>A reasonable, common-sense definition of poverty should include not just an absolute measure of material deprivation and a relative gauge of a person’s situation compared to the rest of society. It should also strive to measure how secure people feel — in their homes, their health, and their jobs.
I generally agree, but this has potential downsides. A good friend of mine from college comes from a very conservative family. Despite doing well for themselves (father is a MD), these people are generally pretty insecure about non-whites having the ability to vote, immigration (legal or illegal), and all the other things they hear on Fox News or talk radio. They also own a home > $1million USD.
So do we consider them poor because they're insecure?
I guess my point is there should be some objective measure - e.g. Person A or Family B is more likely to become homeless if they lost their jobs or if one family member became disabled.
I come from a very conservative family. Nobody's insecure about non-whites having the ability to vote. They might be worried about the fact that some demographics vote like 95% Democrat, but that's just a concern about blind loyalty to party and identity politics.
But agree with your sentiment. Insecurity in general is a very loose term. Some people are prone to believe the sky is falling and there's little that government can do to rectify that.
Wow! Talk about not providing context for that quote!
The State's argument was voting hours were inconsistent across the state. The districts that offered additional voting opportunities, that other districts did not have, were predominantly African American and would vote Democratic.
So their answer was to ban Sunday voting so that every district had the same window of opportunity to vote.
One could argue that their solution wasn't the optimal one, but they were aiming to level the playing field.
"In emails, state and county Republican officials lobbied members of at least 17 county election boards to keep early-voting sites open for shorter hours on weekends and in evenings – times that usually see disproportionately high turnout by Democratic voters. Reuters obtained the emails through a public records request."
"The officials also urged county election boards to open fewer sites for residents to cast ballots during early voting that began on Oct. 20 and ends on Saturday."
The reason inconsistencies existed is because there was a coordinated campaign in 2016 that made the holdouts appear inconsistent.
This is classic voter suppression. There will always be different voting patterns among different groups. Identifying the patterns of your preferred group and then normalizing just those patterns is how suppression is accomplished, period.
What blows my mind is that Republicans have been discussing these strategies freely and openly for years, and yet for some reason people still feel compelled to believe post hoc rationalizations.
The Republican Party is morally bankrupt. America is an intrinsically conservative nation and conservatism will live on. But apologizing for the Republican Party and its politics... I find it inexcusable.
Except that's not how it happened. The original 2000 bill permitted localities to provide 17 days of early voting and it turned out (not something that was known beforehand) that Blacks disproportionately voted during the first week, and especially the first weekend:
"The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina's 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting. 'After receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days,' the court found."
This isn't even one of those issues where one can employ whataboutism. The motivations and behaviors are express, unambiguous, and unilateral.
It's one thing to be concerned about voter fraud and fairness. But when one group selects solutions out of a large basket of potential solutions that not only happen to consistently disadvantage a particular group but are express in their motivations.... I mean, come on. How many of these Republican states have thought about improving ballot audits? Just today Paul Ryan made a comment about how California's voting rules were too susceptible to voter fraud, but they fail to mention that California actually has very robust auditing processes and continues to improve them. And, notably, the pro-immigrant camps aren't crying foul.
Suppose you roll out a new voting schedule expanding voting hours. The purpose is to make things more convenient, not affect election outcomes -- someone who might have had to miss an hour of work to vote can now do it during off hours instead etc. But without having any way to know this ahead of time, the new schedule turns out to change who votes in a way that disproportionately benefits one party over the other. What should be done?
There is no logical reason for one schedule to be more fair than another, assuming that everyone has a reasonable opportunity to vote in both cases and the difference is only a matter of convenience. The problem is that convenience can affect election outcomes -- and there are arbitrarily many possible schedules.
Suppose that increasing voting hours at certain other times (e.g. opening polls earlier in the morning) would benefit Republicans more than Democrats. If they did that instead of removing the hours that disproportionately benefited Democrats, you could accuse them of the same thing -- changing the schedule to affect the outcome. But they're also just restoring the original balance that existed before a change was made that wasn't expected to alter it but did. On the other hand, who is to say that the original status quo is more fair than some other thing?
And that's the problem. Nobody has any more right to slightly more convenient voting hours than anyone else, but who gets them can determine the election. The incumbents are the ones who get to make the decision, so what would you expect them to do? More importantly, what principled thing do you propose to do instead?
In theory they could allow voting 24 hours a day for a month, but the expense of that likely exceeds the marginal benefit. Meanwhile as soon as you start deciding which hours to cut, you're potentially choosing who wins the election again.
> In theory they could allow voting 24 hours a day for a month
That's exactly (well, perhaps not exactly a month) what places that adopt all mail-in (or just permanent, no-special-qualification mail-in) voting do, so it's not just “in theory”.
That has other costs. It allows people to buy or coerce votes by observing the target filling out and mailing their ballot, which is specifically prohibited at polling places. And it opens you up to an extra set of dirty tricks, e.g. stealing ballots from mailboxes on the day they're distributed. And it's effectively impossible to prevent people from mass producing forged ballots (e.g. by using serial numbers and then detecting non-issued serials or duplicates) while at the same time allowing the voter to be confident that no one is using that to correlate who they voted for with their identity.
At least in King County WA (which contains Seattle) EVERYONE gets mail-in ballots. They can be dropped off at drop boxes, and they can now also just be dropped off in any post-office box (without a stamp).
Every ballot is a mail in ballot.
~4 weeks before the election that thing arrives, I spend a few hours the next weekend going over the choices I didn't already evaluate in the primary before the election, and I drop that thing off like a hot potato as I ignore the political ads.
Everyone should have mail in ballots and as much time as they need to fill it out.
> They were making the argument and affirming that they were discriminating based on political affiliation, in an attempt to show they were not discriminating based on race. It was a conscious legal strategy to admit this.
Wow. Can't be racial prejudice if its already political prejudice.
Reminds me of the court scene in New Jack City where the Wesley Snipes confesses to being a foot soldier and therefore he can't be the kingpin.
>Wow. Can't be racial prejudice if its already political prejudice.
It can, but it's not in many cases. I also know lots of conservatives who are not the strawman racists people on the left like to attack. They really only care that people don't vote in left-wing people.
Keep in mind that suppressing the Democrat vote will dis-proportionally affect black people (as well as poor people, etc), but that doesn't mean the people trying to do it are prejudiced against black people. They are just prejudiced against Democrats.
To me it's not clear if the court is leaving out some context here. "The State" may have mentioned that the counties were disproportionately democratic and disproportionately black in their justification but to say that WAS their justification could easily be editorialization on the part of the judge who wrote this.
I think the benchmark they are suggesting is: Is their insecurity resulting in their making decisions that affect their ability to have the fundamentals (roof over head, food on plate, etc)? And if those fears come true, will it materially affect them to the point where they could lose that roof?
For the former: If their fear/insecurity is causing them to pay more than they could/should afford in bunkers, security guards, etc, then I would say according to the article: "Yes".
But that's true for almost no one in the demographic you're highlighting.
For the latter: If immigration (legal/illegal) keeps continuing, or other demographics gain more voting power, will they likely lose that $1M house? I don't think so.
Why did you choose the word insecure rather than bitter or something similar? Insecure means feeling that things around may easy fall apart or collapse. It doesn’t sound like your friend’s parents are remotely close to that.
I chose the word insecure because insecure is the best way to describe them.
They're not really "angry" that LGBT folks, Hispanics, and Muslims are able to vote, for example. A better way to think of it is that the root cause is fear. Does that result in anger? Sometimes... but they're insecure insofar as they believe their way of life, their financial independence, and their freedom is on the verge of being taken away. They see prosperity and opportunity as a zero sum game where the Hispanics are here to either not work at all and force the whites to pay for them and the ones that are willing to work are only stealing the opportunity from the "real Americans".
Before you respond - this isn't a topic of debate.
I mean, I'm revealing conversations I've had with these people over dinner in their home. This is what they believe, from their own mouths.
At the end of the day, these are people who I consider family, even though I almost violently disagree with their views and believe they have been brainwashed.
I just want to say you're not alone in having family like that; the vast majority of my dad's side is like this (my mom's side are all basically hippies). I love them to death, and they're good people, but they're so damn insecure about their way of life (or they're insecure that they can't force it on to others, in my grandmother's case), that they want to stop others from getting opportunities for fear they might change it.
This type of insecurity is not what the article is referring to. Racists yes, but certainly not insecure (in food/shelter/safety terms that the article refers to) with a million dollar home and a head of household who is a doctor and would likely be able to get a well paying job anywhere in the country if not the world. If non white people vote will this family be out on the streets? If immigrants come over will they starve? Of course not. I don't even see how you can consider that insecurity. Hate and racism have nothing to do with being insecure.
I just wanted to point out that racism like that is on its last leg. I used to live in a rural, very conservative, upper class area. While they do watch fox news, they are not racist. Its close minded to call fox news racist or cnn socialist.
> "I'm not saying they're racist, I'm just saying that racists like them a lot"
Civil Liberties organization defends due process. "I'm not saying they're rapists, I'm just saying rapists like them a lot."
Fertilizer company sells ordinary fertilizer that happens to be a major component of large bombs. "I'm not saying they're terrorists, I'm just saying terrorists like them a lot."
Tech company protects privacy of customers. "I'm not saying they're child pornographers, I'm just saying child pornographers like them a lot."
This form of argument is obviously more incendiary than illuminating.
Conservatism tries to maintain the existing structures of society and, in a country like USA, these structures are racially determined - it is just part of the history of the country. Therefore, conservative policies will tend to maintain racial discrimination, even when this is not the stated goal of the policy maker.
>Conservatism tries to maintain the existing structures of society
Only in a loose, meaningless sense of the word that doesn't really tie to most conservatives in the US. Many conservatives in the US want to change structures of society, particularly WRT how much the government is involved.
>these structures are racially determined - it is just part of the history of the country
Not really. A poor white immigrant is just as disadvantaged by current laws as a poor black immigrant. Money is the #1 indicator of how hard you are going to have it in the US.
>Therefore, conservative policies will tend to maintain racial discrimination
No, they will tend to discriminate against low-income people. A larger portion of black people are low-income so people who are into identity-politics will intentionally confuse this and claim the policy is designed to hurt black people.
> No, they will tend to discriminate against low-income people.
Even this is disputed. The conservative argument is that existing regulations make it more difficult to operate a business, so more of the people who would otherwise have their own small business are stuck working a dead end job for someone else, or are unemployed because the small business they would have worked at was destroyed.
Better for the same person to have a $60,000/year job than a $30,000/year job plus $15,000 in government assistance.
I generally agree, but this has potential downsides. A good friend of mine from college comes from a very conservative family. Despite doing well for themselves (father is a MD), these people are generally pretty insecure about non-whites having the ability to vote, immigration (legal or illegal), and all the other things they hear on Fox News or talk radio. They also own a home > $1million USD.
So do we consider them poor because they're insecure?
I guess my point is there should be some objective measure - e.g. Person A or Family B is more likely to become homeless if they lost their jobs or if one family member became disabled.