New GOP Bid to Limit Voting in Swing States

What do you do when you political platform is increasingly unpopular and your chances of winning elections are reduced as a result?  If you are today's Republican Party, you craft ways to disenfranchise voters who are not likely to vote for your "steal from the poor to give to the rich" agenda and homophobic and thinly disguised white supremacist policies. Heaven forbid that you moderate your party platform.  The effort to disenfranchise voters is on full speed with the GOP, especially in swing states.  Here are highlights from a New York Times article on this insidious agenda:

Pivotal swing states under Republican control are embracing significant new electoral restrictions on registering and voting that go beyond the voter identification requirements that have caused fierce partisan brawls. 

The bills, laws and administrative rules — some of them tried before — shake up fundamental components of state election systems, including the days and times polls are open and the locations where people vote.

Republicans in Ohio and Wisconsin this winter pushed through measures limiting the time polls are open, in particular cutting into weekend voting favored by low-income voters and blacks, who sometimes caravan from churches to polls on the Sunday before election. 

Democrats in North Carolina are scrambling to fight back against the nation’s most restrictive voting laws, passed by Republicans there last year. The measures, taken together, sharply reduce the number of early voting days and establish rules that make it more difficult for people to register to vote, cast provisional ballots or, in a few cases, vote absentee.

In all, nine states have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013. Most have to do with voter ID laws. Other states are considering mandating proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or a passport, after a federal court judge recently upheld such laws passed in Arizona and Kansas. Because many poor people do not have either and because documents can take time and money to obtain, Democrats say the ruling makes it far more difficult for people to register.

Republicans defend the measures, saying Democrats are overstating their impact for partisan reasons. The new rules, Republicans say, help prevent fraud, save money and bring greater uniformity to a patchwork election system.

Democrats and other critics of the laws say that in the face of shifting demographics, Republicans are trying to alter the rules and shape the electorate in their favor. Those most affected by the restrictions are minorities and the urban poor, who tend to vote Democratic.

“What we see here is a total disrespect and disregard for constitutional protections,” said the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P. and leader of the Moral Mondays movement, which opposes the changes.

Note how the GOP always defends disenfranchisement on "preventing fraud" even though there almost no cases of voter fraud.  It's always the same non-existent bogey man used to defend nasty GOP goals.