Since when have Democrats been passing laws to prevent old white people from voting?
They do this because they know that people who might or might not vote are much more likely than not to vote Democratic. Thus adding these people to the vote advantages themselves and disadvantages Republicans.
It is not as nasty as voter suppression, but it is no less a form of vote manipulation.
If you don't call this voting manipulation, what do you call it?
I agree that it is nicer than trying to disenfranchise people, but the intent is the same. And I believe that the people pushing the rule would be doing the opposite if that's what their poll data suggested would be effective. As evidence see the story I linked to above of somebody trying to disenfranchise Florida Republicans by calling them up and telling them that they were ineligible to vote.
However:
Increasing voter access is NOT ANTI-DEMOCRATIC.
Restricting voter access IS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC.
Which one are you accusing the Democrats of pursuing? Thus is the crux of this entire thread.
If the increase in early voting schedules (even assuming that there is an intent to manipulate on the part of one side) are favoring one side, it is easily neutralized by the other side by participating in the early voting with equal, if not more, enthusiasm.
On the other hand, the victims of voter suppression tactics have no easy recourse to counter these attempts.
Trying to disenfranchise people is wrong and should be outside the bounds of political activity, it's not 'the same' as trying to get your people to vote.
If they were taking up weapons and shooting up precincts likely to vote for the other guy, would 'the intent be the same'? I mean, they're just trying to win the election.
Granted, I don't think that the US gov't is an example of a system in which we are achieving wild successes and are therefore wanting to keep certain people in office :-)
/sarcasm
Stop with the class-warfare nonsense.
http://blog.luxehotels.com/2012/10/30/luxe-sunset-boulevard-...
Did I mention you need to be voting in Bel-Air to take advantage of this offer?
Yep, it's all pretty much the same everywhere. Let's drop that class-warfare nonsense.
I don’t get US voting. Why don’t you do it on a Sunday, like much of Europe? 12 hours, fine, but on a day when most people have to work. When you add in commute times and all that there has to be little time for many people to vote and you basically have to plan your day around it. If voting is on a Sunday you might even spontaneously decide to take a lazy Sunday stroll to the voting booth. (But then again, you have to register beforehand in many states, which also seems pretty crazy to me.)
Add the long lines (Seriously, what‘s even going on with that? Germany has a much higher voter turnout than the US – 74% vs 49% during the last federal election – and I have never seen any lines. The most I ever had to wait were two or three minutes, and I also haven’t ever seen media reports about long lines.
It seems to me that trying to make voting easier is very much the right thing to do in the US while making it harder is not.
However, I do not believe in any grand or small conspiracy theories and I don’t think there is any kind of large scale manipulation going on. It just all seems dysfunctional, not manipulated. When comparing it to German elections, why does it seem that politicians have so much control over it? They don’t seem to be shy to make politics with how voting is implemented – which is a total taboo in Germany†, no politician would ever dare to give off the impression that they are trying to change how the election is run in order to favor their party. Much of the organization is handed off to independent experts who take most of the decisions.
It’s not that hard. There are many Europeans countries where voting is just not a big deal and where there are never big issues like in the US. You are the oldest democracy in the World, shouldn’t you have figured out that stuff by now?
—
† There is one recent exception to this. The federal voting law was declared unconstitutional two times in a row from the constitutional court during the last years.
The way federal elections work is that it’s basically proportional representation – i.e. people vote for parties, any party with more than five percent gets the percentage of seats they won – but there are also direct candidates in every district, insuring that everyone has her or his candidate they can write to. Those direct candidates are elected using first past the post, but they are at least supposed to be inconsequential to the percentage of seats a party gets. If there aren’t enough direct candidates to fill the seats a party got, those seats are filled from a per-state party list of candidates.
However, what happens when a party has more direct candidates than they have seats? Before the constitutional court struck that down those “overhang mandates” were just added without changing anything else, basically skewing with the percentages. A party which got 50 seats might suddenly get 60 seats without other parties (without overhang mandates) also getting more seats.
In the last election this has favored conservatives, but taking this to the constitutional court was successful. The court gave the parliament time to change the law. What was unique and unprecedented, however (and a rare case of German politicians making politics with how voting works) was that the current conservative government decided unilaterally on a solution – instead of by working together, as had been tradition. However, that solution was also struck down (with constitutional judges showing pretty open dismay that the parliament was seemingly unable to solve this problem in the long time allotet and worried about the fact that an election is coming up in 2013) – leading the conservative government to this time around try and find a consensus solution. So it all was back to the tradition of not just changing election laws unilaterally without at least talking to the biggest opposition party and trying to find a solution both can agree on.
What will happen now is that parties without overhang mandates will get more seats to balance those overhang mandates of other parties, thus not skewing the percentages. I’m personally still not a fan of this solution – the parliament is already to big and now it will grow further – but it should be constitutional.
Stop with the naive "we're all in this boat together" bullshit.
More people voting == voter manipulation??!??
I would call that a MORE REPRESENTATIVE democracy.
It's the difference between persuasion and "get out the vote". Persuading voters to your point of view is more honorable, but "get out the vote" is often more cost effective.
Just what we need? Definitely.
I cannot think of a scenario where having more people in a representative sample would be worse than having less.
It is well-known that the subset of the population that goes to the polls is NOT representative of the country as a whole. That is why pollsters are so careful to get polls of "likely voters". Because Republicans tend to be more motivated to vote than Democrats, so if they just took a poll of everyone they called, the results would always be strongly skewed Democrat.
(Getting this right is very tricky, and different methodologies around it is one reason that different pollsters often have a consistent difference in the polls that they produce.)
It looks good if have there are a lot of people participating but you have not gained anything if those that voted did not have the slightest of interest in it.
Even the well-informed can end up thinking "my vote doesn't matter anyway, so why bother." And rationally, they are not exactly wrong. Yet, the system would break down if everyone took that view. People need to be encouraged to vote, even though they may see it as a waste of time, because in aggregate their votes are important.
"As" nasty? Nice wording. There isn't a shred of nastiness in it at all.
As for making voting easier, Republicans see it as cynically making fraud easier in the name of getting uninformed people who don't pay attention to vote for you. If you see it as Republicans see it, what the Democrats are doing is not exactly nice behavior.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/09/26/obama-accus...
Besides the responses nearby taking you to task for the sophistry of your last sentence, I feel like it's worth highlighting the very real history of vote suppression in the South under Jim Crow. That's decades of violence, physical intimidation, bogus literacy tests, and a host of other tactics, directed at suppressing the vote of blacks and the poor. At every step of the way, these shameful tactics were justified as some kind of proxy for "intelligence" (and some other "wise" comments here repeat that justification).
Working to increase access to the vote is, in a very real sense, a continuing rejection of these disgusting tactics.
This is why I used the term "ignorant" above. It is as if you do not understand and appreciate the significance of this history. This is not a simple Democrat/Republican issue. Increasing access to the vote is an attempt to remedy, in an imperfect way, the biggest failing of American democracy.
I actually am quite aware of that history. I am also aware that of dozens of efforts in the last several years to change voting rules, every Republican effort has been to make it harder in the name of reducing fraud, while every Democratic effort has been to make it easier in the name of improving access.
It may not be a simple Democrat/Republican issue, but at this point it is definitely a highly partisan Democrat/Republican issue.
Complaining that it's dishonest and wrong is like the joke about "reality having a well known liberal bias"