Lawsuit Seeks To Block New York Ban On 'Ballot Selfies' (msnbc.com)

You have have the right to vote, but should you have the right to take a selfie at a ballot? According to ABC News, a federal lawsuit is challenging a New York state law that makes it a misdemeanor to show a marked election ballot to others: The lawsuit filed late Wednesday in Manhattan federal court seeks to have the law banning so-called "ballot selfies" declared unconstitutional. The lawsuit says publishing a voted ballot on social media can be a powerful form of political expression. It says that someone claiming they voted without photographic proof reduces the credibility of the individual. Attorney Leo Glickman, who filed the suit on behalf of three voters, says the lawsuit is consistent with claims made in Michigan, Indiana and New Hampshire, where similar laws have been struck down. In a separate report, Mother Jones' Kevin Drum explained the reasoning behind why a law against "ballot selfies" would exist in the first place: Just for the record, then, there is a reason for selfie bans in voting booths: it prevents vote buying. After all, the only way it makes sense to pay people for their votes is if you have proof that they voted the way you told them to. Back in the day that was no problem, but ever since secret ballots became the norm vote buying has died out. Selfies change all that. If I give you ten bucks to vote for my favorite candidate for mayor, I can withhold payment until you show me a selfie proving that you voted for my guy.

Comments

Re:No, I didn't say Republicans are perfect

[silentcoder]

This goes back way further than the teabaggers. This began way back in 1964. LBJ had recently passed the civil rights act - with great difficulty and through a lot of hard realpolitik in a rare moment when the circumstances allowed it (in many ways - that law may never have happened if Kennedy had lived for though Kennedy had pushed for it -congress wouldn't have gone for it, LBJ could ride on the 'legacy of the lost leader' thing to pull them in). Either way - there was a huge (and expected) backlash - all the dixiecrats departed the democratic party and joined the republicans.

And in this mess came the 1964 Republican nominee for president - running on a platform of anti-civil rights, shouting racial slurs throughout his campaign speeches, bombastic and demagogic and quite crazy with no respect for the democratic process or the constitution, indeed running on nothing but populist ethno-nationalism and flat-out racism. The original Donald Trump mister Barry Goldwater.
Goldwater took the republican nomination in a landslide - in part with the help of the Southern dixiecrats who pulled the republican party from the one that ended slavery into the new home for crazy racists (northern republicans remained relatively sane - conservaitve, but not crazy - but were helpless before the onslaught).

Goldwater got his ass handed to him in the election. LBJ trounced him and won a decisive second term in one of the biggest landslides in American election history (though Trump looks set to beat his record for least votes to a major party-candidate ever). In 1955 some 40% of black voters voted republican - they were a big chunk of the religious right. In 1964 it was less than 5% - no sane black man would vote for Goldwater after all. It would be like a black man seeking membership of the KKK and volunteering to be lynched. .Thus the 60's ran along and 1968 came around. The republicans had learned some lessons. Shouting ni***** in your speeches pissed of moderate republicans, scared of even the most religious of black voters away. But to keep the dixiecrats they had to be racist... and Nixon appeared on the scene with his 'Southern Strategy' - a way to appease the racists by saying racist things without saying them - so that the moderates didn't run away, and the rest of society couldn't condemn you so easily. The main brains behind it was Nixon's campaign strategist Kevin Phillips - Phillips was actually hired by Trump in this year's campaign but like so many others he didn't last, you can't get Trump to use dog whistles, he loves using foghorns too much.

Either way - that set the stage for republican politics ever since. To quote Philips' own description of what he taught Nixon: "Instead of nigg*r, nigg*r, nigg*r you just say 'law and order' and everybody knows you really mean nigg*er but they can't prove it". Of course Nixon was a disaster as a president but the Southern Strategy was a roaring success. It would keep the hard-right racists in the republican fold without forcing the republican party to go full-crazy, and it worked very welll for decades. It got the republicans three presidential victories in a row in between Reagan and the first Bush and kept Carter to a single term (though he had contributed to that with some mistakes of his own).
The democrats didn't get a succesfull counter until Clinton turned them into a center-right party that paid lip-service to liberal ideals with token legislation of no real signfiicance only. Basically, it was the Southern-Strategy done backwards. Clinton's most liberal law ever was giving the vote to Romani people, the rest of his time in the white house included welfare reform and don't-ask-don't-tell (very anti-liberal laws both). Of course Bush II stopped Gore from puling that off again - and ditto defeated Kerry - mostly by expanding the Southern Strategy using some seriously crazy levels of pandering to the religious right. But have you wondered why he had to pander to the religious right ?
Because the demographics were shifting - even in