Plain Talk About Georgia
This morning on This Week on ABC the panel had a discussion about the canceling of the MLB All Star game, or rather the moving of the game away from Atlanta Georgia later this summer. The Republican leaning members of the panel, Chris Christie and a woman who had been in the Trump administration, tried to say that the recent Georgia voting law actually expanded voting procedures, so it is therefore unfair of Major League Baseball and others to say that the law was passed in order to suppress black votes.
Rahm Emmanuel was also on the panel and he is the one who put the correct light on the topic - Emmanuel said that if Trump had won the November election there wouldn't have been any changes made to the Georgia voting law. Of course Emmanuel is right.
Republicans control the Georgia legislature and the Georgia governorship, so no law is passed and signed in Georgia without the approval of the Republican Party. The Republican Party does not want more blacks to vote in Georgia, they want less to vote. They may not be sure that these new laws will result in fewer blacks voting in future elections, but it is certainly what they are hoping for. They also gave responsibility to oversee the elections to a new board that will be appointed by the state legislature, so as to make it more right leaning as long as the GOP holds the majority there .
The effect of the new Georgia voting law will not be specifically known until the next couple of elections occur, but the intent of the law is already known. The conservative Georgia legislature is not going to make it easier for people who want to vote for Warnock and Ossoff, and Stacey Abrams , to vote. Start with that obvious truth and it is easier to make sense of what is happening.
If Trump had won last November there would be no new voting law in Georgia . People who don't understand that probably deserve to have their all star game taken from them.
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When Rahm Emmanuel made his argument today ( if Trump had won the November election there wouldn't have been any changes made to the Georgia voting law), Christie didnt disagree on substance, he just said Joe Biden is a liar.
Christie could not disagree on substance.
The changes to Georgia's do not keep one single person from casting their vote
They just need to follow a few simple rules
Sure they don’t PREVENT anyone from voting but they make it a bigger pain in the ass with the obvious intent being so lower turnout especially in places like Atlanta. Maybe the law will do what the GOP intends, maybe it won’t. With any luck it will have the opposite effect and turnout will be higher specifically because certain people do t want to start turning the clock back 70 years.
If you (left wingers collectively) support fair and honest voting for ALL, then you should support photo ID's for all.
None of these changes restrict voting or make it harder for anyone to vote.
I'm not left, but I'm all for photo ID and proof of residency to vote. I need to present those where I vote now. It's just common sense and no big deal.
There is nothing wrong in general with the idea of requiring more id in order to vote.
There is something wrong when the purpose is to see if you can get more people from certain groups to not vote.
No one has ever proven or convincingly demonstrated that requiring photo id will prevent voter fraud. Signature checking ALREADY eliminates voter fraud, and Georgia has signature checking.
So why the craving for photo id? Because they either know or believe that a photo id voting law will decrease the number of Democratic voters.
The intention is wrong. That makes the law the wrong thing to do.
Not sure about proof of residency. What if someone is only 18 and lives at home or with friends and has no bills in their name or no lease.
I still say voting should have a national standard. We already have a national data base.
Having patchwork laws in different states is ridiculous. As we have seen in the past, some states cannot be trusted to be fair.
What was not fair and honest in the last election?
What do these new laws do to protect honesty?
Nothing...
Anything with their address listed would work, be it junk mail, Amazon package, college mail ads, ect.
That would make things so much easier and more efficient.
Photo ID seems like basic common sense to prove you are who you say you are and that you have voted.
Photo ID is just a basic requisite to vote. It shouldn't be the only one.
When a person registers to vote they sign their name which is then saved at the Election Board. When you vote, in person or by mail , the election workers check the signature when voting against the signature from the registration. Totally effective.
The idea that someone is going to convincingly forge hundreds or thousands of signatures is nonsense.
Good!
All you need is a photo ID and proof of address after registering. That should be quite effective.
How much training and expertise do you imagine the average poll worker has in evaluating handwriting to detect forgeries?
It’s a lot easier to fake a signature than it is to fake a state-issued ID card.
I'm sorry, this is nonsense. In order to successfully, aka convincingly, forge someone else's signature you would first of all have to have their signature in your possession, and then practice it CONSIDERABLY to be able to reproduce it on demand at the polling place. You think someone is going to put that sort of effort into stealing one vote? It borders on ridiculousness.
If someone did try to sign someone else's name on a ballot or a in person voting slip I guarantee you that in almost every single instance it would be EASY to detect the fraud, because no effort will have been made to make a good forgery, because it takes a lot of time.
What you need is honest poll workers who will actually check the signatures, that is all. The same thing would be true with photo id's.
You apparently dont understand that the reason Republicans want photo id is to disenfranchise certain voters.
The reason people want something matters.
That’s a good argument for doing away with any kind of remote voting, as much as possible.
Most of the poll workers I see are ancient humans with failing eyesight. You’re lucky if they even realize a human being is standing in front of them.
It’s just not accurate to imply that people haven’t been arguing about election procedures until just since November.
I'm not buying that! Photo ID's are a good idea. It's not difficult to get an ID either. Go to a voting poll, flash your ID, and you should be good to go.
When Republicans tell you they want voter id laws in order to disenfranchise Democrats, believe them
How are certain voters disenfranchised?
I think a better question would be...How are they helped...
A national standard for the purpose of containing the Covid virus would also have been so much easier and more efficient, and a hell of a lot more effective.
I don't think I have ever been able to sign my name the exact same way twice. Can anyone?
My signature is a scribble only I understand, but I can’t guarantee I could replicate it satisfactorily over and over. When you’re just starting out in life, you think it’s really important, but then you realize no one looks at that stuff. You can sign your checks “Abraham Lincoln” and the bank would still cash them.
And what is supposed to happen at a polling place? Is the retired lady working the table supposed to analyze signatures expertly and throw people out of line? That’s just never going to happen.
Your ID picture might not look exactly like you (people change weight and hairstyles, after all), but at least those cards are a lot harder to counterfeit.
This is ignorance or denial, probably mixed with the usual political agenda of getting everyone outraged over nothing.
The pandemic drove anxiety over elections far more than - and looonnng before - Trump lost in November. It was an issue in Georgia and many other states. And this came on top of debates that have been boiling for years about how best to run an election.
Anxiety over the election was entirely driven by Donald Trump via his followers.
He said the same damn things in 2016, the difference being because he won he didnt have to follow through on his threat not to accept the election result in '16.
That’s simply not true. I wish you guys would go back and look through the old news. Here are some headlines from liberal sources and commentators from before November. You could have done this without my help.
Georgia's pandemic primary was a disaster. Experts fear the state is still vulnerable to a repeat.
Georgia’s Failure Shows How Not to Run an Election in the Pandemic
Anatomy of an Election ‘Meltdown’ in Georgia
And those are just Georgia. There were similar stories in other states. And everywhere you might look, both liberals and conservatives were complaining.
Yep.
If some think all these bills were not fueled by unexpected Democrat wins and donald and his minions yelling and screaming about fraud, I got a bridge for sale.
Says Jim Kavanagh (R Arizona):
” Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues,” Kavanagh said to the outlet. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
The most unAmerican thing an elected official can say. If they thought the uninformed were equally inclined to vote R as D, they would never say this. They know how unpopular their brand is even to the unknowing.
I guess he means that a vote of quality is a vote for the GOP and otherwise it shouldn't qualify.