This story being the general practice of lobbyists writing laws. I agree that it’s normal. It’s still a huge problem and nothing good comes of it.
And lobbyists writing laws that go against our core values should never be legitimized by anyone.
See also
I’ll take Disbanding County-Level Election Commissions and Handing Authority to the Republican Legislatures for $10000, ALEC.
Ha! You are soooo selling yourself cheap; taking that position usually nets a politician way more than ten large.
One time a state legislature passed a bill that included the ALEC copyright. Republicans have learned to exchange their racist dog whistles for bullhorns and hiding voting restrictions in other bills- they do so openly now because there is no downside. The MAGA crowd is perfectly happy with keeping “other” people from voting and they don’t mind the racism at all. If it overtly restricts voting for minorities, so much the better from their point of view.
…
The data point comes in a new CBS/YouGov survey,…Further down in the survey, pollsters asked GOP voters whether in advance of the 2022 election, they would advise Republican leaders to “tell the public about popular policies and ideas” or instead “push for changes to voting rules”, on the basis that Republicans “will win once those changes are in place”.
Nearly half of Republican supported the latter move, with the strongest demographics in support being female Republicans, non-white Republicans and white Republicans with no college degree.
……many Republican voters have become dead-eyed operatives who actively support voter suppression regardless of how it might conflict with their party’s bromides about freedom and democracy.
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The new CBS poll doesn’t appear to be an outlier. An Economist/YouGov poll from March found that 57% of Americans say they would support or aren’t sure they would oppose “laws that would make it more difficult to vote”. An Associated Press poll in April found that while a majority of the country supports making it easier to vote, a majority of Republican voters do not. And voter ID laws – which are sculpted to make it harder to vote – are wildly popular, according to various surveys.
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The Democrats (and others who care about fair elections) can’t relax their vigilance on this front.
A proposal by Texas Republicans to change how Election Day polling places are distributed would reduce the number of polling places in areas with higher percentages of voters of color, according to an analysis conducted by The Texas Tribune.
The bill would create a new formula for how polling places are set and would mostly affect Democratic counties with populations over 1 million, the Tribune reported. The bill would require counties to distribute polling places based on the number of registered voters within a county’s state House district.
Under the proposed changes, the five largest counties in Texas would be affected: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis. Collin County may also be affected depending on census figures that are released this year, the Tribune noted.
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Harris - Houston
Dallas - Dallas
Tarrant - Ft. Worth
Bexar* - San Antonio
Travis - Austin
Collin - Dallas suburbs
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According to the Tribune’s analysis, the bill would reduce the number of polling places only in districts represented by Democrats. It would remove 73 polling places across 13 Democratic-represented House districts and redistribute them across seven Republican-represented districts and two Democratic-represented districts.
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That should tip things in Pubs’ favor, amirite?
*Bexar is pronounced “bear” like big hairy mammal.
ISTM that Dems had better scale down their efforts to block or overturn this legislation…and start reserving rentals on a lot of buses for Election Day.
Why? The most effective way to stop all of this is to pass legislation that gives the DOJ the power to crack down on all of this voter disenfranchisement.
Trying to outwork Jim Crow by getting all of your voters to figure out how to jump through the hoops is going to fail at some point.
Politico getting on board with the concerns shared by a few of us in this thread (piece linked in a Dan Rather tweet this morning).
We lefties are still a little slow on the uptake. It’s just so hard to believe how low Republicans will stoop in their quest for power. But at last the concerns are getting a little traction.
Liz puckers up.
Yeah. Liz Cheney isn’t a good person. Somehow the apple fell straight down to the center of the tree.
It’s extremely important people understand that there are no boundaries with Republicans now - none. People who aren’t alarmed assume that there will be some tipping point which inspires people to act against them, but that is not necessarily how this works. The average person doesn’t understand the implications of some of these voter restrictions, or the implications of installing hyper-partisan loyalists in positions that would enable them to reject election results.
Republicans are already preparing a legalistic and constitutional position against what we’ve come to understand as liberal democracy. They will say “The Constitution doesn’t necessarily state that we have to expand voting rights; it just says that states shall have control over their own elections and that’s what we’re doing.” “The Constitution doesn’t require a democratic government; only one that is republican in form.”
She probably got orders from pops, but as we’ve observed before: Republicans have always been receptive to voter suppression in one form or another.
I’ve said it over and over: for any moderate republican left, the solution is to abandon hope of saving the party and joining with Dems and Independents in challenging this nonsense, not just with voting but openly calling it out. Those who remain, enable. And that makes them just as guilty, even if they have an occasional vertebra or two.
Just because she showed some courage in standing up to Twitler doesn’t mean she’s become progressive, or even conscientious, on anything else.
She represents the rest of “sane Conservatives” very well. She’s doesn’t actually have a problem with destroying democracy, she has a problem with something that really has the appearance of destroying democracy.
Refusing to answer a politically inconvenient question does not suggest any such thing.
~Max
You have to ask yourself why it’s politically inconvenient to Republicans.
Republicans are the ones who’ve been making the issue of voting rights political, and they’ve trafficked in conspiracy theories to do build support for their assault on voting rights.
No one else needs to afford them the opportunity of framing voting rights as equivalent to any other political issue. If Cheney actually followed the logic she herself used about 1/6 she would admit that.
Some disturbing news and some disturbingly hilarious news from Nevada:
Disturbing: the Proud Boys are trying to take over the Clark County GOP and intend to run candidates for office.
Disturbingly hilarious: Nevada GOP rigged the vote to censure Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske (using the Proud Boys for extra votes).