Elephants and Jackasses...

There is no need to remove the requirements for ID for anything. I completely agree that an ID should be necessary for voting ( or purchasing firearms). So provide a universal ID to facilitate this. It doesn’t have to be this hard.

 

and they should be able to track down every person (homeless or otherwise) and provide one to them as well.

Though again, focusing on the ID requirement part of the new GA laws is missing the real issue with it.

 

I use my second amendment rights waaaay more than I vote.

I don't think it's dumb. It's a constitutional right, government has put up barriers and infringements on people who want to exercise that right. Plain. And. Simple.

 

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
So....how often do you militia? Been doing a lot of tyranny defense over there recently? Or do you just mean "I carry around a gun/have one in a safe somewhere."...because one of those is exercising a right, the other is just owning a thing. And if you think that right is universal, tell me how much fun it is carrying a gun into a church/mall/school, or how it works for you the next time you have an encounter with law enforcement, and how respectful they all seem to be about you exercising your right.

There are few elements of public life more mythologized and frankly chock full of bullshit than the 2nd Amendment, and I outright despise the fucking nonsense regulations around gun purchasing, owning, carrying, etc.

It's this basic premise of opt-in vs. opt-out. Voting is one of the few universal rights all citizens should exercise. Gun ownership isn't: lots of us see no need to exercise that right. Driving isn't either. Hell, the only other universal I can think of is taxes, and you damned sure don't opt into paying them. That's an opt-out premise: it is assumed and the systems are structured in such a way that you will pay taxes, until you provide a valid excuse not to. So, why is voting not given the same approach?

What is the argument against voting again? No, we wouldn't want every citizen to vote, because that would mean....what?

If the argument is anything more substantial than "My side wouldn't have won the last one", I'm here for it.

 

BeCaUsE vOtEr FrAuD, DoWnNdIRty!

 

We're in a golden age of fraud detection thanks to a confluence of big data, AI, fiscal transparency, best practice sharing across industries and sophistication of fraud detection techniques bypassing a lot of fraudulent actors. I know, because I worked on some of this that helped us identify a bunch of it, and was blown away at how advanced some of this is.

So.....you ever wonder where the evidence is for any of this? Or like...how hard it is to find, considering it apparently hit dozens of states? f

Because I wonder. I wonder a lot.

 

Hey, do y'all think they would be trying to pass all these voting laws if Trump won instead?

 

They've been trying to pass these kinds of laws since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Trump's "stop the steal" bullshit just lit a fire under their ass because it both gave them a pretext and impetus to do it (you can't spend months claiming that an election was stolen and then just... not do anything, thus tacitly admitting you were full of shit the entire time).

 

Of course not. Yet, simply thinking that you and your neighbors would band together, protect one another in a time of great need, is as far as sane person ever hopes to have to take that particular constitutional right. We'd sure look like one silly band of merry men without those things that we simply own, as you put it.

 

Imagine the 2A arguments (or whatever the fuck it is) with the distinction that it's not guns or arms in question, but the right to disrupt a government action you deem as "tyranny". Because that interpretation is one that has a lot more weight, and is one that has been taken very seriously by the federal government.

You're getting hung up on the tools of this particular trade, and I think things would be very different if we treated the concept of a gun more abstractly and the consequences of using, brandishing or carrying one much more concretely.

Ie, if I can roll up with a crossbow or a Sikorsky helicopter and it doesn't make much difference....the gun isn't really operative.

And for the record, I think my neighbors and I would band together in a time of great need, because I've seen it happen doznes of times in my professional capacity. I've yet to see one of those "times of great need" that was made any less dramatic, severe or traumatic with the presence of someone with a gun. Just saying...most of the folks you'd be happy to see in times of a crisis aren't showing up armed, and it's not even close.

 

There's, what, 72,000,000 gun owners in the US and you don't think they, with very few exceptions, treat brandishing, using and carrying a gun concretely? It sounds cliche by now, but if legal gun owners were the problem, you'd know it.

There's a great many reasons to band together without arms. Thankfully, very few to do so otherwise. Are you trying to twist me into something I'm not, a militiaman, a far right extremist, because I think it is acceptable to do for voting what has been done to another constitutional right?

 

Not at all. I am a fan of regulating behavior, rather than the ownership, acquisition and transfer of a thing.

I think voting should be far easier than buying/owning/selling a gun. Because that is a facet of citizenship that should be universally exercised, whereas 2A is selective at best, and most of the time its exercised, it doesn't actually matter (ie, showing up with a crossbow instead), whereas voting pretty much always matters.

 

You either have more faith in the people that have streamed across the border illegally over the years, or you're indifferent. In my mind, I have no doubts that some of those people have tried to both acquire a gun and vote in an election.

You can't make something easy without degrading its security.

 

I have more faith in the people who's job it is to secure our elections, regardless and independent from political influence, telling us that they are secure, and that the results aren't nearly as compromised as the losing party would have you believe.

Dude, I've worked with illegal immigrants who have ZERO problems getting a gun, in much the same way they don't have any issues getting a shovel, a hair dryer or a credit card. What they tend not to do with those things....is break laws.

I've never encountered an illegal immigrant who had such a hard-on for democracy, they'd waste their time voting fraudulently. The immigrants (legal or otherwise) I know are imminently practical people, and I don't see a ton of practicality in committing fraud to vote, in much the same way the formerly incarcerated population isn't committing crimes to vote....not worth the risk, no payoff.

So, when you're swimming against the current, logically speaking, it helps if you have evidence...which no one seems to have.

I kind of love how illegal immigrants are the bogeyman nowadays, when that status is a result of an administrative decision, influenced by bureaucracy. When illegal immigration was at it's peak, it was the Bush administration failing to enforce tougher laws by making it harder for them to get a job. The cages we put kids into were built for Obama, yet are somehow a noose around Trump's neck? We can blame it all on the illegals, at most all 11 million of them, which is 3% of the US population, or about as many member s of the LGBT community when you subtract the L and the G. This is such a small group of people you can eclipse it by a including Q into the gang of folks who are changing their gender, or dumb enough to tell the government they are bisexual.

For frame of reference, you get more people viewing furry porn than immigrating illegally to the United States, and the vast majority of illegals are people that over-stayed a student or vacation visa, not the poor brown folks in the desert.

When they become legal, you know, with a stroke of a fucking pen, will they still be responsible for the unravelling of America? Are they still some evil cabal working to undermine democracy and destroy the fabric of our great, Christian nation? Surely they aren't as American as us native-borns, these newbies? Will we need a second, more specific term for the value of their citizenship....Or how about a number system, like 3/5?

Or should we keep them illegal forever, preserving the sanctity of our citizenry?

We've made paying taxes easy and secure. I fail to see how we couldn't do the same with voting, or why we shouldn't.

I also fail to see how a group of people illegally voting (again, with no evidence or alarm raised by people whose job involves professionally securing said elections) is an argument against universal voting, in much the same line of thought that people abusing their right to bear arms isn't an argument for curtailing those rights for the rest of us (and that's an argument with thousands of dead kids involved in it).

 

to add to this, those I know who are here illegally and have firearms, damn sure don’t wanna use them and then... have to go back home? Just like I don’t wanna use my CCW and deal with the fallout even if it is in completely justifiable self defense. But if the alternative is literally dying, then yeah I’m gonna use it and I’m sure they would too. But Jose isn’t crossing the border and getting a pistola just to go rob a bank.

Stated another way, they wanna follow all of the laws because they wanna make sure they stay here because the place they left was a lot worse living conditions. I’d be a lot more suspicious of someone who knows they can commit a crime and get released on bail back into suburbia.

 

Except for the fact that voter fraud has been investigated a gajillion times and every time is proven to be a non-issue.

 

And there's the you're a racist page of the playbook. I think Kubla called that shot about ten posts ago.