North Carolina Voting Law Targeted African-Americans “With Surgical Precision” | Hacker News Reader

North Carolina Voting Law Targeted African-Americans “With Surgical Precision”

motherjones.com

51 pointscurtis24 comments

What's amazing to me is that people who bill themselves as "protectors of our liberty" have the audacity to blatantly subvert the democratic process that they claim to hold dear. Changing the voting rules to remove the ability of people to vote, it's madness. I find it repugnant. We (the US) should guard the right to vote for all people by making voting days mandatory time off. We should also relax the voting ID laws. Fraud has never been an issue, NEVER.

Maybe also remove the need for voter's registration? In other words, everyone eligible to vote should be automatically registered...

Come to think of it, when you're issued a state ID/driver's licence, that should also be considered your registration to vote, provided you've reached voting age.

That should eliminate another thing you need to register for.

> Come to think of it, when you're issued a state ID/driver's licence, that should also be considered your registration to vote, provided you've reached voting age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Voter_Registration_Ac...

"Section 5 requires state motor vehicle offices to provide voter registration opportunities to anyone applying for a new or renewed driver's license or state identification card."

Not the same thing.

My idea is this: When you're get a state issued ID, no need to fill out another form. You ID may be tagged with something that lets officials know whether you're a citizen or not.

And you shouldn't have to declare a party, or at least forced to.

In NC when you get an ID or a license it is mandatory for them to ask 2 questions: would you like to register to vote? Register for which party? Unfortunately how the party system works, you can't just merely auto register to vote...as we seen this year in the democratic primaries you must register as a democratic in order to vote democratic in their primary.

That's a closed primary, but not all states have them.

That is another thing Oregon just did, they call it the "motor voter" law. Do your business at the DMV, you're automatically registered to vote.

Of course the usual suspects came out to decry how this'll let more poors and minorities vote, but then, don't they always come up with reasons why those people shouldn't vote?

There is a tradition, thousands of years old, of the rich and powerful not wanting the common man to vote.

Yep, it's a continuation of slavery -> Jim Crow ->

>voting days mandatory time off.

Think about that for a minute. If it were a full mandatory day off, then basically no retail could possibly be open. And people who are paid hourly are often those who can't afford to take a day off at all. Maybe a mandatory paid two hours?

Making it trivial to vote by mail, on the other hand, means that people can vote whenever. Like they do in Colorado: Universal vote-by-mail packages are sent to every registered voter. [1]

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/colorado-all-mail-e...

Here in Argentina we vote on Sunday, so most of the people have a free day anyway.

In Brazil too. We also have mandatory voting (not defending this idea here, just stating)

You know, some small cities in Europe (thinking of Germany) shut down for "quiet time" after lunch. Guess what happens? Nothing bad, life goes on. You know what would happen in America, we couldn't buy stuff for an hour or two. You know what else would happen? The voices of the people that make this country run would be heard.

Make it half days for two days. You can easily identify "critical" services like medical/fire/police and stagger them or have early voting. Things like this work, and they work well. Doesn't matter how long, two hours would likely be fine. I've had problems getting to vote in that amount of time. I've waited in a line at a Texas polling station for more than that (which is why I said a day).

These voting laws are only half the problem. Maybe via mail would fix the issue. I doubt people who decry "voter fraud" would trust mail-in ballots.

>we couldn't buy stuff for an hour or two

To be clear I'm not saying a two hour shut-down would be bad. Just that vote-by-mail would be better because it would allow anyone, on any schedule, to vote, and it wouldn't require hourly employees to lose money in order to vote.

Not everyone works within an hour of their voting location, so a two hour shut-down wouldn't help them at all -- and as you point out, bad lines can mean two hours isn't enough, period.

>I doubt people who decry "voter fraud" would trust mail-in ballots.

Well, I agree, but only because they don't really give a crap about voter fraud; the difference in NC was only that they ended up being proven to be changing the rules to limit black voters. I just heard today that reports of actual voter fraud are not even as common as reports of alien abduction; no one in government actually believes these rules are about fraud, or they're idiots. Some are just better at hiding their racist and anti-Democratic-voter motivations.

In any event, Colorado is one of (at least) three states sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters, so it's something that can be done.

Mail-in ballots are wonderful. They have them in Oregon (I used to live there), it's great:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon

And fraud is negligible (tl;dr, 13 cases of confirmed voter fraud since 2000):

http://www.ktvz.com/news/early-look-how-prevalent-is-voter-f...

While some things in some cities "shutdown" the entire city dies not. People will work during that quiet time.

What's even more amazing is how many are willing to discuss their motives openly[1].

I say we trade in Columbus Day for a national voting holiday, and if lawmakers want IDs then we should give every eligible voter a free one.

[1] http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/24/voter-discrimination/

You can read the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case that struck down the preclearance part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...

Under that rule, the federal government had the power to prevent changes to voting rules.

To me, the most interesting part of the oral arguments was this exchange:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: General, is it -- is it the government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?

GENERAL VERRILLI: It is not

As bad as this looks, what are the black lawmakers in NC doing? What's the democratic leadership in the NC congress doing?

Don't they know how to put up a fight?

> the black lawmakers in NC

There are none. The system has been rigged against them for so long that they have zero representation even though they're a decent portion of the population.

See: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/NC#representatives

There's not a single non-white member of NC's representation.

NC is also one of the most gerrymandered states there is, so it's almost impossible for change to happen.

Also, there's hardly any democratic representation, again due to historical gerrymandering.

Please don't accuse those that are being oppressed while not being present. It's bad enough they're getting screwed over, it doesn't help for someone who doesn't understand the situation to accuse them for "letting it happen".

That was a reference to local elected officials in NC, not NC's reps in the US congress.

You linked to the US congress and US senate instead of the NC house of representatives and senate.

http://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/members/memberList.pl?sChambe...

There are 10 black senators and 20 representatives, by my count, out of 50 and 120, respectively.

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