff committees recommended rejecting a Texas redistricting map in 2003 and a Georgia photo ID voting law in 2005, saying they would dilute minority voting power. In both cases, the career veterans were overruled. But courts later said the map and the ID law were illegal.
Bob Kengle , a former deputy voting rights chief who left in 2005, said Schlozman also pushed the section to divert more resources into lawsuits forcing states to purge questionable voters from their rolls. One such lawsuit was against Missouri, where he later became US attorney. A court threw the Missouri lawsuit out this year.
Schlozman also moved to take control of hiring for the voting rights section, taking advantage of a new policy that gave political appointees more control. Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.
Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.
Critics said candidates were being hired more for their political views than legal credentials. David Becker , a former voting rights division trial attorney, said that Schlozman's hiring of politically driven conservatives to protect minority voting rights created a "wolf guarding the henhouse situation."
Asked to respond on behalf of Schlozman, the Justice Department said it considers job applicants with a wide variety of backgrounds and insisted that politics has played no role in hiring decisions.
After the 2004 election, administration officials quietly began drawing up a list of US attorneys to replace. Considerations included their perceived loyalty to Bush and a desire by White House political adviser Karl Rove to increase voter fraud prosecutions, documents and testimony have shown. Most of the proposed firings were for US attorneys in states with closely divided elections.
Among those later fired was David Iglesias , from the battleground state of New Mexico, where many of his fellow Republicans had demanded more aggressive voter fraud probes. Iglesias has accused his critics of making the "reprehensible" suggestion that law enforcement decisions should be made on political grounds.
Missouri is another closely divided state. According to McClatchy Newspapers, Graves appeared on a January 2006 list of prosecutors who would be given a chance to resign to save face. He abruptly resigned in March 2006. Gonzales quickly installed Schlozman as Grave's replacement, bypassing Senate confirmation under new law that had been slipped into the Patriot Act.
That summer, the liberal activist group ACORN paid workers $8 an hour to sign up new voters in poor neighborhoods around the country. Later, ACORN's Kansas City chapter discovered that several workers filled out registration forms fraudulently instead of finding real people to sign up. ACORN fired the workers and alerted law enforcement.
Schlozman moved fast, so fast that his office got one of the names on the indictments wrong. He announced the indictments of four former ACORN workers on Nov. 1, 2006, warning that "this national investigation is very much ongoing." Missouri Republicans seized on the indictments to blast Democrats in the campaign endgame.
Critics later accused Schlozman of violating the Justice Department's own rules. A 1995 Justice election crime manual says "federal prosecutors . . . should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the preelection period" to avoid "chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities" and causing "the investigation itself to become a campaign issue."
"In investigating election fraud matters, the Justice Department must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself," the manual states, adding in underlining that "most, if not all, investigation of alleged election crime must await the end of the election to which the allegation relates."
The department said Schlozman's office got permission from headquarters for the election-eve indictments. <h3>It added that the department interprets the policy as having an unwritten exception for voter registration fraud, because investigators need not interview voters for such cases.</h3>
On Nov. 7, 2006, Missouri voters narrowly elected Democrat McCaskill over the Republican senator, James Talent . The victory proved essential to the Democrats' new one-vote Senate majority.
Last week, McCaskill told NPR that she'd like Schlozman to testify before Congress: "What this all indicates is that more questions need to be asked, and more answers under oath need to be given."
As the controversy over the US attorney firings started building, the Bush administration picked someone else to be western Missouri's US attorney. Unlike with Schlozman, the administration first sent the nominee to the Senate for confirmation.
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Originally Posted by pan6467
You want to vote, you have an ID. That plain and simple. I don't see a reason why this is even a problem.
State IDs are dirt cheap and you can even use fake addresses on them.
I deal with a great many homeless people and even they have ID's.
All having an ID will do is help to prevent voter fraud (you know dead people voting, illegals voting, etc.), I'm a Democrat but if my party is scared of this law then something is seriously wrong.
And for anyone to bring race into it "it's discriminatory against blacks".... how the fuck do you figure?
....If you drive, you need a driver's license, so that takes care of that population.....
....There is no reason in the world why a legal resident should not have an ID.....
It's a major way to stop voter fraud and if one party is using excuses why it is wrong to need one to vote, when you need an ID for just about any other service, it makes me wonder what that party is truly afraid of.
But.... why not let the populace vote on it, put it on ballots and let the people decide.
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pan, both jewels443, have already posted "it's discriminatory against blacks".... how the fuck do you figure?" answers as to how it is discriminatory to add new ID requirements to restrict voting. I've reposted jewels443's description, in this post.
A driver's license is a privilege, voting is a right. There were, into the mid 1960's poll taxes and literacy tests as law in some states to intentionally block some from voting, and many are the same people who would face a new hardship in the way of their voting because of new ID requirments.
Show me independent reporting on this "voter fraud" which concerns you enough to add restrictions to some people's access to the polls. Now, you've only convinced me that you've allowed yourself to be influenced by the illegal republican vote suppression opertation, exactly in the manner that they've intended for you to be.
Am I too partisan? I've done my "homework", and I've shared it with you on this thread, if you'd only read it and mull it over. Your reaction is curious, you seem angry for the exact opposite reasons for which it would be reasonable, given the documentation.
A series of crimes have been committed, good people have been "roughed up", experienced their rights being trampled on by lawyers, partisan party, and elected officials, and your response, set a new hurdle to impede them from voting. Haven't I documented that republicans have certainly done enough of that kind of thing, already, pan? Hasn't jewels443 already supported ny contention that, for some, new ID requirments would be an added hardship?
Last edited by host; 01-11-2008 at 11:40 AM..
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01-11-2008, 11:22 AM
