Do We Let Them Vote Next Time?

Once Charm City Jimmy (I forgot who to credit for this nick, but it isn't mine) splits this site, you won't have that problem anymore...

 

At one point I had hopes that this forum wouldn't play a political version of Smear the Queer*, but I guess that ship has sailed long ago.

* -- ******** you, anyone over 35 knows what that means

P.S. "Charm City Jimmy" is mine.

 

Ever get your change back from the bro at the convenience store and it smells like incense?

You could try to contact ITN, The Guardian and Jumpin Jack Flash. Them returning would help balance out the leanings.

I'm over 35, I know what it means, no biggie. We played it in elementary school.

Props on the nick.

 

I think every red-blooded 'murican kid did.

 

All of this. I get the thread is theoretical, but some of the places it was going was ridiculous.

@American Brummie

We went from disenfranchising Trumpsters to youth vote, to what about emancipated minors...don't all 30k of them deserve a vote. Some of this stuff needs a little internal vetting before we dump it on here. Letting 14-17 year olds vote is one of them. What I'd do with that if I were the GOP:

1)Make the test difficult enough to weed out those without minimum literacy. That skews things white. And white people aged 18-29 voted Trump.

2) Create an ambiguously phrased multiple choice test that will lead people who black/white, simplistic thinking to the "right" answer while introducing enough ambiguity for deeper thinkers. Like high school health tests written by meathead gym teachers and DMV tests. The kind of questions where people with relativistic thinking skills say, "This is poorly phrased. It could be X or Y under certain circumstances. It really depends. Am I overthinking this?"

3) Use polling locations and lack of teen mobility in your favor. Moderately red Missouri has zero polling places in urban public high schools. They're in libraries, elementary schools, private schools. Not in "scary places" where brown teens hang out. In lower density suburbs and rural areas, they are in high schools. Sometimes because the high school is the only building big enough in smaller towns. You can pull the "right" teens by placing polls down the hall from their classes. A kid getting bused 90 minutes as part of a deseg program won't be able to vote anyway.

4) You know who can get kids to polls if they aren't in their schools? People with access to buses and a chauffeur license who can go to a HS and drop off groups of kids they know at 4-5 polling areas. People like evangelical pastors. They wouldn't tell kids who go to their church who to vote for mind you. That would be between those kids and Jesus. Vote their conscience (wink).
5) A "non-partisan" group could post guides questions that youth group leaders would just happen to spend time on with their kids...so everyone could be a "Good Patriot"because God would want that.

Restricting voting or qualified expansion of voting isn't the way to fix this...because the tools to accomplish either can be used just as easily by the other side to achieve precisely the opposite. Reducing barriers for those of legal age is the only way to "fix" this.

 

Uh, what?

 

Variations of these are, sure. The problem is that you continue to propose solutions without assessing if they are going to address the solution. If you open up the vote to "well informed, qualified" citizens age 14-17, they aren't going to vote against people like Trump.

It's much easier to suppress the vote of non-GOP voters at this age than any other age. The GOP could engineer/rig literacy/qualification tests That doesn't exist today. Locating polling places where you know that students can't be by law is a lot more effective than simply reducing the number of polling places.

So really, what you're proposing would introduce a series of problems that would be far worse than what we see today.

 

The problem is that your posts lack any sort of coherence. Your comparisons between Trump voters, whom you seek to disenfranchise, and other groups of people are tenuous at best.

Disenfranchising Trump voters on the basis of temporary restrictions on CSA participants is false equivalence. CSA voters actively committed Treason. If Trump attempts to re-write a Constitution through force later in his first term and he gets re-elected to continue the effort in term 2, I would have no problem with temporary voting restrictions...assuming we could actually ID Trump voters. That's not where we are.

As for extending the right to vote to younger people...you don't really adequately indicate your motive here. On its face, maybe you really do believe that the age limit is arbitrary. If that's the case, then I really wish you could draw some inferences from what I've ****ing written. It is too damn easy to categorically suppress certain categories of <18 voters to reach a desired partisan outcome. Much easier than it is to do so with any other group. This will lead to less democratic outcomes. Is this clear enough for you?

The other inference we can draw from this is that you are seeking to counterbalance the influence of older voters. You have blamed older voters for portions of this mess in other threads. Therefore, extending suffrage to younger groups, who typically vote very differently than older voters, would adequately diversify the electorate. Except it won't. Above.

More generally, you're trying to draw people into discussions re: qualifying suffrage. If you're too dumb to see through Trump, or simply don't care, then maybe you shouldn't vote. If you're young and informed, why shouldn't you vote? Why 18? Hey, maybe we can take away voting rights from older citizens, or test people for literacy before granting suffrage, or tie voting to taxpayer status. You haven't specifically mentioned all of these things, but what little sense you've used could be applied to all sorts of scenarios. If someone has no concept of scientific reasoning and believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, maybe we should strip them of their voting rights. Then again, I don't believe (or disbelieve) in a god/gods. Other groups I'm sure would love to strip me of my voting rights. Or others because they happen to be libertarian or communist. And that's why we don't attach conditions to voting.

 

You're going to have to look a while to find libertarians willing to take positive action to disenfranchise just about any group (except purely rhetorically in a fit of frustration). Note that this is a different action than a positive action to extend the franchise to some arbitrary group, where you will undoubtedly find as many opinions as people.

 

Reported!

 

Having access to accurate, factual information would be helpful, too.

 

But I do recall in 2016 some Republican dickhead legislators in AL or NC requiring all kinds of gyrations for college kids to vote. It's what they do best.

 

Go back and read what I said. Seceding from the country and aiding in a war is obviously treason. Voting for Trump in 2016 is not. Because even if he and his administration were guilty of treason, this would not be known to voters as of 2016. Now lets assume we do know this in 2018 and he is booted from office. If people still support Trump, who isn't on the ballot in 2020, is it treason? Kind of. Except he isn't on the ballot. How would we know who supports him? They aren't taking up arms against the country. They aren't mounting an insurrection. So how do you propose disenfranchisement even for those who support him after the fact? Theoretically, we could extend this to Michigan militia types who are at least sympathetic to the Timothy McVey's of the world, could we not?

You've responded, but you haven't adequately addressed considerations that are unique to citizens who aren't of the age of legal majority. Many are of the age in which school is compulsory. This means that on election day, we know exactly where they are. They are at school. In urban settings, this means that they aren't near their polling place. 400+ polling places in St Louis city/county that serve non-white communities. No polling in high schools. Not one. And 13-15 year olds can't even hold a drivers license. Exactly zero of them can show up to work 2 hours late/leave early to vote and they often go to HSs far from where they actually live. States like NC, MI, etc can suppress the hell out of people in these scenarios. Go to a rural community where high schools are full of FFA kids, and you can literally find polling places within the HS. This is literally the most accessible place you could put a polling place for any category of voter. I'm not saying kids would be manipulated. What I am saying is that it is very easy to alter the composition of who votes. Because they have less time on their hands than seniors and are less mobile than any other demo by far. It you were a GOP leg setting rules for voting, it would be very easy to pull 80% turnout for a bunch of farm kids and probably 20-25% for the urban set. A far wider discrepancy than we have between demos of any other age group.

If you're capable of following this to its logical conclusion, then you'd see how this is a dumb idea ripe for manipulation. If I look at an actuarial table to weight votes, then a black person's vote is worth less than a white person's vote, and man's less than a woman's and an older person's less than a younger person's. The latter in each case is expected to live longer than the former. I guess Medicare reform would be easy though, no? Basically, we'd be the opposite of Florida politically: screw all the old people.

One thing I wouldn't mind is seeing votes compiled/weighed differently for the House and Senate. Senate seats votes scaled to 25% for each of 4 groups: young workers (18-45), older workers (45-65), older/retirees (over 65). House seat votes on some type of future life expectancy...age only...not by race or sex. So for example, in SD, you'd have exactly the same people voting for both in a given election, but they're effectively two different electorates due to weighting. One chamber would skew towards future-oriented goals of the youth while the other chamber would be able to resist some of that by being more evenly distributed across ages.

I'm in favor of auto-enrollment for voter registration, a national holiday to vote, and ending the ban on felons. Basically anything to reduce vote barriers for people who are legally adults. All of these things are realistic, at least in steps. 12 year olds voting or someone who isn't a citizen? What for. Speaking of citizens, something I noticed amongst my dual national friends this last cycle was that they were the ones more inclined to go Bernie or Bust. Their reasoning is that they are Americans, we need to roll the dice, but hey, if it doesn't work out and Trump really does create a catastrophic domestic scenario, they can head back to France or Australia. I have kids and older parents here. I'm a citizen of one country. The stakes are a bit higher for me. I've got more skin in the game. And poor minorities have even more skin in the game than me. Since you're floating around crazy ideas, maybe that should be the consideration.

 

Kennedy or Thomas could go next.

It would not be a shift, but would solidify a conservative tilt for the court.

This is a clear reason on why conservatives could vote for the conman, Republicans understand way better the importance of the SC than Democrats IMO.

 

Yeah, that's why Trump carried the Pharisee vote, because all those single-issue alleged "Christians" who only care about overturning Roe v. Wade don't mind if we literally go to hell in a handbasket, as long as they nominate some knuckle-dragging neanderthal who can bring us back to the 1950s when those colored people and wimming knew their place and didn't get too uppity.

 

You are probably going to be very disappointed.