Republicans Start a New Super PAC Intended to Make It Harder For You to Vote

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http://www.politicususa.com/2014/01/25/republicans-start-super-pac-intended-harder-vote.html

Republicans Start a New Super PAC Intended to Make It Harder For You to Vote
By: Rmuse
Saturday, January, 25th, 2014, 1:10 pm

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The Presidential Commission on Election Administration finally released its report, and made reasonable recommendations to ensure that every American who wants to can easily participate in the democratic process.

Any American that loves democracy should celebrate that the commission came up with easy solutions to ensure that America’s fragile democracy would be preserved. However, there are Americans who are not the least bit interested in free and fair elections and as the editors of Bloomberg View acknowledged, even though the commission’s suggestions are “so resolutely practical that it’s hard to imagine its recommendations stirring much debate, much less controversy, not all politicians want to make it easier for Americans to vote.” The truth is that part and parcel of the Republican Party’s platform is making it difficult for all Americans to participate in the electoral process; particularly if they are minorities inclined to support Democratic candidates.

What the bipartisan commission, and Americans with a memory, noted was that the greatest Election Day problems occurred in large urban areas with concentrations of African American and Latino neighborhoods plagued with confusing ballots, hours-long voting lines, broken voting machines, and inaccurate voter rolls. The commission suggested expanding online voter registration and early voting, improving and modernizing voting machines, and improve efficiency to reduce wait times at polling places.

Sadly, it is a fact of life that Republicans have no interest in implementing any of the commission’s recommendations because it is not in their best interest, or survival, to have free and fair elections. Republicans used voter ID laws supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to shut down voter registration drives and restricting early voting to ensure Republican’s ideology that voting should be so incredibly complicated and difficult that only people voting for Republicans have the right to vote.



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Republicans killed the commission simply and effectively by refusing to appoint or approve any commissioners at all. Now they have a conservative super PAC to support Republican secretaries of state that will pursue restrictive voter laws, purge voter rolls, and generally kill the democratic process. Several southern states already implemented voter suppression laws after the conservative Supreme Court ruled racism is non-existent and gave Republican legislatures the green light to restrict minority voting to guarantee that, as Lindsey Graham said, only “angry white guys” are allowed to vote.

Despite President Obama’s commission’s recommendations to ensure every American is allowed to cast a vote, Republicans will ramp up their voter suppression efforts because a recent study shows that Republican states with higher minority turnouts will attempt to pass voter suppression laws; especially now that demographics have turned against Republicans and they know there are not enough angry white racists to keep them in office.