photo id required limits on drop boxes no mail in voting rights no early voting rights not good. hopefully a sane appeals court fixes this A judge has found Ohio's new election law constitutional, including a strict photo ID requirement (msn.com) A federal judge has upheld as constitutional provisions of the sweeping election law that Ohio put in place last year, rejecting a Democratic law firm's challenge to strict new photo ID requirements, drop box restrictions and tightened deadlines related to absentee and provisional ballots. ............... In a ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Nugent determined that the state's new photo ID requirement “imposes no more than a minimal burden, if any, for the vast majority of voters." .............................. The judge wrote that voters have no constitutional right to a mail-in voting option — or, for that matter, early voting — at all. He added that Ohio's new schedule for obtaining and returning absentee ballots remains more generous than 30 other states. He said the claim that limiting ballot drop boxes to a single location harmed voters was misplaced, because the 2023 law was the state's first to even allow them. While that was true, Republican lawmakers' decision to codify a single-drop box limit per county followed a yearslong battle over the issue.
Evil sentiment. It is probably correct given the absurdity of past Supreme Court decisions, but it’s morally wrong and should be considered unconstitutional if the Court applied even more most basic honest analysis
It starts now. Anything other than 24/7 voting 365 days a year is a “restriction”. So, we can argue about what is sane, fair, and legal but we’re simply debating where to draw the line. Classic case was Georgia and all the hubbub that led MLB to move the All-Star game. Evil Republicans passed new “restrictive” voting laws and ….. participation went up!!!
……. So why does it have to be pushing for stricter limits - multiple forms of picture ID, birth certificate, over-the-top heavy handed police presence, no drop boxes, no mail in ballots, no early voting, no accommodations for special needs, limit voting locations in minority neighborhoods, and limit voting hours which requires waiting in line literally for hours and illegal to provide anyone with water?
Not likely. Unfortunately, the right-wing majority on SCOTUS has spent years undermining democratic rights. Voting is not treated as an actual fundamental right, despite the "right to vote" appearing at least five times in the Constitution. It's been relegated to a lesser status.
well if voting was important enough to them, they would wait days in freezing rain to vote...am i right?? smdh
In your opinion, if the government wants to restrict a fundamental right, what should it have to demonstrate?
The problem with cases like this is that it’s kinda like instant replay in football. I doubt the judge would take away early voting if it’s out there either and conservatives challenged it, But early voting in itself isn’t a fundamental right. We went 200 years without it and democracy functioned ok. The current law will get deference. The exception for me is the id. A good chunk of people don’t have that for various reasons. That is a burden imo.
That's not the proper frame. It's like saying you don't have a right to AR-15s. If Ohio is going to restrict existing voting access, it has to justify burdening a right. The fact that they didn't always offer that form of voting access is about as relevant to the constitutional question as the fact that regular citizens in America didn't have AR-15s until the 1960s.
As far as I see it, if a state wants to impose a voter ID law, it should be required to provide the IDs for free and pay for any documents a person needs to get the ID.
AR-15s were a technological advancement, to give early voting was a choice. In most places it has only been in the last 45 years or so in its modern form. But it has been around since the dawn of the republic, just rarely used. And as far as I know there was no judicial or other federal gvt mandate to do so then or now. Because they chose to provide something at some point doesn’t suddenly make it an irrefutable right. And to be clear, I wholeheartedly support early voting, the attempts to constrict how voting is done are cynical attempts at repression imo. But the idea that telling a state they have to keep something simply because they chose to have it for a relatively brief period of their history is a tough sell. Just as telling they can’t do it if they have it now would be. Hence the replay analogy.
Last point, to be clear that I am not going all Dunning Kruger here, I freely admit and respect that you know constitutional law better than me. I also actually respect that you are a relative absolutist on speech and voting among other things, even when I disagree with you. Your views are consistent. But I do think sometimes that blinds you to possible other valid points of view, which is one of the reasons I take the time to post in these threads sometimes. It’s interesting debate for me. Anyway, time for some sleep.
Now all you have to do is put one working voting machine in heavily minority mostly urban areas and 20 of them in affluent suburbs on Election Day and you get the tilted result you want.
I agree with you that states ought to do everything possible to make voting easier while at the same time ensuring there’s no fraud. Having said that, if I remember correctly, the Constitution says nothing about how the right to vote is to be exercised, implying it’s up to each state.
I don't think our history reflects that we have never had a problem with voting not being a fundamental right. Multiple constitutional amendments suggest to the contrary, as well as the Voting Rights Act, whatever still remains of it
I don't understand why you would need early voting???? I agree absentee voting is a necessity, but not so much on early voting. I also don't understand where you can get that having an id is regressive. You need an ID for just about everything, including cashing checks, so if voter fraud is not a thing. Then a couple of the commonsense necessities shouldn't be a big deal.
I think you made logical arguments. But I don't agree with you. Certainly, the judges in power today think about voting rights the same way you do. I see it as a problematic lens. The right to vote is unique in that it's the one right we have that's entirely controlled by the government. And there's a long history of the government abusing this. That's why we have five different constitutional amendments that explicitly prohibit the government from infringing the right to vote in some very specific way. The reason I don't favor your lens (beyond Tampa's fabulous point about how the right to vote has historically been withheld in this country and the fact that it wasn't even constitutionally protected in theory until at minimum Reconstruction) is because it gives the government near carte blanche to control voting access. It can expand it. It can restrict it. And it almost never has to justify itself. That's inconsistent with how we protect fundamental rights. But it's actually even more insidious than that. The 15th Amendment says: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The 24th Amendment says: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax." And the 26th Amendment says: "The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age." We enacted these constitutional amendments to address three specific problems: the government restricting people's access to vote on account of race, age, and through poll taxes. Yet, the courts have interpreted these amendments in such a disingenuous manner that they no longer actually address these issues. If the government requires you to pay for a voter ID in order to be able to access your right to vote, what is that? It's a poll tax. It's an indirect tax, but it's a tax all the same. Yet, courts would rather play semantic games than enforce the amendment. Looking to another example. Many of these "election integrity" laws passed by Republicans intentionally make it harder for certain racial groups and young people to vote. Yet, we have courts that do mental gymnastics to explain away why it doesn't actually violate the Constitution. (This is after the judiciary and the country ignored the 15th Amendment for a century, making the injustice all the worse.) One of the big problems is that the Supreme Court in all its wisdom has required people to prove BOTH a disparate impact (that the law harms one race more than another) and a racially discriminatory purpose to invalidate voting restrictions. You might say, "That doesn't sound unreasonable." The problem is that Republicans "judges" have spent decades making it almost impossible to prove racially discriminatory purpose. Just recently, the two federal appellate courts that cover much of the South (Fifth and Eleventh Circuits) ruled that state legislators have an absolute immunity from having to comply with discovery requests in civil rights cases. (This absolute immunity does not arise out of any federal statute or from the Constitution. It is judge made.) Basically, you're not allowed to ask the legislators who passed the law for internal documents and communications and you're also not allowed to question them on their motivation for passing the law. That means that you have to prove that these legislators had a racially discriminatory motive in passing the law, but you're not allowed to actually review any of their records/communications to show what their real motivations were or question them about their motivations while they're under oath. In other words, unless the legislator is stupid enough to say publicly that they're passing the law to discriminate (which does happen on rare occasion), they're free to violate the Constitution with impunity. To put a fine point on this, if a representative drafted a new law and then sent it to the other representatives in his party with the email saying, "I worked with outside groups to craft this law specifically to create barriers that make it more difficult for Blacks to vote than whites," that email would not be discoverable if a group of Black voters sued. The only way they could get it or even find out it exists is if somebody who received it turned it over to them voluntarily. Now, the good news in Florida is that we have a robust public records scheme that might make that email available. Of course, the Republicans in power (including in the judiciary) are currently doing everything in their power to weaken that public records scheme in order to shield our government officials from accountability. (And the current folks in charge, even when they can't avoid turning over public records, do everything they can to stall for as long as possible.) Many states don't have the public records laws we do, and that means people there are shit out of luck. This is a long-winded way for me to say that we don't have a judiciary that values the right to vote or even justice. We have a judiciary that does mental gymnastics to justify not enforcing even the applications of the right to vote that are explicitly protected by the Constitution (much less the aspects that are implicitly protected). We have a judiciary that protects government officials from accountability and empowers them to violate the Constitution. It is beyond frustrating.
