Dear Attorney General Holder:
We are writing to express our concerns about highly restrictive photo identification requirements under consideration or already signed into law in several states. These measures have the potential to block millions of eligible American voters without addressing any problem commensurate with this kind of restriction on voting rights. Studies have shown that as high as 11% of eligible voters nationwide do not have a government-issued ID. This percentage is higher for seniors, racial minorities, low-income voters and students. Voting is the foundation of our democracy, and we urge you to protect the voting rights of Americans by using the full power of the Department of Justice to review these voter identification laws and scrutinize their implementation.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act vests significant authority in the Department to review laws before they are implemented in covered jurisdictions. As you know, the burden of proof in this preclearance process is on those covered jurisdictions, which must be able to show that legal changes will not have a discriminatory impact on minority voters. New photo identification laws, for instance, must be subjected to the highest scrutiny as states justify these new barriers to participation. In Section 5 jurisdictions, whenever photo identification legislation is considered, the Department should closely monitor the legislative process to track any unlawful intent evinced by the proceedings.
Restrictive photo identification requirements are also being considered or have passed in states and jurisdictions that are not covered by Section 5. The Department should exercise vigilance in overseeing whether these laws are implemented in a way that discriminates against protected classes in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Additionally, federal civil rights law – 42 U.S.C. 1971(a)(2)- prohibits different standards, practices or procedures from being applied to individuals within a jurisdiction. We believe the Department should ensure that these photo identification laws do not violate this statute or other federal voting rights statutes.
Thank you for your work protecting the civil rights of all Americans.
Michael F. Bennet, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin Charles E. Schumer, Patty Murray, Jeanne Shaheen, Mary Landrieu, Benjamin L. Cardin, Sherrod Brown Mark Begich, Jeff Merkley,Kirsten E. Gillibran, Ron Wyden,Tom Harkin, Tom Udall, Herb Kohl
Here’s some basic info on the VRA.
This has disappeared from memory, but I think it’s important to recall that some Republicans tried to remove certain protections in the VRA in 2005 and 2006. They failed.
The House voted overwhelmingly Thursday to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act for 25 years, rejecting contentious efforts by Southern Republicans to dilute the landmark law.
Conservatives introduced four amendments to weaken the act, and all were rejected by large bipartisan majorities. One proposed eliminating the requirement for foreign-language ballots. Another would have created an easier method for states to escape federal oversight.
Chris
I guess enough congressmen in 2005 still believed in the very basic notion of the right to elect one’s own politicians, rather than allowing politicians to select the voters.
kay
Now Chief Justice John Roberts advocated watering down the VRA, when he worked for Reagan. Reagan once said it was “unfair” to the south, but I think that was pure dog-whistle pandering.
This has been going on a long, long time. They never, ever quit.
MikeJ
IIRC (and I may not) the current way for a state to “escape” federal oversight is to go ten years without having a voting law struck down as unconstitutional. Pretty easy as it is, yet the treason section of the country hasn’t been able to do it.
danimal
I’m dreaming of a definitive court ruling that states are required to protect the franchise of all citizens, even those who are young, brown, disabled or without a driver’s license.
A man can dream, can’t he.
TooManyJens
How does a jurisdiction become a “covered jurisdiction”? Are they only the ones that were specified when the VRA was passed, or is there some mechanism by which you can get added if you fuck with the voters enough? If there isn’t, there should be.
MikeJ
Only if you have photo ID.
BO_Bill
The purpose of the Voting Rights Act is to extend political empowerment to those who are not capable of self-government (Plato’s ‘Drones’), thus empowering those who seek nothing other than power. It is legislation designed to crush the individual (Plato’s ‘Free Men of Nature’).
It is important to consider the difference between a ‘Liberal’ and a ‘Leftist’. A ‘Liberal’ uses his five senses and the seven liberal arts and sciences, in the arena of an open exchange of ideas, to discern and celebrate Truth.
A ‘Leftist’ seeks totalitarian rule over people whose individuality is necessarily crushed.
High IQ people (Plato’s ‘Free Men of Nature’) are drawn towards Liberalism. Low IQ people (Plato’s ‘Drones’) are drawn towards Leftism. The IQ break is somewhere in the range of 95-100.
Hearing: Live Police Scanner from Detroit.
PeakVT
Okay, somebody needs to be given another vacation from the blog.
Lolis
You would have to think these laws would violate the Voting Rights Act, especially the Ohio law that says poll workers can refuse to tell voters where they should be voting. That is truly disgusting.
Spaghetti Lee
Ever notice how conservatives always cite long-dead guys as people who agree with them? Is it because dead guys can’t argue back?
TooManyJens
@PeakVT: Oh, but his trolling is so witty and creative! It’s so hard to come up with racist and misogynist material every day! That’s why there’s hardly any of it on the internet.
stuckinred
At noon Boortz and some other genius were just railing that the founders never intended for the “people” to elect anyone.
Martin
AFAIK, there’s no way for a currently exempt jurisdiction to become a covered jurisdiction other than by another act of Congress. There has been some effort to expand the VRA to cover the entire country, and it’s a valid argument I think. Even though jurisdictions can apply to be exempt from being a covered jurisdiction, I think it’s somewhat unreasonable to assume that certain jurisdictions have the same kinds of voting problems today as they did half a century ago, while other jurisdictions have none.
The law should be much more fluid and a bit more nuanced than what it currently is. I mean, the entire state of Georgia except for one city is covered. And if VRA was supposed to be more broadly based than just the specific issues surrounding Jim Crow laws, then why are 3 boroughs of NYC covered, but parts of Ohio or other parts of Florida that have had serious and well documented voting rights issues lately not included? VRA was an important law, but with each year it seems more and more misplaced.
Martin
That’s part of it, but it still requires other actions to be taken by the jurisdiction and an application for exemption be filed.
Arizona appears to be fucked forever since they seem determined to regularly fail the unconstitutional law test.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mike J #6:
But correctly oriented cadres know that some photos are more equal than others. Four IDs good, Two IDs bad, also!
Davis X. Machina
BO_Bill? The guy with the pie fetish? I don’t think it’s going to do his arteries any good in the long run, but hey, whatevs.
Davis X. Machina
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: If you don’t have photo ID, you do get to dream provisionally, but only after everyone else has woken up, and only if they all had nightmares.
Martin
Well, there’s unfortunately some basis for that. Presidents are elected by the Electoral College, not by the voters. Gore did win the popular vote, after all, and that’s not at all in dispute. Senators were chosen by the states. The only group that was directly elected were Representatives.
How much of those decisions were due to some kind of principled stand on representative vs direct democracy and how much was based on the realities of trying to accurately count millions of nonstandard paper votes in a reasonable period of time is a different debate, but they aren’t exactly wrong on the intention. Of course, the presence of those constitutional amendments sort of suggests that for at least a century now we haven’t really given a fuck what the founders wanted – we determined that they were either wrong or misguided and we corrected the process. End of story.
kdaug
Somehow I find the thought of BoB in a tunic and with a laurel wreath on his head kinda fitting.
Bit more “conservative” than most, BoB, but hey – play it to the hilt.
You do retrograde reprobate like few others.
Chris
Then WHY is it that when Congress and the President passed health care reform, they were out there screaming themselves blue about how they were contradicting “the will of the voters”? After all, the will of the voters doesn’t matter, the Founding Fathers were afraid of democracy, etc etc etc.
Elizabelle
Live event: President Obama doing a twitter conference; just beginning. MSNBC link through NYTimes (for me).
Please let the twitterers ask some better questions than the Villagers.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
What is this “commensurate” nonsense? Can you even trust people who use words like that? Everybody knows that Replicants are voting, and in large numbers too, I tell you! I demand that all would-be voters pass a Voight-Kampff test. Flip over that turtle that is stuck on its back, you heartless bastards, or no ballot for you!
Elizabelle
First question: what could you have done better in handling the recession?
Pres Obama’s first questions to twits: what items would YOU cut from the budget?
kay
Look at section 2, from the link. There are also enforcement provisions that apply to the basic right. Handing people a “right” with no way to get into a court when the right is violated is an empty promise, so there’s law on that.
The Act was actually strengthened in 2006, so it was a massive failure for conservatives. The attempt backfired.
Elizabelle
Here’s a C-Span link to Twitter conference.
http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/Twitter-Town-Hall/
Chris
Sarah Palin (happy oblivious permanently-screwed-in-place cheerleader smile): “ALL of them!”
Reporter: “You’d cut funding for the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities?”
Sarah Palin: bursts into tears, runs to dry her eyes in Roger Ailes’ jacket, bawling about how the mean liberal bullies are asking gotcha questions.
Martin
True that it defines a particular right, but it doesn’t put an offending jurisdiction into the section 5 ‘covered jurisdiction’ category, where basically they can’t do shit without approval from DOJ, even if the new offenses are worse than those found in any section 5 jurisdiction. That doesn’t seem right to me that the section 5 jurisdictions have this unique association that would never be applied to a non-section 5 jurisdiction.
kay
Well, why? That’s where the pattern and practice was. Makes sense to me.
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
100% concurred with this. There should be a process in place for areas to certify that they are able to have elections without being assholes. More to the point: There should be an ongoing mechanism for determining if the Act is being followed. And the Act should be nationwide; the North may not have a tradition of laws that lock out minorities, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a tradition of doing it nonetheless.
Sadly, these laws pretty much underline that not only will we not get such common-sense updates, we’re lucky there’s even a VRA to potentially intercede.
Greg
OK, I’m going to nitpick a bit here. And let me start by saying that I am 100% sure that these proposed voter ID laws are a thinly veiled attempt to stop “those people” from voting. I am all about everyone getting to vote. HOWEVER, I am tired of seeing people write that these proposed laws require a driver’s license. They do not. They require a “government issued ID”. That could be a variety of things. Yes, a driver’s license is one. But there are also state IDs, passports, military ID’s and many others. And, on a personal note, I spent many long years working for companies that provide student ID’s (ISIC, local schools etc.) Student ID’s are not valid for anything except to prove that you are a student. You cannot buy alcohol, get on a plane, buy cigarettes, cash a check, enter a bar, prove residency, get a state ID or driver’s license, nothing. Every student is told that their ID is only valid for on-campus use and to get, maybe, a student discount somewhere. I live in Texas (sadly) and when I moved here they let me register to vote with my FL state ID and a copy of my lease to prove that I was currently a resident of Dallas. So, please stop saying that they want you to have a driver’s license to vote. I don’t have one. And I vote.
Having said that, I still think that that they are trying to supress minority voters.
Martin
And if the pattern and practice develops in Ohio and vanishes from, say, Austin, then Austin should be forever destined to stay on the list and Ohio never go on the list?
I’m not saying the VRA is bad legislation, but at least as Section 5 protections are concerned, it’s stuck in time. The patterns of discrimination being sought now are not against African Americans but against Latinos, immigrants, and young voters, and while these patterns are emerging in Section 5 states, they’re also emerging (sometimes far more strongly) in other states. And legislators are blatant in their goals here.
PurpleGirl
Greg: Can you name a state ID other than a driver’s license/non-driver license that you know of? I can’t think of one other than a driver’s license/non-driver license.
kay
You really have to read each state law on that. Passports, for example, are often NOT accepted. A student ID from a state university is a “public document” under Ohio’s previous law, and it no longer is, so that’s where the student ID controversy comes in, under “public document”. Why is it now not a public document? Did something change since 2006?
Downpuppy
Why the hell is the letter necessary? Is Holder completely asleep?
Martin
Actually, it varies quite a lot by state. Some will only accept state issued IDs, so passports and most military IDs are out. Some require your local address and photo to be on the ID, so military ID is probably out on that one.
A CA photo id (not driver’s license) costs $28. If the state requires that the ID carry my local address, and I’m a student, then it’s probably going to cost me $28 (plus my time) every semester or every year to keep it accurate. If the state is going to mandate that voters have a state ID in order to vote, then the state should issue that ID for free. Otherwise, it’s little more than a poll tax given that the ID isn’t actually solving any known problem.
kay
Well, it does move, Martin, but, granted, slowly. It’s a big ‘ol machine, federal law. It doesn’t turn on a dime :)
For example. One big fight in 2005-6 was over bilingual ballots in Chicago, a very specific immigrant group were being disenfranchised. The same thing happened in several Texas jurisdictions, so sec. 5 is a blunt tool, but enforcement is more flexible than it may appear.
Election lawyers (I am not one) are endlessly clever. They can combine this statute with some others and get stuff done. Ohio conservatives just lost a big round in federal court under equal protection, where the voters relied on Bush V Gore. Hah! Throw that dog right back in their face. I love that tactic very much, Martin.
dollared
The Wisconsin recall elections are going to be the Laboratories of Anti-Democracy. One Milwaukee suburban town is going to have one polling location open after having had six in the last election. And of course, the Wisconsin law limited absentee balloting and early voting.
As for fixing one’s ID issues: with budget cuts, there are sections of Wisconsin where a trip to the nearest ID issuing office is a 200 mile round trip with no public transportation.
The lawsuits need to be filed now, and I am dead serious that the Carter Foundation needs to be brought in.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Greg #30:
I see that others above have already chimed in with the point I was going to make that in some states military ID isn’t good enough, etc.
The other problem here is that the GOP keeps moving the goalposts. Today it is photoID. What about 4 years from now? Photos are easy to fake, photoshop, blah, blah. Now we need holographic IDs. Then the year after that it will be embedded RFID chips. This game never stops and they can always set the line at some point that seems reasonable to anybody who is upper-middle class or above and non-technophobic, but just by accident happens to be less than prevelant amongst the poor.
A basic constitutional right that you cannot in any practical sense exercise unless you prove to the state that you deserve to exercise it (which is what voter identification of any sort comes down to in the end), using arbitrary and changeable criteria, that is no right at all.
ETA: and that was the serious point behind my snark at #15 above that “some photos are more equal than others”. Just wait, it is coming. Regular photos won’t be good enough just as soon as the overwhelming majority of pro-Dem voters have photoIDs.
Martin
No, I realize that. But it seems to me that if you had a pattern of discrimination going over years, rather than constantly putting the burden on the voters (as it is under section 2) you would seek to put it on the jurisdiction (as it is under section 5). That’s my main issue – why is section 5 unique and fixed in time? Why are patterns of discrimination against, say, latino voters not deserving of the same kind of broad protections that VRA gave to african american voters that may no longer even be needed? I guess I don’t see the magnitude of distinction between say, Tennessee and Alabama today, the latter being fully under section 5 and the former not at all and never to be. Alabama can scarcely make a move without approval from DOJ and Tennessee can do whatever the fuck they want until someone complains.
Porlock Junior
A couple of weeks ago I added the pie filter, being very fond of all kinds of pie and wanting to see it more widely endorsed. Seemed to work. But currently I try to add some entity that’s stinking the place up, like BO_Bill, and get no proper result.
// add your list of badguys here. these are case insensitive
var baddies = new Array(“WyldPirate”, “Ghanima Atreides”,”murbella”,”BO_Bill”);
Am I doing something obviously wrong? The first two worked.
Southern Beale
Def con lavender alert … Michele Bachmann’s husband sets off gay folks’ gaydar too. LOL.
catclub
Martin @ 18 “realities of trying to accurately count millions of nonstandard paper votes in a reasonable period of time”
Canada does it every election.
It is what as known as a ridiculously parallelizable problem.
kay
It’s a great question that I don’t know the answer to. I can tell you the political climate between conservatives and liberals on the VRA, though. Conservatives (including John Roberts) have argued your same point, but from the other side. The VRA is too rigid and “unfair” to the south (“unfair” is what Reagan argued, not Roberts, but same idea).
So, in 2005-6 when the battle was joined, liberals and Democrats didn’t go anywhere near that argument, even from your perspective, which is “expand and protect”. They argued the history. They wanted to hold on to what they had.
I say this all the time here, but I believe it, and I think it’s central to understanding this whole long, fight. Liberals and conservatives have a fundamentally different IDEA on voting. I could split a room down the middle on “access” versus “fraud”. It runs deep, and there is no compromise, which is why it always, always ends up in court. To me, one wrongly disenfranchised voter is one too many. Conservatives feel just as strongly that one invalid vote is one too many. It’s a stand-off. No middle ground.
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
@Porlock Junior/40: It’s very likely that, when the Reply function “broke”, whatever code the pie filter depends on broke, as well. It might need an update.
rikryah
Greg,
you simply don’t get it, or you are pretending not to.
the most transient part of our population is the poor. things happen to the poor. especially with their housing. and, it’s not unlikely for them to move several times within the span of a couple of years. it’s not just the getting a government issued id – it’s one with the ‘ correct’ address on it. what – they should get a new one everytime they move?
celticdragonchick
Wow.
Frank Rich has a few things to say about the Obama Presidency and coeporate Galtian overlords here…
goblue72
@kay – I’m assuming your “did something change in 2006” question is snark.
@martin – Thank you. This is nothing but a thinly disguised poll tax. I’m an upper middle class white guy who happens to live in a major city. And rents. Which means I change my address fairly frequently. And I can guarantee you I sure don’t update my driver’s license every year with a new address and cough over the fee to the CA DMV.
kdaug
Check you quotation marks and spaces in your list…
Todd Dugdale
Greg wrote:
“They require a “government issued ID”. That could be a variety of things. Yes, a driver’s license is one. But there are also state IDs, passports, military ID’s and many others.”
Nearly all of the VID legislation that I have seen does not allow passports. The reason is that a passport does not include your address.
The issue is being framed as proving one’s identity, but the underlying issue really is proving one’s address.
Why? Because a lot of people do not update their ID when they move. Low-income people tend to move more often, and have less time and ability to stand in line at a government office to have their ID changed to reflect their current address. It also costs money to get an updated ID.
This makes “voter-caging” remarkably easy, and creates fraud when someone votes using an ID that does not contain their current address. Republicans can then present hard evidence of ‘massive fraud’ in virtually any election.
MikeJ
Porlock Junior, use the version for the chrome browser. There’s a UI to add and delete baddies.
kay
This went to court in Ohio, and the court-sanctioned fix (to avoid ‘poll tax’ connotations) was this: if there is an address mismatch on an unexpired OH driver’s license the voter may enter their SS# on a line in the ‘poll book’ (a paper record at the precinct). Conservatives in OH are now changing that provision, which means (to me) if they get this garbage past a court they come back and tweak it later to make it harder to vote.
So you and Martin are right. The poll tax question on driver’s license fees is a “live” one.
scav
Just as a break, here’s news we can probably ignore: 7.8 (prelim) earthquake but in the middle of nowhere, Pacific end.
Amir_Khalid
@Porlock Junior #40:
I’m not a programmer any more, haven’t been for many years, but I noticed this:
What should be the open-quote marks before the nyms murbella and BO_Bill are in fact close-quote marks. Maybe, just maybe (see my caveat above) it’s these typos that you need to fix.
AliceBlue
@#9 Lolis: Is this for real?
Martin
Well, yeah, but how did you communicate the results of that count? In the 18th century when the founders were writing shit down? Today it’s trivial, back then you didn’t have benefit of telegraph or even train. Communication latency was measured in days or weeks. For statewide and national seats, they avoided the entire problem. For districts, you could presume that the district was sufficiently compact (they didn’t have Alaska-sized at-large districts back then) that you could have the results in a day or two, and you’d pack up the elected fellow on his horse and send him to DC, so for House races the elections were considerably more manageable to run directly.
I don’t fully understand all the rationale behind the electoral strategies proposed back then, but I think it’s too much of a coincidence that the voting solutions proposed also solve the communication and logistics problems that they would have faced at the time to believe that it didn’t play at least some role in the decision.
GambitRF
Failed media experiment watch:
Chris Cilliza is mad that people on Twitter asked too many questions about actual policy issues.
“A question I (and political junkies all over the country/world) would like to hear: What do you think of the 2012 Republican field?”
“What they haven’t done well: More follow-ups by a moderator pressing Obama to go beyond his standard-issue answers and more non-policy questions. Throw a political question in there!”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/live-blogging-the-presidents-twitter-town-hall-askobama/2011/07/06/gIQAwW7f0H_blog.html
Brachiator
Sometimes I wish that the DOJ would screw with the GOP by outlawing absentee voting, which is used often in conservative districts. I mean, where is the ID verification for that absentee ballot? Who knows who could have been doing the actual voting?
arguingwithsignposts
Head/desk
Sillyza needs to get out more or something. I’d venture most americans, even those on twitter, are far more interested in policy than what clowns arre in the gop clown car.
briber
@Porlock Junior #40:
The first two array elements are surrounded by ‘dumb quotes’. The remaining elements are surrounded by ‘smart quotes’.
More info here
The moral of the story: always use a text editor to edit scripts. Word Processors are for making human readable documents. Text editors are for making machine readable documents.
Davis X. Machina
@Brachiator: I have similar reservations about the highly-touted vote-by-mail procedure in Oregon and Washington state.
Sooner or later there’s going to be situations where you bring your mail-in ballot to church for fill-in-your-ballot night, on Wednesday, in the basement after Bible study, where Pastor Bob and the ministry team will assist you in your prayerful selection of candidates.
At the polling place at least you can write in ‘Thomas Hobbes’, drop the ballot in the box, and lie to your wife or husband when you leave.
Suffern ACE
@GambitRF – 56 – Well, Chris, maybe if your paper did a better job reporting on policy, there wouldn’t be such a pent up demand for answers to policy questions.
handy
@GambitRF
To the Village, the Horse Race is the only thing that counts. This policy stuff–who’s got time for it, and really none of it matters anyway. It’s not like people are losing their jobs, getting kicked out of their homes, being forced to declare bankruptcy because of steep medical bills, etc.
kay
This is James Fallows:
Fallows noticed back in the 90’s that voters at forums asked about the WHAT while media asked about the HOW. I agree with him. I think there’s a huge, huge hole there: “the what”.
It’s a easy one word distinction, and I’m turning to it more and more. If you’re interested in “the what”, you won’t get it from them.
Mnemosyne
When did you move there? Because the point that Kay is making is that they have been changing the laws so that you would no longer be able to prove your eligibility to vote with an old/out-of-state ID and a utility bill. They’re trying to change it so that only a current state-issued ID with the current address is acceptable, no exceptions.
Given that they actually are trying to change the laws so that you can only use a driver’s license to prove your eligibility to vote, I’m not sure why you think we’re supposed to shut up about their attempts to change the laws until they actually succeed.
rikryah
while I do appreciate this being a post, the new development of VOTER SUPPRESSION IN OHIO also deserves a front page post, IMO.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/07/05/260823/ohio-gop-weakens-election-law-by-allowing-poll-workers-to-refuse-to-inform-voters-where-they-can-vote/
Greg
Thank you all for your very well thought out and polite replies. I guess all I was trying to point out is that we are dealing with three very different issues. 1. What sort of paperwork proves identity? 2) What sort of paperwork proves residency and/or citizenship? 3} Should a voter be required to provide any of the above to be able register to vote?
IMHO, screaming “State X wants you to have a driver’s license to vote” is both wrong and counter productive.
Greg
@rikryah
I have lived in 8 states. I don’t drive. I have always had a state ID. My entire income right now is Pell grants and Food Stamps. We are talking about $900 a month. How much do you live on?
Greg
@Mnemosyne :
Not a driver’s license. A state ID. There is a huge difference. ANYONE can get a State ID. Felons, DUI’s, fraudsters, drug addicts. ANYONE. Yes, they cost money and a minimal amount of time. And I am firmly in the camp that State ID’s should be free to anyone. But that is a different topic.
Do I despise what they are doing here in TX? Yes. But lying about the law they are trying to pass only hurts us.
Mack Lyons
Quotation marks and spacing. I fixed those for you. :)
Todd Dugdale
Greg wrote:
“3} Should a voter be required to provide any of the above to be able register to vote?”
Interestingly, Pawlenty vetoed “Motor Voter”, which allows you to register when you get your driver’s license. If you have adequate documentation to get a driver’s license, one would think that would cover you as far as proof of identity for voter registration. This shows, at least to me, that identity is not the issue.
Voter registration itself often serves as an artificial barrier to voting. Anyone who can prove citizenship and residence should be allowed to register at the polls. You don’t have to “register” to send mail through the USPS, get a car title, get your rights in court, or avail yourself of police or fire protection. No one stops you at the State line and asks if you are “registered” to leave the State. No one asks if you are “registered” to associate with others, criticise the government, or engage in commerce.
Porlock Junior
@ kdaug @ 48
Thank you!
God DAMN those mofos at Microsoft who decided to cleverize an international coding standard so you will get the mis-coded back-quotes that THEY want you to use when they decide to put them in. And everybody who went along with that.
Oh, not to mention that the stupid wrong quote-marks appear to be the ones that Greasemonkey (or Firefox or somebody) insists on at the left end of a quoted string. Or maybe that’s not how it’s really working, but just how the browser shows it today. No problem, I can read the text and find the hex equivalents and force them to what I want them to be, or of course just copy-paste the quotes in the right text editor.
Again, thanks for pointing it out, since I failed to examine my own posting result (unlike the text that I was posting) as I ought to have.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Greg #66:
The distinction between registering to vote and casting a ballot is absolutely crucial here. Best not to confuse them, IMHO. What most of these voterID laws are doing is making it more difficult to cast a non-provisional ballot (keeping in mind that provisional ballots are unlikely to actually get counted) after you have already registered successfully, including being in full compliance with whatever address and identity verification requirements are in force for the district in question.
Registration occurs before election day and the county clerk or other relevant authority in charge of maintaining the voter rolls has a set of procedures to follow in vetting those registrations (e.g. “Mickey Mouse”, umm I don’t think so…) to prevent fraudulent registrations from getting thru, and presumably enough time to apply them in a professional and legally correct manner.
What the voterID bills are trying to do is impose additional requirements on legitimately registered voters to be assessed at the polling station on election day. This isn’t about preventing fraudulent registrations, it is about discouraging legitimate voters from actually, you know, voting.
Porlock Junior
However:
First, thanks to the several people who pointed out the inconsistencies in the text I posted. And apologies for the intemperate language. But still, I have yet to see an actual programming language used by actual programmers (to instruct a computer rather than specify typography; cf LaTeX) that insists on the notion of opening and closing quote marks. So I retain this on the long Hate Microsoft list.
Whatever. The text now in my script, copied and pasted from a posting and inserted with a text editor, is
var baddies = new Array(“WyldPirate”, “Ghanima Atreides”, “murbella”, “BO_Bill”);
[And as I edit this on the site, those quote marks are all the same]
and I don’t know what that will look like when post it here, which is why I need to waste space with this. [Looks exactly like the posted text] [and fails to fileter the pie lover, though it was filtering the other one already.] What I do know is that Gas Oven Bob’s stuff still shows up in this thread, which murbella remains pied in another recent thread. Please forget the whole thing, with my repeated apology for what I thought would be a simple problem.
kay
Absolutely. I would add that professional voter suppression people like the editorial writers at the WSJ and the media personalities at FOx News rely on the conflation and confusion between registration and voting to kick up a cloud of dust around the whole process.
Voter ID laws are meant to combat ONE kind of voter fraud. Voter impersonation fraud.
That means the voter has already survived the registration process (which includes a valid address analysis with the USPS) but is now asked to prove identity AGAIN, so he or she cannot “impersonate” a validly registered voter.
Hugely important (but dull and nitpicky) distinction.
Greg
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Excellent point! Worth more discussion…
kay
Finally, Greg, one more important difference between registration and voting.
With registration validation (and, perhaps, a rejected registration) the voter has time to fix it before the election. If there’a an address screw-up, or they somehow end up not on the voter rolls, they can fix the defect prior to election day.
Not true for a refusal at the polling place, like with voter ID. No do-overs on election day. This is recognized in election law, by the way. They have an expedited calendar and all kinds of ex parte and emergency injunctive process, because there’s a recognition that the voter has 12 hours to get it right.
There’s wiggle room with a registration process, which is why I am calmer on conservative demands for documentation at registration than demands at the polling place :)
kay
I’ll do it, but brace yourself. It’s complicated. In Ohio, there is a live dispute over a race for a juvenile judge. Provisional ballots were voted correctly, but due to pollworker error, were accepted in the wrong precinct. Right polling place, wrong table.
Conservatives argued (in state court) that the ballots shouldn’t be counted. They want to throw out 800-some provisionals )from Democratic precincts). They won.
Liberals argued (in federal court) that the ballots should be counted. They ALSO won.
So it’s a state-federal stand-off, a big huge fuck up, and it’s going to end up at the US Supreme Court.
The best part is, conservatives will now be arguing against Bush v Gore, because liberals won in federal court relying on equal protection/Bush v. Gore.
You can’t make this stuff up, I swear.
So, that’s why conservatives in Ohio are ordering pollworkers NOT to tell people when they’re in the wrong precinct. That’s the backstory.
Mnemosyne
Again, I don’t understand what you think is “lying” about saying, “They are trying to change the laws so that you will have to show a current state ID at the polling place with your current address in order to vote, and no other form of ID or documentation will be permitted. If you used an expired ID and a copy of your lease the last time and were allowed to vote, you will be shit out of luck this time because only one form of ID will be permitted.”
Yes, it’s shorthand to say “driver’s license” when you mean “driver’s license or state ID card issued by the DMV,” but since they are both issued by the same agency at the same office, I don’t get what deep distinction you’re trying to draw by claiming that a driver’s license and state ID card are so completely different that it’s “lying” to conflate them.
Todd Dugdale
Mnemosyne wrote:
“I don’t get what deep distinction you’re trying to draw by claiming that a driver’s license and state ID card are so completely different that it’s “lying” to conflate them.”
Especially since he used an example of his out-of-state ID and copy of his lease to register, not to vote.
Midnight Marauder
Greg
Tell me, how do you start off saying that you are 100% sure that these laws are outright voter suppression of “those people”…and then end by saying you “think” they are trying to suppress minority votes?
What, are you 64% sure now? How in the world does that shift in language happen exactly?