> Nobody's insecure about non-whites having the ability to vote
Actually they are, and go so far as to pass laws specifically to suppress non-white votes https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280
Actually they are, and go so far as to pass laws specifically to suppress non-white votes https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280
The State's argument was voting hours were inconsistent across the state. The districts that offered additional voting opportunities, that other districts did not have, were predominantly African American and would vote Democratic.
So their answer was to ban Sunday voting so that every district had the same window of opportunity to vote.
One could argue that their solution wasn't the optimal one, but they were aiming to level the playing field.
"The officials also urged county election boards to open fewer sites for residents to cast ballots during early voting that began on Oct. 20 and ends on Saturday."
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-northcarolin...
The reason inconsistencies existed is because there was a coordinated campaign in 2016 that made the holdouts appear inconsistent.
This is classic voter suppression. There will always be different voting patterns among different groups. Identifying the patterns of your preferred group and then normalizing just those patterns is how suppression is accomplished, period.
What blows my mind is that Republicans have been discussing these strategies freely and openly for years, and yet for some reason people still feel compelled to believe post hoc rationalizations.
The Republican Party is morally bankrupt. America is an intrinsically conservative nation and conservatism will live on. But apologizing for the Republican Party and its politics... I find it inexcusable.
I would argue creating special voting opportunities (i.e. Sunday voting) that directly appeal to the people who vote for you is morally bankrupt.
"The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina's 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting. 'After receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days,' the court found."
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-s...
This isn't even one of those issues where one can employ whataboutism. The motivations and behaviors are express, unambiguous, and unilateral.
It's one thing to be concerned about voter fraud and fairness. But when one group selects solutions out of a large basket of potential solutions that not only happen to consistently disadvantage a particular group but are express in their motivations.... I mean, come on. How many of these Republican states have thought about improving ballot audits? Just today Paul Ryan made a comment about how California's voting rules were too susceptible to voter fraud, but they fail to mention that California actually has very robust auditing processes and continues to improve them. And, notably, the pro-immigrant camps aren't crying foul.
Suppose you roll out a new voting schedule expanding voting hours. The purpose is to make things more convenient, not affect election outcomes -- someone who might have had to miss an hour of work to vote can now do it during off hours instead etc. But without having any way to know this ahead of time, the new schedule turns out to change who votes in a way that disproportionately benefits one party over the other. What should be done?
There is no logical reason for one schedule to be more fair than another, assuming that everyone has a reasonable opportunity to vote in both cases and the difference is only a matter of convenience. The problem is that convenience can affect election outcomes -- and there are arbitrarily many possible schedules.
Suppose that increasing voting hours at certain other times (e.g. opening polls earlier in the morning) would benefit Republicans more than Democrats. If they did that instead of removing the hours that disproportionately benefited Democrats, you could accuse them of the same thing -- changing the schedule to affect the outcome. But they're also just restoring the original balance that existed before a change was made that wasn't expected to alter it but did. On the other hand, who is to say that the original status quo is more fair than some other thing?
And that's the problem. Nobody has any more right to slightly more convenient voting hours than anyone else, but who gets them can determine the election. The incumbents are the ones who get to make the decision, so what would you expect them to do? More importantly, what principled thing do you propose to do instead?
In theory they could allow voting 24 hours a day for a month, but the expense of that likely exceeds the marginal benefit. Meanwhile as soon as you start deciding which hours to cut, you're potentially choosing who wins the election again.
That's exactly (well, perhaps not exactly a month) what places that adopt all mail-in (or just permanent, no-special-qualification mail-in) voting do, so it's not just “in theory”.
Every ballot is a mail in ballot.
~4 weeks before the election that thing arrives, I spend a few hours the next weekend going over the choices I didn't already evaluate in the primary before the election, and I drop that thing off like a hot potato as I ignore the political ads.
Everyone should have mail in ballots and as much time as they need to fill it out.
Wow. Can't be racial prejudice if its already political prejudice.
Reminds me of the court scene in New Jack City where the Wesley Snipes confesses to being a foot soldier and therefore he can't be the kingpin.
It can, but it's not in many cases. I also know lots of conservatives who are not the strawman racists people on the left like to attack. They really only care that people don't vote in left-wing people.
Keep in mind that suppressing the Democrat vote will dis-proportionally affect black people (as well as poor people, etc), but that doesn't mean the people trying to do it are prejudiced against black people. They are just prejudiced against Democrats.
Voter suppression should be a universal bad in a democracy no? It’s not only bad when done for racist ends.