Monday, October 13, 2014

Voter ID Laws: "The Big Lie"


From the New York Times:
Election Day is three weeks off, and Republican officials and legislators around the country are battling down to the wire to preserve strict and discriminatory new voting laws that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans.  [snip] 
Voter ID laws, as their supporters know, do only one thing very well: They keep otherwise eligible voters away from the polls. In most cases, this means voters who are poor, often minorities, and who don’t have the necessary documents or the money or time to get photo IDs.  (our emphasis)
From the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle:
THE NATION is about to hold a midterm congressional election that, if history is any indication, will see substantially lower turnout — and therefore results that are substantially less representative of the country at large — than votes in presidential years. Responsible politicians should be doing all they can to encourage people to exercise their most precious of rights. Instead, Republican leaders in states around the country are continuing their war even on what should be uncontroversial, small-scale reforms, in a transparent attempt to depress turnout among poor and minority — that is, Democratic — voters. [snip] 
The United States does not have a voter impersonation crisis demanding the imposition of voter ID requirements, which, as the Government Accountability Office found last week, tend to depress turnout. And it’s hardly outrageous to spend money to open polling places well before Election Day and keep them open for long hours. Instead of juicing the rules to minimize opponents’ turnout, the country’s leaders should adopt an automatic, universal voter registration system and remove absurd restrictions on which polling places individuals must attend. The current, cumbersome, two-step voting process promotes confusion and deters participation. Republicans’ blatant efforts to depress turnout even more is a disgrace.  (our emphasis)
Surprise!  Republicans play for keeps when their (white) power and privilege is being threatened, and they're not particularly concerned that you're on to their game. The "big lie" that's become so transparent that even the partisan Republicans on the Supreme Court seem to be backing off a bit is that we have a "voter fraud" problem in this country.  Arrant bullshit, of course. It should be no revelation to anyone with a pulse that Republicans want to limit who votes based on race, ethnicity, age, religion, or any other factor that would enable them to stack things in their favor.  When you have no philosophy other than "I got mine," that what you're reduced to as a party.

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