Holder’s speech could not come at a more critical time. Over the last year we’ve witnessed an unprecedented GOP war on voting, with a dozen Republican governors and state legislators passing laws to restrict voter registration drives, require birth certificates to register to vote, curtail early voting, mandate government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot and disenfranchise ex-felons who’ve served their time. The Brennan Center for Justice has estimated that “these new laws could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012,” and notes that “these new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities.”
The story of GOP voter suppression continues to be the major headline in 2011 and that will continue into 2012. If there is one demonstrable difference between the two parties, it's that Democrats want as many eligible people to be registered to vote as possible, and that the Republicans want to restrict voting to as few people as possible. Period.
The wingers immediately come up with nonsense like this to attack that truth.
The Democrats will use their constituent organizations to whip up a frenzy of opposition to “voter suppression,” while DOJ launches, or threatens to launch, legal challenges to selected state statutes. This will energize the Democrats’ base by pretending that Republicans are trying to disenfranchise voters. It also may succeed in increasing the illegal votes that Democrats rely on at the margins of close elections.
Democrats want felons to vote, because an overwhelming majority of them will vote Democratic. They want illegal aliens to vote for the same reason. And they want loyal Democrats to vote more than once where they are able to do so. Where there is no voter security, these abuses will increase. So, either through legal rulings or through intimidation, the Democrats want to disable the states from protecting the integrity of the ballot box. It appears that Obama’s politicized Department of Justice will be in the forefront of this effort.
This is such rabid idiocy as to deserve open scorn. John Hinderaker here is openly accusing the President, the Attorney General, and the Democratic Party of massive voter fraud, and he has no proof whatsoever, he just assumes it to be true because it has to be, else how did we end up with a black President? What is true is that Republicans tend to win in general elections when turnout is low, and Republicans want to keep turnout as low as possible among the poor and working class, those of us who don't have the luxury of being able to take time off to vote on a Tuesday and miss work.
If you disenfranchise the poor and urban voters, you affect Democratic voter turnout. It really is that simple, and that's why Republicans want to make it as difficult as possible, so they win. Instead of admitting that, we get that it must be "the politicized Obama Justice Department orchestrating massive voter fraud!"
Which one makes more sense to you, Republicans going out of their way to add hurdles to voting in multiple states so that they can lower turnout among the poor and college students by needlessly passing Voter ID laws that wouldn't actually prevent voter fraud but would actually prevent eligible people from voting, or Hinderaker's ACORN BLARGLE BLOOGITY BLOO BLAH here?
The fact is, the reason Hinderaker doesn't have proof of his insane accusations is that the "voter fraud" that Republicans are fighting doesn't exist. In his eyes, the only fraud out there is poor people, minorities, young people, and the elderly being allowed to vote for Democrats.
And Republicans are making every effort to "correct" that fraud in state after state.
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