I’m a conservative. I don’t mind the liberal stuff here. It’s good to learn the other side, but I don’t want a liberal echo chamber. I’d like to be more politically balanced in the fediverse. Is there any way I can do that?
I’m a conservative. I don’t mind the liberal stuff here. It’s good to learn the other side, but I don’t want a liberal echo chamber. I’d like to be more politically balanced in the fediverse. Is there any way I can do that?
If you have only two choices and both are bad, you have to choose the lesser evil. The OP probably doesn’t like the racism and stuff, but they dislike certain policies of the other party even more.
Also, “trying to make it harder for people to vote” is an interesting way to say “requiring people to bring their citizen ID when voting, like in any civilized country”.
I would say that the dismantling of human rights would be a greater evil than the things the democrats could cook up, but if you are not affected and have no empathy for others it could be better to vote for the republicans.
And werent the conditions to be able to vote pretty restrictive to a lot of people?
I live in a country where identification is required for voting and it doesn’t feel restrictive. On the contrary, I’m glad someone can’t just vote in my name.
In the US the largest group of people without id’s are Democrats and black.
It’s literally making the system more racist.
Every black person has an ID, you have to otherwise you can’t do anything anyways. I have never met anyone in my community who doesn’t have some form of ID that’s valid in elections.
So the question is, why doesn’t everyone have IDs? How does the country identify its citizens?
IDs cost money, require visits to DMVs (which conservatives work hard to shut down in poor areas, or other fuckery with their hours or such), and if you want the federal level one cost more and require more paperwork
We use the garbage and not-designed-for-this social security number for major IDing
Because the republicans work very hard to make it difficult for people who would likely vote democrat.
If you got an ID sent to you when you turned $AGE I’d support requiring it to vote. But any proposal of free/automatic IDs gets shouted down by fanatics who think it’s the mark of the beast from Revelations. It’s a non-starter.
In my country:
Where is this Shangri-la?
Not such: we’re in Latin America and we have a multitude of other problems.
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I’m thinking specifically of gerrymandering but this article covers the many voter disenfranchisement methods used by Republicans in the US in the past decades:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/09/29/stacking-the-deck-how-the-gop-works-to-suppress-minority-voting/
ETA: I see you wrote that you “live in a country where identification is required for voting” so you might not understand the American history of voter suppression. This article should give a good introduction. There are many more methods being used today, including requiring IDs. Many, many more methods.
Maybe it’s just me but I’m ok with convicted felons not being able to vote.
Registering to vote using and then presenting a federally issued government ID is a good thing. It stops voter fraud dead in its tracks. Why are people against this? Because it supposedly disadvantages minorities? It doesn’t. They can get a federally issued ID just as easily as anyone else.
Felony disenfranchisement is a relic of the Jim Crow era. It’s an incentive to arrest and convict POC on false charges of a felony so that their rights are permanently stripped away. Restoring the right to vote lessens this incentive.
https://www.vox.com/voting-rights/21440014/prisoner-felon-voting-rights-2020-election
If you’re interested in learning more, please check out this book:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow
Re voter ID laws, this is from the ACLU’s fact sheet on voter IDs:
-Minority voters disproportionately lack ID. Nationally, up to 25% of African-American citizens of voting age lack government-issued photo ID, compared to only 8% of whites.
-States exclude forms of ID in a discriminatory manner. Texas allows concealed weapons permits for voting, but does not accept student ID cards. Until its voter ID law was struck down, North Carolina prohibited public assistance IDs and state employee ID cards, which are disproportionately held by Black voters. And until recently, Wisconsin permitted active duty military ID cards, but prohibited Veterans Affairs ID cards for voting.
-Voter ID laws are enforced in a discriminatory manner. A Caltech/MIT study found that minority voters are more frequently questioned about ID than are white voters.
-Voter ID laws reduce turnout among minority voters. Several studies, including a 2014 GAO study, have found that photo ID laws have a particularly depressive effect on turnout among racial minorities and other vulnerable groups, worsening the participation gap
There’s far more to making voting more difficult than just requiring an ID. For example, I believe it was Texas that relatively recently lowered its number of voting stations in left-leaning areas and made it illegal to give people water that were waiting in line to vote.