Comment by tristan957 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristan957 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm not sure how you can call disenfranchisement activist wordplay. It makes me not even want to engage with you.

Just because someone didn't vote doesn't immediately mean the reason was disenfranchisement.

Given you live in Maryland, how can you claim voting is easy in the the entire US? Are you familiar with voting laws in every state and how elections can be weaponized by the state governments against certain populations?

Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.

I think you are taking your lived experiences and applying it to everyone. Are you elderly, disabled, a single parent, or are you living in poverty? Do you have immediate access to your birth certificate or a passport? Do you have a government ID at all? Do you have access to transportation? All these factors play into how easy it is for someone to vote.

> I'm not sure how you can call disenfranchisement activist wordplay. It makes me not even want to engage with you.

"Disenfranchisement" means legally or physically people from voting. Activists repurposed that term to attack any sort of rules and regulations around voting, with the specific purpose of making Voter ID seem akin to laws requiring a grandfather eligible to vote. The whole point is to muddle the facts rather than clarify them.

> Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.

No, voting is a civic ritual and should be treated with an appropriate level of solemnity to engender trust in the voting system. Look at how Taiwan counts votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUZa7qIGAdo. What's the purpose of the ritual? Surely a machine could count all the votes easily. But that's not the point. The point is to have a public exercise that people can see and easily understand, to build civic trust.

If you cannot vote because you have no way to prove who you are or cannot get to a polling location, that is a de-facto lack of a right to vote, otherwise knows as disenfranchisement. If you can own guns but not buy ammo, you also would not have a second amendment right.

I don't even know what you're going into with the civic ritual portion of the comment. You originally said voting in the US is easy, which I countered, and you seemingly did not respond to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com