Gonna be really awesome when the GOP does everything it can to stop the Democrats from fixing this complete nonsense.
Several recent polls and studies suggest that long waiting times in some places depressed turnout in 2012 and that lines were longest in cities, where Democrats outnumber Republicans. In a New York Times/CBS News poll taken shortly after Election Day, 18 percent of Democrats said they waited at least a half-hour to vote, compared with 11 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis determined that blacks and Hispanics waited nearly twice as long in line to vote on average than whites. Florida had the nation’s longest lines, at 45 minutes, followed by the District of Columbia, Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, according to Charles Stewart III, the political science professor who conducted the analysis.
A separate analysis, by an Ohio State University professor and The Orlando Sentinel, concluded that more than 200,000 voters in Florida “gave up in frustration” without voting.
“When I got there, the line was around the building,” said Jonathan Piccolo, 33, who said he had waited nearly eight hours to cast a ballot in Miami-Dade County the Monday before Election Day.
“It’s one of the most sacred rights you have,” Mr. Piccolo added. “They should make it as painless as possible.”
Rigging the system to remove undesirables from the voter pool has been an American tradition since we got started on this little adventure in social science. It’s taken 2oo plus years just to get this far, and the country will have to be dragged screaming and kicking towards The Right Thing To Do just like we’ve had to do every single effing day of the country’s existence.
Or, as Chuck Pierce reminds us:
The simplest solution is to change the legislative emphasis to expand the franchise and, if your ideas do not prevail in that expanded electorate, then simply to re-examine whether your ideas are worth having. Yeah, right.
I mean we’re basically at the point where Republicans are openly tapping the Really Rottens playbook and the country is collectively responding with a resounding “meh” from NYA-HA-HAAAAA overload. When do we finally get around to saying that Republicans are fundamentally incompatible with our continuing republic we’re trying to keep here? Is there any aspect of governance that the GOP isn’t looking at with a bucket of napalm and a zippo lighter in hand?
Just a bunch of nihilists, really.