Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/07/is-america-a-democracy-if-so-why-does-it-deny-millions-the-vote

by aramanto • 7 years ago

32 54 7 years ago

aramanto• 7 years ago

From the article: "Rather than being ranked with other major western democracies, the US falls lower down the list alongside countries like Kosovo and Romania."

https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com

loons2• 7 years ago

A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

naravara4• 7 years ago

In the context of the classics (which Franklin would have been steeped in), a Republic is a form of government where citizens vote for qualified representatives to represent their interests and a Democracy is when you pick citizens by drawing lots to decide on who holds positions.

So the "we're a republic, not a democracy" line from people who want to argue for not letting people vote makes absolutely no sense.

chrisco255• 7 years ago

What classical government had the right to vote for a representative? Rome? No. Only the elites could vote. Athens? Same story.

The old distinction between a republic and a democracy was elected representatives passing laws versus the citizens voting directly on laws themselves.

The U.S. is of course, a hybrid and has some republican elements and some democratic elements, but in the classical sense, at the Federal level, it is more of a republic than a democracy.

eindiran3• 7 years ago

It seems like Canada (for Federal elections at least) and most European countries have voter ID laws [0]. Notably, the UK does not; they scrapped government issued ID cards altogether in 2011([1]). I'm not sure why requiring ID to vote is so controversial in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws

[1] https://www.gov.uk/identitycards

naravara4• 7 years ago

They don't need it. You need your voter registration card or some other way to identify yourself (like a piece of mail with your name on it) to vote in your precinct and they take your name off the list once you vote.

Voter ID laws are intended solely to make it harder to vote by requiring a specific ID (driver's license or state issued ID) to vote. They won't accept your passport, a lease, a library card, or any other vetted and validated way of verifying who you are.

This is intended to suppress participation by people who are unlikely to have a current license or state issued ID which is disproportionately people who don't own cars (poor, young, and/or urban) or people who have to move a lot. If your ID isn't your current address or at least within the precinct, once again, you're barred from voting. It's meant to privilege property owners (less likely to have their address change frequently) at their expense of people with less stable residential situations and it undermines the premise behind universal franchise.

eindiran3• 7 years ago

France has a similar setup to what you described; however, in towns and cities with >1000 voters, they do require a state-issued identification document specifically because using mail/other forms of id and a large list of names doesn't scale well.

See here: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1361

masonic4• 7 years ago

  You need your voter registration card

Where? This is never the case in CA.

  or some other way to identify yourself

Meaning... you need ID?

Simulacra• 7 years ago

It’s controversial because one party favors strong voter ID laws which means in the American system the other party must oppose it. A more concrete answer is that the party that favors less restrictions on voting, believes that everyone under the governed regardless of disposition, nationality, age, etc. should have the right to vote. The other party believes that the law says you must be 18 and a citizen to vote in federal elections, and that’s how it should be, and if the law says that then there must be someway to verify that.

mullingitover5• 7 years ago

That other party has a long history or preventing "the wrong people" from voting by any means available: murder, intimidation, "literacy tests," gerrymandering districts, and making requirements that are very difficult for the "wrong people" to obtain. The level of hysteria over election fraud is wildly disproportional to the number of documented cases of said fraud.

jbob20002• 7 years ago

It's not that voter ID is controversial, it's that the Republicans make it really difficult to get ID in their states.

Canada makes it easy to get ID, we don't de-fund our government offices to make it difficult to get registered. You can renew your driver's license online now, so we invest in programs to make it easier to get and keep your ID.

eindiran3• 7 years ago

If that's the case, then folks should be focused on making it easier to get state ID and widen the class of IDs that can be used (state ID/voter ID card/passport/driver's license).

From this page though, it seems like people actually do think voter ID itself is controversial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...

There was even a Supreme Court case in the US about whether it was constitutional for a state to implement one: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-election/u-s-to...

mullingitover5• 7 years ago

It's a vote suppression tactic when the IDs aren't trivially easy to obtain. A county in Wisconsin only issued them from a DMV that was only open on the fifth Wednesday of every month[1].

That DMV service center is inside the Sauk City Community Center. And, sure enough, as Oliver’s piece stated, it’s open only on the fifth Wednesday of every month, from 8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The DMV doesn’t list the actual dates, so we looked them up. The four fifth Wednesdays in 2016 are in, as Oliver noted, March, June, August and November.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/19/...

neonIcon3• 7 years ago

So let's change the rules to make them more easily attainable, instead of throwing out the idea of something that we desperately need in this country.

masonic4• 7 years ago

"A county in Wisconsin only issued them from a DMV that was only open on the fifth Wednesday of every month[1]"

That's a flat lie, as the article itself makes clear. That particular DMV desk (not office) is just the nearest to that one small town (not county), and residents there can go to any other DMV in the state as well.

Meanwhile, you need an ID anyway to have a bank account, enter a Federal building or state courthouse (even if summoned to jury duty), etc.

Partisans are so desperate to push this narrative, truth goes by the wayside.

neonIcon3• 7 years ago

It is required for almost every other conceivable activity that an adult might want to do. However when applied to voting it suddenly becomes some sort of suppression tactic.. Mind boggling

alistairSH3• 7 years ago

One of those activities (voting) is constitutionally protected.

mcphage• 7 years ago

However when applied to voting it suddenly becomes some sort of suppression tactic.. Mind boggling

Mind boggling until you read about the ongoing history of voter suppression in the US.

scj• 7 years ago

Canada's voter identification laws changed for 2015, then reverted for 2019. This was due to change in governments.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-election-2015-voter...

Realistically, in the short term the law is going to be "whatever the government wants it to be until the Supreme Court sets a precedent".

bryanlarsen2• 7 years ago

Yes, in the last Canadian election you didn't need ID to vote, you just needed someone with an ID to vouch for you.

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why requiring ID to vote is so controversial in the US.

Because there is no evidence of a problem that it would solve and because it has consistently been deliberately engineered as a system of disenfranchisement of eligible voters and the people pushing it (even recently) keep getting caught openly touting its benefits in that direction when they think only their political allies are listening, as well as being the same people pushing other techniques designed to disenfranchise the same people they try to use voter ID to disenfranchise. Its kind of a "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, can't get fooled again" situation, to borrow the wise words of former President George W. Bush.

tombert• 7 years ago

Most people (as far as I know) don't have a direct issue with voter ID laws inherently. The issue comes down to the fact that most implementations have been surgically targeted to affect certain racial groups [0], combined with the fact that widespread voter fraud has not been demonstrated to be a problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St... A North Carolina law was overturned as "its provisions deliberately target African-Americans with almost surgical precision … in an effort to depress black turnout at the polls."

bryanlarsen2• 7 years ago

Your wikipedia link for Canada says one option is:

Take an oath and have an elector who knows the voter vouch for them (both of whom must make a sworn statement). This person must have authorized identification and their name must appear on the list of electors in the same polling division as the voter. This person can only vouch for one person and the person who is vouched for cannot vouch for another elector.

IOW, voter ID is not required in Canada.

cam_l• 7 years ago

Australia does not require voter id, has compulsory voting, paper ballots, postal voting, weekend voting, very low levels of voter fraud.. and right wing parties still win elections.

The republicans shouldn't be so worried.

simonblack• 7 years ago

You left out early voting, where you can vote for several weeks before the actual election date. <grin>

derision2• 7 years ago

No, it's a republic.

paulgb2• 7 years ago

Is it a fruit? No, it's a banana.

derision2• 7 years ago

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Is probably a more accurate metaphor

zeristor• 7 years ago

Why has this post been flagged?

This is an important issue, if it’s contentious then who is contending it? Am I missing something?

thejynxed• 7 years ago

Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy, and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised democracy as tyranny of the ignorant masses.

dragonwriter2• 7 years ago

Constitutional Republic, so no, we are not a democracy

"Constitutional Republic" and democracy are orthogonal rather than mutually exclusive descriptions. All "Constitutional Republic" means is that it isn't a monarchy and that it has some fundamental governing law. Being a (direct or indirect/representative) democracy is perfectly compatible with that. The foundational concept of government by consent of the governed and of government--as it would be elegantly described somewhat later--"of the people, by the people, and for the people" embraced by the founders is exactly that of representative democracy. The actual specific form written into the Constitution both clearly intends something very much like representative democracy while not quite being one.

and furthermore the men who founded this nation and established the government thereof rather despised democracy as tyranny of the ignorant masses.

They despised both direct and unconstrained democracy, but while the pragmatic compromise of the Constitution clearly fell short of this, many of them certainly embraced in principle limited government by consent of the masses expressed through a combination of equal suffrage in approval of a basic law and equal suffrage in electing representatives to the government under that law, or, in the language of modern political science, Constitutionally-limited representative democracy.

Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote?

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