For those who thought that making restrictive voting laws was all about the “integrity of elections” and to ensure “illegal aliens didn’t vote” (we’ll see if the biggest supporter of these theories here, Bricker, rears his head), well, Republicans down in Florida were refreshingly candid about their attempts to actively disenfranchise Democratic voters:
This is a bit off-topic, but was I the only one who found the statement “an individual in Florida is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud” odd? One is an uncontrollable (as far as we know - dun dun dun!) externality, and the other is a personal choice, unless they’re thinking of coercion, but that’d be even rarer, I’d think.
If you don’t want to wait for **Bricker **to show up, you can visit his post here- in which, essentially, he says, neither Greer nor Crist are credible. So really … nothing to see here.
There. Don’t you feel silly now?
Clearly there needs to be a national “people who have been hit by lightning” database to keep these people from voting.:mad:
But…but…but…it’s leeeeeeeeeegal! That’s all that matters!
Seriously, could anyone be surprised by this revelation? Of course it was meant to suppress the vote, just like the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House boasted that the voter ID law would give his state to Rmoney.
Other nations must think we’re a bunch of idiots, and that’s only because we are. We boast of being the cradle of liberty, yet we can’t run an election without having people wait in line for hours? What’s the deal? Modern voting machines are not that damned expensive. Triple the number of booths. Double the number of poll workers. If we ran things efficiently we wouldn’t even need early voting. My own state of Michigan does not have early voting, and the most I have ever waited to vote was a half hour. Why are some states so damned incompetent?
Heh. When I saw the OP’s link mentioned Crist I knew that was all some folks would need to hand wave away everything that followed.
Lot of things that were sure to work didn’t. All that money, for instance. As another ThinkProgress piece noted, outside PACs poured fifty million dollars into the race to defeat Sherrod Brown. He had a five point edge when they started buying negative ads…fifty million dollars!..and when they were done, he won by…wait for it!..five points.
What miracle is this? That Citizens United doesn’t matter? You can’t just buy five pounds of political power like five pounds of hamburger? Dare we hope? We do dare, do dare!
The Republican Party and Rove and the fat cats have demonstrated that you can underestimate the intelligence of the American public. All it takes is being a fanatical partisan.
That’s not a problem, that was the GOP’s goal all along.
I really hope that Obama saying that we have to fix that (voter suppression) during his victory speech, we’ll actually have active action on this instead of simply reacting to each move by the GOP. We’ve known all along that’s their goal, these articles simply confirm it. The GOP is a bunch of nasty, fraudulent, shysters who will stop at nothing to try to steal power by any means necessary. They have the funding and the propaganda arm to fool a lot of people, but sometimes people push back. Unfortunately, even with the expanding minority and youth vote and the shrinking old white guy vote, they’re not going to just go away quietly. We have to fight to keep every single inch of ground we’ve gained and then fight for more, because if even a few of their tactics worked, if we didn’t have someone as terrific as Obama running, we would have lost. The American people would have lost. We cannot allow the GOP to gain power again
Not only to we need equality of voting rights, we also need equality in voting opportunity. Nobody should have to stand on line for two hours-six hours to vote. To the extent that voting opportunity is a reflection of economic status, such problems are repugnant to the American ideals many of us revere and some of us pretend to.
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Conservative billionaires think they are as skilled in politics as the professionals. They are naive.
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They will get smarter. They will stop limiting themselves to advertising. They will refine the alchemy of turning money into power and power into money.
Well, thank you, Mr. Sunshine!
Oh come on, even Bricker has never really denied this was the case, that’s why he always falls back on the “but it’s legal” argument.
Everyone but the most uniformed doofus knows voter ID laws are meant to suppress minority votes. Most Republicans know full well what they’re for. This is the most open secret in the world.
Now, to be fair, the argument is somewhat more nuanced than that. Yes, he admits, such motives exist in some Republicans, but liberal hypocrisy.
He’s right, they’re not. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it’s just that no respected Republican is going to admit this as the goal.
Not directly, anyway.
They might have said during the campaign that the Voter ID law will help Romney win, but they can pretend they’re talking about voter fraud and voter confidence instead of voter disenfranchisement.
One of my more loony right wing friends just posted this link on FB:
She picked it up from Breitbart.com. Warning, it’s a Will Bill video*, so it could cause your brain to implode.
*I always wonder if he’s any relation to Wildest Bill
If a Republican did admit it, he/she would immediately become, “not respected”. Sort of a Catch-22 situation.
The actual name would be the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
I really would like to see people prosecuted for treason for pursing this line of electoral strategy. The right to vote is as sacred to Americans as anything and someone using their official powers to obstruct the exercise of that right should suffer severe consequences. National exile would be my preference. (N. Korea would probably welcome their emigration)