“Or We Could Try Appealing To More Voters.” [Pause] Hearty Laughter Breaks Out All Around.
By Today in Republican vote suppression:
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.
Note the Republican focus on reducing voting hours. There’s not even a theoretical relationship between these laws and addressing the zero consequential cases of voter fraud that have ever existed. The laws are openly and explicitly about making it harder to vote, period, because the more people vote the worse it is for Republicans. This, in its entirety, is what the wave of vote suppression in Republican statehouses is about.