Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 13, 2011

Maybe only property owners should be allowed to vote.

So no physically disabled or Quakers.

Yeah, the truth is the similarities to the fall of the Roman Republic are scary. And some of the richest people are apparently perfectly okay with going back to a kind of nobility/serf caste system. First step, strip rights from the people who won’t support you. Second step, take away their money, and so their property. Now that they are poor, offer them step three, indentured servtitude, and most will take it, just to keep their families alive. Voila, plutocrats at the top, no one in the middle, lots of helots on the bottom, scraping to get by, fighting each other to get hired by the rich. What does it take to get people to pay attention to whats going on?

The framers of the Constitution allowed only white male property owners to vote. Roll back what activist judges have done to it. Strict constructionists, arise! Unite! Legislate! Enforce!

Give me some men who are stout-hearted menWho will fight for the right they adoreStart me with ten who are stout-hearted menAnd I’ll soon give you ten thousand more-ore. Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolderThey grow as they go to the foreThen there’s nothing in the world Can halt or mar a planWhen stout-hearted men Can stick together – man – to man.

I seem to be hearing that comment about returning to the caste system alot lately, and here’s what I don’t understand: Presumeably the largest percentage of the 1%, at some time in their life, studied history. Now, it’s been a half-century for me, but from what I recall that class was largely about revolutions, often Of the poor Against the rich. Now, for all those smart one-percenters: What part of that revolution thing don’t you understand? You HAVE been watching regimes fall in the middle east, right? Do you REALLY believe you’ll be able to pay off EVERYONE that has it in for you? REALLY? I mean, REALLY???

GT knows it doesn’t matter who wins elections — everybody in Washington is committed to making the taxpayer back apartheid

“GT knows it doesn’t matter who wins elections — everybody in Washington is committed to making the taxpayer back apartheid” Whew, gladlythecrosseyedbear, sooo glad you’re back. What can we do to assassinate the character of the evil GT?

Almost no voter fraud? When did Chicago secede?

 HM=AM (Honest Man = Angry Man).

“… the Roman Republic was with a shaky democracy …” 

Seems the Roman Republic was never a democracy at all, but rather a true oligarchy (the Senate), converted — around the turn of the millennium via Julius Caesar — into a empirical dictatorship (ED) more successful by far than Hitler’s short-lived “thousand-year reich”.

Furthermore, the peripheral problems of the ED’s hegemony have many parallels with our US hegemony that didn’t exist during the oligarchical period. This oligarchical rule was exemplified by the senate-ruled republic, which on any case was hardly REPRESENTATIVE of the Roman citizenry: the poor, tradesmen, women, slaves — not to mention non-citizens such as conquered peoples (Carthaginians of N. Africa, the Jews of Judea, the Samaritans of today’s Lebanon, Greece, denizens of today’s Turkey, the eastward-flung remnants of Alexander’s empire, etc.).

This we know: People are honest, you can depend on it everytime! No ID’s in supermarkets, Please!

Your vote is the only one that counts.

We are a rabble, but in arms unlike say, the Syrians.

Voter fraud is close to non-existent.

That statement is just plain silly. A voter registration card is about as hard to obtain as a Cheerios box top. Eight of the 9/11 terrorists had valid voter registration cards from Virginia or Maryland.

The extent of illegal voting can be debated, but the fact that it exists can only be denied by the terminally naive. Many elections, up to and including the state level, are determined by a few hundred votes.

If voter fraud is non-existent, why do so many Bush haters still maintain that he “stole” the election?

“I’d love to give Mr. Romney a “Mitt”—RIGHT IN THE KISSER!!” You gonna vote for the by-then toothless Romney? Or the Obamannoyer?

In Florida a drivers license costs $54 or $31 if you just move.Plus you need a social security card, your birth certificate, and TWO proofs of residence.Supply all of that or you don’t vote.

You want to know what the best thing about our political system is? It’s not made in China.

How would you know that voter fraud barely exists? And frankly, if it exists at all, that’s too much.

No fraud? Then why have they found that in places like Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis and others, they have found there are more voters registered than actually exist?I guess to GT that’s not fraud unless it gets a republican elected.But, I’m confused. How, exactly does requiring ID prevent folks from voting?I know, I know, “some people don’t have an ID” – whose fault is that? Is there some republican conspiracy to prevent democrats access to ID’s? The poor? If they are collecting benefits then they do have an ID. Does an ID requirement prevent folks from voting? Yes – those who aren’t allowed to vote.

@AKHenderson, I was gonna say, I remember a few years back when I lived there one district had 107% voter turnout.

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True. Watch the movie Rescue Dawn. Dieter was a true American hero

Just another way for Carl Rove to get his one party country.

So many sensible people commenting. It’s almost …whelming to make a mark here. As a suggestion for the future, the rich DO taste better. They’ve been mostly raised more in controlled environments, and metaphorically, have one foot tacked to a board and chosen viands poured down their gullets. It behooves us free-rangers to try some of that ‘high on the hog’ stuff FIRST.

RED RASCAL announcement:Tomorrow is the date Becca set for the publication of Jeff’s romance/memoir. See the strip athttp://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2011/08/31

If we go with the Roman analogies, soon we’ll get Caesar seizing power from the 1% Senate, followed by a couple hundred years of Pax Americana.

72 comments and not one mention of “motor voter.” (It’s my impression that the large illegal alien population is the primary motivator for the voter ID laws.).Officially “motor voter” doesn’t count as fraud, just as the City of New London’s use of eminent domain doesn’t officially count as theft. De jure is at odds with de facto in both cases..Did anyone ever investigate those four Florida counties that were engaging in what by all appearances was a “First Ward” election? (Thank you Chicago, for your contribution to the lexicon.) For the uninitiated, that’s where the votes are recounted over and over until the desired result is achieved. Once an election board is on the third recount, it’s time to smell that rat. That’s one reason election laws set strict deadlines..The truth is we don’t know how much election fraud there is. Just because we can’t find something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. People can and do get away with committing crimes without getting caught. Long-term election fraud systems have a learning curve over ad-hoc schemes in avoiding detection – especially detection by the opposing party..Was the Bush administration even looking that hard?.Honest Strawman doesn’t explain how the push for voter ID laws suppresses legal votes.

The Athenian Democracy restricted voting to free male property owners. That’s where John Locke got the idea which inspired our founders- they were copying Athens.

The Athenian Democracy only lasted 50 years. They were too disorganized to defend themselves against the Spartans.

P.S. The Roman Empire collapsed because of high taxes and unrestricted immigration.

Geez a democrat shark feeding frenzy.

No intelligent people allowed to vote I see.

Former Harvard prof and piano bar entertainer Tom Lehrer had a good line in one of his songs: “…Poll tax! ..How I love ya.. How I love ya … My dear ole poll tax!”

Does Mark’s hair colour change depending on the context?

@spamgaard; you refer to “working people that can’t get time off from work”; in Canada BY LAW everybody who has a job must be allowed a large number of sequential hours off work to vote. I don’t remember the exact number, but there’s enough time to go home from work, vote, and get back to work. Or, if someone has calculated out when they can finish for the day, just go home, vote, and not go back to work at all till the next day.

@Saskfan? or @Mrssaskfan? or any other Canadian? Does anybody else know the exact number? I’d also be curious about how it works in Australia too. Seems like you have a pretty good system, from comments Ozzies have made.

So no one can say how checking a person’s ID at the polls with discourage democrat turnout.

only 3% of the vote is fraud in my precint

Wow, that’s a very timely joke, @AKHenderson! You must be a hit on the Vaudeville circuit.

A booming economy?

Great game lwp, a fourth down conversion attempt too far and a calm handshake.

Be honest, ready to jump on the Niner bandwagon?

is that paid hours? there is a reason that business owners and people that work shift work and/or long hours get absentee voter ballots

How about letting only those who have some skin in the game vote. Freebies are not Frisbees. I need a new one as O bama tore the middle out of mine.

<<<Voila, plutocrats at the top, no one in the middle, lots of helots on the bottom, scraping to get by, fighting each other to get hired by the rich.>>>Sounds like Cuba! You ought to move there…

No different than demoncrats wanting to give convicted felons, still behind bars, the right to vote like they tried in Florida a few years back.

Re the actual strip… when did Mark’s hair turn white? Or is it the colorists??

There were districts in 2008 where more people voted for Obama than were registered to vote. His voter registration drives registered thousands of people named Mickey Mouse.

And it’s physically impossible for anyone to be prevented from voting by any of the GOP-enacted voter ID laws unless they’re ineligible to vote. You have to be a non-citizen, or be registered and have voted in another district – something, incidentally, that was done for Gore in 2000 by part-time Floridians in numbers two orders of magnitude higher than Bush’s margin of victory. That fraud didn’t turn that election is nothing more than a statistical accident.

You could argue that these laws aren’t the best way to solve voter fraud – God knows they won’t eliminate it. You could even argue suppression, if you could identify a scenario in which someone legally eligible to vote might be prevented from doing so by one of these laws – but nobody has described any such scenario.

But to claim that there is no fraud, or that it’s not a problem, is simply nonsensical. Too much of it happens in the wide open to even entertain the possibility that it doesn’t exist.

Bottom line, there is absolutely nothing wrong with demanding that people who aren’t citizens don’t vote, and that those who are citizens only vote once per election. And voter ID laws do exactly that and nothing more.