Republican Conservative Paul Weyrich: "I don't want everybody to vote."
by John Lawrence, July 1, 2020
To continue with Weyrich"s quote: " Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Pretty good reason why Trump doesn't want widespread use of #MailinBallots. Weyrich was an American religious conservative political activist and commentator, most notable as a figurehead of the New Right. He co-founded the conservative think tanks The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). He coined the term "moral majority," the name of the political action group Moral Majority that he co-founded in 1979 with Jerry Falwell. So much for his bonafides.
The Department of Motor Vehicles has no problem with identifying every licensed driver and every registered vehicle in the state. They also use the mails to inform drivers when their registration is due and when their license has expired. You never hear anything about driver fraud, so how hard is it to locate every registered voter by mail? Republicans have notoriously used voter suppression techniques to make sure that blacks and Latinx are discouraged from voting. Just having to take a day off from work and stand in a long line at distant polling places is discouragement enough. But there's more. The Atlantic reports:
A new poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic has uncovered evidence of deep structural barriers to the ballot for black and Latino voters, specifically in the 2016 election. More than that, the survey finds that the deep wounds of Jim Crow endure, leaving America’s democratic promise unfulfilled.
The real extent of voter suppression in the United States is contested. As was the case for poll taxes and literacy tests long ago, restrictive election laws are often, on their face, racially neutral, giving them a sheen of legitimacy. But the new data from PRRI and The Atlantic suggest that the outcomes of these laws are in no way racially neutral. The poll, conducted in June, surveyed Americans about their experiences with voting, their assessments of the country’s political system, and their interfaces with civics. The results, especially when analyzed by race, are troublesome. They indicate that voter suppression is commonplace, and that voting is routinely harder for people of color than for their white counterparts.
In some places voting is a luxury poor people can hardly afford. So making voting easier would allow more poor people and people of color to vote. For sure they would probably vote Democratic. That's why Republicans, who are the party of the rich, want to make it as difficult as possible for them to vote. In addition to that gerrymandering has made it almost impossible to get a fair outcome in many elections. In many states the party in power gets to draw the voting districts any way they want so they draw them in such a way that minorities or candidates that minorities favor can never win. Incumbents are reelected time after time.
Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries. Two principal tactics are used in gerrymandering: "cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). A third is homogenization of all districts (essentially a form of cracking where the majority party uses its superior numbers to guarantee the minority party never attains a majority in any district).
Several states are considering independent redistricting commissions taking the power to draw district lines away from the party in power. This would guarantee a fairer distribution of districts and that district lines were drawn in a neutral manner not favoring either party.
