Suppressing the Vote
In Florida and Ohio, both crucial swing states and both states with Republican governors and legislatures, the lines for early voting are horrendously long, some people waiting as much as half the day to vote (reports range up to six or even nine hours). Some are getting their cars towed while they wait. Many are just being turned away. A lot of people see the lines around the block and turn away, not being able to spare the time away from second and third jobs to vote.
But not everywhere. Primarily in poor, heavily minority areas, it seems.
Apparently, the Republican state governments somehow seemed to forget to give them enough voting machines and other resources to let everyone vote, even though it was obvious more were needed since lines were already too long before Republican slashed the number of early voting days and hours.
Gee, how about that? I’m sure it was an innocent oversight. Because otherwise there would have been intent to deprive tens of thousands of people of their right to vote based upon their political orientation, and that would constitute felony election fraud. And that’s not possible, right?
same thing on college campuses back in 2000 and 2004 in these swing states.
republicans passed into actively evil a long time ago
How far back do you have to go to when you never ever even considered an election to be, or have been, stolen?
With the possible exception of Kennedy in 1960?
One might have assumed a garden variety corruption, but for me, I never really considered it until 2000.
The whole problem has been, and remains, Movement Conservativism. I am down for saying that Movement Conservativism does not survive an Obama re-election (unless a major unanticipated event occurrs). That means Movement Conservativism is facing an existential threat. One can assume that they’ll pull out all stops to prevent that – which makes the next 48 hours very nerve biting. Perhaps many MCs don’t realize it. But other than that, I don’t see them going quietly into the night.
I think conservatives will always have significant power in our system.
Thanks to the legalized looting that has been going on since 1980 if not earlier, they have a lot of money now and are going to fight to keep it.
Like Japan (and perhaps Korea?) still, they enjoy a constitutional power bias (rural vote overrepresentation) that magnifies their political effectiveness.
They have tens of millions of ideological shock troops thanks to their pandering if not outright takeover by the Christianists among us.
They own the military power bloc still, and we haven’t yet tried to cut that back, not since the mid-1950s:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=cuE
and that was only scaling back from the immense growth during the Korean Conflict.
Defense spending was still 20% of wages back in the 1950s (!) though, so that wasn’t much of a loss:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=cuF
Running trillion-dollar fiscal deficits before the baby boom retirement wave even begins to crest is fiscal insanity. Fiscal Pressures are going to really build this decade and max out early next decade. We can go the Zimbabwe route of printing (like what we’re doing now, actually) but that’s not a solution, only a delaying tactic.
The state level — here in California at least — is just as FUBAR’d fiscally as the federal, for some of the same reasons — borrow & spend and the general Cinderella nature of economic expansion since we started offshoring our work.
Conservatives generally do well in crises, and we’re barreling towards one now.
OT, but I really liked this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OxMyDXHlR4
There’s quite a simple solution for voter suppression really: make it a minimum 15 years to life in a federal prison for any state governor who does not provide adequate voting facilities (say, ten machines per 10,000 voters) in a precinct.
There is also concern in Ohio about voting machines owned by a company which counts as some of its investors, Romney’s son Tagg among others…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/10/20/romney-family-investment-ties-to-voting-machine-company-that-could-decide-the-election-causes-concern/
Just thought I’d add that into the mix.
–kensensei