Real Fraud: Republicans Keeping You From Voting

There's a pretty decent editorial in USA Today encapsulating Republican efforts to suppress voting by people they deem likely to vote Democratic.  It's not news to most of you, but it's good to see it in a paper with 3 million circulation nationwide (and at least it's not a lie- filled op/ ed by Trump).

One of the most self-destructive features of the Republican Party is a reliance on repressive election laws to obtain and maintain power. It is one reason the GOP controls the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.  

This can be seen graphically in the grotesquely gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts they have drawn in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas. In the Austin area, for example, urban and suburban Democratic voters are split among five mostly rural Republican districts. [snip]

Exhibit A for Republican bad acts would have to be Georgia, a state with a Republican legislature and Republican governor, but which is increasingly competitive and has a surprisingly tight gubernatorial race this year. Georgia passed a law last year that says information on registration forms must exactly match what is on file in public agencies, down to details as irrelevant as the presence or absence of a hyphen. 

Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who also happens to be the GOP candidate in that very tight governor's race, has used that law to block a reported 53,000 voter registration forms, largely from African-Americans. These people can still vote if they bring in an ID that matches government databases, though many might not be aware of this. What's more, their registrations will be canceled if they do not correct the clerical error.  

In North Dakota, meanwhile, thousands of Native Americans are unable to register because they do not have street addresses. They don’t have addresses because the Postal Service won’t deliver to their remote homes on reservations and insists that they create a post office box as their mailing address. The irony here is palpable. The people who lived in North America long before anyone else are told they can’t vote because they are not sufficiently rooted.

One irony, it appears, is that these blatant efforts are making people even more determined to cast their ballots, whatever the barriers.

BONUS:  More disgusting Republican voter suppression tactics here.  They're afraid little people.