What Makes a Democrat, Part 3 - Voting Rights
TL;DR Free and Fair elections are the single most key part of any functioning Democracy - we're the closest we've ever been to achieving them, and voting rights are under attack on the basis that voter fraud (while incredibly rare) is somehow overwhelming our elections.
I want to be very clear on this one - Election Day should be a National Holiday, all states should allow vote-by-mail, and make sure elections are well funded and supported to run as smoothly as possible. That of course includes precautions against fraud (which already exist), but also should be very strict about protecting the rights of people to vote. There is arguably no higher duty for government agencies.
Democrats have been fighting hard to expand access to voting, Republicans in office have fought to restrict it, sometimes without even hiding that it's for partisan reasons.
Voter Disenfranchisement is not. Neither are broad campaigns to make Americans trust their elections less. The White House right now has a big scary headline (courtesy of the Heritage Foundation) about Voter Fraud, but outright cites 1,071 total cases.
It claims not to be an exhaustive list, but it also covers the past ten years, where over 300,000,000 votes have been cast in National elections alone, not counting local or even state-wide elections.
And that right there is the problem. Despite multiple studies, many of them run by Conservative groups who bent over backwards to find it, and the more closely it's looked at, the *less* of a problem voter fraud appears to be.
But still. Voter ID laws (1, 2, 3), voter purges, polling place closures, and barriers other to voting continue to crop up, most of the pushed by Conservatives to guarantee them winning elections.
Of these, voter purges stand out as particularly bad to me - that is using some sort of data to run through and mass removed registered voters' registration. Because of the specter of voter fraud, Conservative-led swing states like Wisconsin have been particularly aggressive about this, removing 230,000 registrants in some years.
The idea here is to remove people who have never voted, or to guess who may have passed away or moved. The idea itself isn't bad, but like so many of the problems here, they overwhelmingly target minority and Liberal areas, and without notifying people that they're being unregistered. Where this steps well into bad territory is that if someone is purged and doesn't know it, they could show up to vote in a key election only to find out then, and not be able to register because most states don't allow late or same-day registration to vote (ALSO because of the "threat" of fraud)
Polling place closures are also a significant issue - again because they're most common in Conservative states, and because they disproportionately close polling places in Liberal and minority areas.
Let's also not forget, Gerrymandering. That is, marking the borders of Districts within a state to favor one party over another. On this one, both Democrats and Republicans are guilty, and I want to see both of them take a stand against it. Not only does Gerrymandering make partisanship worse, but it makes States very non-representative of what voters actually support.
On this one also, yes Donald Trump has popularized the subject, and been especially bad about crying wolf on voter fraud, this has been a staple of the Republican party establishment for decades or more. Republican politicians regularly tout Voter ID laws, push for hyper partisan District maps, voter roll purges, and closing polling places strategically, and fought the hardest to prevent things like later registration, early voting, and (now) vote by mail.
Our elections should be fair, and run in as non-partisan a way as possible - if you can't win a fair contest, you don't deserve to win at all.
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