beatbandito wrote:All an enumerator is required to get is the number of persons that occupy the residency more than half the year. Yes, I see that technically it's illegal to misrepresent your answers, but what the fuck is that? There's just binary male/female gender options. Who's the one to determine you're misidentifying if you're trans?
The binary sex options are some bullshit and I wholeheartedly acknowledge that.
That's not an argument for me or you, who are, to the best of my knowledge, also a cis male (and I apologize if I'm incorrect about that), to mark "female" on the census form.
If you believe that you're Native American and someone comes after you for that and you so much as own a dream catcher you have a lawsuit.
Sorry, it sounded like you just said that white people should mark themselves as Native American on the census and justify it with dreamcatcher ownership. I'm...gonna go ahead and ask you to clarify if that's really what you meant, because from where I'm sitting, that sounds pretty bad.
I think another thing you're missing with your argument that people should just claim to be a different race is that representation is a zero-sum game. If people misreport racial demographics en masse, then that's going to affect how district lines are drawn. A bunch of white people claiming to be black or Native American or some other demographic is going to disenfranchise people who actually belong to those demographics.
"this agency won't share your information" and "other agencies have your information anyway" aren't just both bad reasons to give in to sharing more than you would have been required to if someone in person was asking,
I think "required" here is an argument of what's required by law versus what's required in fact. You're legally obligated to answer the questions on the census, though obviously someone who's asking you in person, or on a pen-and-paper form, can't force you to respond to all of them before proceeding.
(I guess I am kinda curious about whether all the authentication's done on the backend or just the frontend. If anybody wants to try to fuck around with the site JS and submit the form without everything filled out, I'm not saying you should do that but I am sort of curious whether it's competently-designed enough to not let you do that.)
The online census' refusal to let you move on without answering every question is what will ultimately impact the number of people who are counted when some people choose not to do that, and I think that's a bad, scam-like way to move forward. Do get counted. The rest of the form is for you to determine.
If you see it as literally a choice between "lie about your identity" and "don't respond to the census at all", then I guess sure, lying about your identity is the lesser-evil option.
I'd still strongly advise that cis/het white dudes not pretend to belong to another race or sex, because that amounts to ratfucking the demographic numbers that determine congressional representation.
If anyone who's not a cis/het white dude feels that including their honest information is going to make them a target, hey, do what you gotta do. In particular, if you've got undocumented folks living in your household, I can understand why you might not want to disclose that information, or even use a name that sounds Hispanic.
If you feel you have to lie about your race, your sex, or any other demographic information, for the sake of your safety, I'm not going to tell anyone not to do that. But I'm very skeptical that you or I need to do that for our safety, and what's more, if a bunch of people like us do it, that's going to hurt people who are already vulnerable.
Caithness wrote:Thad wrote: I don't know how representative I am of people who've voted third-party in past elections, but there it is.
I voted for Nader in 2004 and Stein in 2012. I will write in Sanders if Biden is the nominee.
I don't have the moral authority to condemn anybody for doing that. But I'll note that one of the things that convinced me to back Kerry in '04 rather than voting Nader a second time was something Tom Tomorrow (who backed Nader in 2000) said. Paraphrased as best I can: "Yes, there's a cancer on American democracy. But if you've got a cancer patient who's just been in a car accident and is bleeding everywhere, you need to treat the injuries before you worry about the cancer." I fucking hate the prospect of Biden being president, but on balance, if it comes down to a choice between someone who's going to close the baby jails and the guy who opened the baby jails, I'm gonna mark the box for "close the baby jails."
I don't know what state you're in. If it's a swing state, I hope you'll consider that your vote's more important than most people's. If you're in California or Texas, I guess go nuts and write in whoever you want; just make sure you fill out the rest of the ballot while you're at it.
It does bear noting that, while looking at Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania is a useful shorthand, this election probably won't come down to the same state breakdown as the last one. I still suspect that if Arizona goes blue then it'll just be running up the score in a decisive win for Biden. But these are strange times and there's a very good chance we'll have two Democratic senators come January, so I'm less inclined to say "Arizona isn't going to go blue, and if it does, it won't be the state that swings the election" than I have been the last five times.
