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Unbe-effing-lievable.
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Lol, what link? I told you where you can do it. Are you ever planning to actually engage in a conversation here?
Lol, Ask.com banking rules for no specific location?
Cashing a cheque is a private business transaction and companies are free to set their own requirements.
For that reason, it is a pretty terrible example to being with. Voting is not the same as a private business transaction.
How is pulling out your ID to vote any more difficult than pulling out your ID to cash a cheque?
Oh brother. One of you is fixated on what he thinks a nondescript group of people in the US might think of Canada's voting laws, and the other one is fixated on cheque cashing rules, and both of you seem to think that you are somehow winning an argument about US voter ID laws.
I guess when you have no chance of winning an argument about the actual topic, you can just talk about anything else until everyone else gets bored.
I guess when you have no chance of winning an argument about the actual topic, you can just talk about anything else until everyone else gets bored.
Okay.... This will probably be more in tune with things you can grasp...
How is pulling out your ID to vote any more difficult than pulling out your keys to get into your house ... or your ID to get into the bar.
You'd be the expert in yammering on when you have no hope of winning.
BTW.... Topic is people in North Carolina
How is pulling out your ID to vote any more difficult than pulling out your keys to get into your house ... or your ID to get into the bar.
You'd be the expert in yammering on when you have no hope of winning.
BTW.... Topic is people in North Carolina
Gave you a greenie there because you're so good at
This........
And more of the same there......
That's right.... Restricting access to qualified people - like those folk in North Carolina restricted access to a protest about restricting access. It was never about cashing a cheque
Not necessarily. All it does is restrict access to people who don't have the key.
As has been pointed out already, they tend to be poorer people, minorities, and the elderly.
Really? I'm hard pressed to find a "fact" you've posted. Perhaps you've been afflicted with "CB Syndrome"
Some people are just too damn lazy to make a phone call. I cashed a cheque years ago at Money Mart (or a reasonable facimile) when I lost my wallet and had no ID.
You should have the right to vote and not the right to enter a bar....or do you not understand the difference in the two acts?
Do you not understand the examples are of showing you are who (or what) you SAY you are? I see a heifer-duster's fear of being found out....
Here are a group of nuns who had problems with the new I.D. voting laws....
This is from their perspective but it might help some understand problems the elderly or poor are facing. Just because it doesn't affect someone personally or they have never personally experienced it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
How new laws are preventing voters from casting their ballot
By Kristen Hannum| 4 |
Print |
Share
Article Politics Social Justice
New laws restricting voting rights hit African Americans and the poor particularly hard. That, of course, is no coincidence.
Two dozen fragile, white-haired nuns from the Our Lady of Peace Residence waited for hours last summer at the Driver’s Licensing Center in Dunmore, Pennsylvania to get state-issued IDs that would allow them to vote under Pennsylvania’s new photo ID voter law. Unlike many seniors, the sisters had help getting together documents that would fulfill the new law’s demands, along with drivers who took them to the center and waited with them—a wait of four hours for one 95-year-old. “It was so hard on them,” says Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister Margaret Gannon, 87. “Many of them have diabetes and arthritis.”
The Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters joined thousands of other Pennsylvanians who swamped state licensing centers—which did not respond by expanding their hours. It was even worse in some other states with new voter ID laws. The office issuing IDs near Sauk City, Wisconsin was open only on the fifth Wednesday of the month for people trying to satisfy the new law there. Fifth Wednesdays come four times a year.
Gannon and other Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters saw Pennsylvania’s controversial new voter ID requirements as a justice issue, and they shared their story with the local paper, which ran it on the front page. “We represented thousands and thousands,” says Gannon. “Usually we work on justice issues that don’t touch us personally, but this one does.”
Opponents of the new law argue that the Republican legislators backing it had not identified a single case of voter fraud that the law would have stopped, and yet they threatened to disenfranchise 750,000 of the most vulnerable Pennsylvania citizens. A Pennsylvania judge agreed and postponed the law in October 2012.
Voter ID requirements are just one of a myriad of new laws and policies proposed in recent years that hinder voting, especially for poor and minority voters. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund has found a direct link between “increasing, unprecedented turnout among voters of color and the proliferation of restrictive measures across the country.” Their report Defending Democracy found the assault on voting rights in recent years to be historic, “both in terms of its scope and its intensity.”
The Supreme Court’s pending decision on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (UPDATE: Read about the Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act here and the U.S. bishops' statement on voting rights here) has troubled some court watchers, who sound pessimistic about its survival. Section 5 compels states and counties with a history of voter suppression to “preclear” any election rule changes with the Justice Department. Opponents argue it is outdated and an unnecessary infringement on state sovereignty. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia described Section 5 as a “racial preferment” because it does not protect white voting rights.
Gary May, professor of history at the University of Delaware and author of Bending Toward Justice (Basic Books), a history of the Voting Rights Act, says Scalia’s attitude shows either obliviousness to our nation’s history of minority voter suppression or “woeful ignorance” of the Voting Rights Act’s history. May sees the current chipping away at voting as an organized campaign, “in some ways even stronger than the original state-by-state efforts to disenfranchise voters after Reconstruction in the South,” he says. “I see this as a second generation of those efforts.”
He’s referring to how African Americans voted in large numbers during the years immediately following the Civil War, but when federal troops left the South in 1877, unrepentant Southerners suppressed the black vote. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses (where only men whose grandfathers had voted could vote), and rigged questions like, “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?” were all used to keep African Americans from the polls.
“Today we’re seeing a modern version of what was done after Reconstruction,” says May. “This is not a small thing; it’s an attempt to suppress the minority vote coming at a time when we have a much more diverse country.”
Denise Lieberman, a senior attorney for the Advancement Project, another civil rights organization, points out that democracy only works if everyone has a voice. She offers that the problem is the cumulative effect of efforts to discourage voting among marginalized citizens. Getting a photo ID is harder for most poor citizens, she says, but the difficulties don’t stop there. “Maybe I have a hard time getting to the polling place,” Lieberman suggests. “Maybe I have a disability and then the lines are long and I’ve got two kids in tow—those burdens add up.”
Lieberman says that women religious have been extremely helpful in St. Louis. “They’ve been able to elevate the discussion beyond the political,” she says. “It’s a hard thing to talk about without sounding partisan, when really we just want to give a voice to the voiceless.” Sister of Loretto Mary Ann McGivern, based in St. Louis, explains that the reason she has become involved in defending voting rights is because it’s the bedrock of democracy. “The Catholic principle of subsidiarity says that the people affected by a decision should make the decision,” she says. “So the right to vote is foundational to all our other rights.”
Walk in their shoes
Americans who possess some combination of stable income, transportation, child care, and flexible work arrangements are unlikely to be affected by voting restrictions. “They only affect the most vulnerable,” says Lorraine Minnite, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. “People react to the voter ID laws by projecting their own situation onto everyone else’s. But there are millions of Americans who cannot meet the ID requirements. They’re marginalized people, elderly people.”
The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law estimates that 10 percent of eligible voters—nearly 22 million people—lack a valid government-issued photo ID. The center estimates 25 percent of African Americans lack the type of government-issued photo IDs required by the new laws; 18 percent of Americans over 65 lack such an ID. The voter ID laws, which demand a current address, are disproportionately burdensome to the homeless and to poor Americans, who move frequently.
How new laws are preventing voters from casting their ballot | USCatholic.org
This is from their perspective but it might help some understand problems the elderly or poor are facing. Just because it doesn't affect someone personally or they have never personally experienced it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
How new laws are preventing voters from casting their ballot
By Kristen Hannum| 4 |
Print |
ShareArticle Politics Social Justice
New laws restricting voting rights hit African Americans and the poor particularly hard. That, of course, is no coincidence.
Two dozen fragile, white-haired nuns from the Our Lady of Peace Residence waited for hours last summer at the Driver’s Licensing Center in Dunmore, Pennsylvania to get state-issued IDs that would allow them to vote under Pennsylvania’s new photo ID voter law. Unlike many seniors, the sisters had help getting together documents that would fulfill the new law’s demands, along with drivers who took them to the center and waited with them—a wait of four hours for one 95-year-old. “It was so hard on them,” says Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister Margaret Gannon, 87. “Many of them have diabetes and arthritis.”
The Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters joined thousands of other Pennsylvanians who swamped state licensing centers—which did not respond by expanding their hours. It was even worse in some other states with new voter ID laws. The office issuing IDs near Sauk City, Wisconsin was open only on the fifth Wednesday of the month for people trying to satisfy the new law there. Fifth Wednesdays come four times a year.
Gannon and other Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters saw Pennsylvania’s controversial new voter ID requirements as a justice issue, and they shared their story with the local paper, which ran it on the front page. “We represented thousands and thousands,” says Gannon. “Usually we work on justice issues that don’t touch us personally, but this one does.”
Opponents of the new law argue that the Republican legislators backing it had not identified a single case of voter fraud that the law would have stopped, and yet they threatened to disenfranchise 750,000 of the most vulnerable Pennsylvania citizens. A Pennsylvania judge agreed and postponed the law in October 2012.
Voter ID requirements are just one of a myriad of new laws and policies proposed in recent years that hinder voting, especially for poor and minority voters. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund has found a direct link between “increasing, unprecedented turnout among voters of color and the proliferation of restrictive measures across the country.” Their report Defending Democracy found the assault on voting rights in recent years to be historic, “both in terms of its scope and its intensity.”
The Supreme Court’s pending decision on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (UPDATE: Read about the Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act here and the U.S. bishops' statement on voting rights here) has troubled some court watchers, who sound pessimistic about its survival. Section 5 compels states and counties with a history of voter suppression to “preclear” any election rule changes with the Justice Department. Opponents argue it is outdated and an unnecessary infringement on state sovereignty. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia described Section 5 as a “racial preferment” because it does not protect white voting rights.
Gary May, professor of history at the University of Delaware and author of Bending Toward Justice (Basic Books), a history of the Voting Rights Act, says Scalia’s attitude shows either obliviousness to our nation’s history of minority voter suppression or “woeful ignorance” of the Voting Rights Act’s history. May sees the current chipping away at voting as an organized campaign, “in some ways even stronger than the original state-by-state efforts to disenfranchise voters after Reconstruction in the South,” he says. “I see this as a second generation of those efforts.”
He’s referring to how African Americans voted in large numbers during the years immediately following the Civil War, but when federal troops left the South in 1877, unrepentant Southerners suppressed the black vote. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses (where only men whose grandfathers had voted could vote), and rigged questions like, “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?” were all used to keep African Americans from the polls.
“Today we’re seeing a modern version of what was done after Reconstruction,” says May. “This is not a small thing; it’s an attempt to suppress the minority vote coming at a time when we have a much more diverse country.”
Denise Lieberman, a senior attorney for the Advancement Project, another civil rights organization, points out that democracy only works if everyone has a voice. She offers that the problem is the cumulative effect of efforts to discourage voting among marginalized citizens. Getting a photo ID is harder for most poor citizens, she says, but the difficulties don’t stop there. “Maybe I have a hard time getting to the polling place,” Lieberman suggests. “Maybe I have a disability and then the lines are long and I’ve got two kids in tow—those burdens add up.”
Lieberman says that women religious have been extremely helpful in St. Louis. “They’ve been able to elevate the discussion beyond the political,” she says. “It’s a hard thing to talk about without sounding partisan, when really we just want to give a voice to the voiceless.” Sister of Loretto Mary Ann McGivern, based in St. Louis, explains that the reason she has become involved in defending voting rights is because it’s the bedrock of democracy. “The Catholic principle of subsidiarity says that the people affected by a decision should make the decision,” she says. “So the right to vote is foundational to all our other rights.”
Walk in their shoes
Americans who possess some combination of stable income, transportation, child care, and flexible work arrangements are unlikely to be affected by voting restrictions. “They only affect the most vulnerable,” says Lorraine Minnite, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. “People react to the voter ID laws by projecting their own situation onto everyone else’s. But there are millions of Americans who cannot meet the ID requirements. They’re marginalized people, elderly people.”
The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law estimates that 10 percent of eligible voters—nearly 22 million people—lack a valid government-issued photo ID. The center estimates 25 percent of African Americans lack the type of government-issued photo IDs required by the new laws; 18 percent of Americans over 65 lack such an ID. The voter ID laws, which demand a current address, are disproportionately burdensome to the homeless and to poor Americans, who move frequently.
How new laws are preventing voters from casting their ballot | USCatholic.org