Not advocating they go down that road, just a thought experiment.
Posted Jun 25, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC
No. Technically Democratic legislatures could do (or go back to) partisan gerrymandering to keep Democratic hold of the House. But I doubt that’s going to happen. Undoing gerrymandering has been a very Democratic thing to advocate for.
What Dem representatives could start doing is advocating for laws and funding to help getting everyone IDs. Federally nothing is going to happen, because there isn’t big money to be made in protecting voting rights. Conservative Supreme Court is going to uphold most voting suppression laws.
You need to work with what you have.
This is not the way.
As cathartic as it might feel to see similar tactics turned on Republicans, it would be an awful idea to stoop to their level on voter suppression. That’s a moral high ground we need to keep.
Not even just a moral imperative: if we tried ensuring Democrats were the sole party with power, then corrupt actors would infiltrate the party facing zero repercussions with all external opposition to the party’s power having been systematically eliminated. There’s so much more at stake to preserve democracy than just having moral high ground.
Absolutely correct
I mean, if you wanted to go down that route, all you'd have to do is do exactly what the Republicans are doing in a different location. They close polls and DMVs in predominately minority and Democratic areas, they implement voter ID laws which include IDs their voters are statistically more likely to have and exclude IDs democrats are statistically more likely to have, they purge rolls of likely Democrats, and so on. There is nothing technically stopping Democrats from doing exactly the same things, other than the fact that they would need more state and local level control to implement such things as that's how Republicans have done it.
Should they though? No. That goes against Democratic principles big time. While I totally advocate for removing toxic republicans from your life on a personal level, and while I may totally say extremely hostile things towards them, it's a major principle that every citizen should have equal representation and equal rights in the eyes of the law. Preventing people from expressing those rights, even if those people are all for restricting you if they had the chance, is not okay. You combat that by adding additional protections preventing them from restricting others when they win, not by removing their ability to win the same way they want to remove yours.
It’s not the jedi way
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Not advocating they go down that road, just a thought experiment.
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They could put the ballots at a third grade reading level
Or increase educational opportunities equally for all citizens. Or both.
Shut down hick town polling places. Require voter ID but cut back hours in rural DMVs.
It's the only way conservatives learn their behavior is wrong
False. Those people have unmet needs, which allows them to be persuaded by corrupt propagandists. The most effective method would be to ensure all citizens can make informed decisions by way of a life without desperation where their needs are met. What you suggest is fascist and totalitarian.
Of course there are, in many areas Republican voters are some of the poorest and least educated. some of the same rules can be put in place just in different districts
I do wonder how many of the Republican laws will accidentally make it harder for their own voters to cast their ballots. A lot of the people Trump brought out in 2016 and 2020 were low information, low-educated voters and if you make voting less convenient will they bother voting? Biden, meanwhile, put together a coalition of suburban middle and upper middle class voters who don't usually have the same struggles.
They might shoot themselves in the foot with some of these laws.
It probably happened with trump's attacks on mail in voting. When you scare everyone about a method of voting, it surely shoots you in the foot.
You know, it's just, Democrats don't actually do such things.
That wasn't the question I was answering
You were answering the question "are there any voting laws [Democrats] can pursue to restrict Republic voting?" And my response to your "sure" was that Democrats don't use voter suppression tactics like Republicans do.
Not advocating they go down that road, just a thought experiment.
I'm also including that. That tells me this is a very open hypothetical question
No, no, no and no. Not even as a thought experiment. It violates democratic principles both big D and lower d. We can't descend to their level on something like this.
We can and should
So we should let them win by becoming them? No.
The only way to stop bullies is to hit em back
We can do that without resorting to the very tactics they're using to undermine the foundations of our democracy. We don't win by imposing an authoritarian state in competition with the authoritarian state they want.
So myopic. Entrenching the political power of one party over another allows corrupt actors to infiltrate the empowered party and create an anti-democratic stronghold.
Why? If we win by increasing access to voting, and it has the moral high ground, what's the rationale in not just doing that?
The only way conservatives, rural ones in particular, ever learn that something is in fact wrong is if it is done to them.
You can offer Republicans statistics about DMVs closing after Voter ID laws pass or closed polling stations in big cities and they'll laugh their asses off.
It has to happen to them for them to come to the table and want to solve the problem.