What should a political party do when it is demographically challenged because its position on many important issues does not appeal to a majority of Blacks, Latinos, Asians and young voters? The Republican Party’s solution is to make voting less accessible to minority voters. But this is a losing strategy for a party that has lost its way. North Carolina Governor Patrick McCrory signed a so-called voting reform bill that imposes strict photo identification requirements on the state’s 4.5 million voters, rolls back the early voting period and repeals one-stop registration during early voting. The governor and the state’s Republican controlled legislature have imposed a solution is search of a problem. Nearly 7 million votes were cast in the state’s 2012 general and two primary elections. But only 121 alleged cases of voter fraud were referred to a district attorney’s office, about 1/1000 of a percent of the total votes.
So let’s say that you were in charge of a process that has proven to be 99.9999% problem-free. You’d think you were golden, right? When 6,999,879 out of every 7,000,000 instances of your process being put in motion work as intended…well, those 121 instances are hardly worth worrying about, right? You’d be so focused on the vast majority that works instead of the infinitesimal minority that doesn’t. Unless you’re a Republican legislator in North Carolina, in which case you’d see the .0001% as proof that the system is broken, corrupt, and in desperate need of repair. And you’d understand why Republicans are bent on disenfranchising minorities and the poor- traditional Democratic constituencies- in the name of “electoral integrity.” It seems that one person’s desire to prevention election fraud looks an awful lot like another’s voter suppression. What we have here is a classic case of a solution in search of a problem. Thank God for Republicans looking out for the greater good, eh?
Having evidently concluded that they’re not going to be able to win elections on the strength of their ideas, Republicans are looking for alternate means to achieve electoral success. That being the case, they’ve recognized that their only hope of seizing power involves cheating, racism, and voter suppression. They know that if voting rights are expanded, the GOP loses. Anything that works to make voting easier and more accessible lowers Republican prospects at the ballot box…and so they’ve resorted to the sort of racist, anti-democratic, un-American tactics that makes North Carolina the model for our future “democracy.”
What North Carolina Republicans have done is take the war on voting rights to a new low. It used to be that Republicans at least made a pretense of camouflaging their efforts to game the system. Now their tactics are so blatantly obvious that the only people they’ve convinced that they’re all about preventing “voter fraud” are other Republicans. No longer do Republicans make an effort to pretend they’re about honesty and integrity. They no longer bother to portray themselves as moderate and that their strategy is a middle way, a path that all Americans can accept as reasonable, moderate, and measured. Their strategy and tactics can really only be described using the phrase “slash and burn.” Welcome to the new Civil Rights Era…didn’t we fight these same battles in the ’60s?
Republicans have not only attacked the voting rights of minorities and the poor, they’ve succeeded in passing legislation that will likely disenfranchise large numbers of college students, another traditional Democratic constituency. Gov. Patrick McCrory claims that it’s all about protecting North Carolina from “voter fraud,” a “problem” that exists only in his mind and the minds of his fellow Republicans. He may well believe the words coming out of his mouth, but the man is as much a liar as he is a fraud (not words I toss around lightly). Any reasonable person- and by “reasonable,” I mean anyone not a card-carrying red meat Conservative- will look at what’s happening in the Tar Heel State and conclude that what’s happening is a blatant, undeniable attempt by Republicans to game the system. They know they can’t win on ideas, and so they’re left to cheat. So much for representative democracy, eh?
If they only way you can win is to lie, cheat, and steal, your ideas suck.