Tuesday, December 8, 2020

QOTD -- Gearing Up More Voter Suppression


Jamelle Bouie tells us to be ready for more efforts by the rotted out Republican Party to try to restrict access to voting in the months and years ahead:

The upshot of all of this — the charges of fraud, the refusal to acknowledge the president’s defeat — is a party prepared to do even more than it already has to restrict voting. “This election has shown we need major reforms to our election systems, including voter ID laws across the nation, to protect against fraud and rebuild the American people’s trust in fair outcomes,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida said in a statement touting a federal bill that would introduce a strict ID requirement in addition to making it more difficult to get a mail-in ballot. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas has similarly called for new ID requirements and a crackdown on mail-in voting. And Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky told his Twitter followers to “look at the evidence” of fraud “and decide for yourself” while he shared a conspiratorial blog post on “anomalies in vote counts.”

A party that's been manufacturing and living off of white grievance for decades is using every rear guard tactic to delay the political effects of inevitable cultural and demographic changes.  They're emboldened by their Dear Leader getting 74 million votes (only about one- third of the electorate), but as Bouie points out later in his article, their voter suppression efforts could easily backfire by disenfranchising some of their own voters.  Even that ironic outcome is not to be wished for;  democracy demands free, fair and open elections.  In achieving that goal, the fight with these un- democratic, banana Republicans is never over.


2 comments:

Mart said...

Amazing to me how many more people voted this year. Suppose can attribute some to the asshole in chief, but think more of it is the ease of the mail in ballot.

W. Hackwhacker said...

Mart -- I think you're right -- combination of the relative ease of mail- in ballots and feelings about the Shitgibbon one way or the other.