I’m curious about why those voters in Detroit are waiting hours to cast their votes.
I’m curious about why those voters in Atlanta are waiting hours to cast their votes.
"Absentee ballots are an option for registered voters [in Georgia] who prefer to vote by mail instead of voting in-person. You do not need an excuse to request an absentee ballot."
Only perhaps. The idea is to prevent voters being influenced through the use of food and drink. A little vodka can be persuasive to some…
—
Oh please, you really think that was intended to keep people from being convinced to vote for Abrams over Kemp by slipping them some vodka? Really?
Can’t say as I know whether it was a problem in Georgia or not. However, the new law certainly doesn’t seem to be suppressing voter turnout. Let us know if you find out otherwise.
DB2
Not quite. The changes were intended to suppress turnout. It appears to have backfired.
Nothing motivates a person to vote like being told they can’t.
AW
Nothing motivates a person to vote like being told they can’t.
AW
Having to identify yourself is not equivalent to being told you cannot vote.
Sheeesh!
Having to identify yourself is not equivalent to being told you cannot vote.
I have voted in every election since 1972 and in every instance I’ve had to identify myself, even when I’ve known the person at the polling place.
Don’t kid yourself. Voter suppression is much more insidious than having to identify yourself.
AW
Having to identify yourself is not equivalent to being told you cannot vote.
After the third hand count of the 2020 election in Georgia, conservative Republican Raffensperger announced…
“Today is an important day for election integrity in Georgia and across the country,”
“Georgians can now move forward knowing that their votes, and only their legal votes, were counted accurately, fairly, and reliably.”
Accurately and concisely identifying who voted and where they voted and how they voted has been going on since before you were born.
We just don’t make Black Americans guess the number of jelly beans in the jelly bean jar
“I have voted in every election since 1972 and in every instance I’ve had to identify myself, even when I’ve known the person at the polling place.”
I have voted in every election since 1964 and have never been asked to provide picture proof of my identity. Merely being …asked…who one is hardly counts as securing the vote integrity.
Can’t say as I know whether it was a problem in Georgia or not. However, the new law certainly doesn’t seem to be suppressing voter turnout. Let us know if you find out otherwise.
LOL, you are comparing a law crafted to suppress voting in the general election with early voting turn out in the primary. The two are in no way related.
Sloppy.
I’m not familiar with Michigan election laws, and practices vary from state to state. But generally, decisions about the number of precincts, the number of voting machines in each precinct, the staffing levels at the precincts, and other matters that would affect Election Day waiting times are left to county or municipal elections officials.
Until this last election cycle, we did not have “no excuse” absentee voting in Mich., nor much if any early voting.
Yes, administering the polling process is left largely to local officials, and Detroit has been notoriously inept in this matter. However, insofar as the impoverishment of Detroit (to the point of bankruptcy) and Wayne County is at least partly the result of state-level legislative and, until recently, gubernatorial hostility toward the city, the state bears some responsibility. The city also grapples with very low education levels among adult residents, which complicates staffing of polling places. Local social justice organizations are very much in the face of local as well as state officials in insisting that they address the chronic problems.
What is sloppy is saying that asking for an ID to vote is “suppression”.
You know, the same ID that one shows for:
Buying alcohol
Buying cigarettes
Getting on an airplane (oh wait! That requires a passport in most cases)
I could go on, but you get the point.
Hypocrisy by any other name is precisely that.
Cheers!
Murph
What is sloppy is saying that asking for an ID to vote is “suppression”. …I could go on, but you get the point.
Oh I get it, all right.
And since you apparently think it “requires a passport in most cases” to get on an airplane, I’m thinking you haven’t reviewed the documents required these days in order to obtain a state-issued ID, or the cost and ID requirements to obtain those documents. As an exercise, you might try getting a state ID without an official copy of your birth record, or an official copy of your birth record without a state ID–not to mention the cost of same. I’m thinking you’d be surprised at the number of native-born Americans who find themselves in this predicament.
Over the past 12 years, I’ve personally assisted more than 1,000 native-born adult Americans in negotiating these hurdles. My students and fellow volunteers have assisted thousands more. Thousands. In some instances it has taken me nearly a year and more than $600 to get to the finish line. Try getting a birth record from Alabama if you’re 60+ years old, your parents were Black sharecroppers, and you were born at home. Or providing a recent utility bill or rent receipt to prove your address when you’ve been sleeping in an abandoned house for the past two years.
If a state is willing to provide ID at no cost and also assist in providing the documents required to obtain that ID, fine. If not, then it’s a poll tax, pure and simple.
The bill’s passage was motivated by unfounded claims of fraud in the Georgia presidential elections… That statement is entirely accurate. Entirely.
I think you have to make up your mind; less than an hour before you admonished us that:
What I know is that there are no more than a handful of isolated instances of individuals casting fraudulent ballots.
A handful of fraudulent ballots implies that claims of fraud were not unfounded. Overstated - perhaps, but not unfounded.
The food and water prohibition is to avoid campaigning at the polling place in the guise of merely helping with sustenance, or even an overt reminder; “you just remember it was [insert candidate here] who took care of you today!” Since campaigning at the polling place is already prohibited, that doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me.
I’d like to see a law that makes it illegal for a voter to have to stand in line in the hot sun or pouring rain for hours in order to cast a ballot in America.
Yes - that is a constructive response to changes in voting practices that makes a lot more sense than “This is Jim Crow on Steroids!”
In the specific case of passing out water, I would suggest that election officials could be tasked with staffing aid stations, rather than campaigners. It does get hot in some areas, even in November; it is a real issue - but so is campaigning at the polling station.
Overstated - perhaps, but not unfounded.
You’re playing word games. The claim wasn’t that maybe a handful of people may have cast ballots fraudulently (as often as not Republicans, it’s turned out). The claim was that there was massive fraud that undermined the integrity of the election and may well have affected the outcome–which is utter nonsense, as any number of analyses have demonstrated. Bye now.
I travel mostly internationally. 
The rest of your post is about managing the vast majority of people by exception.
I got it, Fungi!
Don’t bother you with the fact that the vast majority of folks have ID’s of some sort; just focus on the exceptions, right?
What balderdash!
Murph
Over the past 12 years, I’ve personally assisted more than 1,000 native-born adult Americans in negotiating these hurdles. My students and fellow volunteers have assisted thousands more. Thousands. In some instances it has taken me nearly a year and more than $600 to get to the finish line. Try getting a birth record from Alabama if you’re 60+ years old, your parents were Black sharecroppers, and you were born at home. Or providing a recent utility bill or rent receipt to prove your address when you’ve been sleeping in an abandoned house for the past two years.
Are you claiming, these ID challenged people exist just fine in all other aspects of society with all it’s requirements to show an id. The effort and delay only become a problem when they decide they want to vote?
Yes, administering the polling process is left largely to local officials, and Detroit has been notoriously inept in this matter. However, insofar as the impoverishment of Detroit (to the point of bankruptcy) and Wayne County is at least partly the result of state-level legislative and, until recently, gubernatorial hostility toward the city, the state bears some responsibility. The city also grapples with very low education levels among adult residents, which complicates staffing of polling places. Local social justice organizations are very much in the face of local as well as state officials in insisting that they address the chronic problems.
It is always challenging for poorer areas to administer public services, whether elections or otherwise. Which is one of many reasons why simply passing a law to prohibit long election wait times is unlikely to be successful - those long wait times can be due to a lot of complex factors, as you have enumerated above, that can’t be wiped away simply with a legislative command to do better.
Still, Wayne County has a budget of $1.6 billion, of which only $2.4 million are allocated to elections. For comparison, my home Miami-Dade County has a an operating budget of $5.8 billion, of which $54 million are allocated to elections.
https://www.waynecounty.com/departments/mb/reports/budget.as…
https://www.miamidade.gov/budget/library/fy2021-22/adopted/v…
Wayne County has significantly fewer resources than Miami-Dade (our population’s about half again higher) - but they’re also allocating significantly fewer resources proportionally to elections funding. That’s probably something that will have to change, at the local level, in order to make those long lines materially shorter - regardless of whatever happens at other levels of government.
Albaby
Are you claiming, these ID challenged people exist just fine in all other aspects of society?
No. I’m not claiming that at all. In fact, their lack of ID presents all sorts of problems: can’t apply for a job, can’t rent an apartment, can’t apply for job training, can’t get a bus pass or a library card, etc., etc. But they’re impoverished people, mostly, and so a lot of folks (like some here) don’t give a [deleted]. They say things like, “Well, if you need ID to get a beer, you should need ID to vote.” Or “Well, they’re just exceptions.” Whatever.
My argument is that if government requires that you have ID in order to function in society, then government should make an affirmative step to assist people who, often through no fault of their own, are unable to acquire said ID. They are our fellow Americans, after all.
Voting is not like buying a beer. Voting is a fundamental right of a citizen. As I said, I’ve got no problem with requiring ID to vote. My problem is with requiring it but then doing little or nothing to enable folks to meet that requirement–i.e., imposing it as a hurdle in order to suppress the votes of certain classes of Americans.
Which is one of many reasons why simply passing a law to prohibit long election wait times is unlikely to be successful - those long wait times can be due to a lot of complex factors, as you have enumerated above, that can’t be wiped away simply with a legislative command to do better.
I didn’t mean it literally, albaby.
I didn’t mean it literally, albaby.
Gotcha.
I took it seriously in part because, as noted in the NPR article, Georgia did try that route in its efforts to cut down the lines (which always seem to make the national news) in the Atlanta area. They passed laws that place a number of requirements on local elections departments to make sure that polling places are adequately resourced and have a small enough number of voters assigned to each. Local governments have routinely flouted those requirements - the NPR article castigates the state for not doing enough to enforce, but they certainly deserve the initial blame for failing to follow the statutes in the first place.
Albaby