Showing posts with label Liberal Viewer Presents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberal Viewer Presents. Show all posts
Monday, December 3, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Lil White Lies: Jumping the Shark
In reviewing a Grading PolitiFact review of a PolitiFact Florida ruling on a statement by the ACLU of Florida on the amount of voter fraud in Florida versus the number of shark attacks, I let it go and didn't publish a response because the only reason I could find to oppose their argument—although it was a good one—was the ideological “it’s always best to expand democratic participation.”
But a recent youtube video from “Liberal Viewer Presents” (see below) and a follow-up post from Grading PolitiFact made me realize that Grading PolitFact’s basis for saying this Mostly True ruling was in the “wrong” and should be “False” was a, pardon the pun, felonious one, and did something it often accuses others of, that is, it built a “felons voting” straw man around the voter fraud (in this case, third party voter registrations).
I would have argued originally that in some states felons can vote once they have served their time—their debt to society has been paid, so to speak, so why should they be banned from voting. It sort of shows the absolutest, unforgiving, punishing bent of some Republicans. I might also have taken it right to the end of the slippery slope with the reductio ad absurdum “death panel” argument as well: if you’re not going to allow felons and those without ID to vote, why don’t you just restrict voting to property holders….just like our founding fathers considered doing.
But the “democracy” argument is not the right one for this case. That’s because Grading PolitiFact cannot add these felons to the count as voter fraud to compare to shark attacks. The reason it cannot add them is because the new law does not prevent felons from voting. A person’s driver license does not indicate if they are a felon. Often the police can only see that a person’s drivers’ license is legitimate and hasn’t expired along with traffic charges, and the only way to know whether the driver is a felon is to have police access and be able to look at the person’s arrest record. One can possibly have a felony conviction with traffic charges from being at fault in a deadly traffic accident, but there are many more felonies outside of that. In some cases the police access is restricted (there has to be “cause”): Is it a “cause” to check every person’s driver license for a felony when they vote? In the case of the teacher helping her students register to vote, I’d say the felon question applies in the same way. When filling out the application you must confirm that you are not a felon without “civil rights restored.” The article in the Tampa Bay Times as well as the PolitiFact ruling was not about felons found voting; it was about the rules for third party voter registrations.
It should be noted that Florida’s assistant attorney general called the subject teacher in the article (doing the "third party registrations") and made her an offer to “settle out of court” which means it was not being treated quite like an “illegality.”