There have been and will be plenty of conspiracy theories on both fringes of the political landscape concerning the election and the candidates running. However, there are identifiable facts that show the right is actively trying to suppress voter turnout to magnify the power of the limited conservative base. There are plenty of ways that the GOP has gone at this in the past and this year is no exception. Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast wrote an article in Rolling Stone to lay out the despicable truth.
From Rolling Stone:
Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.
Passed in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set standards for voting systems, created an independent commission to oversee elections, and ordered states to provide provisional ballots to voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls.
But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.
The article goes into far more depth about how the process is undertaken. Already we can see the fallacious claims of voter fraud by ACORN and the pathetic attempts to connect it to Barack Obama. While the story of
GOP operative Mark Jacoby has tempered the political attacks, it by no means suggests that the right's tactics of voter suppression has stopped behind the scenes. In Montana
the GOP tried purging voters in heavy Democratic areas. In Ohio
they tried stopping the early voting system. In Michigan the GOP
tried to invalidate the registrations of people who had their homes foreclosed on. There are many more stories like this across the country, especially in states with large minority populations.
As Weyrich stated, it is best to knock off as many voters to enable a GOP victory. That is why we must fight each and every attack of theirs on our collective democracy. At the same time we must turn out as many voters as possible so that the majority of America can decide who our next President and not just the plurality of those who escaped the purging of voter rolls.
