I wrote a good, high-level analysis of the problem with a useful anecdote to personalize and contextualize the problem.
You posted a pretty picture and said '
look here I win' without giving it so much as a cursory inspection. And somehow I'm the condescending one?
(well I still am condescending, more on that later)
Okay, so it's difficult to get an absentee ballot. How many poor people really need an absentee ballot though? Last I checked, most poor people aren't in professions that require them to do a lot of out-of-town traveling.
Not to mention, that opening sentence is probably one of the most condescending things I've read on this site.
No, they are not the minority. In fact, 27 states offer no-excuse absentee ballots:
Your infographic doesn't show what you think it does. No-excuse absentee ballots are only a subset of the problem. Notice how states with large minority populations tend not to have this. Also note that they tend not to have mail in balloting or in person absentee balloting.
Also, your graph shows states with early voting but it doesn't say for how long., when or by what method (they're not all equal). It also doesn't show anything about restrictive voter id laws, movements to cut funding to church and activist groups that bus poor people to polling stations or the systematic targeting of minority and urban polling stations for closure.
I too can take a graph from the internet, fail to examine or analyze it and declare
total victory.
Did my post come off as condescending? Maybe that's because it was. I don't feel the need to be super nice to people who have a lack of capacity to empathize with millions of their fellow citizens.
I'm wasn't going out of my way to be a jerk but I was bluntly calling a spade a spade. If I'm wrong about the poster's background I'll cede the point without arguing. The points I made were still useful regardless of their background for anyone that's actually interested in learning about this problem and seeing it from a perspective they may not or could not have considered.
A lot of people don't understand on a visceral level that:
a) Being poor sucks in inventively cruel ways and
b) There is a targeted effort to ensure poor people are disenfranchised by manipulating those same, cruel suckeries of poverty.
Also lol what
Last I checked, most poor people aren't in professions that require them to do a lot of out-of-town traveling.
Is this?
What does that have to do with the need to take a sick kid to the hospital, or pay for a car, or get out of your 10am to 2am back to back shifts at McDonalds, or any of a trillion other suckeries that either don't apply to the middle class or would at worst be a nuisance for them?
Also how many truck drivers (many of which are working poor) and seasonal workers (construction, farming, even retail) are there? All of those can involve constant relocation.
