|
The quote ends before saying what he was leading to. I'll try to say what *he* said and then my personal judgment (and possibly those of others) to what he said.
1. Members of minority communities tend to die younger. True. (Moreover, he said it's a bad thing, due to discrimination and a lack of equality in medical care and access. Also true, and obviously something only a freeper would say.)
2. Members of minority communities tend to be a disproportionately smaller percentage of the elderly population. Presumably true, at least I can't think of any plausible conditions that would make it obviously false. But note this implies that there are elderly minorities.
3. Therefore, when you look at potential race-based disenfranchisement that unfair ID requirements might produce, you can't just look at the absolute numbers of people with valid IDs. It's important to look at rates of ID possession. True; at least it's a valid assertion, IMO. A small number of elderly without IDs might translate to a wildly disproportionate racial impact, or you may find that other assumptions that would lead us to predict a higher rate of minorities without valid IDs lead to wrong conclusions.
4. However, if you look at the population of elderly who has ID acceptable under the Georgia ID voter law, in terms of percentage of subpopulations, you find that there's a slightly *higher* percentage of minorities that hold the accetpable kinds of ID than there are whites. It's a claim I hadn't heard, and have no way of judging, but one that should be established to be true or false in order to actually form a reality-based opinion. In any event, this is the statement that the audience found either controversial or counterfactual (based entirely on anecdotal information, however), and the claim that actually needs to be defended or rebutted when discussing voter disenfranchisement in racial terms. (Note that dsenfranchising *anybody* is bad, but when the argument is made in racial terms, anything that shows that there's no race-based bias in the outcome is sufficient to deny the argument's validity.)
However, nobody seems to get past the first statement in the series of statements that form the argument, because obviously what's true must be false if it's an offensive truth, even when the last claim is what is much more important for the argument. It's especially bad when the string of disclaimers saying that it's a horrible, discriminatory state of affairs that should be remedied, is left off the quote. It's also bad when the guy's on record as saying he personally finds the voter ID requirement bad policy, but his office doesn't make the policy, it just investigates the "policy-reality interface" (my jargon, not his).
|