Archive for Vote Suppression
Fixing Elections
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s possible (though rare) for a candidate to become president of the United States without winning the popular vote. Americans complain that it is a bug in the Electoral College system.
Republicans wants to turn that bug into a feature.
At The Atlantic, David Graham suggests:
Let’s play a game. Let’s say, hypothetically, that your party has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Even worse, long-term demographic trends suggest that your chances are only going to get worse. What do you do?One option might be to revamp your policy proposals, improve the technical operational side of your party, and think about ways to improve your candidate pool.
Or you could try to find ways to make sure fewer people’s votes matter.
Care to guess what Republicans chose? Here’s the plan.
Sunday Morning Reading
Posted by: | CommentsSkipping around the internets, I found these delectables:
Turns out gerrymandering did the GOP a lot of favors nationwide this year, and the coup de grace was what they pulled off in North Carolina. The top line in the graphic below represents the popular vote, and the bottom line represents number of seats won. Read all about it at Mother Jones.
Vote or Consequences
Posted by: | CommentsMissed this a few days ago. The Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina dislikes how the local and state Board of Elections resolved the Warren Wilson voter registration confusion. Their executive director does not seem to recognize that Warren Wilson students had no need for (and the school did not furnish) dorm-specific addresses prior to Republicans drawing a new district line through the middle of campus. (Have I got that right?)
An unpopular but prudent solution would either have been to let the students vote by absentee ballot from their home of record or for the Buncombe County Board of Elections to count their ballots as “partials,” only applying their votes for the bigger races but not the problematic district ones. Some would scoff at that, but let’s never forget how many college students don’t even qualify for in-state tuition. They can vote in local races without consequence and rarely pay local property taxes.Election officials blew the call. Hopefully, the courts will appreciate this peril along with a few related issues involving the entire student-voting franchise: First, do college students living at temporary addresses really have standing in local races? Second, are those young adults being politically manipulated by their college professors who can shape values with a bully pulpit and a grade book?
Fox News using the public airwaves to manipulate voters is one thing, but parents paying to send kids to the private school of their choice? The horror.
Plus, we can’t have students “voting with their feelings,” I guess.
When a phrase like “without consequence” makes you cock your head and go “baroo?“, you’ve just heard another right-wing dog whistle. Or when they consider it “emancipating” (later in the piece) to require students to pay property tax before they can vote. This is how self-appointed VIPs ensure that “no voters are disenfranchised.”
They Really Don’t Like Other People Voting
Posted by: | CommentsIn Buncombe County, the local GOP wants to invalidate votes already cast by Warren Wilson students. They don’t like other people voting, much like their colleagues in Florida:
A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.Republican leaders said in proposing the law that it was meant to save money and fight voter fraud. But a former GOP chairman and former Gov. Charlie Crist, both of whom have been ousted from the party, now say that fraud concerns were advanced only as subterfuge for the law’s main purpose: GOP victory.
What We Are Not Going to See
Posted by: | Comments
Even as Fox News wrung its hands Tuesday over images of a New Black Panther opening doors for voters at a polling place in Philadelphia, calling his presence “intimidating,” the character at right stood guard in a Confederate Great Coat outside the Dr. Wesley Grant Sr. – Southside Center in an African-American neighborhood in Asheville, NC. He stood there not opening doors — or doing much of anything — for much of the day.
Rachel Maddow has more of what we are not going to see going forward.
Enjoy your relevancy while it lasts, NCGOP.
Lesson One from Election Night — Dog whistles no longer get a pass. Insist they explain themselves.
Voter ID is a Fraud
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Rep. Tim Moffitt (R-116) and many other Republicans have declared their full-throated support for an expensive measure that would disenfranchise thousands of voters. The measure is know as Voter ID. It’s roundly criticized by people who understand that broad participation is a cornerstone of effective democracy. Voter ID advocates claim there is voter fraud happening all over the place. They don’t mention that the people least likely to have photo identification are also among the most likely to vote for Democrats – young people, African-Americans, the elderly, and the poor. Again and again Voter ID advocates disingenuously cry fraud, but, like Mike Turzai in Pennsylvania, their real intent is to restrict the vote in order to keep their party in power.
Today’s Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the false claims of Moffitt and other area Republicans:
In North Carolina, the nonpartisan state Board of Elections last year sent letters to 637 suspected noncitizens after checking driver’s license data.
Of those, 223 responded showing proof they were citizens, and 79 acknowledged they weren’t citizens and were removed from the rolls along with another 331 who didn’t respond to repeated letters, said Veronica Degraffenreid, an elections liaison for the board.
She said the board did not find evidence of widespread fraud, noting there were only 12 instances in which a noncitizen had voted. North Carolina has 6.4 million voters.
[...]
Walton Robinson, spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said voter fraud is about as common as being struck by lightning. He also said implementing an ID law would be expensive — ranging from $11 million to $43 million.“At the end of the day, voter ID is nothing more than a Trojan horse for state-sanctioned voter suppression, and Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for attempting to disenfranchise over 1 million North Carolina voters,” he said.
Sarah Silverman’s Guide to Vote Suppression
Posted by: | CommentsNSFW. Translation: ROFLMAO.
PA Supreme Court Voids Lower Court Approval of Voter ID
Posted by: | CommentsFrom the Brad Blog:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a 4 to 2 decision this afternoon, has vacated a Commonwealth Court’s earlier ruling, which had denied a temporary injunction on the state GOP’s polling place Photo ID restriction law. Rather than issuing their own injunction, they have has sent the matter back to the lower court for review.
According to the high court’s 7-page order [PDF] issued today, if the lower court finds that the state is unable to implement “liberal access” to the supposedly free Photo IDs to be issued by the state, as dictated by the General Assembly’s requirements detailed in the statute itself, “or if the Commonwealth Court is not still convinced in its predictive judgment that there will be no voter disenfranchisement arising out of the Commonwealth’s implementation of a voter identification requirement for purposes of the upcoming election, that court is obliged to enter a preliminary injunction.”
In other news, the Washington Post shows Obama up eight points in Virginia in a pre-Romney-video-meltdown poll. PPP has Obama up in Virginia by five points.
“The truest news story you have ever seen.”
Posted by: | CommentsHow YouTube describes it: “For a fictional show (based on actual events), this is the truest news story you have ever seen.”
Plenty more here.
