GOP Takes Voter Suppression To New Lows

Uber blogger Digby, aka Heather Digby Parton, has a must read review and analysis of the history of GOP voter suppression. It used to be voter suppression, invariably race based, was the hallmark of Southern conservative Democrats. But there are no more Southern conservative Democrats. Today, it's the GOP that hoists the banner of racism in the ongoing struggle against democracy. The GOP promises to take voter suppression to a new level in 2012. From denying individual voting rights to rigging the electoral college system, they've got their filthy hands in every pie of anti-democratic slime imaginable...

Voter intimidation and vote suppression had long been a part of Democratic politics in the South, in places where African-Americans had been granted an illusory right to vote. But as the South made its dramatic shift to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, and as African-American voters in the North then shifted to the Democrats, the Republicans began to dominate the process and thus began the decades-long GOP project to suppress the vote. Along the way it has developed into a full-blown operation to undermine democracy in general, at whatever choke points are available. 
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It shouldn't have come as any surprise that the historic election of the first black president, thanks in part to an influx of new voters, would revive the panic Republicans had felt at the prospect of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition successfully mobilising Democratic voters more than 20 years before. And as before, it resulted in an energised effort to subvert democracy.

Rolling Stone contributor Ari Berman has documented an assault on voting rights since the 2008 elction that makes the previous eight years look like child's play. Since then, 38 states have introduced legislation designed to make voting more difficult, if not impossible, for American citizens. Berman documents efforts across the country to impede registration, cut short early voting, repeal same-day registration, and more.

Make no mistake, the GOP is an organized bunch of racist, power mad pricks desperate to win by any means possible, foul or fair, but mostly foul. To paraphrase uber idiot RickPerry, ..."it's close to treason," if by "close" one means exactly like.