Anyone else worried about the Republican attempts at voter supression?

Forgiveness Man wrote:Well, you have a photo ID then? lol I don't think anybody is saying that your mother is committing fraud. But sometimes we gotta do things we don't like because of others.

Forgiveness Man wrote:Again, most people in this country have a photo ID, I think. The few that don't are able to get them. Yes, it's a temporary added obstacle. But who the hell cares? It seems to me that people are just trying to contrive excuses to whine about something that they really have no leg to stand on in opposition of.

Forgiveness Man wrote:As I said before, I only worry about legitimate things. This leading to voter suppression is not a legitimate worry, so I don't worry about it.

Supernova wrote:


Yeah well hard as it is to believe, the rest of the country is NOT New York City.

Nystyle709 wrote:

I'm sorry....I live in NYC....it's just asinine to me to be a grown adult and you walk around with no form of photo identification.

Anyone who’s ever stood in line at a motor vehicle office would shudder to imagine what’s about to go down in our neighboring swing state of Pennsylvania.

With less than 100 days until the November election, at least 750,000 people there need to get a photo ID in order to vote. A strict new state law passed by Republicans, now under review by the courts and Justice Department, means nearly all of them will run into a logistical nightmare at the DMV or the polls.

Why? To prevent voter fraud. A problem that doesn’t exist.

Picture the long lines, the wait times. Pennsylvania has the lowest percentage of government workers in the nation, and many DMV offices are open just two or three days a week. Staffers are confused about what kind of identification is required to get the proper photo ID and, at best, only 20 percent will get training, officials say. Many people won’t know about the new law until they get to the polls. As Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-Pa.) put it, "It is absolutely, unequivocally clear that the state cannot pull this off by Election Day."

So thousands of legal voters will be turned away, in order to stop a crime that no one has even seen. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, voter fraud happens at a rate of 0.0004 percent. Which means, less frequently than people are struck and killed by a bolt of lightning.

Pennsylvania officials admit they’ve never had a single instance of in-person voter fraud. But still, Republicans say in their most spooky voice — we must remain vigilant. What about undetected voter fraud? Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it’s not there. And so they’ve hit the road like a gang of ghostbusters, passing voter ID laws in state after state, setting up enough logistical hurdles to disenfranchise more than 10 percent of the American population.

To see why, look no further than Philadelphia. A huge block of residents won’t be allowed to vote because they don’t have the most common form of photo ID, a driver’s license. They are young, poor, minorities — and, not coincidentally, heavily Democratic.

Which rips the mask off the true reason Republicans sought these laws in the first place. As House Majority Leader Mike Turzai, a Republican, once bragged, the voter ID law "is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."

At least he’s honest. Admit it or not, Republicans know that administrative rules can make the difference between victory and defeat in a close election. Remember Bush vs. Gore? So does Mitt Romney. He likes voter ID laws and has called for "more of them."

But we have enough gun laws, he says.

Pennsylvania is the top interstate supplier of crime guns to New Jersey. But voter fraud is the real threat.

Suzi wrote:
I grew up in Los Angeles County (another big city) and never needed picture ID, as I said until we wanted to go to the US on a vacation. We even immigrated to Canada and I didn't need picture ID. I have written checks all my adult life and never needed picture ID. As I said I have only had to show it about 3 times since I got it a few years ago.

Supernova wrote:Boy what we need next is a sarcasm emoticon so I'd have a face to go with this one: 'maybe they ought to just order everybody get a barcode tattoo on their foreheads so they can tell we are who we are just by looking at us'. You know that's coming next.

captainbryce wrote:

Alan Smithee wrote:Under the guise of trying to prevent (non-existent) voter fraud, GOP authorities in many states have rammed through requirements that voters must have state issued ID's in order to vote. Not surprisingly this most often works to disenfranchise the class of people that would support the Democrats and Pres. Obama. How real of a threat do you think it is that the Republicans could actually steal this election?

Well of course it's a 'threat' since it can ultimately effect the outcome of the election. But this is hardly the "new" development everyone is acting like it is. They have been doing this for YEARS now! The last three Presidential elections have seen the same voter suppression take place. And back then it was also under the guise of "preventing voter fraud" (of which there is still ZERO evidence of).

But I don't "worry" about such things because there is really nothing that we can do about it. Most republicans WANT voter suppression because it helps their candidates get elected. So there is no way that they are going to do anything to stop it. And even most democrats don't care enough to actually do anything about it. Therefore, nothing is going to change. The best thing that you can do is to make sure that YOU (as an individual) have all the credentials you need and make every effort to have your voice heard. If people have a strong enough desire to vote, they WILL make it happen (somehow or another). And since it's common knowledge that attempts at voter suppression are being made now, you have all this time to counteract that. Educate yourself on the candidates, save up your money, make sure you have valid ID, get everything double checked and show up in line early. That's pretty much all anyone can do.

Alan Smithee wrote:

That kind of thing was tried before

GOP Voter ID Backers Admit Voter ID Backs GOP

At a Heritage Foundation luncheon, one of the GOP’s chief proponents of Voter ID laws, former Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, cheerfully acknowledged that laws requiring individual voters to show a photo ID will be far more effective at suppressing votes by Democrats than Republicans.

“Absentee vote ballot fraud is the tool of choice amongst fraudsters,” Fund told a group of bloggers munching on Chick-Fil-A at the conservative Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. “Everytime you see a truly massive, coordinated effort at voter fraud, it usually relies in part on absentee voter fraud.”

While lacking any examples of actual massive, coordinated efforts at either in-person or absentee voter fraud to support his claim,* Fund admitted that Republicans’ focus on voter ID may suppress voting by Democrats





Rest of article @

http://wonkette.com/480365/gop-voter-id-backers-admit-voter-id-backs-gop

Pennsylvania GOPers Concede That Voter Fraud Claims Are a Myth



As our regular readers undoubtedly know, Republicans have been engaged in a concerted effort to reduce voting by college students, people of color, poor people, the elderly and other Democratic-leaning constituencies by enacting laws prohibiting people from voting unless they have certain government-issued photo IDs. Supporters of such laws claim that they are trying to stop rampant in-person voter fraud – i.e., concerted efforts to have ineligible people vote in order to throw an election. But the reality is that there is no evidence of any such fraud. For example, a five-year long investigation by the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush found “virtually no evidence of any organized effort” to fraudulently impact federal elections, and other analyses have similarly found no evidence of fraud.

This past week in Pennsylvania, leading Republicans admitted in two separate circumstances that in-person voter fraud is virtually non-existent. The first such admission came in the state of Pennsylvania’s response to the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the restrictive voter ID law that was passed in March 2012 and is scheduled to go into effect for the November election. The court hearing in that lawsuit – titled Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – is scheduled to begin on July 25, 2012, and in a pre-hearing filing, Pennsylvania (which has a Republican Governor and Attorney General) stipulated that;

- There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania

- The state is not aware of any in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania

- The state will not offer any evidence that in-person voter fraud has occurred

- The state will not offer any evidence or argument that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in the absence of the photo ID law

In short, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has admitted that the entire “justification” for the photo ID law does not exist.




Rest of article @


http://www.winningprogressive.org/tag/voter-suppression

Supernova wrote:Boy what we need next is a sarcasm emoticon so I'd have a face to go with this one: 'maybe they ought to just order everybody get a barcode tattoo on their foreheads so they can tell we are who we are just by looking at us'. You know that's coming next.