dyna mo

do you know how many blacks are NOT in az?

most of them.

Qbert

GOP controlled legislature tried to add a gov't issued photo ID requirement at the polls here in TX and the Fed court tossed it out.

kane

Yeah, they tried to pass similar laws in other states. Pennsylvania was one of them. Most of those laws either got thrown out or were frozen with an injunction pending legal action.

Dvae

Yes Really.
I know its hard to believe there are people who don't believe the steaming pile of sh*t this gang puts out. The nerve of some people!

The BC was real?
Now I'm the one ROTFLSHMSFOAIDMT

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Arguing with a troll is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig, after a couple of hours you realize the pig likes it.

_Richard_

aren't all these forms of jim crow laws?

Captain Kawaii

I've never had to show ID. Not in a long time. Just show the card I got in the mail confirming my polling place.

I no longer vote, its a total waste of time. Special interests own the gov and they are the only voices the gov hears. $$$$$$$$

My concerns were about the nefarious actions of activists within illegal immigrant communities.

I hope it works out well for everyone. Just, I think it is odd to not have to show proof of who you are and that you have a legal right to vote. You guys assume way too much when you think the feds can monitor this well. They are pretty incompetent.

kane

To me the local and state elections will have more impact on my life than the national elections. There can sometimes be ballot measures that can have a serious impact for better or worse on your life so to me, even if a person is fed up with national politics, they should vote for the local and state stuff.

Mutt

where are people seeing this apathy? i've never seen people so engaged with politics as they are today. this is a PORN INDUSTRY forum and it is filled with political threads and debates constantly and I see the same thing all over the Internet.

Voter turnout in the past two presidential elections was 57% which is historically very good.

Look at these numbers from 1932 to 1944 - the Great Depression and World War II, a period where people would be as politically aware and patriotic you'd assume, in simpler times where people had many less distractions.

1932 52.6%
1936 56.9%
1940 58.8%
1944 56.1%

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baddog

Really? Then what do you care? Your opinion means naught, let's hope some illegal steps up in your place.

_Richard_

don't you love people who go out of their way to tell you your opinion doesn't matter?

i do

Joe Obenberger

No, that shouldn't be 2013 - it looks like 1984 to me.

A master roster of citizens? That's one of the things Americans have been resisting and fighting since the beginning. But it's a losing battle. Though there is no federal law requiring registration with Social Security, it's damn well impossible to survive without it. But we're not quite there yet, and I'd not consider it progress to establish a master list of citizens in the hands of the government.

In former times, when I was a small child in Milwaukee, just before every election, a list of all the voters in the precinct was posted on lamposts on every block so that good voters could inform the election clerks about the death of registered voters, the possibility that noncitizens had registered to vote, etc. It worked pretty well in keeping elections honest in that squeaky-clean city and state. Nowadays, they keep the voter list restricted, at least in Illinois, and the public has no chance to help purge the voter list. They claim that's associated with privacy. But that roster is free to the Republican and Democrat committeemen. Funny how "privacy" can be trotted out when it's convenient to the pols and connected powers and ignored when it does not suit their purposes.

Should voting be restricted to citizens? Maybe, but in US history, it's gone back and forth. In Wisconsin, non US citizen residents were permitted to vote and hold public office till 1908. That's how the German Socialists took over Milwaukee City Hall from the Irish - and according to Wikipedia, 40 states permitted noncitizens to vote until an anti-immigration backlash in the first decades of the 20th Century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_o..._United_States That article notes a US Supreme Court opinion noting that citizenship was not necessarily required to vote, a decision from the 1870s. For sure, at least some of the people reading this post had ancestors who voted in US elections before they were US citizens. They did so legally and it should be noted that this was the greatest era of growth in the American economy.

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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964

DWB

kane

The apathy is in the numbers. 57% voter turnout is good? That is terrible. That means 43% of those eligible to vote either don't care enough or can't be bothered to take a few hours out of their day every few years to cast a ballot.

In my state we have a little higher than the national average. In the last election we had about 61% turnout. Here is the kicker. In my state we have vote by mail. They mail you the ballot. All you need to do is fill it out and put it back in the mail and you are done yet 40% of the people can't be bothered to do that.

_Richard_

or you have 43% 'not educated enough on the parties' to vote

or 43% feel that the government is a joke and there is no point, since both 'parties' have the same goals and ideals, and do the exact same things

Mutt

What kind of paranoia is that? What's wrong with a country's government knowing who is living in the country and who's a citizen? If people can hide from the government that means you can hide from paying taxes, you can hide from a military draft, you don't exist. I'm all for privacy but I don't consider the government knowing I exist as a threat to my privacy. When you DIE it is the law that a death certificate needs to be created. When you die your family can't keep it a secret and go bury you somewhere without informing some government authority.

Is it not a criminal offense to refuse to take part in the Census in the US? I think in Canada it is.

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Captain Kawaii

Very true.

Captain Kawaii

Anyone follow the most recent election for mayor in LA? Like choosing between a douchebag and a turd sandwich. Voter numbers barely hit double digits. We ended up with turd sandwich.

kane

I think the majority of those who don't vote are people who either just don't care or they feel like voting doesn't matter and it doesn't matter who gets elected. To me, if those people actually took a few minutes to do a little research and find a third party candidate that they liked and then voted for them, we would actually have a third party and there might be some change. But they don't do that. It is easier to sit and bitch than to stand and act.

_Richard_

yea that seems to be an international assumption

but then you get into how Romney made the primary and you're not so sure.

Mutt

I just showed you historical numbers, if you consider 57% to be apathy then people have been apathetic since the turn of the LAST century - the last time voter turnout in a presidential election was 70% or better was 1900.

And it's not all apathy when people don't vote - I bet 10% or more of non-voters are people with major problems - physically disabled, serious illness, mentally ill, fucked up in some way. Then there are the dumb and the lazy, not sure I'd consider them apathetic, they are ignorant, many of them voluntarily ignorant and proud of it. Then you have the people who don't vote because they feel not voting is their political statement.

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Mutt

Voter turnout in Canada is pretty much the same as the US.

Last two federal elections, 58% and 61% turnouts.

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Joe Obenberger

Mutt, are you perhaps a Canadian? If so, that might explain your disconnect from the political culture of the United States. The founders of Canada, at least anglo-Canada, had a much higher respect for King and Crown, for power and institutions that the founders of the United States. They fought for the crown and against the American rebels. Fully one-third of those then living in the colonies that became the United States fled to Canada to be with those who saw eye to eye with them that the government was to be trusted. Two thirds remained here, very mistrustful of government, and establishing legal mechanisms to keep the power of government in check. Because they - and we - largely do not trust our government. We don't trust it inasmuch as it always abuses the power it has. Read the Declaration of Independence.

Americans have traditionally opposed national ID and a roster of citizens. In those countries where those things existed, they have often notoriously been abused by tyrants.

There are a whole series of laws though that get close to such a roster. All live births must be registered. Immigration, at least on paper, is tightly recorded. Every male must register for the draft at 18. It is a crime, as you note, to fail to answer the questions of the census taker, though there is no affirmative obligation to get counted if they miss you. And everyone earning income over a certain minimum limit must file an income tax return. But, so far as I know, there is no law that makes it mandatory to obtain a Social Security number. In my lifetime, it was something we tended to do when we got our first job. Now, there is financial pressure on parents to register their children at birth in order to get an income tax deduction for their support. The circle slowly tightens.

But no, it's not paranoia to distrust the government. Such distrust is actually the keystone of the American political tradition and it's completely impossible to understand the Constitution or its Bill of Rights without recognizing this. Read the Federalist Papers, the seminal explanation of the American system which was written to obtain support for the ratification of our constitution in the Eighteenth Century. These articles, easily found online, are often cited by the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution. Mistrust of the power of government is evident on every page. Do all Americans mistrust the government? No. There has been a serious failure in our educational system to teach kids our cultural cynicism about the power of cops and legislatures and courts and much harm has been done by teachers who think that good citizenship means to do what the cops want you to do.

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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964

kane

While I don't doubt that some of these people are disabled, sick, injured or otherwise just unable to vote at the time of the election and others are mentally handicapped, I still think Apathy is one of the leading reasons for lack of voting.

Here is a list of voter turnout in many different countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout

Countries like Australia, Austria and Italy have 90% voter turn out or higher. I'm sure they have sick, mentally ill and otherwise injured/disabled people in those countries as well.

Turnout among registered voters hovers around 70-75% with the most recent presidential election numbers I can find being 2004 when 69% of registered voters actually voted. That is higher, but still makes me wonder why someone would go to the trouble of registering to vote then not actually vote.

kane

I'm not sure I understand what you mean in regards to Romney.

_Richard_

could have fooled the rest of us

it's impossible to find links due to the election, but the primary results/votes had a lot of votes 'not counted' for Ron Paul etc, and those areas were then labeled as 'wins' for romney

dyna mo

also as recent as 2005 with the real id act, stemming from the patriot act, that which americans said hell no.

Mutt

I understand American history and the roots of its political culture. Jefferson, Franklin and Washington are heroes of mine. I'm also mindful that they lived 250 years ago in very different times. They were all very reasonable men and were they to come back from the dead today I'm sure some of their thinking would change and they'd look at many of the far right conservatives who use their names to promote their political goals as utter morons.

I don't think Canada has a national roster/list of citizens other than the Census, so no different than the US and since 9/11 and its political aftermath in the US, Canadians enjoy more privacy than Americans.

And you're right, English Canadians began as American colonists in New England, fleeing the American Revolutionary War - they were called United Empire Loyalists.

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weewilly

Political Machines always have had the dead voting and is still not uncommon in some larger cities.
In the 1960 elections Daly held back the results from Chicago until all other results in and then he delivered enough votes to win Illinois. LBJ Congressional district had over 100% turn out.

Joe Obenberger

Posting now just to add something I wish I'd said above.

A whole series of laws exist precisely to compartmentalize information so that it's not used by the US government to assemble dangerous lists of citizens. For example, it is a federal crime for the data to be retained or compiled when a pre-gun purchase background chek is performed. The only person who could commit such a crime would be a government employee. Similarly, census data is confidential for a very long period of time and particularly identifying data cannot be accessed for decades to protect the privacy of the living. When I last looked into it, the "tracts" or raw data of the 1930 census was first being released, perhaps we're up to 1940 by now. These prohibitions are routinely inserted into US laws to reflect our (popular) adversity to a master government list. When names are taken for one purpose, like draft registration, it is usual that the law requires that this information be segregated.

This policy got some bashing and deformation after 911 because the law formerly required FBI records and CIA and NSA records to be segregated, and while I'm no expert, I think the Patriot Act facilitated data sharing among these agencies with Homeland Security. You can expect all of this to be looked at again closely in light of the Edward Snowden disclosures.

This is one of several important cultural differences between Americans and Canadians that tended to result in very different societies. Canadians are great collaborators while the American tradition impedes that with great value attached to rugged individualism. The whole gun issue turns here on what is seldom expressed; it's really not only about self defense from criminals and hunting, at least psychologically it's also about the power to fight tyranny if and when it emerges here. Canadians don't worry about tyranny as much as we do. But I'm always complimented when, in Canada, I'm taken to be a Canadian. When I've asked why, Canadians said that it was because I was well-spoken and nice. I take that as a compliment.

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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964

Mutt

Great quote I'd never read before from one of the American colonists turned Canadian/United Empire Loyalist.

As Daniel Bliss of Concord, Massachusetts (who later became a Chief Justice of New Brunswick) stated: "Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away."

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Joe Obenberger

Mutt - I like the wry humor of that quote.

But the Americans decided to put shackles and chains on those thousand tyrants down the road, and at least for a very long time, it worked - though those in our Southern States with a mind toward tradition and history would tell me that the American political order, as it was intended by the Framers, died a very painful death at the hands of Abraham Lincoln in 1861 and the Radical Republicans of Reconstruction after his death. That sure did shake up relations between the federal government and states' rights.

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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964

blackmonsters

Do you know what made big AZ Sheriff act like a buffoon?

It was one nigga who didn't live in AZ.

He won an election, a big one!

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baddog

Which makes your vote that much more powerful, but you decided to toss it aside.

It is apathy; no matter how long it has been going on.

That is hardly the same as illegal aliens showing up at the polls, is it?

Captain Kawaii

I would not have voted for either one. Both are despicable bought and paid for dung heaps.

Trust me there is a lot of voter fraud going on in the activist communities. At least in LA.
My old video editor and gaffer took me to a "voting party" once in Echo Park. Un-fucking believable.