One party as a platform is always trying to make it more difficult to vote in ways that mostly affect people that tend to vote for the other party. There's no reason to pretend it's incompetence when there's clear evidence of voter suppression
Making it harder for people to vote is literally voter suppression. You might argue that it is ineffective voter suppression, but I don't think you can argue that adding unnecessary steps to voting, and making penalties for making mistakes harsher while making it easier to make mistakes, is anything else.
That other party has a long history or preventing "the wrong people" from voting by any means available: murder, intimidation, "literacy tests," gerrymandering districts, and making requirements that are very difficult for the "wrong people" to obtain. The level of hysteria over election fraud is wildly disproportional to the number of documented cases of said fraud.
It's not like voter suppression of vulnerable groups is a tactic that can work at the same time for both of your major parties. This "golden mean" line of reasoning is not worth much.
Agreed. Given the history of one of the US political parties toward voter suppression, I tend to assume malice rather than incompetence in these cases.
Making it easier for people to vote (and make sure their vote is counted correctly, as is the overwhelming primary use case in "curing") is not fraud, it's democracy. The fact that one party is (and historically has been) opposed to this is not something to be proud of.
This might be my political bubble speaking, but the vast, vast majority of voter suppression stories I've seen have been Republican legislatures trying to deprive the Democratic party of votes.
But even if that's not the case, it stands to reason it'll end up being a left/right thing, because it's the right trying to deprive the left of a vote, or vice versa. The two party system guarantees it.
One party wants people to show up to vote with their face and ID. The other wants them to vote by mail as much as possible (which is more prone to fraud). Tell me again: who is sabotaging who?
You aren't mentioning the other part (notably more influent part) that systematically prevents people from voting. One removes names from voting rolls using brain-dead software that is 95% inaccurate.
If it didn’t suppress Democratic votes then you wouldn’t have Republican politicians nearly universally in favor and Democratic politicians nearly universally opposed. I take that as prima facie evidence.
We have the same debate with early voting, how long polling places are open, and where they are located.
For whatever reason, conservative voters tend to be more motivated to vote. So any friction in the voting process tends to disproportionately affect Democrats.
As an aside, there are structurally racist policies that suppress Democratic votes both historically and today. To give one example, most states do not allow exconvicts to vote.
As to why many Americans are opposed? Because for so long this country has tried to prevent anyone but white men from voting.
Besides that, voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. There’s just not a plausible way to commit large scale fraud at the polls. You’d have to round up bus loads of people willing to commit voter fraud, take them from polling place to place, then have them sign their names as some other voter on the rolls at that polling location and hope that the real voter hasn’t and won’t show up to vote. I lack the imagination to see how this could occur without detection.
In any case, what everyone should actually be concerned with is that the voting system accurately captures the will of the people. In which case, voter fraud at the polls, in America, is the least of our problems. Our attention should be focused on things gerrymandering, first past the post, and for presidential elections, the electoral college, among other issues.
There is no nastiness in preventing voter fraud either. Unless you call it voter suppression.
As for making voting easier, Republicans see it as cynically making fraud easier in the name of getting uninformed people who don't pay attention to vote for you. If you see it as Republicans see it, what the Democrats are doing is not exactly nice behavior.
So, this article states that 42% of Americans identify as politically independent. This beats the next largest political identity (Democrats, 29%) by 13%. Yet, the political system has been rigged - obviously so, for anyone who cares to look - so that an independent party fails to get the 5% necessary to get onto the ballot and future funding for the next election cycle for presidential running.
How is it that there is nothing that can be done to alleviate this type of obvious voter suppression and electoral corruption on a national scale?
I understand this is tertiary to the title, but makes up a large part of the article, so I thought I'd bring it up.
Voter fraud and voter supression are two different things.
Fraud is I sneak into the booth and change your vote before it is counted. Suppression is stopping bus service on election day in the neighborhoods that don't vote how you want them to.
Democrats are accused of fraud, but there are almost no cases of it happening (and they all end up being in favor of Republicans when they are found). Republicans use suppression so often that in 1965 a law was passed requiring them to get federal approval to make changes that impact voting, which unfortunately was overturned in 2013.
OK, but even if you disregard voter ID (others have explained that issue well here already) the Republican party has engaged in a large number of other methods to supress votes. Fighting to overturn parts of the voting rights act , Gerrymandering, reducing polling places in cities with demographics that tend to vote for Democrats, removing early voting days and fighting against vote by mail (methods favored by Democrat leaning demographics), and the list goes on.
The Democrats have engaged in many of these same methods in the past btw, but today's GOP have taken it to the next level. So far that I question if many Republican leaders believe in democracy at all anymore.
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