Well, at least he’s honest about how he feels about my work helping poor people to register to vote.
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
There are desperately poor white people living all throughout Appalachia who voted overwhelmingly for John McCain and Sarah Palin. They all benefit from the Motor Voter Law, which makes it possible for them to register to vote at the welfare office as well as the Division of Motor Vehicles. You NEVER hear Democrats complaining about how easy it is for these folks to vote. It’s true that the Democratic Party benefits when overall turnout is high and suffers when it is low. Democrats have a self-interested motivation for doing voter registration, including among the poor. But we’re not hypocrites about it. We try to make it easy to vote for everyone.
If we’re talking about people voting more than once, or voting when they’re not eligible to vote, or people impersonating someone in order to cast a vote, there is almost no voter fraud occurring in this country. Probably the most common cases of voter fraud are when people move and fail to reregister in their proper precinct. If they go ahead and vote at their old precinct, that’s voter fraud. It’s minor, but it does take place. Much less common are cases like Ann Coulter’s where people deliberately lie about what precinct they live in for whatever reason.
These types of relatively minor cases of voter fraud do not involve an increase or decrease of the overall electorate, and unless someone moves out of state, they only impact local races. When people don’t follow the rules, they should be punished, but there is no epidemic of voter fraud, and certainly not from the underclass.
Yet, the Republicans have moved in state after state to make it more difficult to vote.
The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.
Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes…
…In Georgia, Florida, Ohio and other states, legislatures have significantly reduced opportunities to cast ballots before Election Day — an option that was disproportionately used by African-American voters in 2008. In this case the justification is often fiscal: Republicans in North Carolina attempted to eliminate early voting, claiming it would save money. Fortunately, the effort failed after the State Election Board demonstrated that cuts to early voting would actually be more expensive because new election precincts and additional voting machines would be required to handle the surge of voters on Election Day.
Voters in other states weren’t so lucky. Florida has cut its early voting period by half, from 96 mandated hours over 14 days to a minimum of 48 hours over just eight days, and has severely restricted voter registration drives, prompting the venerable League of Women Voters to cease registering voters in the state altogether. Again, this affects very specific types of voters: according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, African-Americans and Latinos were more than twice as likely as white voters to register through a voter registration drive.
So, the evidence is quite plain. Democrats want more people to vote, and Republicans want less. The Democrats try to expand the electorate, and they don’t try to suppress Republican votes. The Republicans actively try to suppress the Democratic vote.
The idea that all citizens are equal and we’re all entitled to one vote is perfectly fine with the Democrats, but it it’s a socialist plot to conservatives.
