2020 US Election (Part One)

[amadeus]

You're not wrong, but those students are still victims of voter suppression.

How long would you define a wait to be voter suppression? I mean in either absolute or relative terms.

This is not a leading question; I’m interested in hearing how you would define it and have no intent on arguing your position.

 

[cardgame]

If they are unable to vote because of the wait. Most states offer some paid time off to complete a vote. There were lines in some Texas location for like 7 hours. That's disgusting. Australians on this forum tell me they are able to vote every single election in about 15 minutes. Why can't we do that? What happened to America #1?

I'd say 2 hours is definitely unacceptable. Open more locations. Or just declare it a national holiday like anyone actually interested in democracy would do.

When I voted in 2012, if I remember right, it took longer to walk there and back (it was just off-campus, maybe half a mile?) than anything else.

 

[Socrates99]

Living in a majority white town does have its perks. Yesterday I was in and out in under 15 min. On a major election day it's more like a half hour.

Anything over an hour would discourage me. I have young kids and a job. Itd take planning to do that. If wait times are that long in a country with the resources the US has it's intentional. It's not like those people working the election are making big bucks. Open a few more polling places.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

If they are unable to vote because of the wait. Most states offer some paid time off to complete a vote. There were lines in some Texas location for like 7 hours. That's disgusting. Australians on this forum tell me they are able to vote every single election in about 15 minutes. Why can't we do that? What happened to America #1?

I'd say 2 hours is definitely unacceptable. Open more locations. Or just declare it a national holiday like anyone actually interested in democracy would do.

When I voted in 2012, if I remember right, it took longer to walk there and back (it was just off-campus, maybe half a mile?) than anything else.

They don't want non-whites and Dems voting, repubs have been intentionally disenfranchizing communities for years, shutting down polling places, enforcing id strictly for certain groups

 

[amadeus]

When I voted in 2012, if I remember right, it took longer to walk there and back (it was just off-campus, maybe half a mile?) than anything else.

I would agree that 2 hours is too long! I would say 30 minutes at most is a reasonable amount of time.

I last voted in person in 2010 and I think it took all of about 10 minutes. I lived in a metropolitan area before that for 2008 and I think it took about 30-45 minutes once my paperwork was done processing.

They don't want non-whites and Dems voting, repubs have been intentionally disenfranchizing communities for years, shutting down polling places, enforcing id strictly for certain groups

Republicans have been disenfranchising voters in the primaries run by the Democratic Party?

 

[Kaitzilla]

tink by "industrial cleaning alcohol" you mean "methanol" which by its very nature is poisonness and can cause blindness and even death.

Ya, methanol.
It was almost impossible for bootleggers to remove that particular poison.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/poison-alcohol-prohibition

Chemists with criminal leanings found ready employment during Prohibition. Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, writes that the easiest alcohol to convert was Formula 39b—it was mild, intended for perfumes and cosmetics, and “renatured” almost perfectly into entirely drinkable liquor. As the federal government introduced formula after formula, chemists managed to distill out the danger. According to Blum, by 1926, the federal government had retired three formulas entirely, since bootlegger chemists had gotten so good at distilling them away. A former administrator remembered raiding illicit distilleries and finding advanced chemistry setups on site.

So methanol was added big-time to industrial alcohols starting in 1927!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity

https://time.com/3665643/deadly-drinking/

So, as TIME reported in the Jan. 10, 1927, issue, a solution emerged from the anti-drinking forces in the government: that year, a new formula for denaturing industrial-grade alcohol was introduced, doubling how poisonous the product became. The new formula included “4 parts methanol (wood alcohol), 2.25 parts pyridine bases, 0.5 parts benzene to 100 parts ethyl alcohol” and, as TIME noted, “Three ordinary drinks of this may cause blindness.” (In case you didn’t guess, “blind drink” isn’t just a figure of speech.)

Not everyone thought it was a good idea to make alcohol deadly, when making it illegal hadn’t stopped drinkers, and New Jersey Senator Edward I. Edwards called it “legalized murder.” However, the Anti-Saloon League persisted, arguing that legal alcohol had killed many more in its day than denatured alcohol would kill during the transition to a teetotaling world. “The Government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it,” said advocate Wayne B. Wheeler. “The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide… To root out a bad habit costs many lives and long years of effort…”

The government made no attempt to pretend that increasing the denaturing formula wouldn’t lead to deaths. Later that year, Seymour M. Lowman, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of Prohibition, even told citizens that the fringes of society that drink were “dying off fast from poison ‘hooch'” and that if the result was a sober America, “a good job will have been done.”

And, when large-scale fatalities occurred as a result of the policy, the agents of Prohibition shrugged it off.

The rich of course drank smuggled alcohol from other countries and died/went blind not at all.
Back when the do-gooders were firmly in charge of this country.


Ugh, to make this post vaguely relevant to today 100 years later.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...xic-alcohol-fake-coronavirus-cure/5009761002/

Iranian media reports that at least 44 people have died from alcohol poisoning and hundreds have been hospitalized after consuming bootleg alcohol in an effort to treat the coronavirus.

 

[Estebonrober]

How long would you define a wait to be voter suppression? I mean in either absolute or relative terms.

This is not a leading question; I’m interested in hearing how you would define it and have no intent on arguing your position.

Anything over 30 minutes in the US considering work requirements.

 

[Sommerswerd]

You're not wrong, but those students are still victims of voter suppression.

True, so are the people in Mississippi. A Mississippi Senator was even caught suggesting it outright:

Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith was caught on video saying she wants to make it harder for liberals to vote.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican white woman running for Senate against a black man in Mississippi, told a group of college students it would be good to "make it just a little more difficult" for some people to vote in a newly released video. Addressing what appears to be a primarily white crowd, Hyde-Smith said she was in favor of voter suppression tactics. "There's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don't want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that's a great idea," she said, smiling.

Hyde-Smith is locked in a close Senate race against Democrat Mike Espy, with the two now facing each other in a Nov. 27 runoff election. Both candidates received roughly 40 percent of the vote on Nov. 6. It is unclear what "other schools" Hyde-Smith is referring to. Mississippi is home to numerous historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and has a long history of racist voter suppression tactics. The Clarion-Ledger points out that in Mississippi "African-American voters faced voter-suppression policies such as literacy tests and poll taxes in the past, and where some strict voting policies remain."

Hyde-Smith is already facing scrutiny for a different video where she casually joked about lynching. "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row," Hyde-Smith said of a supporter. In Mississippi and across the South, crowds of white spectators would often gather to watch public lynchings of black Americans. In fact, Mississippi has the highest number of known lynchings recorded in the country.

 

[amadeus]

Anything over 30 minutes in the US considering work requirements.

My understanding was that employers had to let employees take off from work in order to vote. It may be depending on the state; I’m not fully informed on the issue.

 

[Sommerswerd]

How long would you define a wait to be voter suppression? I mean in either absolute or relative terms.

This is not a leading question; I’m interested in hearing how you would define it and have no intent on arguing your position.

Intentionally making it more difficult for persons/demographics who are more likely to oppose your party to vote is a pretty simple/straightforward definition of voter suppression... which the Republicans are disproportionately doing/attempting all over the country.

 

[Estebonrober]

My understanding was that employers had to let employees take off from work in order to vote. It may be depending on the state; I’m not fully informed on the issue.

Depends on the state and like so much of these types of laws the culture can be very hard to change. For example when I talk pay at work people get all clammy. We are allowed to by law but boy it makes management squirm which means it puts me in jeopardy for raises and promotions and such. Its a good thing I'm good at my job.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Living in a majority white town does have its perks. Yesterday I was in and out in under 15 min. On a major election day it's more like a half hour.

Anything over an hour would discourage me. I have young kids and a job. Itd take planning to do that. If wait times are that long in a country with the resources the US has it's intentional. It's not like those people working the election are making big bucks. Open a few more polling places.

I live in an affluent, mostly white suburb. There is literally ZERO wait to vote... as-in, I pull up to a parking spot right in front of the building where I vote, walk 50 or so feet to enter the building, walk right up to one of the multiple check-in desks, state my name and address, take a ballot, walk over to one of the plentiful empty polling booths (I literally had over 10 booths to choose from), vote, drop it in the ballot box and leave. The whole process takes less than 5 minutes. Sometimes there is one person ahead of me, so it takes the full 5 minutes. And that's at 5PM on election day... we also have a week of early voting, when, if you can believe it...its even faster than that

When I lived in mostly black/poor Southwest Atlanta, and later a mostly black, lower middle class suburb of Southwest Atlanta, the wait was always 2 hours or more, and you had to park at least a few hundred yards away and walk to the polling place, then stand in a line that was wrapped around the building, just to get inside the polling place. Once inside, you had long lines snaking through hallways to get to the check in counter, then you had to get in line to go to an open polling booth. Plus there are poll watchers and you get hassled about ID. It sucked.

When I lived in Philadelphia, it was better, I lived in a middle class hybrid urban/suburban section of the city, but it was still usually an hour at least to vote, with general election and Presidential primary lines wrapped around buildings and snaking through hallways. Mid term elections weren't as bad though... usually 45 mins to an hour for those. You still get hassled about ID and since it was a swing state, there are all these people outside the polls yelling and intimidating people, plus the hassles over ID.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

More repetitions will not change anyone's mind.

BENGHAZI

I don't know that this is true, sadly

I'd rather have no tickets for smoking OR drinking on the street. land of the free my ass.

although I can actually understand it more for smoking, at least smoking has secondhand smoke as a negative factor - what's drinking? oldschool puritan morality? drinking is a sin and nobody should see you do it in public? public drunkenness is fine, that can stay ticketed/illegal but open container for a legal adult is loads of bull. change my mind? I don't even drink except at home so no dog in this fight it just doesn't make sense to me.

Before you edited in you public drunkenness save, I was going to bring that up. People pissing and vomiting in the street are just demonstrations of the freedom we love.

So let me ask: what are the benefits, or value or other good things about drinking in public beyond "freedom"? Like you I am not a drinker, so it is not an important issue in my life.

I think public drinking will cause more issues than public smoking, even from a health standpoint. I don't think standing near a smoking stand will make you any worse off than standing near a busy city street. Being near a drunk with anger issues certainly can put you in more danger though.

I don't think the first resort to enforcing these laws should be jail time though. Should be warnings, then fines, then jail in that order unless the drinker or smoker is violent or causing other issues.

Most states offer some paid time off to complete a vote.

My understanding was that employers had to let employees take off from work in order to vote. It may be depending on the state; I’m not fully informed on the issue.

I do not think this is true in most states but I could be wrong. I do not think there are any special laws giving workers cover to go vote in most states.

 

[Kyriakos]

Trump will get a second term, the Democrats will blame Bernie and shift evermore to the right, learning nothing at all.

Indeed.
DNC winning the nomination at the comparably unimportant to them cost of having four more years of Trump instead of Bernie.

Hopefully in 2024 they won't be as successful against AOC.
I think the 2020 election will be a bloodbath. See how protecting Biden from scrutiny will play when it isn't a dem election but a national one.

 

[amadeus]

Intentionally making it more difficult for persons/demographics who are more likely to oppose your party to vote is a pretty simple/straightforward definition of voter suppression... which the Republicans are disproportionately doing/attempting all over the country.

I’ve heard this, but yet to see objective evidence that points to Republican malevolence as the culprit.

 

[Sommerswerd]

No if Biden loses because people stay at home thats on them.

You claim to want to change things. Step 1 is getting Trump out for SCOTUS if anything.

Biden might lose entirely on his own merits that's on him.

If you and enough of your friends sit out and Trump is reflected that's on you.

When Biden won Massachusetts and Minnesota, it was pretty hard to see how Bernie had any way forward. With Bernie losing Michigan and Missouri, I think its time to call it. I mean, what is the Bernie campaign's argument for staying in? Even Washington and North Dakota are saying too close to call, and besides those two, Biden swept last night. Bernie was supposed to cream Biden in Washington so the fact that he didn't even win that one decisively pretty much seals it.

As a side bit of trivia. Biden has won all the "M" states so far... MA, ME, MI, MN, MO and MS, which pretty much cover every region of the country except the Mountains and West coast. Only MT is left.

 

[Estebonrober]

When Biden won Massachusetts and Minnesota, it was pretty hard to see how Bernie had any way forward. With Bernie losing Michigan and Missouri, I think its time to call it. I mean, what is the Bernie campaign's argument for staying in? Even Washington and North Dakota are saying too close to call, and besides those two, Biden swept last night. Bernie was supposed to cream Biden in Washington so the fact that he didn't even win that one decisively pretty much seals it.

As a side bit of trivia. Biden has won all the "M" states so far... MA, ME, MI, MN, MO and MS, which pretty much cover every region of the country except the Mountains and West coast. Only MT is left.

I refuse to like this point, but it is nonetheless spot on. Four more years of stupid or ever so slightly less stupid. Here we go!

 

[Sommerswerd]

Trump will get a second term, the Democrats will blame Bernie and shift evermore to the right, learning nothing at all.

So this raises a puzzle. A Bernie supporter has to make the argument that Bernie is the best to beat Trump, of course, but some are going even farther, saying that they know Trump will win unless Bernie gets the nomination. But then the question becomes...Who's responsibility is it to see to it that Bernie gets nominated? Surely, its not the responsibility of Biden supporters or Warren supporters etc., right? It has to be the responsibility of Bernie and his supporters to get Bernie nominated, right? So if Bernie loses, its the fault of Bernie and his supporters, right? So if you knew, that Trump would win unless Bernie was nominated... and you failed to get Bernie nominated... then isn't Trump winning your fault since Bernie's nomination was your responsibility?

If there is an alternative to this reasoning, I would really like to hear it, because this seems like the only logical conclusion based on the above premise.

 

[Socrates99]

My understanding was that employers had to let employees take off from work in order to vote. It may be depending on the state; I’m not fully informed on the issue.

I want to be an ass and respond to this with a long series of lols but that might be undeserved. If this is a thing anywhere I'm unaware of it. I remember a guy trying to put his foot down about this at the company I used to work for. After a couple hours of *****ing he finally walked off the job to vote. Was gone for 2 hours. He got suspended for a week with no pay for walking off the job.

 

[Patine]

And I honestly couldn't care less

But I, even though not being a Boomer, will view your posts on this regard as empty bigotry and not to be given any weight, value, or credence, and encourage others to do the same.