Instead of throwing women under the bus, in a misguided attempt to appeal to anti-abortion people, [View all]

[pnwmom]

Last edited Fri Apr 21, 2017, 04:57 PM - Edit history (2)

and black and brown people under the bus, in a misguided attempt to appeal to racist whites, why isn't the Democratic party concentrating on overcoming the vote suppression that IN AND OF ITSELF was enough to flip the election to Trump?

Why aren't we having continuous voter registration drives and making plans for how we're going to get everyone to the polls? Why aren't we working to help EVERYONE get the Voter ID's that they need? (While we continue to fight against such laws.) Why aren't we fighting state laws that prevent convicted felons (a crime with a sentence of more than 1 year) from ever voting in their lifetimes? Why aren't we trying to figure out how to inoculate our core constituencies from the onslaught of fake news?

We don't need to expand our base to racists and sexists. We just need to get higher percentages of our core supporters back on the registration lists and voting.

We don't have a lot of time. We need to be on this NOW.



https://thinkprogress.org/2016-a-case-study-in-voter-suppression-258b5f90ddcd

Three such states serve as case studies for the effectiveness of these voting restrictions: Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida.

All three elected staunchly conservative governors during President Obama’s terms. All three implemented voting restrictions that affect millions of people. President Obama won all three states in 2008, and won all but North Carolina in 2012, while Hillary Clinton lost all three of those states this year.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890

Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.

The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.

https://www.thenation.com/article/voter-suppression-is-a-much-bigger-problem-than-voter-fraud/

The real danger to American democracy stems from GOP efforts to make it harder to vote. New voting restrictions—like voter-ID laws, cuts to early voting and barriers to voter registration—that are in place in 14 states for the first time in 2016 will make it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast a ballot. And voters are lacking crucial protections because this is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

That is the problem we should be focusing on. Take Wisconsin, for example, where Preibus warned of “voting irregularities in Milwaukee” last night. Wisconsin didn’t present a single case of voter impersonation in court to justify its voter-ID law. Yet 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lack strict forms of photo ID and could be disenfranchised by the law. “It is absolutely clear that Act 23 will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes,” wrote Judge Lynn Adelman. Another federal judge in Wisconsin, James Peterson, wrote, “A preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections.”

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/2/1648016/-Wake-up-Democrats-and-pay-attention-to-voter-suppression-and-felony-disenfranchisement

Felony disenfranchisement policies have a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Black Americans of voting age are more than four times more likely to lose their voting rights than the rest of the adult population, with one of every 13 black adults disenfranchised nationally. In four states – Florida (21 percent), Kentucky (26 percent), Tennessee (21 percent), and Virginia (22 percent – more than one in five black adults is disenfranchised. In total, 2.2 million black citizens are banned from voting.