Creeping Jim Crow Watch
The latest ugly move in the whole Republican effort to rig the electorate is the enactment of laws that make conducting voter registration drives extremely difficult. Ohio and Florida are two recent examples. You can read a bit about it here and elsewhere in the progblog. People for the American way just sent out a petition on the subject. I singed it, and wrote a little custom letter, and I urge you to do so as well.
This stuff really ticks me off. It is so blatantly anti-democratic. And its similarity to efforts to suppress the black vote during segregationist days is really creepy. Or maybe I should just realize that it is the exact same shit that was going on then. It never stopped. Those who practice it (and it’s Republicans) should be excoriated by the popular media and decent Americans everywhere.
This is one enormous contrast between Democrats and Republicans: Democrats are always trying to expand the number of voters, and Republicans are trying to shrink it. Why? Because they know that they don’t represent the interests of the majority of Americans. They do well when a lot of regular folks (especially non-white regular folks) stay home, and only the partisans of either side show up. (Because conservative partisans outnumber liberal partisans in this country by about 1.5 to 1.) They often use fear of voter fraud as their justification for their restrictions, but seem to rarely produce evidence of the pro-Democratic fraud that their vote suppression efforts are allegedly designed to quash.
Perhaps I’ll get a good conservative response to this—Isn’t there something about Chicago and the Kennedy presidential election they’re always going on about? My question is this: would the restrictions Republicans are putting on voter drives prevent that kind of alleged fraud? This isn’t snarky, I’d actually like to know a way we can assuage any genuine fraud concerns while still expanding the franchise as much as possible.
This stuff really ticks me off. It is so blatantly anti-democratic. And its similarity to efforts to suppress the black vote during segregationist days is really creepy. Or maybe I should just realize that it is the exact same shit that was going on then. It never stopped. Those who practice it (and it’s Republicans) should be excoriated by the popular media and decent Americans everywhere.
This is one enormous contrast between Democrats and Republicans: Democrats are always trying to expand the number of voters, and Republicans are trying to shrink it. Why? Because they know that they don’t represent the interests of the majority of Americans. They do well when a lot of regular folks (especially non-white regular folks) stay home, and only the partisans of either side show up. (Because conservative partisans outnumber liberal partisans in this country by about 1.5 to 1.) They often use fear of voter fraud as their justification for their restrictions, but seem to rarely produce evidence of the pro-Democratic fraud that their vote suppression efforts are allegedly designed to quash.
Perhaps I’ll get a good conservative response to this—Isn’t there something about Chicago and the Kennedy presidential election they’re always going on about? My question is this: would the restrictions Republicans are putting on voter drives prevent that kind of alleged fraud? This isn’t snarky, I’d actually like to know a way we can assuage any genuine fraud concerns while still expanding the franchise as much as possible.
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