Voter Intimidation Quotes
Actually the program had been taped earlier and on the day of broadcast, Biti had been arrested in Zimbabwe for ‘treason’ by the vicious dictator, Robert Mugabe, who had been beaten by the opposition in the election for the presidency but refused to relinquish power and in a stunning example of Biti’s point, the Electoral Commission never “officially” released the results showing that Mugabe had been defeated despite his control of all of the media, goon squads, and prohibition, intimidation and murder against opposition. See {619882}.
Although there were many irregularities in the 2000 election and many thought that Bush was not the rightful winner, Nadar’s statement is ironic. He entered the race as the Green Party Nominee and siphoned off many more votes from Gore than from Bush. In Florida, the pivotal state, Gore lost by less than 600 votes and but for Nader, Gore would have won and become President. Then for him to later blame Bush’s maneuvers for Gore’s defeat, ignoring his own determinative role struck most observers as the height of selective analysis.
In the beginning of the 21st century, many republican state legislatures attempted to change the voting laws to eliminate the possibility of voter fraud which was not a serious practical problem in America. However, a consequence—some argue indented and some argue unintended—was that it was harder for certain groups of people to meet the new requirements and therefore was a de facto voter suppression for some people such as the very elderly, the homeless, and the poor. Many of these efforts were declared unconstitutional by the courts.
Comment on the Election of President Putin.
The President was asking for passage of his Voting Rights Bill.
A counter ethical argument says that voter suppression is ethically no different from gerrymandering, or having too few locations for voting, or voting on a Tuesday where poor people cannot often get to the polls with work and/or child obligations. For Republicans to suppress Black voting is only logical since such a high percentage of Blacks vote Democratic. It would be the same if Democratic legislatures could make it difficult for business executives to vote. It part of the rough and tumble reality of American politics.
At that time a number of state legislatures all changed their state voting laws to require citizens who try to register to vote to have documentation of various kinds and or obtain special documentation. These were generally possessed by upper class and educated people but not in as large proportions by lower and working class people. To obtain the documents and register if things like original birth certificates were not possessed, the citizen had to lose much of a day’s work and travel some distance. The burden existed on most lower class people and especially the minorities. The courts nullified some of these discriminatory requirements for voter registration, but many were allowed. The rationale was to prevent voter fraud and yet there were almost no cases of voter fraud in the entire country. While the requirements were racially discriminatory, they were also socioeconomically discriminatory. By coincidence, or perhaps not, every state that added these requirements had a Republican controlled state legislature AND a Republican Governor. Despite the effort to suppress Obama and Democratic voters, the effort backfired. Minorities and especially Blacks were so outraged that Jim Crow voting suppression had returned that they made a huge effort to register and get out the vote and Blacks voted in a much larger proportion than historical and well over 90 percent voted for Obama who won the election handily.
