Suffering Universal Suffrage
Traditionally, one of the crucial parts of any campaign strategy was the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) push. Campaign workers and supporters would go door to door or operate telephone banks to get voters enthusiastic enough about a candidate to actually go to the polls on election day. Directions to the poll locations and offers of rides and child care were part of the package. Recently, we've observed a troubling trend in the other direction: partisans are actively working to suppress the vote, often in dispicable fashion.
Adam Cohen authored a guest editorial for the NY Times in which he examines this phenomenon.
The House of Representatives struck a major blow against democracy last month. It passed a bill that would deny the vote to anyone who shows up at the polls without a government-issued photo ID. The bill’s requirements are so onerous and inflexible that they could prevent millions of eligible voters without driver’s licenses — who are disproportionately poor, minority or elderly — from casting a ballot.
With that vote Congress joined a growing number of states that are erecting new barriers to voting. Republican-dominated legislatures and election officials have adopted absurdly difficult registration rules. They have removed eligible voters from the rolls with Katherine Harris-style purges, and required voters to buy ID cards to vote, a modern form of poll tax.
...racial and religious minorities, women and the poor have historically had to fight not just to get the right to vote, but to stop it from being taken away.
America has a hidden history of disenfranchisement. It has operated, as a Harvard professor, Alexander Keyssar, recounts in his valuable history, “The Right to Vote,” on the expected lines of class, race, ethnicity and religion, and often for partisan gain. Right now, we are in another period of what Professor Keyssar calls “backsliding.” Minorities and the poor — and everyone who cares about American democracy — have to stand up for a principle that should by now be beyond debate: universal suffrage.
...The voter ID laws that have been enacted recently have been set up not to verify voters’ identities, but to stop certain groups from voting. Georgia’s law — whose sponsor was quoted in a Justice Department memo as saying that if blacks in her district “are not paid to vote, they don’t go to the polls” — required people to pay for voter ID cards, until the courts held that to be an illegal poll tax. When it took effect there was not a single office in Atlanta where the cards were for sale. [Emphasis added]
It is not by accident that Republicans are the culprits in these voter suppression schemes. The targeted classes, the poor, the black and brown, and the elderly, all tend to vote Democratic. It's much easier to steal an election by keeping the opposition voters away from the polls than to rig the easily riggable electronic voting machines, and there is no overt scandal to blemish the results.
I suppose one can understand the Republicans' concerns. After six years of scandal, incompetence, and corruption, they are running scared, so scared that they are willing to trash the very underpinnings of democracy to stay in power. Understandable, but hardly acceptable.
If the Republicans really believe that their programs are superior to those of the Democrats, they should have no problem in working with the opposition to ensure that universal suffrage remains the law of the land. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Adam Cohen authored a guest editorial for the NY Times in which he examines this phenomenon.
The House of Representatives struck a major blow against democracy last month. It passed a bill that would deny the vote to anyone who shows up at the polls without a government-issued photo ID. The bill’s requirements are so onerous and inflexible that they could prevent millions of eligible voters without driver’s licenses — who are disproportionately poor, minority or elderly — from casting a ballot.
With that vote Congress joined a growing number of states that are erecting new barriers to voting. Republican-dominated legislatures and election officials have adopted absurdly difficult registration rules. They have removed eligible voters from the rolls with Katherine Harris-style purges, and required voters to buy ID cards to vote, a modern form of poll tax.
...racial and religious minorities, women and the poor have historically had to fight not just to get the right to vote, but to stop it from being taken away.
America has a hidden history of disenfranchisement. It has operated, as a Harvard professor, Alexander Keyssar, recounts in his valuable history, “The Right to Vote,” on the expected lines of class, race, ethnicity and religion, and often for partisan gain. Right now, we are in another period of what Professor Keyssar calls “backsliding.” Minorities and the poor — and everyone who cares about American democracy — have to stand up for a principle that should by now be beyond debate: universal suffrage.
...The voter ID laws that have been enacted recently have been set up not to verify voters’ identities, but to stop certain groups from voting. Georgia’s law — whose sponsor was quoted in a Justice Department memo as saying that if blacks in her district “are not paid to vote, they don’t go to the polls” — required people to pay for voter ID cards, until the courts held that to be an illegal poll tax. When it took effect there was not a single office in Atlanta where the cards were for sale. [Emphasis added]
It is not by accident that Republicans are the culprits in these voter suppression schemes. The targeted classes, the poor, the black and brown, and the elderly, all tend to vote Democratic. It's much easier to steal an election by keeping the opposition voters away from the polls than to rig the easily riggable electronic voting machines, and there is no overt scandal to blemish the results.
I suppose one can understand the Republicans' concerns. After six years of scandal, incompetence, and corruption, they are running scared, so scared that they are willing to trash the very underpinnings of democracy to stay in power. Understandable, but hardly acceptable.
If the Republicans really believe that their programs are superior to those of the Democrats, they should have no problem in working with the opposition to ensure that universal suffrage remains the law of the land. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
posted by Diane at 4:52 AM
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