Came here to post this

derp

Potato
http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic

I can not think of any valid or moral reason someone would be against the presenting of IDs for voting. Those who oppose it do so because of politics and corruption.

The post is actually about getting ID, not about presenting ID as a condition of voting. I can't think of much of a reason beyond voting to require ownership of an identity document.

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if you do not have a crisis one can be manufactured for you by our team of experts

I'm totally fine with requiring photo ID. I'm also fine with raising the voting age to 35. The reasons for this extend beyond simply preventing voter fraud. Even if voter fraud did not exist at all, I would still be fine with it. People who have photo IDs of some kind tend to be more responsible in life than those who do not. The more roadblocks we can throw up to prevent freeloaders from voting for a living, the better.

No, fact.  The US is (or at least was founded as) a Representative Republic.  A strong argument could be made that it has devolved to an oligarchy.

I agree.

That whole article is wrong, Jesus fuck.

Actually it's just very confused and conflicted.

ETA: You don't know WTF you're talking about.

Google "Democratic Republic".

The terms are not mutually exclusive.

The fact that things have gotten so bad that we have to demand ID to vote












 

I disagree. I think it is simply the result of having such a large population. In a small community where everyone knows each other it wouldn't be an issue. It's just keeping honest people honest.


ETA: how will people be persecuted based on who they vote for because they had to show an ID instead of just giving a name before receiving a ballot

This is the first time I have said this but loosen the tinfoil

Felons voting illegally probably gave you Sen Al Franken, who gave you ZeroCare.  I'd call that pretty damned significant,

In some precincts in Florida, the voter turnout was 141% of the number of registered voters.  In Washington state, more votes were cast than registered voters in the state.  Mayor Daley and the Kennedy family used to joke about the fraud committed to get Jack elected.  James O'Keefe could have picked up Eric Holder's ballot and voted, but he stopped short of committing a crime.

In Maryland, Ellen Sauerbrey lost a very close gubernatorial election, and it was discovered Baltimore City refused to remove the names of 30,000 dead voters from the registry.

If you're not aware of massive voter fraud, you're simply not paying attention.

Exactly what do you think has been going on for the last umpteen decades when your signature at the polls is compared to the signature on file? SURPRISE! You are being identified as the person voting using that name and address.

ID to practice an inalienable right?  Nope bad idea.

Voting is not an inalienable right. It's not even a natural right.

herp

No, the US is a Democratic Republic.

That's a fact.

Yes, if voting were an inalienable right, then every person on the planet would be able to vote in our elections. Can you imagine the government we'd have then?

No, our governance is self-governance. Citizens of a nation governing themselves would have to consist of voting amongst themselves, absent of any outside influence.

Also, why do they have fucking 80y/os who dont speak fucking english doing the clerical work wtf

I did google it, the United States definetly is not a democratic republic. Maby the Commies think so.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of American and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all." No where in there does it say to the democratic republic.

This right here is one reason for having an ID system for voting, how can we expect a fair vote if anyone can just show up on election day and expect to vote? We must have some form of vetting to know who to allow to vote. We do it for driving, not a right, a privilege, we do it for entering a federal and most state buildings, we do it  to cash a check, buy a hunting license, buy a drink in most states, pick up a package at the Post Office, FedEx, UPS, enroll for college classes, etc.

Benjamin Franklin: When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers: We are a Republican Government, Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy...it has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

John Adams: Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.


Thomas Jefferson: A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.

James Madison: Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

John Quincy Adams: The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.

Thomas Jefferson: The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

Benjamin Franklin (maybe): Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.


James Madison: Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrant.

John Marshall: Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.

Karl Marx: Democracy is the road to socialism.
The list can go on and on America was found a republic, the founding fathers wanted it to be a republic. It's sad that people don't know this

I was a bit remiss in the title, of course I realize and understand that we have a democratic republic. Perhaps what I should have led with was that. Easier to type one word than two without maxing out on characters. The question still stands though, how can we expect our votes for  representatives to remain undiluted, untainted, without some form of ID being used? Otherwise we get something like Tammany Hall drafting Irish immigrants right off the boat to vote. Of course this is what the Dems expect to do by dispersing all those immigrants from south of the border around the country.........isn't it?

Depends upon what for.

Refer to thread title........

Federal, State and Local should require it, with so many legal and illegal immigrants in the US, Voter ID is paramount to protect US sovereignty, they can easily sway elections at the federal level even more so at the State and local level.

If we allow a foreign entities to decide our elections we no longer have sovereignty, the American people would be citizens without a nation as the US would in a nutshell belong to every other nation on earth to manipulate as they see fit.    

I totally agree with you and think you need to be an American citizen to vote and have to show proof. I live in AZ and with all the illigos that are here voting, it won't be long until it becomes a blue state.

Voting is not an inalienable right because limitations on the franchise are contained in the Constitution. As originally adopted, voting qualifications were left entirely to the states. Eventually, disabilities based on race, sex, age above 18, and payment of poll taxes were made unconstitutional. However, states are free to impose any other condition on voting eligibility that they like.

Most compellingly, you do not have the right to vote for President or for presidential Electors.

I didn't think it was possible to fail this hard, I'm actually impressed.

We should require proof of citizenship and dye fingers after voting.

Generally, I'm not a fan of the modern practice of requiring that we show our papers for every little thing, and it is a symptom of having a state that could be characterized as totalitarian in a number of respects, but when it comes to voting, considering how much Americans vote for these days compared to the past and also how many Americans and non-citizens there are in this country, I do feel the need to make an exception.  

Is it an affront to democracy?  Quite possibly, depending on one's theory of what democracy entails.  If democracy is supposed to be maximally inclusive, then it could very well be considered an affront to it.  Aristotle defined democracy as being a form of government where the rulers were the worst part of the people for their own benefit; if that is also the ideal for someone for whatever purpose (a person using the baser aspects of the populace for political gain is certainly no rare creature), I can also see it as an affront to democracy.  If one carries a more limited vision of what democracy entails, i.e. a polity where informed citizens make choices directly or indirectly on a principle of the rule of the majority of those persons, then a photo ID requirement is no affront to democracy, but rather can constitute an important part of it.

Personally, I think the question of whether or not it is an affront to our democracy is moot.  The type of government the Founders gave us is an affront to democracy and was intended to be so.  Aristotle's description of democracy is pretty darn close to the truth.  Anything to counter it or move us away from it is a good thing, and this includes ensuring that those who claim to be electors are in fact qualified to do so and are who they claim to be.  It is also important for ensuring the quality of any electoral process, whether the polity is as a whole democratic or not, as fraud corrupts and undermines elections.  

Legally-speaking, it is no affront.  The Constitution does not prohibit very many qualifications for electors.  One cannot use race itself as a qualification, nor a previous condition of servitude, nor sex, nor a failure to pay a poll tax or other tax, nor age if 18 or older, and in all of this the reference is to outright prohibitions on the whole class voting because of the aforementioned things.  Nor can the qualifications for electors of Representatives differ from those of the most numerous legislative house in each respective State.  There are literally no other restrictions on States regarding qualifications for suffrage, and the idea of laws being unconstitutional because they might affect some groups more than others even though those groups are not actually being targeted is silly and has no basis in the constitution.  The States in ratifying the 14th Amendment wanted to preserve their ability to have a qualified franchise including qualifications which were stricter for blacks than for whites (for example, property-based qualifications continued to exist for blacks for years after whites had achieved universal suffrage, and this is in the northern States after the 14th Amendment was ratified).  They were unwilling to accept an amendment that would infringe upon this State right and the 14th Amendment was thus written in a manner which would not lose their support.  Later amendments dealing with suffrage are very narrow in their purpose compared to the 14th Amendment (which of course covered more than suffrage, those other provisions being used against things like requiring voter ID).

I would say that as far as voting qualifications go, requiring a photo ID to prove you are someone who meets the other very minimal qualifications to vote (being 18 in most cases, being a U.S. citizen in most cases, not being a felon in some cases, not being imprisoned, etc.) is extremely mild and nowhere near as burdensome as historical qualifications, such as requiring freely held ownership of land of substantial value in order to qualify to vote.  I say the stricter the qualifications the better, so long as they are crafted properly.  Will some people probably not be able to vote who otherwise qualify?  Probably.  But I'm not convinced most of those persons are part of the better part of our society and that combined with ensuring that non-citizens and fraudsters are not voting or manipulating the vote makes these laws a good thing.  And since democracy is a very bad form of government I honestly do not care if it is in fact an affront to "our democracy."

It is an issue worth considering, but it is universal for governments to decide whether or not one qualifies to vote and thus place someone on or remove them from voter registries.  I'm not sure there can really be any other way to go about that, as well, especially if even the most minimal qualifications are to be imposed.  

Personally, I think a good way to alleviate this issue is to issue an actual voter ID card automatically if one applies to be added to the register of voters, is found to be qualified, and is placed on the rolls.  If the qualifications differ for voting for different things or offices, or if there are different voter rolls (such as an A roll and a B roll) it should be indicated on the card in print and via colour coding so that one can know what ballots may be issued to a person based on their voter ID card.  Allow for every part of the process to be done by mail or locally in person, so the issue of having to drive far away or get a ride affects very few people.

How is such a minimal qualification on an act that is not a right and is not inherent in a liberal polity an affront to liberty?  That makes no sense.

For all practical intents and purposes, yes it is.  That it was not founded that way (the same being true of many State governments) and retains vestigial elements of its non-democratic past does not change the fact.  It's what we've become.

It shouldn't be a national or universal ID, nor a State ID whose features are governed by the national government.  The national government should not have a role in determining qualifications to vote or having much of anything else to do with that process other than enforcing those few restrictions on voting qualifications that are actually present in the constitution.

Also, as has already been pointed out, voting is not a right.  The Constitution does not prohibit most conceivable qualifications to vote.  Even if it uses the verbiage "right" in later amendments, this characteristic means that the constitution is not treating suffrage as a right nor truly enshrining it as one.  Voting is most certainly not any sort of natural right that ought to be reflected in our laws.

Depends on the circumstances.
Geneal travel - show me you papers Comrade, yes an affront.

Specific activities - voting, driving, drinking, no.

It has always been a democracy, it has never, however, been a direct or pure democracy.

It has not always been a democracy.  The only part of the government that was as a rule chosen by the people was the House of Representatives, and "the people" meant a minority of the population in most States.  There are thus some democratic elements incorporated into the government, but as a whole it is not democratic.  It was designed to be a regimen mixtum, but one in which uses what amounts to an untitled, elective monarch with a term limit rather than a royally titled lifetime elected monarch or hereditary monarch as was the norm for such governments and which also takes into account a lack of nobility in the States (and substitutes federal and aristocratic elements for the noble ones in the constitution of government).  Any claims of the Founders founding a democracy is an evidence of ignorance of our political history.

We are a democracy, of the representative kind at the national level, and at the State level we are a democracy in the form of a hybrid model in most cases, i.e. one which combines direct and indirect democracy to some degree or another (and in many cases in which a provision of a bill of rights could in fact be voted away by 50% plus one of the people).  At the national level, and in some States, vestigial non-democratic elements remain, although some have been perverted to the point where they have effectively become democratic (such as our Electoral College).

Also, any government that can be described as a "thing of the people" is a republic.  It can be a regimen mixtum with a monarch or president, it could be a democracy, with or without direct democratic elements, it can be a socialist state that claims to operate "for the people," etc.  It is a very broad category which has its theoretical ideals, but is broad nevertheless.  Being democratic does not necessarily make a government something other than a republic.

You don't even know the meanings or the words you're using, FFS.

That's quite a statement for someone falsely claiming the U.S. has always been a democracy.  Perhaps you could actually educate us rather than issue one-liners about definitions or even explain why you think we've always been a democracy.

It would be easier if you'd just go read the definition of the words, it really isn't even a topic open to debate, the definitions are cut and dry.

Indirect Democracy is still Democracy. There aren't really any nation states that operate as Direct Democracies, they're all Indirect.

At its founding the US was considered very Democratic, by the standards of the time, though not by current standards. Regardless, it's certainly a Democracy now.

it's what we've become. The founding fathers are banging there heads on the wall seeing "what we've become." So when we no longer have the 2nd amendment or any of the bill of rights or the constitution and are a socialist communist country is that just gonna be "what we've become?" little by little theyre gonna change the country and people are going to be okay with it. And people thinking were supposed to be a democracy gets them one step closer.