Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Thursday, November 1, 2018

How the Goopers hang on to power: THEY CHEAT THROUGH VOTER SUPPRESSION


Infidel753 stated in the comments below that America is a Liberal/Progressive country. 

The GOP's stranglehold on state governorships has allowed it to suppress the minority vote.

Here's just one example:



"With Election Day approaching, an odd little story from Dodge City, Kansas, made headlines in The New York Times and The Washington Post last week. Local elections officials in the Wild West outpost of yore, now a meatpacking center that’s majority-Latino, had moved their lone voting place outside the city limits, more than a mile from the nearest bus stop, as anti-immigration crusader Kris Kobach—the state elections chief—was fighting off a strong Democratic challenge in his quest for the governorship. 

 The whole controversy seemed so obviously outlandish—the kind of over-the-top effort to deter voters of color that could only happen in the Deep South or Kobach’s Kansas—that it’s no wonder the story was catnip for national reporters. While another secretary of state overseeing his own election for governor, Kobach’s Georgia ally Brian Kemp, had been garnering scrutiny for months with his massive “purges” of registered black voters, and while reports on the perils of voter ID laws have become numbingly familiar, the Dodge City tale offered a colorful twist on the theme of race-based voter suppression. The Times editors couldn’t resist a cheeky headline for this saga: “To Cast Their Ballots, These Voters Will Have to Get Out of Dodge.” 

 But the only unusual thing about this story was that it made news at all. Over the past decade, Republican elections officials have been shuttering polling places in minority neighborhoods, low-income districts, and on college campuses at a feverish pace. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the U.S. had more than 132,000 polling places; by the time Donald Trump ascended to the White House, eight years later, more than 15,000 of them had been closed nationwide. After 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court basically lifted federal Voting Rights Act oversight from states that were particularly notorious for racial discrimination in elections—including Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Texas—the pace of poll closures went into hyperdrive. Thanks to Shelby County v. Holder, if you ran elections in a majority-black county in Georgia, or a booming Latino neighborhood in Houston, you no longer had to ask the Department of Justice to approve a change in where people could vote, or to prove the intent wasn’t discriminatory. […]"

6 comments:

Ducky's here said...

This coming election is one of the most important in American history.

If tRump has two more years with a compliant senate and house we will find ourselves far enough down the road to state fascism that it will take a long time to dig out.

More and more we resemble Weimar and the election means nothing less than holding on to a democracy ( albeit faltering but that's for another time) or moving to an entrenched state fascism. He's already got a court that will rubber stamp his executive orders and we can here his disguised call to the brownshirts after the Pittsburgh shooting.

My niece and grandniece were out canvasing for Beto O'Rourke. Do what you can. We have to at least flip the House.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Ducky you are so correct. My relatives who fought the Nazis in WW II would be shocked at what Trump has already accomplished in less than two years.

Can you imagine what the Goopers would have said or done had President Obama threatened to change the US Constitution with an executive order?

Not only is Trump talking about that, but deploying 15,000 troops? To the southern border to protect America from refugees fleeing certain death in their countries?

It's too eerily like 1939.

Anonymous said...

"Fleeing certain death"...thats a bit dramatic Shaw.

Do you allow uninvited strangers to walk into your home?

Anonymous said...

How many votes are being suppressed nationwide this election?

Anonymous said...

The Republicans have control of the White House, majority in both Houses of Congress, majority on the Supreme Court, majority of the Governorship's, a majority of the State Houses, and the claim is this is a liberal country. Give me some of what you have been smoking, it must be great stuff.

Jerry said...

The Republican majority (which has been building for decades) and is now solid at both the State and federal levels was not all won by voter suppression.

If we continue to believe that, we will continue to lose elections.