James Bopp Jr. Quotes
We need more spending on elections. Most people don’t even know who their congressman is—don’t even know the name or their party… [There] is a lack of relevant information.
Bopp was an enthusiast for fewer limits on campaign contributions believing that more money is needed to persuade people to vote and campaigns can educate them about the issues. Many do not agree and see the poor voter turnout and the ignorance as the result of so many noncompetitive districts where voters correctly perceive that their vote will not influence or change anything and politicians who pay no attention to what the majority of voters want anyway (eg gun control and background checking, reduction of foreign aid, more restrictions on abortion, ending filibusters, bipartisanship, etc).
James Bopp Jr., Attorney, Political Activist & Republican National Committeeman, Interview with James Bennet, “The New Price of American Politics”, The Atlantic, October 2012
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Supporting literacy requirements for voters:
This is a very clever analogy to an aspect of astronomy and physics. Most of the mass in the universe is dark matter which is invisible to human sensors and instruments and hence cannot be seen. Yet they have the most gravitational effect on matter that can be seen.
The president had visited Baltimore in August of 1828 and found the campaigning at a feverish pace:
At the time less than 10% of the Southern Blacks were allowed to vote. The result was that Southern segregationists were elected to Congress even in a state like Mississippi which had a majority Black population, The Southern segregationist bloc was large enough that with a few very conservative Republicans, they formed a coalition could block any civil rights legislation including voting rights reform,
The voting problems we have had are managerially and technology solvable but politically each solution is perceived as favoring one of the political parties in the particular jurisdiction and therefore there is resistance to the change.
Most Americans thought that this issue was settled long ago, but there are still some revanchist conservatives who are fighting the fight of the 18th and 19th century democracies of restricting voting to only the “educated” or “property” classes.
James Bopp Jr.. is an American conservative lawyer. He has repeatedly been named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal, and is most known for his work associated with election laws and campaign finance.
