This is how Republicans are trying to win elections.
The Watauga County Board of Elections voted Monday to eliminate an early voting site and election-day polling precinct on the campus of Appalachian State University.
The Pasquotank County Board of Elections on Tuesday barred an Elizabeth City State University senior from running for city council, ruling his on-campus address couldn’t be used to establish local residency. Following the decision, the head of the county’s Republican Party said he plans to challenge the voter registrations of more students at the historically black university ahead of upcoming elections.
Pasquotank County used to be covered by preclearance regulations, before the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision hollowed the Voting Rights Act.
Of course, even without preclearance, the Supreme Court has said that such acts by the government are unconstitutional. (This was in 1979, in yet another case in which Republicans just happened to single out a historically Black university for disenfranchisement.) But it’s possible that this case, too, will wind up in the Supreme Court; if so, there’s no assurance that the Shelby court will have any objection at all to such actions.
* * *
To be fair, although Pasquotank is singling out a Black university, North Carolina Republicans really don’t want any students voting:
Yeesh.
From what I understand, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1979 case (Symm vs. US) that the locality couldn’t single out college students for disenfranchisement. My impression is that any otherwise-legal uniform rule for residency, whether it disenfranchises college students or not, is constitutional as long as it isn’t differentially applied to different classes of people, and isn’t constructed in a way that it only ends up applying to one class. “Residence in a building with a lease term of less than one year” is a valid class of housing that won’t be counted as establishing residency, “residence in a college dorm” is not. Or so it seems; I could be wrong.
Oh, and this is one of those times where I agree with (my muzzy interpretation of) the Supremes; if it’s equally applied, disenfranchise away. Singling out a school = bad; saying “people who don’t really live here don’t get to vote here” = no problemo.
I don’t know why that should be an acceptable standard for disenfranchisement, Robert. One area where this would have unreasonable results would be when applied to manufactured housing communities. Those communities routinely deny yearly leases after the initial lease term runs out (opting for month-to-month instead), whether or not he tenant is trying to move out. So a person could reasonably be a citizen of a state/county/city whatever, and by that interpretation, be denied access to the vote. Why would that make the an equal application constitutional, and why should that e acceptable.
Every state is different, James, but – again this is just my understanding, I’m not making a strong truth claim – it isn’t that “you can’t vote if you live in x,y,z”. It’s “you have to be a resident of this state to vote here [or to do other state-y things like get a driver’s license]. Residency can be proved in the following ways…” and then a long list of things that the state will accept as proof. In most cases this is a trivially easy procedure, because it will include things like having graduated from high school in the state, or having registered a vehicle in the state, or having a mortgage or lease naming the would-be voter as signatory, or any of a number of other things. Even just having a utility bill or bank account is often good enough; in Colorado all you need is a piece of official-looking mail with your name on it.
So the people who have lived month-to-month at the manufactured home park are out of luck on one of the factors that could get them on the voter rolls… but unless they’ve been shut in for 25 years, they have some other connection that will demonstrate residency just fine.
I voted absentee in the state where I grew up all through college and grad school. In college, I did it because I had grown up in a sort-of swing state but went to college in a solidly Republican state, and in grad school, because I was living in DC and wanted my vote to actually count for something. If it hadn’t been for the electoral college reasoning, though, I would have wanted to vote in the places where I was living — I was living there for the better part of the year, I was involved in the community, I was reading the local papers, so voting there would have made sense to me.
Generally speaking a residence (you can only have one) is a place that you live with the intent to remain permanently. You can move to a new state and immediately become a resident; you can go to school for 4 years and not be a resident.
College students aren’t often residents. Ask a Harvard student where they’re from and they’ll answer “LA” or “stockholm” or “NYC.” If they were residents they’d be answering “Cambridge.”
Part of the reasonableness of residency is that residents are assumed to have a long term buy-in to the ultimate health of their community, and more of a stake in the long-term consequences of their decisions. That’s pretty sensible.
It would be ridiculous to focus on black colleges–that’s racist. But the concept that college students aren’t usually “residents” makes a lot of sense. Also, technically it doesn’t “disenfranchise”anyone who is eligible to vote through absentee ballot.
By that definition, I still don’t have a residence. I moved to where I live now because it was the best job offer I got, but I never intended to stay here more than a few years.
If you ask my mother where she’s from, she’ll say Massachusetts even though she’s been living in the NYC area for almost 40 years. She wants to make sure everyone knows she’s not “one of those New Yorkers.”
Ruchama – in that case, we drop from the best indication of your intent to proxies. Where do you pay your state income taxes? Where is/are your vehicle(s) titled? What state’s scratch tickets do you buy?
Currently, I do all those things in the state where I live. When I was in college, I filed a state tax return in that state (probably didn’t actually pay any taxes, since I was earning $80 a week.) Plenty of my college friends had off-campus jobs and owned cars that were registered in that state, though.
Then you’re a resident of that state, and your college friends were residents of their college state. Residence for a citizen is a state of mind, a decision they can make casually or seriously, and can change on a whim; about the only time there is a problem with this model is when the person just can’t decide and so other agencies are forced to try to divine their will, or when a person decides to fraudulently claim multiple residences.
Ruchama,
Any residency rule will have flaws, because none of them are perfect. Anecdotal evidence of a flaw in one program is sorta valueless, unless you also look to the flaws in competing alternatives and make an argument for which one is better.
As a general rule, the idea behind residency requirements is that we want people to have some sort of vested interest in the policies which they are voting on. That’s a perfectly reasonable goal, and IMO a laudable one.
It’s not an easy goal to reach, because life is complicated. But so be it.
I’ve long stated that college students should not be eligible to vote in the State/city where they go to school – they should vote via absentee ballot in the place where they are from. I’d be willing to change that for any student who is not claimed as a dependent on someone else’s income tax return.
Ya know, politics are very interesting.
For example, you might read this article:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/09/20/224152990/this-tiny-town-is-trying-to-stop-neo-nazis-from-taking-over
And you might (rightly) conclude that the neo-Nazis are scary fuckheads. And that nobody wants them to go into the town, for good reason.
But the problem is that when you start looking at things like this:
it gets hard to distinguish them LEGALLY from things like this, which are only slight changes:
If you read the first one and think “go, town! Stop those Nazis by any means necessary!” then you’re like most folks. But when I read it, I also think about the process and relate it to the second example. And things don’t end up quite so black and white.
Similarly, it’s easy to instantly conclude that college students should vote in their town if the ones in opposition are Republicans and the students are sympathetically black and, probably, Democratic. But the analysis also has to apply if someone opens a branch of Bob Jones University in Provincetown, because there are often fewer than 150 people who vote at special town meetings.
I just don’t think that there’s any sort of good generalization that can be made about whether a college student has more of a vested interest in the town where they grew up or the town where they’re going to college, so trying to make a rule based on status as a college student seems like the wrong way to go.
Yes, it is the wrong way to go. That’s why they don’t make the rules based on that.
Robert:
But they do. There are exceptions, for instance, in the motor vehicle laws, permitting a college student to maintain residency in their home state (presumably at the parents’ address) while they are at college. I did this. (And, at the same time, I registered the car I was driving in the state where I attended college, because it was permitted and my home state was a long way off. Since the car was mainly on the road in that state, I have no problem with that. At the same time, I was voting by absentee ballot in my home state, which is fine because I had grown up there and was planning to return.) Many students in the local college do this. I know, because they hand me their license when I stop them.
Likewise, a similar exception is granted to members of the military.
Grace
They don’t make the rules based on status as a college student. They make the rules based on a broad sense of residency requirements and then they apply them to college students.
For example, take the “do you consider it your home and intend to remain there for the foreseeable future” rule:
If you go to college in Tennessee and you consider it your “home” and you plan to remain there for the foreseeable future then should be able to vote in Tennessee.
OTOH if you go to college in Alabama but you still consider Boston your “home” and if you have no intent of ever spending more time in Alabama other than what is required to attend school, then you should not be able to vote in Alabama.
If the students answered it honestly, that rule would probably mean that most college students could not vote in their college towns (since most of them are only there to go to school) but it wouldn’t be a rule “based on college.”
This would make application of Voter ID laws in States with a lot of students interesting.
“You want to register to vote? Great. Let’s see some ID. Do you have a Drivers’ License or a passport?”
Sure, here’s my Drivers’ License.
“Hm. This says you live [ out_of_State ]. Do you have any government-issued ID that says you live here?”
No. I got this before I came out here to go to school.
“Well, if you apply for an absentee ballot back there then you’ll be able to vote. Your ID will qualify you to vote there.”
Here, Ron, I fixed this for you.
“Hm. This says you live [ out_of_State ]. Do you have any government-issued ID that says you live here?”
Yes, I have this government-issued student ID – I go to the state University.
“Oh, no, we can’t accept student ID unless it has a photo, your signature, and an expiration date.”
But my student ID has all that.
“Well, we specifically discussed this, and we decided not to accept student ID, because
you’re probably voting for Democratsvoter fraud. You should vote back where you came from.”But I don’t live there, and I don’t intend to ever live there again.
“Next!”
Well, they in fact have done exactly this, again and again, only to be told again and again it’s unconstitutional. Since the current Court is fairly activist and tends to look askance at voting rights, I think it’s likely that they will try their luck again.
Actually, in North Carolina, as long as you’re not intending to return to whatever state you came from after you graduate, that’s enough. There is no requirement that you be planning to stay in the state after graduation.
(No one else has a special requirement that they have to intend not to move for five years in order to have voting rights. I don’t see why students should face such a requirement.)
G&W, if the folks from Bob Jones University are genuinely the majority of residents – or just the majority of residents with enough interest in local affairs to come to special town meetings – then I don’t see a problem. Racists and idiots have the right to vote, too.
As for condemning, that’s sort of a “legitimate mean trick” in my mind, as long as the health department is also open to receiving tips that structures occupied by anti-Nazis are not up to code, and apply the regulations fairly to both Nazis and anti-Nazis. In other words, I think it’s fair to call out your opponents for breaking codes and laws, if they’ve actually done so, as long as your side is held to the same standards (and as long as the codes weren’t designed and passed merely as a pretext to keep the Nazis out).
I don’t think I’ve ever lived anywhere where I could honestly answer “yes” to “Do you plan to live here for the foreseeable future?” When I was in college, the answer would have been “I don’t know, depends on what I decide to do after I graduate” for the city that the college was in, and “There is absolutely no way in hell I will ever live there again” for the town where I grew up. I still voted in the town where I grew up, though, because the only presidential election while I was in college was 2000, and I figured that a vote for Gore in New Jersey would have a much better chance of making a difference than a vote for Gore in Louisiana would. (The first year that I was allowed to vote, I got all excited about doing my duty as a citizen, and researched all of the candidates for all of the local elections on the ballot. The next few years, I didn’t really care much, except for the one year that I emphatically voted against the mother of the kid who used to write stuff like “[Ruchama] takes it up the ass” on my locker all through high school.)
The idea that permanent, eternal residency is a prerequisite for voting is an interesting one. I’ve never heard it before. Does it have a legal history or was it developed sui generis in this comment thread?
Such a requirement would permanently disenfranchise me, and many many people of my generation. Which is, I suppose, the point.
yrs–
–Ben
Huh? That’s not the requirement (where did you get that, anyway?)
Compare:
1) I plan to remain in Mass. I may leave Mass. next month, for unforeseen reasons. But as of now I intend to stay here and I consider this my home.
2) I reside in Florida. I come up to Massachusetts for three or four months out of the year; I have a second home in Boston. If I had to settle on one place to live, it would be Florida, not Massachusetts. I consider Florida my home.
3) I am from Florida. I come up to Massachusetts to attend school at BU. I live in Boston at a dorm or rented house. I still go home on vacations and most summers; I consider Florida my home. While I don’t know where I will end up after graduation, I don’t have any particular ties to Massachusetts other than the fact that I go to school here.
4) I am from Florida. I started attending school at BU, and I live in a dorm. But while I still go home on vacations, I am starting to make ties here and I am going to do my best to find a job in Massachusetts when I graduate. I want to be in Massachusetts if I can.
5) I live in Massachusetts. I know I’m going to move to Utah next year, to start grad school. But for now, I consider this my home.
None of those people have a five year commitment. But IMO, only #1 and 4 and 5 have sufficient ties to the state that they should be voting there.
Ampersand says:
September 30, 2013 at 11:29 am
Yes, I have this government-issued student ID – I go to the state University.
“Oh, no,
we can’t accept student ID unless it has a photo, your signature, and an expiration datethat’s not what a government-issued ID is. That ID is issued by a civil functionary who has different standards than an official government agency. Sorry.”“But my student ID has
all thata photo, a signature, and an expiration date.”“That’s true. Still, it’s not a government-issued ID any more than you could ID yourself with a door badge proclaiming you to be an employee of the DMV. Sorry.”
“But I don’t live in my old state, and I don’t intend to ever live there again.”
“Well, then: why are all of your IDs from a state where you don’t reside and where you never intend to return to? That makes no sense. Why are you blaming that on us?”
“I’m blaming you because I’m a student and I want to vote.”
We would be happy to admit you to our fine state as a resident, if you would like to reside here. Of course, if you don’t want to reside here and you only want to vote here out of convenience, well… that’s your problem, not ours.
If you would like to reside here, then that’s usually demonstrated by some action which is taken separately and distinctly from trying to vote. Perhaps you should make use of one of the means of obtaining identification which is available to residents of this state.
Or perhaps you might want to get a US Passport, which is admittedly $140 but which lasts 10 years and which is sufficient ID at any state or federal agency throughout the country.”
Currently, UK voter registration for students is largely done by block registration – if you live in halls, or affiliated student housing, you will be registered automatically to vote in that local area. It makes sense to me that if you live for the majority of the year in an area, and pay taxes etc in the area, that you should be able to participate in the governance of that area.
I’m pretty sure that, by gin-and-whiskey’s standards, I’ve never resided anywhere.
Permanency is not a requirement. It has to do with intent .
When you arrived at the place where you now live:
A) Did you intend to make it your principal residence? (If you don’t intend to become a resident then you are usually not a resident; you can often retain residency in your prior home.)
B) Did you intend to remain? (You often can’t claim residency based on an intentionally-transient stay. This can instantly change. You can come visit me in Mass. with the intention of leaving after Xmas; you’re not a resident. But the moment that you change your mind, fall in love, and decide to stay then you can be a resident.)
C) Did you intend to remain permanently? Or, did you intend to remain for an indefinite time? (Either of these, combined with “intent to reside,” is usually sufficient to establish residency.)
Not really. You ALWAYS have one and only one residence, so if you fail to switch your residence then you remain a resident of your prior state. I am a resident of Massachusetts until (unless) I switch my residency to another state. If I move to seven different states, and fail to qualify for residency in any of them, then I remain a resident of Massachusetts.
Now of course, “residency” and “voting eligibility” are not precisely the same thing, but they track reasonably well. If you’re a citizen of the US then you will qualify in at least one state.
When I said “five years,” I was thinking of the situation of a Freshman.
I think that the government should be trying to facilitate legal voting, not look for excuses to prevent people from voting.
If someone intends to be in Massachusetts on election day, and has a credible claim to be living in Massachusetts (as a student attending a MA university, sleeping in an MA dorm or rental, does), that should be enough. Someone who is going to college in MA, but doesn’t intend to make a life there, still has a legitimate and reasonable interest in being able to participate in government, and in wanting the government in MA to be well-run and to reflect their preferences.
They live there, and they contribute to the economy there. To say they shouldn’t be allowed to vote there is to endorse government without representation. And in virtually every case, if you look into what was actually going on when such laws were passed, it turns out that the motivation for the restrictive voting laws was to try and protect one political party from electoral competition.
So I guess I’m a resident of NJ, because that’s where I was living when I turned 18, and thus was the first place I registered to vote. I haven’t lived there since 1999, but I haven’t satisfied your requirements for residency at any of the places I’ve lived since then, since all of them were “I’ll live here until I’m done with [whatever thing I’m trying to do], and then I’ll see what happens and where I end up going next,” so should I still be voting in NJ? I mean, I have a drivers license for the state where I currently live, but I only got that because, when I was buying my car, the dealership said that I needed an in-state license. If it hadn’t been for that (which I don’t think is really a law — since when are you not allowed to buy a car in a state other than the one where you live?), then I’d still have my NJ drivers license, since it wouldn’t have expired until this year.
g&w, you’re confusing me. What documentation will I, as #4, be able to provide that will differentiate me from #3?
What about:
I am an Oregon resident who has moved to Washington to take a better job. I in no way intend to remain in Washington for longer than it takes me to find an equivalent position in Oregon. That may take 39 years or it may take me 39 days. Am I a resident of Oregon or of Washington? What documentation can I provide to prove my intent either way?
I understand what residency is. I’m not sure you do?
Anyway I change my legal residency every time I move (well, generally I am lazy and wait until there’s some pressing reason to do so — like a local election). That’s a total non-issue for me; I take a bill and my passport to the local office and get my shiny new state ID / voter registration card / whatever.
I have never in my entire life intended to live in a place permanently. If “you intend to live in a place permanently” is a standard for establishing legal residence, I am not legally allowed to be a resident anywhere.
Fortunately, it’s not. So yay.
yrs–
–Ben
Jake – you’re a resident of whichever state you want to be a resident of, in that situation. Documentation? Well, rental agreements, legal documents, bills, paystubs, that sort of thing. You have lots of that for one state, but not for the other, and the other is where you consider yourself to reside? Well, in general, though you might have to work a little harder at it to prove it to gummint officials and the like, your will is still what controls.
You guys are kind of coming at this from the wrong angle. It isn’t, which state allows me to be a resident there and what documents do they require from me to make me eligible. It’s, which state do I choose to reside in, and what documents will I need to scrounge together to demonstrate a paper trail on that so that some bureaucrat can justify his or her miserable useless-eater existence. I think the error comes from the fact that young people are often bad at exerting this kind of civic will, largely because things like out-of-state tuition (and the meshuggenah hoops to get residency status for that purpose_ go radically against the grain of the general understanding of state residency. So they get picked on by partisans.
I agree with Amp that it is not cool to make rules that single out college students. Any rule that is applied need to be applied uniformly.
Yes, but I’d go further. Rules that are uniformly applied, but are serving no significant function other than being a pretext for excluding legitimate voters, are also undemocratic.
Well, you’re begging the question there. The legitimacy of the voter is precisely what the legislation or rule is addressing.
It is undemocratic if a person who has done nothing wrong, who has taken the normal and ordinary steps one takes to establish residency in a place. and who is otherwise qualified to vote loses their vote due to an exclusionary rule. If that person remain qualified to vote in another jurisdiction, just not the one where he or she wants to vote, because one jurisdiction considers them a resident and the other, for legitimate and non-discriminatory reasons, does not, then that is not undemocratic. It is bureaucratic – but the person is getting their vote.
I think that the number of people in the first category is vanishingly small, though they do make good court cases. I think that the number of people in the second category is pretty large, and I don’t really care. I think that you consider the two categories to be much closer together, conceptually, than I do; I don’t care about that either. But I’ll take your side if someone tries to not let you vote on it. ;)
“Because I got my drivers license when I turned 17, when I was still in high school. I don’t own a car, and I’m too young to buy alcohol, so I didn’t see much point in trying to find a friend who has a car who’s willing to drive me to the DMV and wait with me for an hour or two so that I can get a drivers license that I’m never going to use for any of its usual purposes, and that I’m going to have to replace in two years when I turn 21 anyway.”
Damn. Messed up the block quote. Can someone fix it?
[Someone can! And did! –Amp]
Of course, if someone doesn’t have the money or the skill in navigating bureaucracy, then requirements like North Carolina’s are going to be a very significant barrier:
…Are, in my view, an unreasonable barrier. Especially for 18-year-olds (who aren’t going to have stuff like tax returns, marriage or divorce papers, or work receipts) and 80-year-olds (often, ditto). Of course, it’s all fine if you have a NC driver’s license (other states accept out-of-state DLs, but NC wanted to make it harder, because Republicans want to keep people from voting), but young urbanites, especially lower-class urbanites, are much less likely to have that – and what a shock, those same people are much more likely to be Black!
To be fair, North Carolina now has the most stringent voter ID law in the country (and they couldn’t have passed it without the Supreme Court gutting voting rights). But as far as I can tell, Republicans want every state in the union to have ID requirements like that (and I expect that they’ll think of new requirements to add on over the next few years). Insofar as the GOP succeeds, lots of people won’t be able to vote in ANY state. But those people will mostly be Democrats, so Republicans will make up some rationalization saying it’s okay.
It used to be that residency requirements were jiggered in the opposite way. Back in the early ’70s, when I first became eligible to vote, one had to be able to prove that one had lived in one’s voting precinct for a certain length of time. I think it was two years, but can’t remember.
This certainly disenfranchised students, many of whom had grown up in the state and lived there full-time except for occasional vacations, because students had a new address each year or even semester, and were disqualified that way. It was also used in large cities, to keep poorer folks from voting since they often moved (for cheaper rent) from precinct to precinct between elections.
So I tend to feel cynical about how residency requirements for voting are used.
“Getting a “free” state-issued ID first requires a trip to a Department of Motor Vehicle’s office, taking with you no fewer than four other forms of identification. One of those IDs must be your original Social Security card or a tax form with your name and Social Security number. How many college students, much less the rest of us, can easily put their hands on that?
Other IDs needed to prove identity and residency can include an original birth certificate – not a copy – a marriage license, a divorce paper, tax records and work receipts – items not every 18-year-old college student readily has.”
Garbage. Pure, unmitigated garbage.
North Carolina’s law is very similar to Colorado’s, but just to be on the safe side I went to the NC website – something which, incidentally, it would have taken you 30 seconds to do, and which should have been the first thing you did upon reading how your fellow citizens are apparently incompetent to find their own mail – to get the straight dope there. (http://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/driver/id/)
The number “four” in the quoted paragraph is accurate. “North Carolina” also bears some passing relationship with veracity. The rest is crap.
You need four documents in total, which demonstrate the following: your name, your date of birth, your Social Security number, and your place of residence.
The documents that your quoted text lists as being additional onerous burdens are not things that you have to have. They are part of a VERY long list of documents which you are allowed to use to demonstrate one of the four categories of information.
Every single category contains at least one document which any person can create themselves, requiring only that they attest to the information contained on the document. Every. single. category.
It is possible that some elderly person, who has by dint of lifetime membership in some sort of criminal cabal that operates outside the boundaries of civilization in a quasi-anarchistic ghost society, would have slight difficulty – SLIGHT – at coming up with the documents. They might have to get someone to take them to the Social Security office to get a legitimate number. Or they can just make one up and fill it in on their 1099, one of the self-reporting documents that can be used to handle pretty much any gap in your documentation.
I could have effortlessly fulfilled the documentation requirements in junior high school. Anyone, even criminal gangster types, could. It’s stuff you could scribble out in the line at the DMV and finish up just before you hand it to the clerk.
It turns out that relatively few of us are completely blind, handless, tax-evading kindergarden dropouts living in the woods, which is the level of nonfunction you would need to be enduring to have ANY difficulty with the NC requirements. Give your fellow Americans some credit, Amp.
Alternatively you can continue to believe, apparently, that coming up with a “tax form with your name and Social Security number” is some kind of Herculean task. “How many college students, much less the rest of us, can easily put their hands on that?” Um, any of us with the ability to use a pen?
You can fill out your own 1099? I thought that was the one that your employer fills out and gives to you.
Let’s have a look at that, Amp:
In the beginning of my comment I said “drivers’ license or passport”. I chose those two for a specific reason; they prove citizenship (it’s my understanding that most States have a distinction on a DL as to whether the holder is a citizen or not, if I’m wrong this would have to change). So Enormous State University’s ID would not suffice, as there’s plenty of non-citizens who are quite legitimately there.
I quite simply do not see it as much of a barrier, especially now, for someone who’s got enough wit to get into and stay in college to obtain an absentee ballot, fill it out and mail it.
Cool. Get a local drivers’ license or State ID. Again, not a particularly difficult task for a college student.
Robert, when you wrote this were you quoting someone else?
My answer to that question is “pretty much 100% of them”. Not being able to readily lay your hands on your original SS card? O.K., I can see where that might get lost, but most kid’s parents are going to have that filed away somewhere. They DID get one for you, because by Federal tax law ever since you were 2 they’ve had to write down your name and your SS# on THEIR OWN tax forms. A copy of which will thus satisfy “a tax form with your name and Social Security number” – and I seriously doubt that your parents never kept a copy of any of their tax forms for the last 16 years.
Are we talking registering to vote, or actually voting? To register, you should have to prove that you’re eligible to vote. But once you’re registered, and you show up at your polling place, all you need to prove is that you’re the person who is on the list of registered voters, and a school ID should be fine for that. It looks like, in North Carolina, you have to register to vote at least 25 days before the election, and I assume that at least part of the reason for that is so that the state can look into the new registrations and make sure that everyone who registered is actually allowed to vote. Proving citizenship shouldn’t be something that happens on election day.
You are right that proving citizenship should happen during the registration process, not election day. Whether or not once registered you should be able to use a school ID to actually vote would depend on the integrity of the school ID. I can see where it could be used for that purpose if the ID is sufficiently secure and has sufficient information on it to unambiguously identify the holder.
But if you registered to vote with an ID that proves you are a) eligible to vote and b) are eligible to vote in that location, then why can’t you bring that ID to the polling place?
You can register by mail. The form asks for drivers license number and social security number, but they’re not marked as required. I assume that, if you put them down, then they get run through some database to confirm that the person who goes with those numbers is eligible to vote, and that, if you say that you don’t have a drivers license or a social security number, then your application gets put into an “investigate further” pile. http://www.ncsbe.gov/content.aspx?id=1&s=1
“You can fill out your own 1099? I thought that was the one that your employer fills out and gives to you.”
Argh. I’m self-employed, I do give myself a 1099 but most people don’t.
W-2, I should have said. (Though they will take your 1099 as a document.)
It seems to me that much of this discussion assumes that we shouldn’t be able to vote in multiple jurisdictions. While I accept that that’s probably a practical necessity, I don’t think it actually follows directly from democratic principles. Consider the following hypothetical:
T1: I am a young entrepreneur. I move to New York City with the intention of making my fortune. I rent, and then buy a residence, live there, work there, build my business and leave the city rarely to never.
T2: I am a wealthy businessperson, living in New York City. I have lived there my entire adult life. My business is there. I pay my state income and property taxes there, and am subject to its laws. I maintain no other permanent residence there, but I do travel for business and vacation frequently during the year—nearly half of the time. (It’s not a tax dodge.)
T3: I am getting on in years, so I decide to purchase a home down in Florida, to retire to. Rather than cut back on work hours, I cut my vacation and travel time down considerably. I continue to earn all my income, maintain a residence, and organize politically in New York, but I am a consumer and property taxpayer in Florida. I also begin to develop an interest in the government of the area around my Florida home; say, about conservation issues and local zoning.
T4: I retire. I sell my NYC residence, move entirely down to Florida, and throw myself into life there. However, with my free time, I take up traveling again.
T5: I grow older and give up on traveling. I remain in my small town in Florida, engage exclusively with local issues, and am content.
Now, it seems clear to me that at T1 and T2 I was a legitimate NY voter; at T4 and T5 I was a legitimate Florida voter. But at T3 I gave nothing less to New York than I did at T2; I participated in it just as fully and freely. The same is true for the comparison between T4 and T3 from the perspective of Florida.
What has changed? We could say that in T3 there was a genuine “romantic rival” for my residency. But to do so begs the question; it assumes a unity of residences, at least for the purposes of voting, and that’s what we’re asking about. Why not simply let me vote in both places?
Well, because votes are additive (in a broad, not-actually-additive sense) and I shouldn’t be given extra power because of where I live. And any attempt to split the vote would be an administrative nightmare, ripe for abuse.
I think that’s the final word with regard to practicality. I do not believe in the implementation of a split-vote system; it would be unworkable. However, I think that the point of principle holds. At T3, I am a legitimate voter in either location.
And if that’s so, then I should be able to choose in which location I exercise the franchise. Totally freely.
Now, I think the analogy to the college question is pretty strong. Sure, students only live where their college is in order to go to college. Sure, they are (often) also legitimate residents of their jurisdiction of origin. But simply because they have a deliberately limited presence in their communities does not mean they cannot and do not engage politically or experience the consequences of law. If and when they can do that, they should be permitted to vote as they please.
Actually, I was wrong. W-2 is the one filled out by the employer. 1099 is for other sorts of income, but it’s still recording a transaction of some sort.
Man. And now we know why Robert’s business partner does most of the tax work. Derpy derpy derp.
W-4 is what I was thinking of, and that isn’t on the list, so I must walk back the original comment in its absolutism, if not its underlying overall truth.
That’s easy enough to change. All that they have to do is to decide to become a resident of the state where they want to vote. Almost every state will allow them to become residents pretty easily. (The state may not give them “resident tuition” privileges, but that’s a separate issue.) It doesn’t take much to declare a new residency.
Of course, they then have to give up benefits of being a resident somewhere else. So be it; that’s a perfectly reasonable outcome.
You can do what you want. But there are consequences. For example, if you insist on remaining a resident of Illinois, even if you have the right and opportunity to become a resident of Florida, then you shouldn’t have the right to vote in Florida. That isn’t impeding your ability to vote. Nor is it impeding your ability to participate in Florida. It just means you have to pick a team before you play.
They CAN do that. They can become residents. That allows them to fully experience the consequences of their state’s laws (jurisdiction, taxation, etc.) just like other, voting, residents.
Now, what they shouldn’t be able to do is to pick and choose which benefits they want from the state, i.e. “I want to vote here, but I don’t want the state to claim a say on my taxes or legal standing, or anything else, and I don’t want to say that I reside here.” Why should anyone–rich multi-state movers in particular– be able to attain that differential treatment? If I can afford to go declare a residence in NH (tax free land) and still vote in massachusetts, why should I be able to do that?
As a good example: a resident of a state has, by implication, consented to the jurisdiction of the courts of that state. And they have, by implication, consented to the application of the laws of that state. And to the right of that state to assess taxes against them.
Those are three Big Important Things. Why should people be allowed to vote in a state and get the benefits of voting, while separating themselves from those three things? I can’t see it: Why would that be a benefit to the USA and/or to the state in question?
Let’s take Joe College Student. He resides legally in New York, and gets a lot of income from his trusts. Should he be permitted to pay taxes to New York (who will be happy to take them) while simultaneously voting on in-state tuition eligibility in California?
All of that is true whether they officially become a resident or not. (And I’m not really sure what “become a resident” would require — just changing your drivers license? Or getting a state ID if you don’t drive?) I never got a Louisiana drivers license, and I lived on campus. I was still certainly subject to the laws of Louisiana. I paid taxes in Louisiana because my job was in Louisiana. When I was living in DC, there was one year when I did some tutoring for an organization whose official address was in Virginia. All the actual work I did was in DC, but since it was for a Virginia organization, I paid Virginia taxes on it.
Now I’m curious about what you mean by “As a good example: a resident of a state has, by implication, consented to the jurisdiction of the courts of that state. And they have, by implication, consented to the application of the laws of that state.” What laws apply to state residents but not to non-residents?
Well, no.
Divorce, child, and family; probate; powers of attorney; marriage; and taxation, to quickly name a few. Some of those can apply to non residents in the proper circumstances but they aren’t automatic.
If you reside in MA and go to school in CA, only one of those states has automatic jurisdiction over your probate, divorce, and taxation. Only one state has authority to grab your kids if you don’t send them to school. Only one state has the obligation to pay our unemployment. And so on.
And since many of those things involve very specific state laws that vary widely across states, then it becomes a pretty important distinction.
Ruchama says:
October 2, 2013 at 9:27 am
As a good example: a resident of a state has, by implication, consented to the jurisdiction of the courts of that state. And they have, by implication, consented to the application of the laws of that state. And to the right of that state to assess taxes against them.
It varies by state.
And depending on the laws of your state of residency, you might ALSO have had to file a tax return in your state of residency, whether or not you did. I’m a Mass. resident: if I get a job in Providence, RI then I may well have to file RI taxes, but that doesn’t necessarily free me from filing MA taxes.
As an example, I am doing a probate right now. I can only file the probate in a county where the decedent was “domiciled” or where they owned property. So I can’t (for example) file in the county where his mildly-estranged-but-still-married spouse lives, even though it would be 1000% more convenient for everyone and even though she is his sole heir.
These things do matter, I swear.
In the right thread this time:
I just looked at the North Carolina voter registration website, and it does use the “plan to reside permanently” language. Which still just makes no sense to me — I’ve never planned to reside permanently anywhere, and neither have most of my friends. In fact, most of my friends’ parents haven’t, either — most of them always knew that they were going to move to Florida, or to a smaller house in a town with lower taxes, once their kids were out of the house.
I would interpret “plan to reside permanently” as meaning “plan to make my primary residence” or “I am not currently planning to leave to reside anywhere else”.
You really seem to be stuck on the word ‘permanant’ as meaning never changing. Ever. For any reason. I think in this context most people think permant to mean the place where you live and plan to keep living until you change your mind and decide to live somewhere else.
Is there some reason you’re doing this? It seems pretty obvious to me.
Because people have been saying that college students don’t qualify, because they don’t plan to stay beyond graduation. If “I’m staying here until I graduate” doesn’t count as permanent, then does “I’m staying here for a few years, and then I’ll move somewhere else?”
I’m still trying to make sense of the North Carolina law. From a PDF on their website: “So long as a student intends to make the student’s home in the community where the student is physically present for the purpose of attending school while the student is attending school and has no intent to return to the student’s former home after graduation, the student may claim the college community as the student’s domicile. The student need not also intend to stay in the college community beyond graduation in order to establish domicile there. This subdivision is intended to codify the case law.” So if you’re from New York, and go to college in North Carolina, and plan to go back to New York after you graduate, then you are not a resident of North Carolina. But if you’re from New York, and go to college in North Carolina, and plan to go “I don’t know, somewhere” after you graduate, then you are a resident of North Carolina?
I think that many people are saying that some college students wouldn’t qualify because they aren’t intending to reside in the state where they are located. (Something similar would be said of, say, consultants or business executives working on a project in a faraway state but planning to return home on the completion of the work.) They don’t need to intend to stay forever or even intend to stay specifically; they just need to think of themselves as a citizen of the new state rather than of the old state.
I explained this before and I’m not sure how to explain it any better. Residency is about state of mind. If you want to be a resident of X, then you are, though proving it to someone else’s satisfaction may involve a smidgen of work. If despite all this you are still in difficulty about what state you reside in, then just pick the state where you are currently sitting. You’re overthinking this about a millionfold.
By “people” do you mean me? if so, you should reread the posts above, because (a) that’s not true, and (b) I have given specific examples of cases why that’s not true. MANY college students don’t qualify, but that is because they don’t intend to be residents.
I am having a hard time convincing myself away from the belief that you’re just pretending to be dumb. I say this because you are claiming a continued inability to understand a pretty basic concept and you seem to be incredibly resistant to having it explained; this makes little sense given that from your posts in other threads it’s clear that you are extremely smart. It’s an aggravating way to converse, if so. Do you actually not understand this at all?
Let me try to make it even more simple:
1) Are you intending to visit, even if the “visit” lasts for years?
OR
2) Are you intending to live there as a resident and give up your old residency, even if you only end up staying for a short time?
People in the first category are not residents. That includes most college students.
People in the second category are residents. That does not include most college students.
The official assignment and recognition of residency are subject to a few time/place/manner regulations. All that these regulations are really trying to do is to find a way to codify the general #1 and #2 above, in various ways. They usually set out some things you can do as demonstrable evidence of your intent.
Those regulations, like all regulations, are imperfect. They are subject to gaming; they exclude and include with a degree of error. But nonetheless they usually make it work out reasonably well in the end.
How many students actually do that? As opposed to going back to their parents’ house over the summer and then coming back to school in September? I went to school in Boston/Cambridge, and I can tell you that the place empties out during the summer.
If someone goes to school and plans to stay there, including summer, until they graduate, then let’s see them get a local drivers’ license. Let’s see them file their State tax return there and not at their parents’ home address.
But you should have an easy time resisting the impulse to make an insulting comment like this on an “Alas” thread.
And even if it’s not easy, please resist the impulse anyway. Thanks.
Robert, you’re right that you don’t need an original Social Security card, or a tax form – there are other forms of social security proof that are accepted, all of which are forms that a typical 18 year old might lack.
Everything else you wrote is nonsense.
For instance, in big bold letters, you wrote “Every single category contains at least one document which any person can create themselves, requiring only that they attest to the information contained on the document. Every. single. category.” This is absolutely untrue, and far from being an irrelevant detail, is central to your entire comment (hence your choice to bold that paragraph and no other, hardly something you would have done if you thought it was irrelevant).
The point isn’t that N.C.’s regulations make it impossible to register to vote. It’s that they make it needlessly difficult to vote, and that the motive for doing that was transparently to try and weed out Democratic voters, who are less likely to have the documents on hand. Yes, if someone plans far enough in advance and is able to spare the time, all of the regulations can be fulfilled. You can get your birth certificate (although it costs money and can take months to arrive), you can get a social security card. The tax forms are only available to those who do taxable work, a category less likely to include students, Blacks, and Hispanics. Etc, etc.
It’s as if the legislature voted to put a bunch of physical hurdles in place between voters and polling places, and set nearly all the hurdles in neighborhoods demographically likely to vote for Democrats. Sure, if you’re determined enough, you can jump over the six hurdles between your home and voting. They’re not THAT high. And anyway, you could always laboriously climb over them, if you can’t jump.
The purpose of the hurdles isn’t to make it impossible to vote. It’s to make attempting to vote a more difficult and frustrating experience for the demographics that you’d prefer not vote, so that more of them will give up and not vote.
From the LA Times:
Yeah, she sounds like she’s a “tax-evading kindergarden [sic] dropout living in the woods.” Would you tell her that to her face?
You can always makes excuses for anti-voting laws – just as your ideological
brethrenpredecessors, once upon a time, found ways to rationalize poll taxes and literacy tests and telling black voters to recite the Constitution. But in the end, it’s nothing more than people who hate democracy trying to win elections by making it harder for people to vote, rather than trying to win elections by winning votes.Amp, I already corrected that bolded section after an exchange with Ruchama. I was mistaken about the identity of one of the tax forms; it’s a form that everyone with a job gets, but not one that you can create yourself so I was wrong. I already said so. Try and keep up.
Mrs. Currie has not been prevented from voting; she is saying that she is going to have a difficult time getting sufficient ID to be able to vote. She does not have a birth certificate, because of the time and circumstance of her birth, and has lost the documentation of that birth in a fire. Her only surviving sibling has Alzheimer’s and cannot attest to an affidavit identifying her. She has not apparently had a driver’s license or a state ID in her eight decades of life. She has lost her original Social Security card.
This is a remarkable chain of circumstances though I do not doubt for a second that Ms. Currie is telling the truth. Such chains of circumstance, however unlikely, are going to crop up in a statistical universe. As a matter of justice, if Ms. Currie is disenfranchised it would be unfair. As a matter of practicality, the number of Ms. Curries is small and within the error bars of vote(r) loss.
But will Ms. Currie be disenfranchised?
Ms. Currie has three years left until the election. However will she get these documents? But wait – she doesn’t need them. In addition to a driver’s license or ID card, birth certificate, and Social Security card, the ‘identification’ requirement can be met by any of the following:
* any tax form that shows her full name and SSN, for example a W2 or 1099.
* any state motor vehicle driver’s record (she won’t have one of these if she never drove, but anyone who has driven can pull theirs at the DMV)
* any signed transcript or registration signed by a school official, or diploma or GED from an NC school, community college or NC university
* US military ID or dependent ID
* a valid unexpired passport from any nation
* a certified marriage certificate
* any of a variety of documents issued by the Federal government
* any court document from a US, Puerto Rican, or Canadian court such as divorce decrees, court order for name change, adoption papers, child support order, etc.
I will readily concede that Ms. Currie might not have been married or in the military or gotten a passport or been sued. I will concede that it is possible that she never attended school at a level where there is an accessible transcript. I will concede that it is possible that she has never worked and has no 1099s or W2s anywhere.
I will not concede that it is impossible, or even difficult, to get one or two of these documents together in the space of three years, which is how long Ms. Currie has.
First, even if she has never worked, there is nothing stopping her from filing an income tax return showing 0s across the board. The IRS accepts her filing, sends her any refundable tax credits she’s got coming to her – and she requests a transcript of that return from the IRS. Takes about 20 days. She’d better hurry, she’s only got 980 days to get a jump on that.
Second, there is nothing stopping her from getting another Social Security card.
Third, there is nothing stopping her from going to the DMV and applying for a learner’s permit. Current and valid learner’s permit are accepted as driver’s licenses in North Carolina.
Fourth, there is nothing stopping her from going before a local magistrate who has personal knowledge of her, or who is willing to accept the attestation of someone who is, such as her children, and having that magistrate issue a document indicating that she is indeed who she says she is – and now she has a court document with her name etc. on it.
Now to be fair, you concede that all of this is possible, but still view it as a dreadful differential burden. To that I don’t know what to say.
Maybe your political party should stop appealing quite so preferentially to the group of voters who have never worked, finished school, joined the military, filed income tax, gotten married, traveled outside the US, driven a car, or established a legitimate identity credible enough to earn a judge’s trust.
[Edited to remove a line that was inexcusably insulting. Apologies to Rob. –Amp]
Or that she retired years ago and hasn’t kept years-old tax forms.
There have been, in the last 13 years, ten cases of in-person voter fraud. That’s in the whole US, not just North Carolina.
In contrast, quoting the LA Times article again, “A state board of elections survey in January estimated that more than 600,000 registered voters did not have a state driver’s license or state-issued ID. Many are young, poor, African American or elderly.” That’s just in North Carolina.
So let’s say that only one in 20 of that 600,000 voters is deterred from voting by the voter suppression laws – that would be 30,000 voters deterred from voting. According to you, 30,000 voters is a statistical blip, not worth any concern. On the other hand, 10 in-person voter impersonation fraud cases in 13 years is apparently a national crisis – something worth spending nearly a million dollars (just in NC!) to prevent, and that’s worth creating a huge increase in bureaucracy and inconvenience for voters, and deterring tens of thousands of voters from voting.
That makes no sense. If tens of thousands of deterred voters are too small a number for concern, then that much, MUCH smaller number of in-person voter fraud cases must logically be an even smaller concern. Yet you seem to think that blocking tens of thousands of legitimate votes – and spending nearly a million dollars – is a reasonable way to prevent virtually nonexistent in-person voter fraud cases.
If you had any principles, you’d have to admit thatIf we’re consistent, it makes more sense to be concerned about tens of thousands of lost votes every election than about 10 cases in 13 years.None of your arguments make any sense. Which is because you just refuse to come out and admit that the goal of these laws is to deter Democrats from voting.
There’s so much wrong with this. As a matter of logic, it’s obvious that you can marry, work, pay taxes, etc., and not have kept the paperwork; it’s also obvious that an 18 year old can quite reasonably have paperwork for none of these.
But what’s more disturbing is how much of your arguments are nothing more than cleverly-phrased versions of “I have contempt for these people, therefore it’s okay to put roadblocks between them and the right to vote.” Maybe you should stop thinking that derision and contempt for people who often have had harder lives than you is somehow an intelligent policy argument.
1)Did you read the quoted article?
2) where are you getting the “three years” number from? The new NC voter restrictions were signed into law in August. I didn’t find a link for when they take effect, but it sounds like you’re assuming that only presidential elections matter?
Phil – The LA Times article said she was worried about not getting to vote in 2016, so that’s the date I used. (So yes, I read it. And I did miss the catch-22 about a replacement Social Security card. But she CAN get a replacement Social Security card – she can use a certified medical record as the identification card.)
Amp – I don’t have contempt for anyone, other than lazy journalists. I am very sure that Ms. Currie has had a harder life than I do, and I am also sure that she is a human being with agency and free will. In this I think I show her rather more respect than you do.
I find it amusing that you think it beyond the pale to imply that I have no principles, but it’s perfectly OK to class me (crime: indifference to the fact that people engaging with the government will have to jump through bureaucratic hoops) with the Jim Crow-era Democratic goons (crime: using lies and outright force to nearly-completely disenfranchise an entire race).
You know, you might not have kept the paperwork, Amp, but the people you worked for, registered your marriage with, went to school at, or paid the taxes too might just possibly have kept some scrap of paper somewhere that you could get a copy of.
Your numbers are silly, and pulled out of your ass. 1 in 20 people are not in Ms. Currie’s incredible string of missing-document shoes. Not 1 in 2000 people are. Yes, hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians don’t or didn’t have photo ID – because they hadn’t needed it, not because it was impossible to get. I don’t have a taxidermy permit but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t get one, if Colorado’s governing busybodies decided that was the documentation required in order to get a drink in a bar.
You are dramatically overheated on this topic, and seemingly immune to common sense. An incredibly mild and easy-to-comply-with identification requirement, with backups and options and route-arounds at every step of the process to accommodate people with unusual circumstances or unique difficulties, is not something intended to deter vast swathes of the electorate from voting. It’s something intended to create a mildly credible association between voter and voter record in the form of an identification card, and to serve as a min-maxed deterrent against the distant but disturbing prospect of organized voter fraud. It’s the maximum deterrent that can be purchased at a minimal price – the price being a tiny concession to bureaucracy, a tiny inconvenience for 90% of the people who were already in compliance, a very mild inconvenience for 9% who were not but easily could be, and a mild inconvenience for that outlying 1%.
Jesus Christ, even if Ms. Currie does nothing from now until 2016, SHE CAN STILL VOTE. North Carolina has provisional balloting; if she shows up without ID and without having registered, they will still take her ballot and research her voting history and – assuming that there’s only one Ms. Currie voting under that name – count her vote. They even give her a website and a 1-800 number where she can track her provisional ballot to see where it is in the process, and to ensure that it was counted. The people who haven’t had ID for decades, who aren’t able or willing to use their years of lead time to get ID, are still not disenfranchised – they just have to wait a little bit while the election machinery accommodates itself to their stubbornness or their plight.
You need to look at your beliefs in some kind of context, Amp. It’s totally reasonable for the government to make 47 million people pay thousands of dollars for a consumer health care product that we either don’t want or can’t afford, in the interest of making it easier for the government to do a job that isn’t even vaguely in its enumerated list of responsibilities. But it’s JIM CROW RETURNED to ask a relative handful of people to get an ID card to prove their identity before they exercise the core power at the sacred heart of a democracy.
Apply a metric: beer or a ballot.
Is it harder, easier, or the same to reliably cast a vote, or to buy a drink?
If it’s harder to get a ballot than a beer, then I will agree with you that there is a barrier to voting that may be problematic.
What does Ms. Currie need in order to reliably buy a drink? She needs a god-damn ID.
I can live with that. You can’t, fine. Go do a Mississippi Burning in North Carolina about the awful, awful oppression. I’m going to be over here in the corner, having a drink.
Robert:
Do they serve Guinness?
Can I come?
-Jut
Sorry, Ruchama, that was out of line. My apologies.
Thank you.
I don’t think the Democractic party machine really cares if college students vote…as much as they care that they get to vote in concentrated mass where it will have an impact on the make up of the state legislature.
Robert, “those people are contemptable and deserve no vote” is your go-to argument whenever there’s a voting rights discussion. You have made that argument more times than I can count, and you’ve made it again on this very thread (” the group of voters who have never worked, finished school,…”). If you don’t believe that you write as if the people you write about are your inferiors, than you simply haven’t been reading your own writing.
And it’s dishonest. You’re not actually too stupid to realize that out of a pool of millions and millions of voters, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of people who went to a school that no longer exists, or whose records of decades ago are lost, or who have not held a job for legitimate reasons, or who held a job for employers that no longer exist, etc etc etc. [ETA:] You’re not unaware that for some people, literacy barriers or intimidation when dealing with bureaucracy make what’s only a pain in the ass for you into something that can be incredibly frustrating and difficult to deal with. You just honestly don’t give a damn about anyone’s voting rights.
Because it’s not true that you have no principles. But it’s unfortunately true that you are the modern-day equivalent of people rationalizing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other Jim-Crow era regulations by explaining how those regulations have nothing at all to do with race and aren’t racist, they’re just about keeping the voting system clean. You’re not the only conservative here that’s true of – but of those, you are the one I most expected to be more principled than that.
You keep on harping on if the laws make it “impossible” to vote. That’s not the issue. The issue is that the political party you favor is opposed by every racial group in America but whites, and has decided to try and make it harder for non-whites to vote by setting up surmountable but difficult barriers in ways that are designed to target non-white voters (as well as students). This is pretty much the inevitable behavior of any political party that finds itself supported by only one demographic group (unless you think the folks running the GOP are innocent saints), and is not something that laws should facilitate.
The idea, as I’m sure you comprehend, is that if a million white voters face only two barriers to voting, while non-white voters face five barriers to voting, then an equally determined non-white voter becomes more likely to be deterred from voting. Over the course of millions of voters, that can add up to tens of thousands of deterred voters. No, it’s not making it “impossible” for black voters to vote. But it’s still racist and anti-democratic behavior, no matter how hard you spin and rationalize.
That is not a moral or legitimate way to try and win elections, and it’s not something you should defend.
“You have made that argument more times than I can count, and you’ve made it again on this very thread (” the group of voters who have never worked, finished school,…”). If you don’t believe that you write as if the people you write about are your inferiors, than you simply haven’t been reading your own writing.”
BUT THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.
You’re saying ‘oh this law wrongly has a greater impact on the black community and on the Hispanic community’. OK, why? Because black people are too lazy to get ID and Hispanics are all undocumented visitors? NO! Because having gone to school and having had a job are the things that make complying with ID requirements trivially easy instead of just regularly easy, and black people like the nice lady in the original article are somewhat less likely to have done those things. Because there’s still racism, and there’s still discrimination, maybe more institutional than personal these days, but still plenty of both to go around. So it is the people who didn’t ever have an over-the-table job or who didn’t finish high school who have a slightly harder time of fulfilling the ID rules. Those people are somewhat disroportionately members of minority groups. That’s your OWN THESIS of why these laws unjustly target minority populations, no? And I agree with it; seems pretty obvious.
How in the name of Crom do you suggest that I discuss the population of people who didn’t work or didn’t finish school, without mentioning the fact that I’m talking about people who didn’t work or didn’t finish school?
“The issue is that the political party you favor is opposed by every racial group in America but whites, and has decided to try and make it harder for non-whites to vote by setting up surmountable but difficult barriers in ways that are designed to target non-white voters (as well as students).”
Odd, the fact that students are in there. It’s almost as though we’re trying to make it harder for people who vote against us to vote, and don’t give a damn what color they are. But wait, if we’ll discriminate against black dockworkers, and Hispanic layabouts, and Japanese-American fishermen, and..(mostly) white college students…then our discrimination would appear to be, uh, multiracial?
Also, you have yet to show any “surmountable but difficult” barriers. Not even one. AT MOST, the barriers are modest, and that to a tiny group of people with freakishly undocumented life stories.
You have a democracy fetish. Hey, more power to you. If you are made happy by the thought that every single potential voter in the 10th Ward got to the polls, who am I to criticize?
But I don’t give a shit about whether every single potential voter got to the polls and I’m not anti-democratic because of it; I have a different conception of the franchise than you do. You think that democracy is improved every time a marginal voter is pushed or dragged across the finish line and manages to join the parade; you like the Australian system of mandatory voting.
To me what is important is this: that everyone eligible who WISHES to participate is ABLE to participate. It bothers me greatly to discover that someone who wanted to participate was denied that; it sucked when some military ballots went awry and ended up not getting counted, for example, back in 2000. It sucked in my mother’s hometown in Mississippi when black people were cheated of their vote. If it actually happened (I can’t tell), it sucks when those white people were intimidated away from a Philadelphia polling place by the Panthers.
It doesn’t bother me at all to discover that all of these people, treated uniformly within their own state, are going to have to wait in line for an hour to vote, or that the polling place is 1.2 miles from their house, or that they had to make some phone calls to get their documentation straightened out before they could get an ID card and vote. Those are first world problems. Those problems *could* multiply and stack to the point of being an issue – and then I would have an issue with it. But not before then.
We have a situation where perfectly feasible ID requirements are part of the voting process, done in a system with copious help to comply with the requirements, boatloads of warning time in which to accomplish the necessary, trivial tasks, and ample route-arounds to permit votes to be counted even from people who technically did not comply with the do-this-or-no-vote rules. Lose those protections and accommodations, and again, you start edging over into territory where I have an issue. But not until then.
You’re an ultra-orthodox Jew, and to you if one microscopic speck of dust comes onto the Torah scrolls in the synagogue, the whole place has to be repurified. I’m a conservative Jew and to me the dirt has to reach the level of being visible to the eye – and even then, if it wipes off the scroll without damage, we’re OK. It takes a real stain for us to have to do the whole sanctification again, oy so many tsorres.
So you think I’m a heathen and that YHWH will smite me for my perfidious apostasy. OK, whatever, Reb Amp – take your blood pressure medication before you die already.
You’re an ultra-orthodox Jew, and to you if one microscopic speck of dust comes onto the Torah scrolls in the synagogue, the whole place has to be repurified.
Let’s see: Amp objects to the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of eligible voters, and Robert objects to the potential of a small handful of votes being cast illegally. But Amp is the stereotypical ultra-Orthodox Jew oh-so-worried about a speck of dust? To me, it looks like the other way around.
Actually, Amp cannot point to potential disenfranchisement. He can point to potential discouragement, such that people find it too hard and quit trying or – more likely, given the relative simplicity of the task over the time allotted, think it will be too hard and never try. But since provisional voting is a thing, even the most die-hard screw-your-ID-law-MISTER-Hayes voter can have their vote counted.
I am not overly worried about voter fraud in a partisan sense; I don’t that legions of shadow Biden voters are lurking in the alleyways of middle America waiting for their chance. I do think that, as voting and citizenship are entwined almost to the point of identity, that an organized ID audit trail contributes to the honesty of elections simply by making much casual fraud vastly more difficult.
It’s not that way where I come from.
A provisional vote is just that. Provisional. It means they won’t turn you away at the polling site. It does not mean that your vote will be counted. A provisional vote allows you to fill out a ballot and promises that the local elections board will take the time to determine if you are qualified to vote and, if so, will count your vote. If the elections machinery decides that you haven’t met the requirements to vote, your vote will not be counted.
Why do I keep seeing the claim that students are disenfranchised by Voter ID requirements? Students have no problem voting. They can come up with the documentation needed because they’ve had to dig up documentation to apply to school and apply for financial aid – and if they don’t need financial aid to go to school Mom and Dad are in a high-enough financial/social strata that their lives are sufficiently documented. “Don’t have ID” != “Can’t get ID”.
Now, can they vote where they go to school? Maybe not. So what? Someone who’s got sufficient wit to go to college has sufficient wit to navigate the absentee/vote-by-mail process in their home town and state. If you can vote you are not disenfranchised.
Of course college students aren’t disenfranchised by refusing to allow them to vote in their college town. The majority of states offer no-excuse-required absentee voting. The remaining states require an excuse, but “unavoidable absence” is sufficient. And they can (as i discussed at length) generally opt to switch their residence to the state in which they attend college, though there are tradeoffs to doing so.
So IMO you are correct that the group of “people who are mentally and financially unable to manage to register for voting” (i.e. “too confused” or “too poor”) does not generally include college students, much less those students who are attending an out of state college. If you can get into college and move to another state and attend school there, you’re capable of either (a) registering for an absentee ballot, or (b) becoming a resident of the state and voting there.
It’s been a while for me, but I’m pretty sure that, for college applications and standardized tests and all of that, I needed to write down my social security number on the forms, and I assume they checked it against some database, but I never needed my actual social security card.
If the requirement for NC as cited is accurate, all that’s needed is a tax form with your name and SS number on it. And what I’ve read doesn’t say your tax form, it says a tax form. Presuming your parents filed a tax form and claimed you as a deduction you can use any of your parents’ tax forms since you were 2. The same tax form your parents had to file with your FAFSA application to get financial aid.
Nope. 1099 or W-2. http://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/driver/id/
On the North Carolina website – this is the requirement for getting an ID which allows you to vote if you don’t have a driver’s license – under “proof of age and identity,” it says:
To me, this seems to say that you need a W-2 or a 1099, either of which is issued by an employer (W-2 for regular employers, 1099 for freelancers).
Under Ron’s interpretation, a tax form that you fill out yourself (or that your parents filled out themselves) would suffice. Nothing on the website seems to support this interpretation.
Also, if we accept for a moment the claim that voters need “real proof” of their identities – how on earth is a form I can fill out myself, by hand, proof of anything? If you’re going to accept a tax form that I filled out myself, why not just accept a handwritten affidavit that I’ve filled out myself?
* * *
Ron, what do you think about the original post? Do you think selecting a Black college for enforcement is a virtuous idea? Do you believe that if Black voters overwhelmingly voted Republican, this GOP official would have acted exactly the same way?
Have a look here. That’s a 1040 and when your parents fill it out they have to put your full name and SSN on it. And then file it with the IRS, who will gladly prosecute your ass if you do so falsely, and keep filing it every year with the same info for about 16 – 18 years in a row by the time you’re ready to go to college. I’m thinking low odds that your parents would have the guts to do that so that you could vote when you were 18. It clearly fits the definition of “a tax form with your full name and SSN”. I don’t see anywhere on the NC website that says “preprinted by the government with your full name and SSN”.
Ill comment tomorrow on the other thing.
I’m not Ron – I’m like, a thousand times better looking, just for starters – but on racial questions he and I tend to think along similar lines so I’ll take a stab at it.
“Do you think selecting a Black college for enforcement is a virtuous idea?”
Yes, plainly. There is a rule. The rule must apply to all citizens, regardless of their skin color or racial background. As colleges do not vote, the framing of one particular enforcement action “selecting a Black college” is absurd; if the college – any college – is named as a party by the Republican politician challenging voter registrations, I will eat a box of Krispy Kreme donuts.
(I see no reason why I should suffer in the unlikely event that I’m wrong.)
The county chairman in question heard about someone who isn’t apparently a resident of the state running for office; he took the steps needed to kibosh that activity.
“Do you believe that if Black voters overwhelmingly voted Republican, this GOP official would have acted exactly the same way?”
Do you? And would that really matter? Because your framing of this story appears to demonstrate that you have an internal racial narrative that is almost impervious to data.
You ignored half of the story that you linked to. In addition to challenging an invalid voter registration and succeeding – crime of crimes – in a different county, an election board canceled an early voting day and folded a precinct at a…historically white college. (I’ll demur to your tribalistic belief that a college can have a race, just for purposes of keeping the discussion terminologically coherent.) That county, by the way, was ALSO subject to preclearance back in the olden days, although you only mentioned the other county, where one black person ineligible to run for office had that ineligibility investigate and confirmed.
So…
We have a change in the law propagating downwards from the Supreme Court. Counties and states can now make electoral changes without running past the DOJ first. Ah, two counties take steps.
1) A Republican-led county takes steps at a mostly-white institution which, by your standards of electoral access, “disenfranchises” 18,000 college students, 89% of whom are white, 16,000 of whom are from North Carolina. (http://www.appstate.edu/about/)
2) Another Republican-led county, when asked by a duly appointed party county official, takes steps to challenge the voter registration status of one black student; the party official, asked if he would keep challenging bogus non-residents, says he might.
So ~16,200 white people and ~1,800 black people are “disenfranchised”, and 1 black guy running for office in the wrong place gets shot down.
And this set of events by you demonstrates that the focus of these evil Republicans, so clearly and obviously that it need not even be assessed as an open question, is to disenfranchise black people?
Robert:
1) Fair enough, I should have reread the article instead of firing from the hip. My question was badly thought out, and if it was important to me I’d rephrase it more carefully.
2) Republicans have very much earned their reputation as racists. The fact that few people other than Republicans are inclined to give the GOP any benefit of the doubt on race issues is not unfair; it is the result of years of attempting to use racism as a wedge for winning elections, from Nixon’s southern strategy to the voter suppression laws of today.
According to the North Carolina Secretary of State’s numbers, 612,955 to 318,643 (depending on the criteria used to count) registered voters lack the ID that the new law will require in 2016. Using the lower number, they found that of the 318,643, 138,425 actually voted in 2012.
There are something like ten known cases of in-person voter fraud of the kind that voter ID laws will in theory prevent (as long as no one in North Carolina has the technology to make fake IDs), in the entire USA, in the last several elections combined. So in North Carolina, we’re talking about making about 140,000 voters jump through governmental hoops – and deterring some unknown number from voting, but from what’s happened in other states it’ll be in the tens of thousands – in order to prevent perhaps one or two fake votes.
Deterring tens of thousands of voters, and inconveniencing over a hundred thousand, in order to prevent one or two hypothetical fake votes, is on its face ridiculous. One or two votes is a decimal point of a decimal point of a decimal point; more to the point, it is microscopic compared to tens of thousands of votes deterred, or 140,000 inconvenienced. (Not to mention the millions of dollars this bill will end up costing.)
Meanwhile, the exact same so-called “voter ID” law contains elements that have nothing at all to do with IDs, but will disproportionately deter Black, Latin@, student, and poor voters. Blacks in North Carolina made heavy use of early voting in 2012, so the GOP eliminated a week of early voting. Eliminating early voting tends to cause long lines, so the GOP took the power to extend hours away from local election boards (but I’m sure the GOP-controlled state board will be very sympathetic). Eliminating pre-registration for teens who will turn 18 before the next election, and youth outreach programs, makes no sense for preventing fraud, but is great if you want to reduce the youth vote.
In your view, I guess the GOP folks who wrote these laws are absolute saints, who are immune to the enormously strong incentives our system gives the GOP to try and deter Democratic demographics from voting,[*] and who did not in any way see deterring Democratic (i.e., poor and Black) voters as a benefit. I don’t buy it, and I don’t think the GOP has earned the right to be considered race saints who would never, ever sanction racism in pursuit of election victories.
In the end, it probably won’t matter. It’s very rare that tens of thousands of votes decides an election. And the deterrent effect is to a significant extent counteracted by the “I wasn’t very determined vote, but now I’m going to wait in line six hours just to spite them” factor. I don’t think voter ID laws are going to serve the GOP well.
But you’d have to be ridiculously naive – or a GOP partisan working very hard to pull the wool over one’s own eyes – to not see that Voter ID laws like this have a lot to do with race.
From what the GOP says, any law which would reduce black voting, as long as some non-racial rationalization can be made up, is legitimate and unobjectionable. I don’t think that’s a position that is compatible with being seriously opposed to racism; and it is a position which, in the past, has been compatible with supporting laws that are now widely acknowledged as racist, such as poll taxes.
Long post (but truly on topic (or at least a response to Amp’s comments @88), and not an attempt to de-rail).
Amp @88
Hogwash and balderdash!
That is just revisionist history. No party rivals the ongoing history of racism in the Democratic Party (except maybe the Dixiecrats, but they did not last long).
And, I am not talking about slavery, Jim Crow laws, and those nasty poll taxes and literacy tests that the Democrats enacted.
The last 100 years, the Democratic Party has had the most cynical policies with respect to race.
With Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party, finding it no longer legal to beat black people, they decided to join them, thus starting its tradition of courting black voters, only to throw them under the bus after they win. And, he segregated the federal work force for their own good.
Then, racist Southern Democrats fully supported the Davis Bacon (both Republicans) Act that put the minimum wage in place. Of course, before purchasing the black vote, labor unions were Democrat’s primary constituency. So, when cheap black labor from the South threatened expensive white jobs in the North, the Republicans and Democrats worked together on the minimum wage law that would lower the cost of discrimination and price black people out of the market.
Truman may have ordered the desegregation of the military, Eisenhower ended it, along with Wilson’s segregation of the federal government. He also desegregated the South, sending the troops to integrate Arkansas schools following the Brown decision. So, Eisenhower also ended the Jim Crow era. Then, with almost unanimous support of the Republicans, and the support of the majority of Democrats in Congress, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which was supposed to strengthen voting for black people. (See, it’s on topic.) Still, Democrats, favoring poll taxes and literacy tests, found ways around the law, requiring him to sign another bi-partisan civil rights bill in 1960. (See, I mentioned voting again.)
And, of course, there was the bi-partisan civil rights act in 1964 that liberals refuse to admit was bi-partisan, even though it would not have passed without Republican support. That is probably because, percentage-wise, more Republicans favored it than did Democrats. Thus, in order to reform history and keep the black vote, the Democratic party line has been that “Republicans are racist.” Actually, that should read that “Republicans are [not as] racist [as Democrats].”
Then, LBJ, at the height of Democratic cynicism about race, created the “Great Society,” thereby guaranteeing that he would “have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” With that program, the Democratic Party, to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, has accomplished in 40 years what centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow could not: the disintegration of the Black Family.
But, it is Nixon’s Southern Strategy that you point to as evidence of persistent Republican racism. What Southern Strategy is that? The Southern Strategy in 1968, which failed to pry Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia, from the racist, former Democrat, George Wallace. Or are you talking about the Southern Strategy from 1972, which was “everything South of Massachusetts”? Because that certainly was a winning strategy, especially when used in conjunction with his “Northern Strategy” and his “Western Strategy.” Sigh. If only he had had a “Massachusetts” strategy….
So, Democrats will continue to talk about “chains” and “plantations,” all the while castigating conservative blacks as “Uncle Toms,” so that they can champion the racist policies behind minimum wage laws and the modern welfare state, while maintaining support of union labor, which traps blacks in underperforming schools. And, it is all because the scariest thing to a liberal Democrat is a black person that votes Republican. But, it is easier to call Republicans “racist” than it is for Democrats to do anything that actually helps black people.
-Jut
Jut, 95% of what you just said is off-topic, in that it no way refutes my claim that Republicans have earned a rep as racists. Rather, you mostly concentrate on claiming “Democrats are racists,” but you don’t acknowledge the possibility that both parties are, to a great extent, racist.
It’s as if I said “the sky is blue,” and you said, “Balderdash – it’s the lake that’s blue!” First of all, both can be true; second of all, perhaps they are both part of the same racist, er, blue, system.
I do agree with you that the Democrats have a racism problem (although most of your examples are from decades ago – you’d do better to talk about how Democrats have supported and still support policies which put huge portions of black and latino American behind bars, if you wanted to get to the present day).
That in no way refutes my claim that Republicans have a well-earned rep for racism.
I think defending the Southern Strategy by saying “it didn’t work very well,” as if, even if that were true, it would somehow excuse the attempt, is weak. “We tried to do something racist, but we weren’t very competent at it!” is not a morally compelling defense.
I didn’t say a word about “chains” and “plantations” and “Uncle Toms,” nor has anyone else on this thread. I was talking about current GOP voter suppression laws, a subject that you didn’t even attempt to defend the GOP on. Please try arguing with the people who are here, instead of straw liberals. Or go somewhere else, where people are actually making the arguments you wish to respond to (if you can find such a place).
Finally, I think that Black people are not stupid or incapable of recognizing their own interests. As long as approximately 90% of Black Americans are choosing to vote for Democrats (problematic as Democrats are), I think it’s ludicrous to defend the GOP by saying the Democrats are the real racists. If Democrats were, as you seem to imply, far worse racists than Republicans, you’d be able to tell because Black Americans wouldn’t be voting overwhelmingly for Democrats. As it is, however, maybe you should take that huge mote out of your own eye.
The website doesn’t call for a 1040. It calls for a W-2 or a 1099.
By a 2-1 vote the 7th Circuit upheld Indiana’s Voter ID law, and the US Supreme Court ultimately concurred in the 7th Circuit’s opinion. Today one of the 7th Circuit judges, Richard Posner, acknowledges that he got it wrong and should have found the law unconstitutional.
Weeeeeeelllllll, crap. Better late than never. But not much.
Amp, do abused people trapped in horrible relationships spend 90% of their energy in trying to placate the abuser they live with, or the abuser who lives across the street?
I think that, given the pathologically bad treatment of African Americans in the American political system, that to dismiss a claim that the Democrats are worse towards blacks than Republicans are by citing the loyalty of blacks to the Democratic party is…problematic.
In 1900, blacks were incredibly loyal to the Republican party. Was it because Republicans believed in racial harmony and love? No, it was because the Democratic party of the time was the party of the white-ish laboring class, and by registering and organizing black people to vote, Republicans could fuck the Democrats over.
Black people can be forgiven for taking the deal; as Condoleeza Rice once said, her father was a Republican because the Republicans were the ones who helped him register to vote. The powerless can generally be understood when they take whatever route they can find to relieve their situation.
That doesn’t mean their actions reflect a genuine affiliation. You don’t get 90% of the vote generation after generation from being someone’s buddy; more than 10% of the population of humans in general are dumb enough to misinterpret who their buddy is, and will vote wrong.
You get 90% by running a political machine and holding people hostage. Doesn’t matter a great deal whether you call that machine a plantation or not.
What the heck does this even mean?
On slave plantations, there were people with whips and guns to keep the workers on the plantation. What, specifically, do you believe is the equivalent mechanism preventing Blacks today from voting for the GOP?
That’s just a currently fashionable Republican catch phrase. Robert gets a little bounty if he manages to slip it into discussion, and a bigger one if someone takes the bait and gives him an excuse to go on about it.
Damn it Charles you broke the code. Now I don’t get any points at all for this whole thread! I needed those points to get Karl Rove to speak at my daughter’s birthday party next week. THANKS.
Amp – Social opprobrium.
Very persuasive. Peer pressure is analagous to violent enslavement. Got it. I’m sure that will be a very effective argument among your target demographic.
Southern working class white men tend to vote Republican – even though there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this is contrary to their self-interest. What accounts for this behavior? I surmise that a person’s sense of identity influences behavior in the ballot box (and perhaps in the jury room).
Conversely, most black people vote for Democrats. In contrast to the behavior of while working-class Southerners, the voting behavior of blacks seems rationally self-interested. I nevertheless retain the view that rationality is not the only, or even the most relevant, explanatory variable here.
To what extent can we say that a person is “compelled” by their sense of identity (or peer pressure) rather than saying that a person “chooses to act in conformance with” their sense of identity?
Jake, is social opprobrium capable of incentivizing or disincentivizing behavior? Yes, obviously.
Were whips and chains and force capable of ditto? Yes, obviously.
Are social pressures, and the use of force, both mechanisms of social control? Yes, obviously.
Does that mean that peer pressure and whips and chains are analogous in a rhetorical, “whips and snubs are the same thing” sense? No, obviously.
No time for substantive comment, but a brief note:
I picked up the phone and called the N.C. office for voter registration. I was wrong. Only a W-2 or a 1099 is an acceptable tax document. Ah, well. So now a college student who has never worked a day in their life has no tax document to back up their ID. How many of those who cannot otherwise document their life are there? I’m thinking zero.