GOP Admits Voting Restrictions Designed To Suppress Democratic Votes

The NY Times has an article that documents all the Republican officials around the country who have admitted that restricting early voting and requiring photo IDs is purely designed to suppress Democratic votes. Of course, despite virtually zero evidence that voter fraud exists, the GOP continues to outwardly insist that these new restrictions are necessary to reduce fraud while inwardly admitting the partisan nature of their actions.

In Wisconsin, Republican Glenn Grothman predicted the state’s voter ID law would reduce Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the election. Earlier Todd Albaugh, a staff member to a GOP state legislator, resigned when he saw other legislators celebrating the idea that the law would suppress minority and younger voters. In Pennsylvania, the GOP leader in the state’s House of Representatives predicted (incorrectly) that the voter ID law would help Romney carry the state while the state GOP chairman believed that the state’s ID law had, in fact, lowered Obama’s margin of victory in the state in 2012. In North Carolina, a GOP county chair told the Daily Show that the voter ID law would “kick Democrats in the butt.” In Florida, the state GOP party chairman and former GOP Governor Charlie Crist both admit that the voter ID law was designed to suppress Democratic votes. The party chairman also stated that consultants had told him to cut down on early voting “because early voting is not good for us [Republicans].”

Earlier this week, the Guardian released a bunch of leaked documents that show just how blatantly campaign finance laws are being subverted. But also included in those documents was a disturbing twist to Republicans bogus claims of voter fraud. As a close race for the state Supreme Court was being contested, a Republican former speaker of the State Assembly openly advocated starting rumors of widespread voter fraud so that the election could be contested if the preferred GOP candidate did not win. So you have to wonder when Trump insists that the election will be “rigged” whether this is just another Republican strategy to challenge the results should he lose.

Todd Albaugh summed it up perfectly when he said, “Think about that for a minute. Elected officials planning and happy to help deny a fellow American’s constitutional right to vote in order to increase their own chances to hang onto power.” This is what the Republican party has become – suppressing voters, subverting democracy, disregarding their constitutional duties, and destroying the norms of governance simply to maintain their grip on power.