Block that Vote!

[paft.livejournal.com]

The GOP is training people in some states to put themselves in between their fellow voters and the ballot box. Raw Story has given a boost to the issue, with a clip from Progress Now from one such class in New Mexico:

Questioner:

What I’m saying is, like, they recently moved, like it was a college student or something, they’re still in that same area…

Pat Morlen, Vice Chair of the Sandova County Republican Party: They can vote provisional, that’s all, they cannot vote regular.

FACT: When someone changes addresses within the same voting precinct they will receive a REGULAR ballot

Progress Now New Mexico goes into interesting detail about just how much Morlen got wrong in her lecture, and links to a Nation piece in which reporter Lee Fang asks NM Congressman Steve Pearce about the likelihood of this causing confusion at the polls. The Republican lawmakers response?

It all comes down to judges and all that stuff—that’s sort of out of my area.

Aw shucks, folks, Pearce is jes’ a down-home boy. He don’t cotton to high-falutin’ talk about “access to the vote” and long words like “disenfranchisement” and “suppression.”

Of course confusion is likely to result from people showing up and challenging voters at the polls using inaccurate information. That’s the idea. The more citizens – especially dark-skinned citizens -- the Republicans can intimidate or frustrate into leaving the polls without voting, the better for the GOP candidate.

How blatant does the Republican Party have to be about voter suppression before there's a significant outcry against this attack on a right people have died to exercise? Are we really in the process of rethinking this whole, "one citizen, one vote" thing?

Comments

[dwer.livejournal.com]

their own polling site, their own unemployment numbers, and now their own voter suppression rules!

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I'll worry about it when you stop lumping things together that don't go together in the name of your conspiracy theory. Just like I do with every other conspiracy theory.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

If someone who was voting for 70 years was suddenly unable to vote due to new laws, is that a conspiracy theory?

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

That's not enough information to be able to tell. Maybe.

[paft.livejournal.com]

What things "that don't go together" am I lumping together? And since the GOP is barely bothering to hide their efforts to suppress the vote, in what sense is this a "conspiracy theory?"

Is the "instructor" in this video a hired actress?

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

You're acting like there's some coordinated effort to do nefarious things, when it's actually just independent people having similar ideas that you don't like.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Right. Independent people across the country, all in the same party (the one that has been consistently caught engaging in voter suppression for the past three decades) all simultaneously came up with the same bright idea about ways of preventing other people from voting.

Whether or not the orders went out from the RNC to do this, it's obvious there's something about the current culture of the Republican party that makes voter suppression appealing to a lot of people.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

It's a reaction to the liberal attempts to get everyone (even dead people) to vote. No conspiracy needed.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Except, you see, there's no evidence that liberals have embarked on some massive campaign to get dead people to vote.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

I didn't say they did.

[paft.livejournal.com]

You strongly implied it.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Your track record of interpreting implications is still pretty piss poor.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That people had to die to make it stick in the first place would seem to argue that 'we' never did fully agree *on* one citizen, one vote. And that as such there are a significant chunk of the American electorate who are still too primitive and backward to adjust to the reality of a democratic society.