The Big Lie Behind GOP Voter ID Laws

Here in Virginia, faced with a rapidly changing demographic mix of the state's population and growing urban areas that reject the racist and religious extremist policies of today's GOP, the Republican Party is finding it difficult to win statewide elections where gerrymandered districts do not come into play.  The result?  The GOP rants about voter fraud - which doesn't exist - and passes laws to disenfranchise those it thinks will vote Democrat.  The pressure to continue the charade will only increase as the state's rural areas continue to shrink in comparison to the growing urban areas and as younger voters reject the toxic religious views of hate groups like The Family Foundation that represents a mix of the mindset of the KKK with the Spanish Inquisition.   The GOP approach to winning by cheating is not unique to Virginia.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the lies behind the GOP agenda.  Here are excerpts:

Election Day is three weeks off, and Republican officials and legislators around the country are battling down to the wire to preserve strict and discriminatory new voting laws that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court — no friend to expansive voting rights — stepped in and blocked one of the worst laws, a Wisconsin statute requiring voters to show a photo ID to cast a ballot. A federal judge had struck it down in April, saying it would disproportionately prevent voting by poorer and minority citizens.

Similar laws have been aggressively pushed in many states by Republican lawmakers who say they are preventing voter fraud, promoting electoral “integrity” and increasing voter turnout. None of that is true. There is virtually no in-person voter fraud; the purpose of these laws is to suppress voting.

In Texas, where last week a federal judge struck down what she called the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, there were two convictions for in-person voter impersonation in one 10-year period. During that time, 20 million votes were cast. Nor is there any evidence that these laws encourage more voters to come to the polls. Instead, in at least two states — Kentucky and Tennessee — they appear to have reduced turnout by 2 percent to 3 percent, according to a report released last week by the Government Accountability Office.

Most striking of all, Judge Ramos [in Texas] found that the rapid growth of Texas’s Latino and black population, and the state’s “uncontroverted and shameful history” of discriminatory voting practices — including whites-only primaries, literacy restrictions and actual poll taxes — led to a clear conclusion: Republican lawmakers knew the law would drive down turnout among minority voters, who lean Democratic, and they passed it at least in part for that reason. Judge Ramos’s finding of intentional discrimination is important because it could force Texas back under federal voting supervision, meaning changes to state voting practices would have to be preapproved by the federal government.

Voter ID laws, as their supporters know, do only one thing very well: They keep otherwise eligible voters away from the polls. In most cases, this means voters who are poor, often minorities, and who don’t have the necessary documents or the money or time to get photo IDs.

 If a political party's agenda cannot win majority support, it ought to be a clear message that the party and its platform need to change.  Sadly, that's not likely to happen in the GOP where the party base is dominated by white supremacists, greedy oligarchs and religious fanatics who want a theocracy.