I Will Do My Best to Only Complain About This Once

Back in the olden days say before 2000, both parties used to compete for voters. Each party did their best to appeal to voters to show up and vote on Election day. But, starting about 2008 (when Barak Obama was voted in) and then with GREAT speed after 2013 when the voting rights act was repealed, Republicans started making voting harder.

States Making It HARDER to Vote

The Voting Rights Act had require pre-clearance for voting restrictions passed in states that traditionally made it hard for minorities, in particular American Blacks, to vote. Once the Supreme Court said they were not needed, because they worked - which is like saying you don't need an umbrella in a rainstorm because the umbrella is keeping you dry - those states went ape-shit crazy making it harder to vote. That is not an exaggeration. 

This year, with Covid changes allowing more mail-in voting, the Republicans have gone overboard trying to restrict voting. Ex-President and all around laughing stock Donald Trump actually said that if everyone votes, Republicans will never win another election.Need to submit a copy o

Trump openly admitting if we made voting easier in America, Republicans wouldn't win elections

Trump: "The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." pic.twitter.com/x5HmX6uogo

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 30, 2020

So, when more people voted than ever before in 2020, Republicans in some states went to work even hard to prevent voting. Three states that swung to Joe Biden (Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia) demanded tougher voting laws, and other Republican states have followed suite.

It is crazy, but Republicans think now that the only way to win, is to PREVENT some Americans (those that aren't white) from voting. Here are some key restrictions being proposed or completed already:

• Limit Absentee voting by reducing the time to get ballots in
• Limit Absentee voting by requiring user to send a copy of their ID and SSN to the state over the mail
• Limit Absentee voting by requiring any vote by mail ballot be notarized (a painful and expensive step in many states) 
• End Absentee voting due to illness (Covid, but would effect other illnesses)
• End a standing request for Absentee voting
• Reduce voting hours on election day itself (just passed in Iowa)
• Reduce early voting (Georgia has specifically calls for an end to early voting on Sunday because that is when Black churches take members without autos to the polls after church)
• Add new requirements to register to vote (proof of citizenship - so Driver's License's would not work anymore). Less than 20% of Americans have a passport (that or birth certificate is necessary for proof of citizenship),
• Increase "voter roll purging" to remove people from the voting roles if they names raise suspicion (Georgia did this in the 2010s to purge over 200,000 "Mexican sounding" last names).
• Increase signature matching on absentee ballots - again Georgia threw out over 100,000 votes in 2018 during due to signature mismatches, including married women with a new name, lack of accent marks or differently crossed "t".
• In Arizona the legislature passed a law that lets them change the winner and ignore the popular vote altogether if there were "irregularities"

This is on top of the massive drop in polling paces in many states.

Look I could go on, and get angry but why? This is a blatant attempt to fix elections that the United States would object to in any 3rd world or authoritarian country. But our courts are letting it happen here most of the time and Republicans are constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptability. My country is dying.

And Republican Senators are actually stating now that our country is not a Democracy, but a Republic (which is true) and that means not everyone gets to vote (that is NOT true) (LINK to detail about this).

We’re not a democracy.

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 8, 2020