Reply to Georgia Senate voting to end absentee balloting

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "Georgia Senate voting to end absentee balloting"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Then GA should also make voting day a day off so people can go vote. But, they won't because then poor people might vote more.[/quote]

Why?  They have  early voting in GA. Surely, they can find a time that works for them.

https://georgia.gov/early-voting[/quote]

Much of Georgia does not have great public transportation, and some areas have none at all. How are poor people without transportation going to get to the polls? [/quote]

Same way they get to the market or to church or to any of the other places they go during their life.  
I am sure Stacey  Abrams' group has transportation available.  If they want to vote, they'll get to the polls.  
I think you underestimate the  resourcefulness  of poor people.  [/quote]

I’ve lived in a poor area of Georgia. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not nothing to do with the resourcefulness of poor people. It’s about putting barriers in place to make it harder for them to vote. It’s about restricting physical access to the polls. It’s about restricting polling locations so that poor people have to travel further to polls and wait hours outside. It’s about removing voter registrations so that people cannot vote when they are at the polling station (this happened to Stacey Abrams). It’s about gerrymandering districts so that the GOP will always win. I could go on. I’d like to know about your experience living and working in these circumstances in Georgia. [/quote]

It's also about restricting the hours of early voting to normal working hours for the poor.  And with the poor public transportation, someone that is poor might have to take off an entire day of work to go and vote.  Even here in the DC metro area which has far better public transportation than many rural areas, the public transportation options take a lot of time.  My wife is visually disabled and cannot drive.  If I cannot drive her places, then it can take her 2 hours to get to places if she is traveling outside of rush hour.  Public transportation runs less frequently in less popular areas.  So if you live in a rural area and you are used to leaving home 1-2 hours before your work and getting home 1-2 hours after your shift is over, then trying to take off 4-6 hours in the middle of the day, to go and vote is a non-starter.  Some of these people live paycheck to paycheck and while they can build the commute into their life-style, they can't handle losing 20% of a week's pay just to go and vote.

Also, there are places, like where my sister lives in Houston, that they restrict the number of early voting sites.  Harris County, the county for Houston, is larger than the state of Rhode Island.  It takes an hour driving in non-rush hour to get from the outskirts of the county to the board of elections offices.  In rush hour, it is 1.5-2 hours driving time (and Houston's rush hours are horrible).  If you need to take public transit, add an hour to that.  And during last November's election, Texas restricted early voting to exactly one location per county.  So, for the people who live on the fringes of the county, at the hours that the early voting site was open, the commute on public transportation to the ONLY early voting site was 3-4 hours each way because it was only open during business hours on weekdays, when the traffic was bad.  If you were not trying to get there with the rush hour busses, then the busses ran once per hour.  If you are so poor that you don't own a car (especially in Texas), then you really could not afford to take a day off work to go downtown to vote at the only early voting site available.

It's just as bad in many conservative rural areas.  Lack of decent regular public transportation, restricting voting hours to when most of the working poor are working, eliminating vote-by-mail, all serve to make voting virtually impossible for the poor.

I agree with PP^2, that you are an entitled rich person who has no idea how the poor live and what roadblocks are created to disenfranchise them.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics