There is no “both sides do it” when it comes to intentionally keeping Americans away from the polls.
As of Sunday afternoon, more than 93 million Americans had cast a ballot in the November elections. That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.
This is excellent news. In the middle of a global pandemic that has taken the lives of nearly a quarter of a million Americans, upended the national economy and thrown state election procedures into turmoil, there were reasonable concerns that many people would not vote at all. The numbers to date suggest that 2020 could see record turnout.
While celebrating this renewed citizen involvement in America’s political process, don’t lose sight of the bigger, and darker, picture. For decades, Americans have voted at depressingly low rates for a modern democracy. Even in a “good” year, more than one-third of all eligible voters don’t cast a ballot. In a bad year, that number can approach two-thirds.
Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?
For many, it’s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn’t matter because politicians don’t listen to them anyway.
For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia. In New York City, a decrepit, incompetent, self-dealing board of elections has been making a mockery of democracy for decades. Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls. For the past few days, some New Yorkers have been forced to stand in line for four or five hours to cast their ballots.
But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/o...publicans.html
We know why. Because most people, especially in ing 2020, are not regressive conservi s clinging to fossil fuels and muh oil jobs and if voting was easy and everyone actually did it, the conservatives would never win another election. there's a reason gerrymandering exists. because on a level playing field, the GOP stands no chance, and they are 100% aware of it
less white male supremacists know non-white, non-males are are threat to white male privilege.
And they are winning, eg the Senate, with minority rule, with voter suppression (esp of non-white votes), gerrymandering.
Repugs know they are LOSERS demographically so they MUST cheat to access/retain power.
Voters of color are much more likely to have their ballots rejected in battleground states
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1991888
I hope New York cleans up their act
The core of modern conservatism is dishonesty. and violence.
An honest person would admit to faults in their own party. Liberals are honest. You are not. Your response was not to be honest, but to deflect.
I will happily admit that New York should clean it up. Ironic that you, a dishonest person, agreed with AOC an honest person on that.
Care to admit that the Republican party has gone heavily in the fascist direction in its authoritarian anti-democracy efforts?
Because they are cheaters, they cheat, ill informed voters cheat.
We cant have ill informed voters voting, they cheat.
Guy drives up to the polling station with his truck jacked up 10 feet in the air capsizes because of giant Trump flags... yells cheaters!
Status: feet washer
Last edited by FrostKing; 11-02-2020 at 05:50 PM.
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