Gutting Out The Vote

Kill The American Dream Before It Dies

The Voting Booth At The End Of The Universe

June 13, 2012

Republican'ts continue their relentless obsession with stifling the vote. Numerous Republican'ts have publicly proclaimed that they don’t want too many people voting. And who could blame them? CONservative icon Paul Weyrich, co-founder of conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation who also helped to establish the Moral Majority spoke directly to this issue in the fall of 1980. While I can unfortunately understand the connection between voter suppression and our Heritage, I'm a little less clear about the Moral aspect.

Weyrich bemoaned the fact that “many of our Christians have what I call the ‘Goo-Goo Syndrome.’ Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote…As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” At least Mr. Weyrich had the courage, if not the good taste to speak his incredibly un-democratic mind in public. Today, his successors couch their language, hide their contempt for just about everyone and pretend to be looking out for Democracy.

This anti-vote philosophy, spoken or hidden remains at the core of the conservative movement. Conservatives know that higher voter turnout hurts their chances. This will become even more likely as the American citizenry becomes less and less dominated by white people. Not sure, but maybe it's because today’s Republican’ts keep shitting on everyone who's not white, straight, rich and misogynistic.

The number of cases of voter impersonation fraud, is infinitesimal compared to the constant handwringing of conservatives and weighed against the tenacity of their now more and more successful attempts to pass voter ID laws. State after state is pushing to Gut Out The Vote. Finally the Department of Justice has noticed and appears ready to make a stand. I'm not Holdering my breath.

You may recall a while back ACORN was vilified for voter fraud, allegedly submitting phony names on voter registration lists. ACORN was hung out to dry by the Dems while the lunatic fringe mainstream of the Republican'ts hacked them to death. In fact, it was ACORN who discovered some illegitimate signatures on their registration forms and reported their findings to election authorities. After Republican'ts ultimately destroyed them, ACORN was vindicated by a Congressional Research Service. Hurrah. The so-called liberal New York Times buried this story on page twenty-four on Christmas Eve, assuring the story scant notice.

Protecting The Integrity Of The Vote, Assuring The Outcome Of The Election

Most of the latest voter suppression laws are purported to stop people from casting votes using someone else’s name. That should be very easy to stop since it almost never happens. We don’t need to disenfranchise countless legitimate voters to solve a problem that does not exist. The truth is these anti-voting fanatics are after one thing – stop non-conservative voters from casting ballots…by any means necessary. If only they would be as honest as Paul Weyrich was, at least on that one day in 1980.

Take the example of 93 year old Viviette Applewhite, who once marched beside Martin Luther King. Ms. Applewhite was finally allowed to vote in 1960 and has not missed a chance to exercise that right since then. She is proud that her daughter and her daughter’s five college educated children all vote every chance they get. Her pocketbook was stolen. She lives in Pennsylvania with its new anti-voting laws and cannot get photo ID and will, though never shirking her civic duty since 1960, not be permitted to vote. She has made numerous attempts to get the proper identification, but has been declined each time without a reason. Ms. Applewhite told an interviewer, “I just think they’re taking your rights away because there were so many rights we did not have. And now we do have them and this way they take them away from us; we won’t have nothing, be right back where we were before…Voting is important to me because it gives you equal rights to do things.”

The voter ID laws cropping up across the country, all backed by Republican't politicians, Teabag conservatives and secretive big money are clearly designed, despite all the denials, to disenfranchise the poor, the elderly and the non-white – historically non-conservative groups for some reason. One group taking a major role in this massive effort to Gut Out The Vote is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an ideologically conservative (like the KKK) group, founded by none other than Paul Weyrich and consisting of business interests and conservative state legislators. ALEC was recently in the news when a number of high-profile corporations including McDonalds, Wendy’s, Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Intuit and PepsiCo severed ties with the previously secretive organization after ALEC hit the headlines for supporting various controversial laws across the country, including anti-voting legislation.  ALEC says they are just protecting the integrity of the vote.  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Let us not forget Florida’s then-Secretary of State and co-chair of George W. Bush's Florida election campaign, Katherine Harris who, along with George’s brother Jeb (then Florida’s governor) hired a private firm to create a list of ineligible voters in her state. Ms. Harris managed to purge the rolls of tens of thousands of eligible African American voters just in time for the 2000 presidential election, in which George W. Bush was eventually alleged to have 537 more Florida votes than Al Gore, giving him an Electoral College victory without winning the nation’s popular vote. Of course the Florida votes were never actually counted once the renegade Supreme Court illegally halted the count, preferring instead to appoint the man who would become the Worst President In American History.

Is That Florida In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Glad To Screw Me?

Well, don’t look now but Florida is at it again.  This time Florida has a smorgasbord of voter suppression entrees on the menu.  Laws to limit early voting (favored 2-to-1 by black voters), laws to curtail registering new voters (important for young people) and of course the good old reliable Katherine Harris/Jeb Bush approach of a wanton purge of alleged illegal voters guaranteed to include countless examples of collateral damage, that being thousands of eligible (mostly Hispanic this time) voters being disenfranchised for no reason, other than the fact that they are very likely to vote Democrat.

If anyone truly wanted to stop vote fraud one need look no further than the conniving manufacturers of computerized "voting" machines and those who store them in their garages, closets, etc. It is clear that these machines are at the beck and call of those in power and can create any desired outcome. I guess the only thing keeping it even slightly real is the fact that they haven’t figured out how to flip these machines en masse, but must manipulate them one at a time. But stopping vote fraud is not the mission of these vote fraud frauds.

Though most of us choose not to vote, those who choose to do so should be encouraged, not purged. I have spent time in both camps and even when I was opposed to voting I never tried to interfere with anyone who chose to do so. These weasels will stop at nothing to prevent actual democratic processes from taking place. It's already hard enough to maintain any semblance of democracy in this country, without the already-too-powerful raining on our facade. Stay vigilant and do what you can to stop those with a vested interest from tampering with our right to vote for whomever we feel will best represent our rights and interests. We are a nation that claims to value the right to vote above most others - let’s act like it.

It Can't Happen Here

There have been at least 180 vote-restricting bills introduced in 41 states since January 2011. Fourteen states have already passed laws making voting more difficult. Those 14 states represent almost 70% of the electoral votes needed to "win" the presidency. Naturally these laws were proposed by Republican'ts, passed by Republican't controlled state legislatures and signed into law by Republican't governors. Nobody could have anticipated this kind of thing happening in Nixonland.

OCCUPY THE FUTURE.

I. Mangrey reporting.

Thanks for listening. Responsible comment (and hanging chads) invited.