One Last Thought
Posted at 3:12 pm on Tuesday, November 7, 2006, in 2006 Election, and tagged 2006, voter fraud.
This may be the last blog-post under a GOP-dominated government* — White House, House, Senate, Supreme Court — so I better make it good. Oh boy, that is a lot of pressure, and worse, it was self-inflicted.
The key to any election is voter turnout, yada, yada, yada. No shit. But the republicans have taken this a step further and have been wildly successful as a result. The GOP has realized that voter suppression is the same as voter turnout. Let’s do the math (this may get tricky)…
One person votes for your candidate: +1.
One person does not vote for your opponent: +1.
Voter suppression is illegal and unethical, but that will not stop anyone in the chattering class to do anything about it, i.e., investigate and report it. Once the election is in the rear-view mirror, that will be the end of it. This is why we never make any progress, and the same “horror” stories reappear every election cycle.
Some may say that the democrats are just as crooked, and they are right. Politics is crooked, there is no doubt about that. But there is something so heinously wrong about voter suppression, something so wholly undemocratic, that it defies modern ethical thought. And if it wasn’t real, or if it didn’t work, trust me, the republicans wouldn’t do it.
The reason the republicans resort to this blatant illegal behavior is simple. The logic is (and the empirical evidence suggests) that Republicans do well when voter turnout is low, and Democrats do relatively well when voter turnout is high. Now, this obviously should be analyzed on a precinct-to-precinct basis, but overall, this is the general case. The GOP wants their voters at the polls (+1), and none of their opponents (+1). To follow from the math above, that would be (+1) + (+1) = +2. (Well, who wouldn’t want none of their opponents’ voters at the polls? Good point. But, how far would you go to ensure it?)
* Not including a lame-duck session.
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