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.
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.
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.
You call it voter suppression, other people call it election integrity. If ballot harvesting is allowed and you don't need an ID to vote then fraud becomes much easier.
It doesn’t allow for manipulation, ballot harvesting, or fraud. All Democrat policies for increasing vote turnout - lowering the voting age, no ID, mail in - increase the chances of fraud.
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.
Democrats have tried to increase the length of time early voting happens, increase the hours, and increase the number of voting locations. All of these changes make it easier for people who were on the fence about voting to vote.
They do this because they know that people who might or might not vote are much more likely than not to vote Democratic. Thus adding these people to the vote advantages themselves and disadvantages Republicans.
It is not as nasty as voter suppression, but it is no less a form of vote manipulation.
Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats, and the Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments.
They use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier, mainly in the name of combating voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
Many believe that one of the greatest opportunities for fraud come from outdated voter rolls. We need more effort to purge them, not less. Again, I am not hearing a single thing from you that convinces me laws like voter ID laws are more harmful than beneficial. If this weren't a deeply partisan issue for an insanity-driven culture of divisiveness, there would be little argument against voter ID laws in this day and age.
Lastly, it is very partisan to focus on efforts of republicans to suppress democrat votes while ignoring democrat efforts to continuously game the system in their favor, like:
* Making Washington D.C. a state, which makes zero sense unless you just want to win.
* Stacking the supreme court, which, again, makes zero sense unless you just want to win.
* Abolishing the filibuster, which completely undermines the purpose of the senate. The founders of the constitution purposely did not set up a pure democracy and they had many good reasons for it.
* Federalizing election laws, obviously in ways that favor democrats, even ignoring the complete unconstitutionality of the law. if anything is obvious about the democrats, they see the constitution as an obstacle more than as a founding document.
* Purposely not enforcing existing immigration laws (this should be illegal and Biden should be in jail for it), and then fighting to allow non-citizens to vote (this is already legal in NYC), or to grant citizenship to illegal entrants. Fortunately, the Hispanic vote seems to be shifting right, so we can hope this evil strategy will backfire against the democrats.
* Gerrymandering that rivals or exceeds republican gerrymandering efforts. But, when it's the democrats doing it, the corporate media like to call it "redistricting".
The democrats have long ago made it clear that they will fight as dirty as possible to win. If anything, Republicans need to start fighting dirtier back.
Given the numbers, every single election has some degree of fraud. It is not really possible to prevent 100% within our current system, and any time it's been investigated, the number of fraudulent votes has been extremely low. Moreover, there is no concerted effort by any political party to cast illegal votes.
In contrast, the Republican party is loudly all-in on gerrymandering and other disenfranchising rat-fuckery.
>And the Democrats have spun reasonable measures, such as requiring some sort of identification to vote, as "suppression", possibly so those who aren't citizens can vote. Who cheats more? Who knows.
Everyone knows: it's the Republicans, and it's not close. Voter fraud is not real. It doesn't happen. It's kind of amazing that it doesn't, but that's the facts.
Voter ID laws and stringent voter registration laws do disproportionately suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning subpopulations; that's also a proven fact that's not up for debate. Poor and non-white voters are less likely to have acceptable identification readily to hand, and even when they do, poll workers in certain areas have a bad habit of suddenly changing the rules or not accepting identification for certain voters.
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.
GP isn't arguing against detecting voter fraud. They're arguing against making the registration process harder in order to prevent (basically nonexistent) voter fraud.
The reason people in the U.S. are worried about voter fraud is that one side of the political spectrum is pushing the narrative — without any real evidence — that voter fraud is rampant. We shouldn't make it more difficult to vote in order to fix a made-up problem.
Being erroneously deregistered makes it harder to vote.
When something gets harder, some percentage of people don't do it.
Purges are being applied in a way that disproportionately impacts demographics likely to vote for Democrats, by Republican state legislatures.
There is absolutely no evidence to support the premise that voter fraud is anywhere near the order of magnitude needed to make a difference in elections. It is a non-problem.
This is probably the least serious vote fraud imaginable. It's not at all obvious that depriving any citizen the right to vote is ethical or constitutional.
The "perception" of voter fraud in the US is itself entirely a fraud, created to allow rules that make voting harder.
Mechanisms like mandatory voting and greater access to polling places (and holidays on voting day) are exactly the opposite of what is desired by those talking about voter fraud. So while there is much talk of voter fraud, those options are always off the table.
Voter fraud just isn't a significant thing in the US. The perception of it won't be fixed by dealing with voter fraud, one way or the other.
Unfortunately, that means that the real problem is much harder. It's a combination of authoritarianism, partisanship, and xenophobia, deliberately exacerbated both within and without. We don't get to spend much effort on the genuine issues because we're too suspicious of each other, and spend all of our time fighting about non-issues.
which if you want to go down that route I think it's important to note that many of the policies meant to protect against the specter of voter fraud in the US drastically increase the cost of voting on a segment of population that the propagating party (Republicans in this case) does not consider to be a part of their base. Sure, this could be accidental, but with the number of times it has happened in separate places with separate policies by the same party, I don't consider it particularly likely to be an accident.
The reason I bring this up is because in the current US system, I would posit that the harder it is for a person to vote, the more likely it that your vote is important given the political capital and effort expended to make sure it is hard for that person to vote. (again, this is predicated on the belief that I do not consider this phenomenon to be accidental in any way)
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.
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