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HR 1 urgently needs to pass through filibuster

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3% of Georgia voters reportedly currently lack that ID, disproportionately minorities.

However, the less discussed, and far bigger risk: The partisan State Election Board (and now republican-legislature controlled) board has been empowered to remove bipartisan county election boards and replace them with a single (republican-appointed) elections manager to oversee county elections - effectively at the whim of the legislature.

Imagine in 2020, as all of those republican legislators that were loudly claiming the election was stolen - having had the power to kick out the bipartisan county election board, and instead appoint a highly partisan career republican election manager to run all rules and management for collecting, processing, and counting of ballots (or not counting of ballots) in Atlanta.

I thought I read somewhere that they can now just arbitrarily call any election they don't like corrupt if they don't care for the result, and overrule said election.
 
my guess would be the secretary of state, as their office is responsible for running the election
Actually, the secretary of state was mostly removed from the election process with this law. The State Election Board runs elections - and the chair is now directly appointed by the (republican) legislature rather than being the elected secretary of state, who is now a non-voting member of the board.
 
I thought I read somewhere that they can now just arbitrarily call any election they don't like corrupt if they don't care for the result, and overrule said election.
That's Arizona, not Georgia ~ and it hasn't passed yet and would pretty clearly violate the constitution if it did pass.
 
I have an honest question. Do African Americans in Georgia have a hard time getting a state issued ID? That is the only part of the law that I do find racist. Isn't it a law where if you are too poor, you cam get a state issued license free of charge?

The problem with the “free” ID is that you still have to have enough supporting identification documents to get it.

If you were born in 30-50’s in the countryside with a midwife at home you may not have a birth certificate. If you got married out of state you may have to go to that state to get proof of your name change. None of that is free to fix.

In Texas the courts had plaintiffs who had spent months with their adult children helping & $100’s trying to get all the required documentation to get one of the “free IDs”.
 
The problem with the “free” ID is that you still have to have enough supporting identification documents to get it.

If you were born in 30-50’s in the countryside with a midwife at home you may not have a birth certificate. If you got married out of state you may have to go to that state to get proof of your name change. None of that is free to fix.

In Texas the courts had plaintiffs who had spent months with their adult children helping & $100’s trying to get all the required documentation to get one of the “free IDs”.
And you have to travel to said offices to submit those documents for ID. Which means you need time and transportation.
Time will be an opportunity cost for the working poor, on top of the financial cost of transportation (either from having a car or paying for services to get you there and back).
So the poor and/or elderly get punished in a variety of ways from voter ID laws.
 
The problem with the “free” ID is that you still have to have enough supporting identification documents to get it.

If you were born in 30-50’s in the countryside with a midwife at home you may not have a birth certificate. If you got married out of state you may have to go to that state to get proof of your name change. None of that is free to fix.

In Texas the courts had plaintiffs who had spent months with their adult children helping & $100’s trying to get all the required documentation to get one of the “free IDs”.
If the states are made 100% responsible for costs and effort to obtain those "free IDs" foe every eligible citizen then I'm ok with voter ID.
 
The problem with the “free” ID is that you still have to have enough supporting identification documents to get it.

If you were born in 30-50’s in the countryside with a midwife at home you may not have a birth certificate. If you got married out of state you may have to go to that state to get proof of your name change. None of that is free to fix.

In Texas the courts had plaintiffs who had spent months with their adult children helping & $100’s trying to get all the required documentation to get one of the “free IDs”.

The real issue though is that those local govts are corrupt. If those people were likely to vote the way that local officials wanted them to vote, their IDs would appear for free like magic. It's only because they're not likely to vote "the right way" that they're forced to jump through hoops and pay large amounts of money.
 
Poor GQPers


know they have a losing hand
A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

It's an overall excellent read, but man... the bolded portion of text just boils my blood.
 
What's that saying about republicans abandoning democracy before abandoning the party...?

The lengths these tools will go to suppress voters...instead of making some policy that might actually get people to vote for them...jeez...
 
It's an overall excellent read, but man... the bolded portion of text just boils my blood.
At least with Obama Care they made the effort to lie about it... Repeal and Replace. Now they dont even bother lying anymore. Its kinda freakish that they think they have that kind of power.... and maybe they do.
 
At least with Obama Care they made the effort to lie about it... Repeal and Replace. Now they dont even bother lying anymore. Its kinda freakish that they think they have that kind of power.... and maybe they do.

So far it looks like they do. Two of the filibuster holdouts haven’t budged. Starting to doubt we will see this pass.
 
At least with Obama Care they made the effort to lie about it... Repeal and Replace. Now they dont even bother lying anymore. Its kinda freakish that they think they have that kind of power.... and maybe they do.
I like how their reasoning was essentially ‘people really like this legislation because they think billionaires can buy off our government so we should immediately go buy off the government to stop it.’
 
At least with Obama Care they made the effort to lie about it... Repeal and Replace. Now they dont even bother lying anymore. Its kinda freakish that they think they have that kind of power.... and maybe they do.
It's desperation. If cornered enough, they will just drop all pretenses and do whatever it takes to keep grasp of what little power they have left. The results will justify the means, even if those means involve completely going AWOL and being brazen about acting in nothing but their own self-interest.
 
It's desperation. If cornered enough, they will just drop all pretenses and do whatever it takes to keep grasp of what little power they have left.
I wouldn't say they have only "little power"...they seem to have quite a bit unfortunately, otherwise this would be an easy pass.
 
So far it looks like they do. Two of the filibuster holdouts haven’t budged. Starting to doubt we will see this pass.
Well then, its game-over with what the legislative Republicans is pulling in different states, R will never lose another election again (if you can call it "election").
 
It's desperation. If cornered enough, they will just drop all pretenses and do whatever it takes to keep grasp of what little power they have left. The results will justify the means, even if those means involve completely going AWOL and being brazen about acting in nothing but their own self-interest.
It is not really. Trump changed everything. Trump came right out and said all the racist and hateful things they always hid before, he was obviously corrupt, openly abused his power for personal gain, and their voters LOVED HIM FOR IT.
It turns out that people that vote Republican already assumed that their politicians were dirty and voted for them anyway. To conservatives all that has changed is that their politicians are now acknowledging what the voters have always known.
 
It is not really. Trump changed everything. Trump came right out and said all the racist and hateful things they always hid before, he was obviously corrupt, openly abused his power for personal gain, and their voters LOVED HIM FOR IT.
It turns out that people that vote Republican already assumed that their politicians were dirty and voted for them anyway. To conservatives all that has changed is that their politicians are now acknowledging what the voters have always known.
And it's all good because Democrats are even more corrupt, so this corruption is needed to beat the even worse corruption.
 
Well then, its game-over with what the legislative Republicans is pulling in different states, R will never lose another election again (if you can call it "election").

I don’t want to be overly dramatic but yeah this will make winning more difficult. Rs will gerrymander the shit out of GA and AZ districts.
 
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