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Old 05-02-2014, 03:55 PM   #4
Jack.Kerr
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Five-ofan View Post
You do realize that purging non citizens from voting rolls is a good thing right? If you aren't a citizen you shouldn't get to vote. Further I don't consider requiring an ID to be restricting of voters. Ending same day registration sucks though.
I'm not sure I agree here, even. Not in view of the fact that evidence of non-citizens voting is pretty much non-existent. And not in view of the fact that evidence of eligible voters being incorrectly 'purged' is not at all uncommon. And not in view of the fact that such purges tend to disproportionately affect both young voters and minority voters, in many cases. And not in view of the growing suspicion that such 'reforms' are actually motivated by a desire on the part of Republican-dominated legislatures to reduce Democrat vote turnout, and designed and executed to that end. Writes Jeffrey Toobin in the 01.14.2013 edition of The New Yorker:

Quote:
The purported justification for the changes was to limit in-person voter fraud, but that claim was fraudulent itself, since voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. Mike Turzai, the Republican leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, revealed the true intent behind most of the laws last June, when, after the House passed such a measure, he boasted, in a rare moment of candor, “Voter I.D., which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: Done.” Turzai’s prediction was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that the Pennsylvania law and others like it weren’t pernicious. Obama won in Florida, too, but a recent study by Theodore Allen, an associate professor at Ohio State University, found that, in central Florida alone, long lines, exacerbated by a law that reduced the number of days for early voting, discouraged about fifty thousand people, most of them Democrats, from casting ballots.
Unable to find a direct reference at the moment, but there is another instance of a legislator who was advocating measures making it more difficult for university students to vote in the district where they go to school (despite that being perfectly legal), in which the legislator explicitly states that young people are more likely to be liberal, and thus to vote Democrat, and that therefore such voting restrictions were necessary in order to protect the district for Republicans. (I have personally heard similiar explicit complaints (though by persons at further remove) by citizens in a small-town which is home to a HBCU, where students vote in local elections, and in some cases throw support to a minority candidate who otherwise would not have a chance at being elected.)

What's more, just logically, I have a hard time believe that 'non-citizens' would risk showing up at a polling place and calling attention to themselves (certainly not in significant numbers) and having to document their addresses. My guess is that 'non-citizens' are more concerned about getting to their jobs and then back home to their families without getting pulled over by police than they are trying to vote in elections in which they are ineligible to vote.

Anecdotally, the only incident of voter fraud that I have heard of being prosecuted lately involved a couple of caucasian Baptist tea-totalers voting against a local option amendment, when they KNEW they were ineligible to vote. The eleciton results were close enough that they got busted when officials were recounting the votes. (Family members turned them in. In-laws!) Other than that, there was the case of a Republican operative having thrown away a large number of voter registrations which had been collected in a pre-dominantly Democratic district. But no, voting by non-citizens has pretty much been shown to be a myth, while the disenfranchisement of eligible voters is not at all uncommon.

In any case, this is a pretty interesting read about alleged voter fraud (http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/d...er%20Fraud.pdf), showing how what self-styled election-fraud reformers try to call 'voter fraud' is acutally more likely to be a clerical error rather than any deliberate attempt to vote illegally or fraudulently.

Beyond that, you have the very recent Wisconsin voter ID case (Frank v. Walker) in which a federal judge struck down a photo-ID law precisely because it unfairly and disproportionately burdened minority voters, and in so finding pointed out that:

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The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past.
Summary article here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...s-none/361403/
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