All over the country, Republican legislatures and governors spent the last two years trying to make it harder to register to vote and harder to vote. They claimed that the laws they were enacting were intended to combat in-person voter fraud, where people show up at the polls and impersonate someone who they are not in order to cast more than one vote. Yet, they consistently failed to provide courts any evidence that this kind of fraud has occurred in more than a handful of cases over the last decade. Without question, they failed to show that even one election at any level of government was stolen through in-person voter fraud.
In addition, they sought to limit early voting. They cut the hours and days of early voting, and limited the places where people could vote early, which contributed to three, four, six, and seven hour lines both during early voting and on Election Day. These decisions were justified with spurious claims that they would save money.
All these efforts were transparently about limiting the percentage of people who could vote. When possible, they went further and designed campaigns that would disproportionately inconvenience, if not flat-out disenfranchise, Democratic voters. The state-issued photo ID requirements were an example of this. So were efforts to restrict voter registration efforts by third-party organizations like the League of Women Voters.
This is the context in which you should view Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s recent comments at the Ronald Reagan library. In 1971, Wisconsin became the first state to create same-day voter registration. By allowing citizens to show up at the polls (early, or on Election Day) and register to vote before casting a vote, the Badger State managed to have the second-highest turnout percentage in the country in 2008. A very respectable 72.4% of eligible Wisconsin citizens cast their ballots that year. It should be a cause for statewide civic pride. But the governor doesn’t see it that way.
“States across the country that have same-day registration have real problems because the vast majority of their states have poll workers who are wonderful volunteers, who work 13 hour days and who in most cases are retirees,” Walker said. “It’s difficult for them to handle the volume of people who come at the last minute. It’d be much better if registration was done in advance of election day. It’d be easier for our clerks to handle that. All that needs to be done.“
Yet, it was states like Ohio and Florida that restricted early voting that experienced long voting lines on Election Day, not states like Wisconsin with same-day registration. Governor Walker wants to eliminate a 41-year tradition of same-day registration in his state, not because it is overly taxing for volunteer poll workers, but because he doesn’t want to compete for 72.4% of the eligible votes in his state. He wants lower turnout. He wants much lower turnout. He’s no different in that regard from the Republican governors of Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida who all went to extreme lengths to try to shrink the size of the electorate this time around, and all of whom failed to hand their state’s Electoral Votes to Mitt Romney.
We ought to have a national debate about what kind of electorate we want to have. Should it be restricted to white Christian men who own many acres of land? If not, why not? Because all these efforts to make it harder for everyone else to vote must be justified in some manner other than it helps the Republican Party win elections.
Right?
Early voting and same day registration are not the same thing. One can have early voting with extended dates and hours that cut down the lines without same day registration. Similarly, one could have same day registration without any early voting at all.
I am aware of that.
Riddle me this: how does Governor Deadeyes of Fitzwalkerstan get the authority to talk about other states? Not that his position is any more valid for justice in Wisconsin, but the fact that he presumes to speak on behalf of other states reveals his game here.
What about compulsory voting? When my Australian cousins told me voting is compulsory down there, I thought maybe that sounded like not such a terrible idea.
I don’t know what all the pros and cons are, but if the Republicans are going to keep trying to restrict voting rights, maybe the Democrats should start pushing to make voting mandatory. If nothing else, the reaction from the wingnuts would be pretty entertaining.
In my experience people across the US political spectrum absolutely freak the fuck out when this is brought up.
So far I’ve found their arguments pretty laughable.
I’d even be willing to create an enforcement mechanism that disproportionately punishes Democrats. There should be no criminal penalty for failing to vote, and all ballot lines should include a “none of the above” option. But the penalty would be that you can’t receive federal assistance if you haven’t voted in either of the last two (general/primary) elections unless you can provide a waiver for both. Basically, you’d lose your unemployment insurance or your Social Security check or your welfare payment if you stopped voting without a valid excuse.
Rich Republicans who don’t need any help wouldn’t have to worry about the consequences of shirking their civic duty. Win. Win.
That might be intended to disproportionately punish Democrats who don’t vote, but it also further incentivizes them TO vote. If I were a Republican, I would look at your proposal as a way to try to compel gift-receiving moochers to go to the polls.
It’s intended to measure the will of the people as accurately as possible.
The dirty secret of American politics is that the underclass doesn’t vote. Until recently, young people didn’t vote.
The Republicans want to keep it that way because they don’t want any redistribution of wealth. Now our wealth disparity is as big as it was in the 1920’s on the eve of the Depression.
The biggest redistribution is going on with full support of the Dems — it is the Central Banking system that keeps undermining the currency for the common man so that the political banking nexus can maintain its status quo despite the fact that it is borderline insolvent absent the proboscis into the holder of dollars. You wonder why fat cats in the Hamptons got so fat, look there and the fact that the system allows them to lever up on fractionally invented dollars, and when it blows up, the rest of us bail it out. There’s your wealth disparity. Focus on that and removing the laws and regulations that enable all that.
Otherwise, the last thing you want to do is redistribute from those among the entrepreneurial class who actually have the talent to organize scarce resources to the benefit of an improved standard of living for society.
Frankly, I don’t care much for those who gain their wealth through parasitic capitalism / corporatism, various oligopolies, etc. If they could be tax targeted while leaving the real wealth creators out of the mix, that’d make sense. But taxing one and all is a blunt strategy akin to raiding and distributing the national economic seed-corn from the very people with the skills and knowledge to get the harvests going again. The third world is littered with such stupid economics.
Problem is that between the parasitic capitalist crowd and the social entitlement redistributionistas, we’re looking at weaker and weaker harvests, less legitimate investment incentives, increased destabilizing speculation and eventual economic famine.
Boo, we’re not on the eve of a Depression, we’re muddling in one already and by compounding the very errors that got us here, we’re prolonging the misery and whatever temporary loft we get will crash down because the very essence of all the solutions further distorts efficient economic arrangement. The economy is horribly mal-arranged and both D’s and R’s just propose policies to further dislocate that.
The temporary halt from reality under Bernanke’s prevention of it all hitting the fan is only because we’re blessed to have sufficient stores of functioning economic seed corn to raid thanks to the orignary arrangers of capital / standard of living growth in this country. Assaulted for a century and finally to massive heights in the last decade, we’ve crossed the Rubicon where our baseline standard of living no longer grows because harvests are shrinking, forcing the collectivists and corporate parasites to take a greater and greater share of the economic seed-corn. And so we corkscrew further.
Consequently, the underlying economic structure has been badly maligned by distorted price structures and dysfunctional resource allocation. Economic famine is virtually guaranteed, and the best solution the people are coming up with is Churchill’s warning of guaranteed equal misery for all, while “real progressives” like the Krugmanites demand we increase the pace of bleeding the patient. Indeed, Bernanke’s neo-keynesian policies have masked reality (the severity), and like those policies, confiscatory taxation and collectivized redistribution remain seductive and powerful machines of wealth destruction. At best they will throw bread to the masses in what will be looked back on as nothing but a postponement of (thus exacerbating )the day of reckoning.
I fear the electorate not because I am a GOPer — anything but! I fear them because the mob on either side has great distaste for Liberty, and unrestrained democracy is the idiotic belief in the collective genius of individual ignorance. They have for decades voted us into this mess, and while they know something is seriously wrong, they are no more qualified to pick the right economic policies than the average person is capable of lifting the hood of their car and fixing what’s underneath.
No — The average person (myself included) has no business voting others into chains of any single Procrustean belief system, economic or otherwise. Give the keys of the economy to Krugman or Goldman or the GOP — we’re screwed.
Give us Liberty.
Brilliant.
A Republican voting against this is encouraging mooching.
Yes. Voting should be mandatory.
If he’s so worried about volunteers, then perhaps he should pay them instead.
Canada pays its poll workers. between $150 and $250 a day.
We are such amateurs when it comes to elections in this country. It’s like we think it’s not all that important.
Poll workers are paid. At least they are in Ohio, I assume the rest of the states are similar. The payment in Ohio is $20 for the training and $125 for the day.
Maine’s teabagger Gov. Landslide LePage, and his newly-Republican legislature ended Maine’s 38-year-old same-day voting law as one of their first legislative acts. (We used to duke it out with MN and WI for highest turnout nationally.)
The people of Maine emphatically undid that, with a people’s-veto referendum the next year, a referendum that acquired the necessary signatures to be placed on the ballot faster than any measure in state history.
I remember that
Didn’t the GOP just lose control of both houses of the legislature in Maine?
Yes they did.
It seems to me that the easiest solution to politicians enacting laws restricting voters from voting is for the citizens in those states to stop electing politicians who want to…..restrict citizens from voting.
There is no organizing necessary to stop such laws. No country wide discussion is necessary. All that is needed is to not vote such people in.
Until the citizens can do that very minimal thing I will assume they approve of such restrictions. It’s not like their politicians are making their goals clear.
.
Is it fear or loathing?
This fuck should be in jail:
Appeals court backs Husted on provisionals
Repubs have long been opposed to same day registration, they just used to think that it was a deal that they couldn’t undo, like Medicare. Todays’s “conservatives” have figured out that there is no real danger to repealing policies that constitute actual social progress, so they are doing it.
So here we have this hypocritical turd Fuhrer Walker actually arguing that the same day registration should be abandoned because it tires out retired Grandma Pollworker. As though maybe the better answer isn’t to increase election day staff, either paid or unpaid. Tired elderly poll workers trump citizens’ convenience in casting their ballots in a democracy, check.
And of course, I’ll bet the turd can’t find many Grandma Pollworkers who think that same day reg should be abolished because it makes for long days for them. News flash for Der Fuhrer: most election volunteers are delighted to have more people voting. But feel free to misrepresent the attitudes of all these admirable volunteers to serve your own anti-democratic agenda, you “conservative” monster.
Anyway, today’s “conservatives” will say anything, make up any fake and phony argument, as a basis for their reactionary anti-democratic policies. The big problem here is that WI crazily returned their legislature to Repub control, so Fuhrer Walker again has total carte blanche to do whatever he wants. And that means WI can kiss their 41 year tradition of same day registration goodbye, I’d say. What has gone wrong there is a mystery.