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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (3261)	10/20/2006 4:46:31 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Re: "zero tolerance" Many zero tolerance policies are bad ideas. I'm not saying that if someone has seriously committed election fraud, and clearly violated the law, and the law has a penalty of a prison sentence that they shouldn't go to prison. I'm not even arguing that if the law doesn't call for a prison sentence, that it should not be changed to do so for serve enough cases. I'm just saying that we should be careful here. Purging the roles in a way that has a net effect of hurting one party more than the other shouldn't automatically be considered an illegal act. Running registration drives where some of the new registrants are not legally eligible to vote shouldn't automatically be considered illegal either. Clearly deliberate attempts to sign people known to be ineligible and get them to vote, or clearly deliberate attempts to purge people who are eligible voters, probably is, and definitely should be illegal, but there is room to take actions that would have a predictable partisan advantage, without stepping over that line. For example - Think of some low income community, that is overwhelming liberal and has a high percentage of illegal immigrants. If the Democrats run a registration driver there, they might pull in some illegal immigrants or other ineligible voters, and by doing so they might help themselves. If the Republicans figuring there are a lot of ineligible voters on the rolls make an attempt to get the rolls in that community purged of ineligible voters, they will likely be helping themselves, and also there is a possibility of a mistake where a few eligible voters are taken off the roles. In either case can you reasonably call for prison terms? I am convinced, as are many democrats that there is a systematic deliberate large scale disenfranchisement going on by the republicans. I am not convinced of anything of the sort. I suspect that there is no such unified, large scale, systematic and deliberate campaign (but I'm not quite "convinced" of it.) I also suspect that the Democrats deliberately distort the vote at least as much as the Republicans. But despite non-agreement as to the main perpetrators we can still discuss the proper way to deal with the issue. The correct way shouldn't be any different if a Republican or a Democrat is committing election fraud.