Redux: Will Republicans Steal Your Right To Vote?

This article is republished from 3/6/2011.  Republicans have a long history of disenfranchising people that they consider more likely to vote for Democrats.  After all, they can’t allow something as minute as voting rights stand in the way of establishing a 1,000 year Republican Regime of one-party rule.  In a master coup, they slimed ACORN, forcing that fine organization into bankruptcy, using fictitious information that looked so damning that Acorn was gone before the truth that Republicans doctored the video reached the public.  During the Bush Regime, they fired US attorneys who refused to file false charges against Democratic candidates on the eve of elections.  Google caging to find another favorite Republican ruse.  And now they’re back to using false claims of voter fraud to steal the right to vote from millions of US citizens.

In statehouses across the country, Republican lawmakers are raising the specter of “voter fraud” to push through legislation that would dramatically restrict the voting rights of college students, rural voters, senior citizens, the disabled and the homeless. As part of their larger effort to silence Main Street, conservatives are pushing through new photo identification laws that would exclude millions from voting, depress Hispanic voter turnout by as much as 10 percent, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars. In the next few months, a new set of election laws could make going to the polls and registering to vote significantly more difficult — in some cases even barring groups of citizens from voting in the communities where they live.

Conservative legislators across the country have said these laws are necessary to combat alleged mass voter fraud. But these fears are completely overblown and states already have tough voting laws on the books: fraudulent voters face felony charges, hefty fines, and even lengthy prison time. In Missouri, for example, voter fraud carries a penalty of no less than 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Yet conservatives have insisted on finding a legislative solution to a non-existent problem. In states like Indiana, where an ID law passed in 2005, both nuns and college students have found themselves turned away from the polls. Similar laws are on the books in eight other states and that number could expand dramatically in coming months… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

Nothing in this country is so precious as our right to vote.  The only way I know to protect our voting rights is to remove Republicans from power at every level of government, so completely that your great grandchildren ask your children, “Who were the Republicans?”

Update:  we received an email from a lawyer to congratulate our work and inform us that one of the links in the source article I used, overblown,  had been retired, and inviting is to update the link, which I did.  I reposted this because it’s still valid today, except that the problem is now far worse.