Thursday, October 23, 2014
"Republican legislatures have enacted all sorts of thinly disguised ways to suppress the vote…"
...writes USA Today's editorial board, adding that voter ID laws only compound the existing problem of "too few" people voting.
Partisan attempts to suppress the vote are bad enough. What's just as disappointing is how the U.S. vote gets suppressed by voters themselves.
While the rest of the world's established democracies typically see 70% or more of their eligible voters go to the polls, the USA typically sees just 60% in presidential elections and an abysmal 40% in midterm elections like the one coming up next month.
The problem in places such as Ferguson, Mo. — where a registration drive after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown yielded just 128 new voters — isn't that too many people are voting. It's that too few are.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/civil_rights/2014/10/republican-legislatures-have-enacted-all-sorts-of-thinly-disguised-ways-to-suppress-the-vote.html
I lived in Ferguson. I now live in North Carolina. The poor white trash guys will say this when you ask them who they voted for in the last election: "My daddy didn't vote and I don't vote." In prior years when the black vote was totally denied, the white oligarchs controlled the elections and did not need JoeBob to vote. But now that the blacks register and vote in high percentages here the RepubliCons are trying to get the poor white trash vote out. Back in Ferguson most of the complaining is not from locals. It is from outsiders. The blacks who wont register over in the Michael Brown section of town (the Section 8 neighborhood) are making a choice not an echo. It is similar to the situation out here with the un-registered poor white citizens. Similar, not exactly the same.
Posted by: BarkinDog | Oct 23, 2014 8:00:16 PM