Politics in history. In general.

[Zzzptm]

Well, if by "best politicians" you mean "most restrictive in terms of legislating voting rights restrictions that make Texas one of the most difficult places in the USA to register to vote and/or cast a ballot, particularly if one is Black, Hispanic, or Native American", then I would agree with you.

As is the case with 48 other state Republican party organizations (the exception being Utah), the Texas State Republican Party consistently invokes Jim Crow-era language and legislation to create barriers to voting that disproportionately affect minorities and younger voters. In states where Jim Crow laws are still on the books, the Republican parties there are defending and expanding those laws. In states where those laws have been removed, the state Republican Parties are fighting to reinstate them. In states where the laws were never passed, the state Republican parties are pushing to impose such laws. In northern tier states, voting restrictions are geared more to impact Native Americans. In farming areas, Hispanics and rural Blacks. In states with a significant Black population, Black voters, usually through voting record purges that are presented as color-blind database cleaning efforts that wind up with 90% or so of their targets being minorities in predominantly Democratic districts.

When I was doing a survey of legislative voter suppression over two weeks earlier this month, only the Utah Republicans stood out as working to both increase voter registration and remove holdover laws from more racially stringent times. All other Republican parties were opposing the expansion of voter registration and were holding the line on restrictive laws or attempting to introduce more stringent critera with race-negative outcomes for Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

And while Democratic Party politicians passed Jim Crow laws in the South in the wake of Reconstruction, it was Republican Party politicians in the North that passed racially discriminatory laws in those states, around the same time period. When the Democratic Party made desegregation and Civil Rights part of its platform in the 1960s, that's when Southern Democrats began to vote for Republican presidential candidates, but continued to support white supremacist Democrats on a state and local level. That began to change in the late 70s as the Democratic Party began to push for state organizations to support Black and Hispanic candidates. That national directive from the Democratic Party then led to a migration of politicians from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the Deep South states. Alabama took the longest to make the cutover, but with it, all the political heritage of Jim Crow in the South has shifted its party association to Republican.

With the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the Republican-dominated Supreme Court ruling in the Shelby County case and rulings that gutted the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by the same court makeup, Repbublican-dominated legislatures have stepped up the introduction of Jim Crow-style legislative barriers to voting. Because of the Shelby County ruling, these changes in voting law are no longer subject to judicial review prior to implementation. Instead, they can be implemented and the Blacks be kept from the voting booths as the court challenges move forward.

This national policy of denying votes to minorities has been well-documented, with the national party itself having been successfully sued several times over coordinating voter suppression efforts. This is why the dirty work of voter suppression now devolves to a state level, with national party approval. The first coordinated national voter suppression drive run by Republicans was Operation Eagle Eye in 1964, patterned after a successful voter suppression drive in Arizona in 1958.

Nationally, a Black has roughly 75% voting strength as a white person and a Hispanic has about 55% the voting strength of a white person. This is determined from access to the ballot as well as representation skews from Senate/Electoral College effects. Continued Republican legislative and judicial opposition to full voting rights will keep those numbers at those levels or drive them down.

So, yes, everything's bigger in Texas, including the barriers to establishing voting rights.

[Typhon]

^^^^^^
Yeah, I meant all that.

[Zzzptm]

^^^^^^
Yeah, I meant all that.

Oh good. I like it when we can agree on things.

Seriously, I love you, Typhon, even when it's not easy to do so.

[Typhon]

Oh good. I like it when we can agree on things.

Seriously, I love you, Typhon, even when it's not easy to do so.

  Because you have trouble controlling your emotions on some issues, I'm going to take this comment with a grain of salt.  I view you as part of the Black Sabbath brotherhood.
 

[Zzzptm]

Well, better to take with salt than not at all.

[Typhon]

A new report finds there are currently 349,773 deceased registrants on the voter rolls in 41 states.  The worst states in this regard are Michigan, Florida, New York, Texas, and California, which account for roughly 51% of the dead voters who are still mistakenly registered.

Even worse, state records show that 7,890 of these deceased voters cast ballots from the grave in the 2016 presidential election and 6,718 did so in the 2018 congressional elections.

Yet, some think that voter fraud is not a real problem.   

[Vyn]

I will say this, I'm glad they caught 350,000 of those little zombie mofos.

[Charger]

Yet, some think that voter fraud is not a real problem.   

Well this wouldn't be a problem if US would be like any other civilized country and demand a photo ID for voting.

With this current system anyone can vote using a dead persons voting ballot..ridiculous system.

[Zzzptm]

Typhon, you stare at the molehill and ignore the mountain.

You also have bad evidence, gathered by an organization with a history of fighting against voter rights in the USA. That report comes from PILF, which raises baseless lawsuits to try to force states or counties to purge their voter databases along lines that produce race-negative outcomes for Black, Hispanic, and Native American voters. Jim Crow laws, essentially.

Here's one of those baseless lawsuits, which PILF asked to dismiss on its own after it was pressed to provide supporting evidence and it had none: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/public-interest-legal-foundation-drops-meritless-voter-purge-lawsuit

In LULAC of Richmond v. Public Interest Legal Foundation, PILF was found to be in violation of both the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

I admit I had not yet heard of the KKK Act until today, but now I have. And those PILF people that you're quoting were found in violation of it. So they're not exactly what I'd call a trusted source on the matter of voter integrity. Their court records show that they are historically hostile to the extension of voting and civil rights, which puts them squarely on the side of white supremacists, which white supremacists have found a political home in the Republican Party.

Which gets me back to those Jim Crow laws: Since 1964, Republicans have been trotting out these same arguments to justify voter database purges that go after minorities. The methodology used for the voter purges is completely the antithesis of proper address list hygiene methods - which they themselves insist upon for their political mailing databases. When we look at the impact of Republican measures in just one state, Georgia, we see that their recent purge done by then-Sec'y of State Kemp removed roughly 500,000 voters, 90% of which were Black. The error rate on those purges was massive, as the disenfranchised voters will attest to. The methods used came right out of Jim Crow.

I am against racism. Jim Crow laws and their derivatives are examples of institutional racism. The facts you quote come from a group that supports those Jim Crow laws and the impact of those laws is much more far-reaching than the 6000-8000 deceased voters nationwide. If you are bothered by 6-8000 bad votes, you should be bothered even more by millions of disenfranchised minority voters collectively in Georgia, Alabama, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Alaska, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, and Louisiana.

If you're not a racist, then stop bringing facts and figures from a group that violated the damn KKK Act of 1871. You learn something every day, but I didn't bank on that being what I learned today... the KKK Act, and the group that violated it with their spurious and flimsy lawsuits...

[Typhon]

^^^^^^
I am no expert on the PILF, but how does anything you are saying prove that there are no deceased registrants on our nation's voter rolls?

And why would it be a bad thing, as Charger suggests, to require photo ID for voting?

[Zzzptm]

Well, regarding the deceased... we have just over 7500 people die per day, and it does take time for the vital records to catch up with other databases, so sure, at any given time, there are dead people on the voter rolls.

As for voter ID laws, those were first cooked up when the 15th Amendment made it illegal to deny votes on the basis of color or prior servitude. So voter ID laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and comprehension tests came out as additional barriers to voting.

Take the example of the Republican-led legislature in North Carolina in 2013. The state had previously seen a rise in voter participation, particularly among Black voters. The 4th Circuit Court found that the Republicans passed a voter ID law with "discriminatory intent." It was demonstrated that the legislators had done research on how Black voters vote and then wrote legislation to target precisely those practices. The court found that, “In response to claims that intentional racial
discrimination animated its action, the State offered only meager justifications. Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist. Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.”

Given the state's history of racial discrimination, the surge in Black voting, and the passage of this legislature to target that surge, the court found that there absolutely was discrimination against Black voters. When we consider the totality of both the nation's history of discrimination and the continuity of that discrimination, the precedent here is that if an error is to be made between increasing voter access and diminishing it, the error should fall on the side of increasing voter access.

The year 2013 is significant in that is the year that the state of Alabama won the ruling in Shelby County v Holder, in which the Republican Supreme Court justices overturned part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Within hours of that ruling, Republican-led states passed legislation to require voter ID. Prior to that ruling, such voter ID laws could not be put in place without first being approved by the courts, due to the history of racial discrimination in those states. So, after that ruling eliminated that pre-clearance requirement, the Republicans immediately took the opportunity to start passing Jim Crow laws, of which voter ID is one such law.

In Alabama, the state legislature packed Blacks into as few districts as possible, diluting their voting strength relative to white voters. Before Shelby, this would likely have joined the hundreds of other laws Alabama tried to pass and would have been denied pre-clearance. After Shelby, the arrangement stands on the books during any court challenges to it.

In Arizona, the voter ID law was supplemented with a requirement to provide additional documents proving citizenship, barring many minorities from participating in state elections and making it more difficult for them to participate in federal elections.

In North Carolina, there was the voter ID law that targeted Blacks "with surgical precision".

In North Dakota, the Republicans passed a voter ID law that excluded tribal IDs as valid forms of photo ID.

In Ohio, the Republicans eliminated the provision to allow registration and voting on the same day during early voting. It also cut back the early voting period in that state and restricted access to absentee ballots and made them easier to reject.

In Texas, the voter ID law was already on the books from 2011, but was not enforced until after Shelby, when it was free from the pre-clearance requirement. When there are errors in spelling on the voter rolls, voters in Texas are denied their votes.

In Wisconsin, the Republicans there passed a law that, like North Carolina's, was indented to target voters of color. It is currently under a stay from the US Supreme Court.

If we didn't have such a history of racism in the USA and voter ID laws weren't so surgical in their targeting of minorities, there would be nothing wrong with them. But we have that history and those laws have that character, so there is harm in them. I'm against racism, so that means I'm also against those voter ID laws that solve a problem that really isn't there.

[Charger]

^^^^

Making it a racial issue is just ridiculous. Sorry but it is.

Virtually in every single other country in the world a photo ID is required for voting and it's been like that for decades. Why is it that only in the US it would be a racial issue??

Come on....that's just a smoke screen and a stupid one at that.

The US voting system is ancient and very prone to misuse or even outright fraud. Not to mention how ridiculously complicated it is.

For example here in Finland you get a voting registration form in the mail few weeks prior to election, you sign that, you take it with you on voting day, then you give it to the clerk who then asks to see your ID and scans it with a computer after which they give you the ballot, every single candidate has their own number, you write the number of your candidate on the piece of paper, seal it in an envelope and then give it to the clerk who stamps it and puts it in a bigger envelope and gives it back so you can drop it in the box. That's it. Doesn't matter what election it is the process is always the same.
Simple, easy and 100% certain that only people with the right to vote get to vote.

There is no way in hell that anyone without an ID could ever vote here. And it's been like that...I don't know even..atleast since the 80s. And not ONCE has anyone said that "fuck that's some racist shit man...!"
Come on. Let's get real, if a country wants to truly get rid of election misuse and fraud ID requirement is the only way to go....and if you're against that then you are also against honest elections.

[Zzzptm]

That's the thing, though Charger. In Finland, there is an organized effort to sign up every person as well as to provide that person with an ID. In the USA, there is an organized effort to *block* minorities from accessing those voting rights.

https://www.infofinland.fi/en/information-about-finland/finnish-society/elections-in-finland paints a picture that looks like a dream to me. Official notification a month before voting of where to vote? We have to look that up for ourselves and when the Republicans close polling places, they don't necessarily make a public notice of that event. And they let citizens of other countries vote in municipal elections! Wow, that is very far ahead of what we do here, and I say that with admiration.

The page itself is in one of 12 languages at the site. I am impressed by that as well. When I search for "voter suppression Finland" I have to specify "suppression" in the search and even then I get articles about US states at the top of the search results! "Finnish" appears on the wiki page for voter suppression because it's a language that the page is translated into. And then there's an article about how Finnish politics has some of the least gender inequality and how that is a lesson for the USA...

... Finland obviously does not have a history that includes forcing an ethnic group to immigrate as slaves and then, upon emancipation, leaving them completely on their own in an economically and socially vulnerable condition where their former masters held power and then used that power to lynch them when their voting rights were protected and then formally oppress them when those rights were no longer protected. It's no mistake that racial violence rose in the USA as Blacks struggled for their voting rights, it was a reversion to form.

Charger, if the government provided IDs and automatically provided registration materials, then yes, voter ID would be a total non-issue. But in the USA, we've got situations where the Republicans are in control of a state's government, see changing voter demographics, and then move to suppress those voters instead of shifting their policies to attract voters.  (we also don't have proportional representation, and use first-past-the-post elections, which further restrict voter rights and representation) In states with large Native American populations, the Republicans made laws that did not accept Native American photo IDs, even though there were identical to state drivers' licenses in their provisioning. They did not show a date of birth, so that criteria was used to disallow them - and in the process, bar Native Americans in that state from voting.

The shorter version, what's the Finnish equivalent of a terrorist group organized on racial lines that used intimidation and murder to attack and oppress another racial group, which has been active for over 150 years? And that lack of a Finnish KKK is why voter ID and registration are non-issues in Finland... and why they are hotly contested issues in the USA, with those adhering to white supremacist stances opposed to fairness in registration, ID, and other matters of voter rights.

[Typhon]

^^^^^^
Complete crap.   

Charger hits the nail on the head.
Democrats have been claiming for a long time now that to require a photo ID will make it too difficult for some minorities to vote.  Meanwhile, you have to have a photo ID in order to drive a car, get a bank account, and receive aid from most assistance programs.  I personally believe that the Dems fear that the more accurate an election, the more unlikely they retain any power.

[Charger]

ZZZ I think you're letting your own political hatred and bias twist and bend the issue completely here. Also you're talking about stuff that happened like 200 years ago. Has nothing to do with today.

The fact of the matter is and will always be. If you don't need to prove your identity upon voting no one can know who it is that is voting nor does that person even have the right to vote. And by such you can never EVER be sure that the elections are neither fair nor honest.

And it's not a party issue, it's a DEMOCRACY issue.