> it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote
I'm staying out of the other issue as best I can, but as a non-American the resistance to this is just baffling, especially given the fact your recent elections have not exactly been widely trusted internally. Not that I'm saying there was much merit to the distrust, but it still makes sense to take steps to demonstrate it. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud in the US.
There is a political talking point that “aliens are voting” in our elections but it has been proven false again and again. The purpose of this is to put up barriers for legitimate citizens to vote, not to truly fix an imaginary problem.
The issue isn’t the proof of citizenship. The issue is that poll taxes are unconstitutional and there is no state that I’m aware of that makes the acquisition of identification documents free of cost.
I’m honestly quite surprised that politicians don’t resolve this idiotic situation because it’s so damn simple, but I think it’s not solved because various state governments rely on small fees for revenue. And of course because there are many political situations in which making it difficult for specific opponent voters to vote is a campaign strategy.
Make fees for drivers licenses, birth certificates, and passports illegal, and ideally institute a system that makes these forms of identification automatic/stupidly easy to acquire and the whole issue is resolved. Now you can require voters to present them and you aren’t disenfranchising anyone.
Thanks for clarifying. Not being of USA I didn't even consider the angle about having to pay for government ID - it's a very alien concept for us in eastern europe at least.
Election fraud on the other hand.. this we are very familiar with. Reaction to the coverage of last three US presidential elections was mostly "oh, how cute, such naive first attempts". So from our PoV there most certainly were widespread attempts to rig them, mostly from Dem side, and so very unprofessional, that their existence cannot be denied in good faith.
> from our PoV there most certainly were widespread attempts to rig them, mostly from Dem side
Oof, I feel bad for whatever news network you are getting your American coverage from. You might want to look into who owns that news network. This is a very common political message specifically originating from the Republican Party’s media network (e.g., Murdoch-owned media, Turning Point USA, etc).
To "get coverage from a news network" is ignorance bordering on pure madness.
They are almost exclusively propaganda and manipulation and as such the only useful signal that can be extracted is something like "how those people chose to frame certain events they feel they can't ignore in hopes of them going unnoticed". Note I'm talking about our local ones, in my opinion yours do not differ materially in this aspect.
So no. I'm not parroting after a talking head on some network or other (the thought itself is mildly insulting). For an interesting incident (and election-related stuff was interesting enough) what one does is gather as much coverage as possible and then try to reconstruct what event could have lead to this set of framings.
What I wrote is somewhat of a consensus between us old hands of many years experience resisting election fraud, with hands-on knowledge of how it's done, how to fight it, how attempts at covering it up look like and how people that prefer to believe it never happens behave.
I just respectfully disagree with your view in a whole lot of ways.
I don't know how you can be aware of things like the January 6 insurrection and the fake electors scheme and believe that election fraud is "mostly dems."
We have a recorded phone call of Donald Trump asking the Georgia secretary of state to "find 11,780 votes" for him.
the law they are trying to pass requires you to prove you are a citizen each and every time you vote
not when you register to vote, every single time for the rest of your existance
it has no basis in logic
it's already illegal to vote if you are not a citizen
no-one trying to gain citizenship would risk being deported for voting in an election
every time conservative groups comb the voter rolls to try to find people who are not allowed to vote, not only do they find only like a couple people out of MILLIONS, they discover they never actually voted, it was a mistaken registration
out of billions of votes the past decade there were like seven people prosecuted
that's what's going on
what they are really trying to do is make it REALLY hard to vote, to make incredible fiction, so people stop voting
because if people stop voting, the people already in power keep that power
btw don't confuse this with showing an ID when you vote
that's already the law almost everywhere
what they want is you must have a passport (most people do not have one) or a birth certificate (most people have no idea where or how to get it) EVERY time you vote, not just register but EVERY time, like it changes somehow
There's also cis-male people who will "pass" that SRY test if they take it for some reason...
This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category... which is about the expected result of bigots trying to work backwards from the result they want headlines about.
SRY testing was done at the 1996 games and for a while before that. 8 cisgender women tested positive at that games. Far more than the number of transgender athletes who have ever participated. This resulted in genetic testing being changed from all women to on-suspicion.
The bottom line is these tests will catch dozens of people who are phenotypically women, who can even give birth. Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?
From what I've read, these women all had CAIS or similar, and testosterone had no effect on their bodies. Thankfully the new IOC guidelines have an exception for that and would let them compete with women.
But I want to point out that XY+CAIS individuals cannot conceive or carry a child. They have no ovaries and no uterus.
> Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?
They are, if they are female or have CAIS. Caster Semenya, for example, does not meet that standard. Caster was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, but is not biologically female, rather a male with a DSD (5-ARD) who has testes and fully male levels of testosterone and musculature.
is that in 100+ years of Olympics, there are ZERO elite athletes who were transgender
none
it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote
because there have been no previous cases of that either
However there are women who have given birth who will fail that SRY test
Because biology is messy, not black and white, never "on" or "off", there is always overlap
They tried this before in 1996 and quickly ended it by 2000 because the result was a disaster