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TomCADem

(17,378 posts)
Sun Nov 1, 2020, 01:42 PM Nov 2020

NY Times: Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters?

Election 2020, the election where Republicans try to demonstrate that you can win an election without convincing a majority of voters that you deserve to hold office. Instead of voters choosing their leaders, Republicans want to be able to choose who can vote.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/why-are-republicans-so-afraid-of-voters/ar-BB1aAsfl?li=BBnb7Kz

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.”

This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade, redrawing district lines to keep themselves in power even when they lose a majority of the statewide vote. (Democrats gerrymander when they can, too, but the most egregious examples of the past decade have been by Republicans.) And the party is behind the early shutdown of this year’s census, which the Trump administration insisted on over the objections of longtime Census Bureau officials, and which it hopes will result in an undercount of people in Democratic-leaning parts of the country.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans’ anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with long histories of racial discrimination in voting. Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.
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NY Times: Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters? (Original Post) TomCADem Nov 2020 OP
Post removed Post removed Nov 2020 #1
Because the Republicans no longer believe that all male and female citizens Vogon_Glory Nov 2020 #2

Response to TomCADem (Original post)

Vogon_Glory

(9,084 posts)
2. Because the Republicans no longer believe that all male and female citizens
Sun Nov 1, 2020, 02:18 PM
Nov 2020

of the United States deserve equal representation under the law. In the view of the faction that controls today’s GOP, voting should be well-heeled and well-connected supporters of their de facto oligarchy as well as the clueless, constantly-bamboozled factions that follow secular con-men and clerics in wolves’ clothing and continue to vote for them.

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