GOP voter-fraud crackdown overwhelmingly targets minorities, Democrats

USA ONE@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 316 points –
washingtonpost.com

As Donald Trump falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Republicans in some states launched special units to prosecute voter fraud as part of a high-profile and controversial push to stamp out cheating some claimed was rampant.

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The intention is voter suppression. The question is how do we sue for this and similar actions that by design infringe on the right to vote?

It's a shame that laws don't seem to be applied to Republicans like they are to the rest of us.

I'm sure you could sue if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt it is voter suppression. But our courts are so politized and corrupt I have little faith you would win.

Right now the best we can do is vote for people who support greater access to voting. I'm personally of the opinion we pass a law requiring everyone who can legally vote must vote and it is the states responsibility to ensure it happens. As well as making it a requirement that all employers must provide one paid day off for voting for every election to be used at the employees discretion so they can vote when convenient for them. And finally any required documentation to vote must be provided free of charge and easily available.

Mandating that everyone must vote sounds like a recipe for disaster, not to mention how would that be enforced? Yes, it is a civic duty of utmost importance; but I simply cannot get behind this specific solution.

Mandating that everyone must vote sounds like a recipe for disaster

If Australia can figure it out, I bet we can too.

Everyone has to pay taxes. There are consequences if you don't. Doesn't seem insurmountable to mandate something similar for voting.

Litigation only matters if the other side wants to play by the rules. They don't, so why should everyone else? Take it to the streets

They've admitted time and time again that they want fewer people voting because that helps their chances.

Additionally, they know the demographics that are least likely to vote for them so they target their opposition based on race and geography.

Same as it ever was.

"I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Because they don't want to stop voter fraud, that's how they win. What they want to stop is legitimate votes from the opposition. The tide is turning against them and they can't win just by cheating anymore.
That's also what makes the next election so scary. If they don't win next time the party will likely die over the next decade or so. Their only hope is to get in power and never let go of it.
The Republican party is a wounded, cornered animal. But people tend to forget that wounded animals backed into a corner are extremely dangerous. And if we let our guard down before it's dead we're done for.

In that case, I think there is a better term for what they are doing.

Anyway attacking voting is one prong of their broad, long-running strategy to get and stay in power. Claiming fraud is an excuse to reboot Jim Crow laws. It meshes well with gerrymandering, closing polling locations, purging voter registration records, and doing whatever else to target Democratic voters.

Basically, "If you lose in a fair fight, cheat."

Everyone better be checking their voter registration status constantly, especially if they're in a red state, because these fuckers will have no qualms about kicking you off the rolls and then arresting you when you try to vote.

Shocked! Shocked I am to find voter suppression from the party that publicly admitted they couldn't win without it!

meanwhile, crackdowns on actual voter and election fraud overwhelmingly 'targets' republicans.

Here's a gift link you can edit into your post which will give everybody seamless access to the article.

Pikachu shocked face.

Yeah. Let’s check something real quick. Republicans, who were elected in blue states or areas. Were they legitimately elected or did dems … steal the election to put those republicans in?

I’ll wait…

Your question is much too sophisticated for conservatives to understand it, let alone engage it.

It is by design. No wonder all the actual voter fraud is committed by republicans by a large margin

As a perceptibly in-group looking person in a place where I'm confident in my registration and rights, how can I help?

This is the best summary I could come up with:


All of the convictions occurred in Florida, Texas and Ohio, while units in Virginia, Georgia and Arkansas failed to obtain a single guilty verdict, despite allocating dozens of staffers and millions of dollars to ferret out voter fraud.

The Post created the first comprehensive look at the work of election integrity units that were rolled out or ramped up after 2020 by compiling a database of nearly every prosecution — 136 in total — that the divisions pursued in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Ohio and Arkansas.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement that The Post was “promoting a false narrative” because it was unable to determine the race or political affiliation for about half the prosecutions in his state.

The Post was able to compile a nearly complete list of prosecutions in six states through filing public records requests with the units, interviewing officials, scouring news releases and media reports, and consulting a database of voter-fraud convictions maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Last year, a jury acquitted former Edinburg mayor Richard Molina, who is a Latino Democrat, of a scheme to orchestrate voter fraud in 2017 in a case that originated with Paxton’s office.

Hart, a White man and convicted sex offender from Tampa, said he was at the DMV in March 2020, when a worker hired by the local county asked him if he wanted to register to vote.


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