I am beginning to become scared that Romney/Ryan will win. Can smart people please post here and say reassuring things to convince me that he won't?

Not anxious about general election. Somewhat anxious about MN marriage amendment vote, as it's dead even now (and I want this one to buck the trend of oops, surprise, +7 in favor of gay marriage ban on election day compared to polls).

― Bobby Ken Doll (Eric H.), Wednesday, October 24, 2012 2:54 PM (30 minutes ago)

the thing that is making me optimistic is that thx to very smart laws in mn, it has to pass the 50% mark on affirmative votes to become an amendment - so anyone who doesn't vote either way counts against it passing. so when you see a 47% to 47% split (which is what I last saw), that still means it doesn't pass, over half the total cast mn ballots have to have a yes vote indicated.

in other words, 47% vote yes, 47% vote no, 6% get confused and just chew on the corner of the ballot for a while and dont mark anything - amendment defeated 53% to 47%

same thing wrt that idiot voter id thing.

gah both of those have me in sort of a tizzy. my gf has been door knocking for the voter ID amendment. we're both pessimistic. i have myself totally convinced that enough ppl not knowing about it will get the fucking thing passed, because even though it's an insane law, on the surface it looks like something anyone would support. "huh, bring an ID to vote, makes sense" *check yes, forget* and i kinda think it's a bigger deal than the marriage amendment in that the idiot ID amendment just makes it easier to tip votes toward more hurtful idiot laws and BLURGH

47% is still too much support imo. Amendments to the constitution should require fucking 75% of the popular vote or more.

Apparently there's going to be a press conference today about how the Voter ID law would also negatively affect, among all other victimized people, domestic violence survivors.

oh eric, i agree, the fact that either of these amendments even have a chance of passing in mn is a huge embarrassment and a total disgrace (although like arby's says, the voter ID one is succeeding mostly due to dumb as fuck inattentive people)

though voter ID laws unfairly target primarily low income and minority voters (who are heavily correlated with voting Democratic), i think that people's experience of attaining a photo ID are generally so mundane (almost everyone DOES have an ID who will be voting on these measures) that it's hard to make the case that it's truly unfair. hopefully this will never become relevant to MN, but in PA where our voter ID law was merely deferred and not actually defeated, progressive activists need to concentrate on making sure IDs are readily available to everyone. i know they were working on making them available in places like nursing homes, assisted living facilities, colleges, etc before the law was postponed. voter ID laws are going to become a reality for a lot of states, i think, but there's no reason they need to disenfranchise voters w/ enough preparation. there's nothing inherently impossible about making sure everyone has an ID afaik??

the voter id law is going to cost us a shit ton of pointless money in a state that has no measurable history of voter id fraud though

If states didn't charge for voter IDs or the acquiring of one wasn't so tedious then, sure, I'd support them 100 percent.

For the record, until I learned the difficulty if not impossibility of a poor person getting an ID, I used to wonder "why the fuss?" too.

I think a lot of people find it hard to fathom that not everyone has a driver's license in their pocket

it's sorta a bubble thing - if everyone you know always has an id on them, why would it be a problem?

I think the point also is that there are valid reasons for some people to not want to be easy to find.

in 2004, 2,800,000 people voted in the mn election, and despite many more cases being brought, only 14 fraudulent votes were found.

AND THEY WERE ALL FOR DEMOCRATS ... oh wait, and Lizard People.

We also haven't done enough to combat the "Voting isn't a right, it's privilege" chant. Many people don't understand the relationship between citizenhood and voting; the burden is on the government to explain the circumstances in which you can vote.

most of the voter fraud that goes on in america is @ poorly monitored rural districts ie republicans are p cool with it

actually this is prob the best summation of why the voter id amendment in mn is particularly stupid: http://www.lwvmn.org/page.aspx?pid=777

I don't have MN state ID (don't drive or live there) and have to do the Russian roulette of using a passport as identification if I'm out drinking in the Twin Cities. Some places don't accept them, but I don't know why that is.

yeah that was basically why I got a driver's license. I think someone's manager just says 'no passports' prob because people aren't gonna know what a nigerian passport looks like and then they just follow the rule across the board.

Can't everyone just wait for the chip implant is my point.

iatee probably otm, but shit, take an american passport goddammit, this is america!!!!!

this is america, if you want to drink you better be able to drive home

I am pretty sure I told this story before but I had a gas station cashier in Portland, OR, reject my passport as valid ID to buy beer; I incredulously asked her why a valid US passport wasn't good enough to purchase a six-pack, then waved over a friend with an unexpired driver's license, gave him my money, had him buy it, picked up the six-pack and stormed out muttering about how asinine it was that a federally-issued ID was not recognized in America.

gallup lv romney lead to 3, also

http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Job-Approval.aspx

53/42 is ridiculous - obama's got his best approval rating in 2 years and is gonna lose? what a strange polling firm

anyone who has a passport is prob a high-falutin elitist anyway

since when have upstanding American citizens recognized the federal government?

xpost

we were probably all decked out in H-bomb gear, too

I had a gas station cashier in Portland, OR, reject my passport as valid ID to buy beer; I incredulously asked her why a valid US passport wasn't good enough to purchase a six-pack, then waved over a friend with an unexpired driver's license, gave him my money, had him buy it, picked up the six-pack and stormed out muttering about how asinine it was that a federally-issued ID was not recognized in America.

had a similar thing happen at a bar in Cleveland. except that instead of giving them our money in the end, we cancelled our food order and went somewhere that recognized Canadian passports.

we were desperate for beer by that point; we had rounds of asshole to play

you are lucky there isnt another you to comment on that post

strongo is slipping, I guess

(almost everyone DOES have an ID who will be voting on these measures) that it's hard to make the case that it's truly unfair.

Voter disenfranchisement is ALWAYS unfair, Mordy.

So after months of driving people to state offices to get IDs, enduring long lines at motor vehicle departments, and looking for elusive paperwork

http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/07/latino-voter-registration-efforts-running-out-of-time-in-pennsylvania/

getting everyone ids in PA is not so easy either Mordy

Did either of you actually read my post???

yes and it was self contradictory

what do you mean by "mundane"?

the key to unlocking the contradiction is not the word mundane but the words "hard to make the case."

well the case that should be made is "this will cost a ton of money to fix a problem that does not exist, unless your version of the problem is too many poor people voting."

yes. in it you seemed to accept that, because your experience of obtaining ID was relatively simple and not very burdensome, that there is no particular problem with placing this burden on everyone FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON!

Pardon my french, but this is a stupid and lazy approach to this issue, for the same reason that it is stupid and lazy when some whitebread middle class person says, "why should anyone object to having the police wiretap them whenever they want to, if they have nothing to hide" and forgetting that perhaps the experience of non-whitebread, non-middle class people with the police might be, shall we say, a tad bit different than their own.

Voting is a right, not a privilege, and putting undue obstacles between citizens and their rights is wrong. Period. No justifications. No rationalizations. No excuses. No special pleading.

A couple years ago my passport expired a few days after moving back to the states and for about a week I was using an expired license and a notarized copy of my birth certificate to buy beer.

This is such an evil ad, but I sickly admire its inaccurate insidiousness:

http://i1.nyt.com/images/2012/10/24/us/MESSAGE1/MESSAGE1-hpMedium-v2.jpg

it's a little too crass to appeal to anyone who isn't already a hardcore republican. would be a better ad w/o that picture.

xps Any time someone has challenged my passport as ID, I've bored them to death with how difficult it is to get one compared to state ID - plus Federal ID ought to be sacrosanct and if not in this bar, why? Nobody working at a bar has ever been able to answer this to my satisfaction, including my own sister. Back in the mists of time I was told the no-passports thing happens because of a hypothetical situation where an older sister with a DL gives younger sib her passport to use as fake ID, but that seems... convoluted. BTW if you did use a US passport as fake ID and got caught you/the holder are both in SRS TRBL.

it isn't hard to make the case, you made the case in that post. if it requires a bunch of specifically targeted outreach to get certain people the required ID to vote, that indicates a barrier to voting with a disparate impact

xp

that billboard ad, to the extent it is meant to do anything but gratify the nasty urges of the people who paid for it, is meant to mobilize the people on the sidelines who think politics are pure crap, by igniting some sort of anti-obama emotions strong enough to get them to vote at all. reactionary politics in its purest form.

Aimless, I don't disagree w/ anything you wrote.

Well, except for the "you seemed to accept" part, which is not true or accurate to what I wrote. But other than that I don't disagree w/ anything you wrote.

You seemed to accept it when you wrote:

"it's hard to make the case that it's truly unfair" and concluded:

"voter ID laws are going to become a reality for a lot of states, i think, but there's no reason they need to disenfranchise voters w/ enough preparation. there's nothing inherently impossible about making sure everyone has an ID afaik??"

This still seems to me a very passive acceptance of the issue, one that mirrors the idea that when you come right down to it, it is no big deal and whatever minor problems it causes aren't much worth fussing over.

You realize voter ID in PA is law now? It was deferred to give time for everyone to get IDs, but it is now law in my state.

It's a good thing it isn't truly unfair to anyone.