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Cruz vs Beto

Washpark

By Washpark
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Hank Scorpio
Hank Scorpio

I'm sorry, look at all these old fucking goblins at this thing:  Let's go one by one:  Beatrice She has not missed a single city council meeting or church bingo in 35 years. S

Born to Run
Born to Run

I’ve heard this bullshit my entire life, hell I used to believe the myth that Republicans were all about “faith in the common man succeeding when unimpeded by the govt.” Left alone business and humani

austingirl
austingirl

I do volunteer work for Beto's campaign (surprise!). I get called a "libtard" on a regular basis and get a lot of responses that are just "#MAGA!" and the like, but I also hear a lot of "who is Beto?"

Chrispy

Chrispy 132

Posted
Posted
Just now, MaybeACoordinator said:

Passed that one. You are still not a real Texan if it took you that long to grasp questions about KOTH, unless you are 60-plus. 

Naw, only 30. We were more of a Simpsons family growing up, however. 

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bernorange

bernorange 8345

Posted
Posted
On 7/12/2018 at 9:21 AM, Ghost of LL said:

We don't register kids in high school automatically, ...

My 18 yo son was registered to vote automagically when he renewed his temporary (16 yo) driving license to a "real" (18 yo/adult) driving license.

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Ghost of LL

Ghost of LL 15327

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6 minutes ago, bernorange said:

My 18 yo son was registered to vote automagically when he renewed his temporary (16 yo) driving license to a "real" (18 yo/adult) driving license.

That's the motor voter deal.  I'm talking about something different.  There is a state law requiring principals to register students.  But the law is observed primarily in the breach, and Republicans take active steps to prevent it from being followed.

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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13388

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Walking my dog down my small neighborhood street (~25 homes) yesterday.  I would say the general makeup of the 'hood is moderate trending liberal.  3 Beto yard signs and 1 Cruz.    However I would imagine that the average Beto supporter wants a yard sign but the average Cruz supporter (or someone just accepting of him) would NOT put a Cruz sign in the front yard.   They don't like him, but they're going to vote for him.

The one thing I do see with Beto is that he has more yard signs than previous Dem senate candidates.  I don't know if that will mean more votes though.  

My two cents on counting the yard signs as a measurement.     

 

I think Beto and Cruz's biggest campaign hurdle is to defeat the straight ticket.  According to this article 64% of the 2016 votes from the 10 largest Texas counties are straight ticket.  It's not easy to poach from the other side when the average voter doesn't actually select individual candidates.  They vote for or against a party.  That's it.  Personally I think straight ticket voting should be abolished but that's another topic.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/11/11/texas-2016-straight-ticket-ballots/

 

 

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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13388

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22 minutes ago, bernorange said:

My 18 yo son was registered to vote automagically when he renewed his temporary (16 yo) driving license to a "real" (18 yo/adult) driving license.

A better question is why isn't everyone automatically registered to vote forever?   We have some perverse system that requires you to state your intention to vote at some point before the election.   Maybe this was needed when everything was paper (or we wanted to keep some people out of the process) but can anyone explain why we can't overcome this obstacle now?

And if we add ID card requirements to voting, you shouldn't need to register.  It should be one or the other.  If I show up on election day with a drivers license saying I live down the street, let me vote even though I never registered.  If I don't have an ID, then require me to register so a check can be done in advance.  Problem solved.

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bernorange

bernorange 8345

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Just now, Nice Guy Eddie said:

... Personally I think straight ticket voting should be abolished but that's another topic. ...

We have the technology.  I say we program voting machines to prompt voters with a question before they can vote in any particular position/race.   First they have to be able to name who the candidates are.  If you don't know who the candidates are, you probably don't know enough to make an informed decision.  I figure after a couple of election cycles where 10 to 30 people are electing everyone statewide, people will start to take their civic duties more seriously.

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tantric superman

tantric superman 4667

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4 hours ago, bernorange said:

We have the technology.  I say we program voting machines to prompt voters with a question before they can vote in any particular position/race.   First they have to be able to name who the candidates are.  If you don't know who the candidates are, you probably don't know enough to make an informed decision.  I figure after a couple of election cycles where 10 to 30 people are electing everyone statewide, people will start to take their civic duties more seriously.

From the introduction to Caro's Master of the Senate (3rd book in LBJ biography).  I remember listening to this as a book on tape when I was driving in Arkansas.  Powerful stuff.  (The passage then switches to Washington, DC)

The room on the first floor of the Barbour County Courthouse in the little town of Eufaula, Alabama, was normally the County Clerk’s Office, but after it had closed for the day on August 2, 1957, it was being used by the county’s Board of Registrars, the body that registered citizens so they could vote in elections—not that the Board was going to register any of the three persons who were applying that day, for the skin of these applicants was black.

It was not a large room, and it was furnished very plainly. Its walls, white and in need of a fresh coat of paint, were adorned only by black-and-white photographs of former county officials. Against the rear wall stood a row of battered old filing cabinets that contained records of deeds and mortgages and applications for driver’s licenses, and in front of the cabinets were six small, utilitarian gray metal office desks, each with a small, worn chair. Then there was a waist-high wooden counter at which people doing business with the County Clerk’s Office usually stood. Today, the three registrars were standing behind the counter, and the applicants were standing in the bare space in front of it. No one offered them a chair, and the registrars didn’t bother to pull up chairs for themselves, because the hearing wasn’t going to take very long.

Trying to register to vote took courage for black people in Alabama in 1957, even when physical intimidation or violence wasn’t employed to discourage them—as it often was. Everyone knew about black men who had registered and who shortly thereafter had been told by their employers that they no longer had a job, or about black farmers who, the following spring, went to the bank as usual for their annual “crop loan”—the advance they needed to buy the seed for the crop they were planning to plant that year—only to be informed that this year there would be no loan, and who had therefore lost their farms, and had had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go. Indeed, David Frost, the husband of Margaret Frost, one of the three applicants that August day, would never forget how, after he himself had registered some years before, a white man had told him that “the white folks are the nigger’s friend as long as the nigger stays in his place,” but that “I had got out of my place if I was going to vote along with the white man,” and how, for months thereafter, instead of calling him “David” or “Boy” as they usually did, white people called him by the word he “just hated, hated”: “Nigger”—pronounced in Alabama dialect, “Nigra”—and how, when they learned he was planning to actually vote, a car filled with men had stopped in front of his house one night and shot out the porch lights, and how, cowering inside, he had thought of calling the police, until, as the car drove away, he saw it was a police car.

And of course there was the humiliation of the registration hearings themselves. Many county Boards of Registrars required black applicants to pass an oral test before they would be given the certificate of registration that would make them eligible to vote, and the questions were often on the hard side—name all of Alabama’s sixty-seven county judges; what was the date Oklahoma was admitted to the Union?—and sometimes very hard indeed: How many bubbles in a bar of soap?

The Barbour County registrars used a less sophisticated technique. They asked more reasonable questions—the names of local, state, and national officials—but if an applicant missed even one question, he would not be given the application that had to be filled out before he could receive a certificate, and somehow, even if a black applicant felt sure he had answered every question correctly, often the registrars would say there was one he had missed, although they would refuse to tell him which it was. Margaret Frost had already experienced this technique, for she had tried to register before—in January of 1957—and forty years later, when she was an elderly woman, she could still remember how, after she had answered several questions, the Board’s chairman, William (Beel) Stokes, had told her she had missed one, adding, “You all go home and study a little more,” and she could still remember how carefully blank the faces of Stokes and his two colleagues had been, the amusement showing only in their eyes.

Nonetheless, despite the humiliation of her earlier hearing in the County Clerk’s Office, Mrs. Frost—a soft-spoken woman of thirty-eight—had returned to that dingy room to stand in front of that counter again. “I was scared I would do something wrong,” she recalls. “I was nervous. Shaky. Scared that the white people would do something to me.” But, she says, “I wanted to be a citizen,” truly a part of her country, and she felt that voting was part of being a citizen. “I figure all citizens, you know, should be able to vote.” In the months since January, she had, with her husband asking her questions, studied, over and over, all the questions she felt the Board might ask, until she thought she would be able to answer every one. And on August 2, she put on her best clothes and went down to the courthouse again.

As it turned out, however, the diligence with which Margaret Frost had studied turned out to be irrelevant, because the Board examined her and the two other applicants as a group, and one of them wasn’t as well prepared as she.

When she asked Stokes for an application, he said, “There’s twelve questions you have to answer before we give you an application.” He asked just two. Mrs. Frost answered them both correctly, as did one of the other applicants. But the third applicant answered the second question incorrectly, and Stokes told them that therefore they had all failed. “You all go home and study a little more,” he said.


Margaret Frost left the room quietly, and she never sued or took any other legal action to try to force the Board to register her. Doing so, however, would almost certainly not have helped. In August, 1957, black Americans in the South who were denied the right to vote, and who asked a lawyer (if they could find a lawyer who would take their case) what law would assist them to do so, were informed that there was no such law—and that information was accurate. Summarizing the situation, a study made that same year by the United States Department of Justice concluded that “There is no adequate legal remedy” for a person who had been denied a registration certificate by a county Board of Registrars.

The scene that had occurred in the Eufaula courthouse was not an unusual one in the American South in 1957. After the Civil War almost a century before, there had been an attempt to make black Americans more a part of their country, to give them the basic rights of citizens—which included, of course, a citizen’s right to vote—and in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had supposedly guaranteed that right, forbidding any state to “deny or abridge” the “right of citizens . . . to vote” because of their race or color. But the amendment proved to be an insufficient guarantee in the eleven southern states that had seceded from the Union and formed the rebel Confederacy; specific laws to give the amendment force and make it meaningful—federal laws, since there was no realistic possibility that any southern state would pass an effective statute—were going to be necessary. During the eighty-seven years since the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified, scores, indeed hundreds, of proposed federal laws had been introduced in the Congress of the United States to ensure that black Americans would have in fact as well as theory the right to vote. Not one of these bills had passed. And in Barbour County, in which there were approximately equal numbers of black Americans and white Americans, out of 7,158 blacks of voting age in 1957, exactly 200—one out of thirty-five—had the right to vote, while 6,521 whites had that right. In Alabama as a whole, out of 516,336 blacks who were eligible to vote, only 52,336—little more than one out of ten—had managed to register. For the eleven southern states as a whole, out of more than six million blacks eligible to vote, only 1,200,000—one out of five—had registered. And of course, even those blacks who had registered to vote often didn’t dare go to the polls to cast ballots, because of fear of violence or economic retaliation. In 1957, there were scores of counties in the South which had tens of thousands of black residents, but in which, in some elections, not a single vote had been cast by a black.

https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/caro/excerpt.html

 

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Mojo Hand

Mojo Hand 4580

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4 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Walking my dog down my small neighborhood street (~25 homes) yesterday.  I would say the general makeup of the 'hood is moderate trending liberal.  3 Beto yard signs and 1 Cruz.    However I would imagine that the average Beto supporter wants a yard sign but the average Cruz supporter (or someone just accepting of him) would NOT put a Cruz sign in the front yard.   They don't like him, but they're going to vote for him.

The one thing I do see with Beto is that he has more yard signs than previous Dem senate candidates.  I don't know if that will mean more votes though.  

My two cents on counting the yard signs as a measurement.     

 

I think Beto and Cruz's biggest campaign hurdle is to defeat the straight ticket.  According to this article 64% of the 2016 votes from the 10 largest Texas counties are straight ticket.  It's not easy to poach from the other side when the average voter doesn't actually select individual candidates.  They vote for or against a party.  That's it.  Personally I think straight ticket voting should be abolished but that's another topic.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/11/11/texas-2016-straight-ticket-ballots/

 

 

Hasn't it been eliminated in Texas (albeit in 2020, so it won't affect 2018)? 

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dark54555

dark54555 72

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On 7/16/2018 at 11:35 AM, Nice Guy Eddie said:

They don't like him, but they're going to vote for him.

 

 

 

Which remains a TERRIBLE way to select an elected official.  And how we ended up with the pair of shit sandwiches that are Cruz and Dannie Goeb.

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Huckleberry

Huckleberry 32661

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Yes, when I think of Ted Cruz I think tough.

What Tough Texas Man wouldn't allow another man to talk shit about his wife and his father and then never say or do anything about it? Isn't that what makes a Texan a Texan, letting other men talk shit about your wife and father?

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26198

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Posted
1 hour ago, NameAlreadyInUse said:

Isn't Tough as Texas a tagline for Toyota or Ford or somebody's pickups?  They ought to sue.

I won't believe Ted is actually Texas Tough unless he pronounces it "Tekshash", and kinda grumbles when he says it, truck commercial/inflamed hemorrhoids style.

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