The majority of so-called libertarians are republicans that call themselves something else when the republican candidates that they always vote for are too embarrassing to admit to... but in any event, they always vote republican.
I still think the most serious implications of these bills are giving the legislatures the power to potentially overturn the will of their own voters.
Nothing can stop this besides reforming the fillibuster and actually getting the S1 bill passed through.
I haven't read all the details of S1 but that appears to address things like ballot access. I'm not sure it addresses legislatures taking more control of certifying elections.
It is understandable how someone would be embarrassed to support much of the GOP platform. Even Lindsay Graham found it "ridiculous" to make it illegal to give water to voters waiting in lines to vote in Georgia.
The Blue States That Make It Hardest to Vote Democrats are criticizing Republicans for pushing restrictive voting laws. But states such as Joe Biden’s Delaware can make casting a ballot difficult. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/democrats-voting-rights-contradiction/618599/ excerpts: If President Joe Biden wants to vote by mail next year in Delaware, he’ll have to provide a valid reason for why he can’t make the two-hour drive from the White House back to his polling place in Wilmington. Luckily for him, Biden’s line of work allows him to cast an absentee ballot: Being president counts as “public service” under state law. Most Delaware residents, however, won’t have such a convenient excuse. Few states have more limited voting options than Delaware, a Democratic bastion that allowed little mail balloting before the pandemic hit. Biden has assailed Georgia’s new voting law as an atrocity akin to “Jim Crow in the 21st century” for the impact it could have on Black citizens. But even once the GOP-passed measure takes effect, Georgia citizens will still have far more opportunities to vote before Election Day than their counterparts in the president’s home state, where one in three residents is Black or Latino. To Republicans, Biden’s criticism of the Georgia law smacks of hypocrisy. ”They have a point,” says Dwayne Bensing, a voting-rights advocate with Delaware’s ACLU affiliate. “The state is playing catch-up in a lot of ways.” Delaware isn’t an anomaly among Democratic strongholds, and its example presents the president’s party with an uncomfortable reminder: Although Democrats like to call out Republicans for trying to suppress voting, the states they control in the Northeast make casting a ballot more difficult than anywhere else. Connecticut has no early voting at all, and New York’s onerous rules force voters to change their registration months in advance if they want to participate in a party primary. In Rhode Island, Democrats enacted a decade ago the kind of photo-ID law that the party has labeled “racist” when drafted by Republicans; the state also requires voters to get the signatures of not one but two witnesses when casting an absentee ballot (only Alabama and North Carolina are similarly strict). According to a new analysis released this week by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, Delaware, Connecticut, and New York rank in the bottom third of states in their access to early and mail-in balloting. *** The restrictions across the Northeast are relics of the urban Democratic machines, which preferred to mobilize their voters precinct by precinct on Election Day rather than give reformers a lengthier window to rally opposition. Democrats who have won election after election in states such as New York, Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have had little incentive to change the rules that helped them win. The party has been more concerned with expanding access to the polls in places where it has struggled to obtain and keep power (although it’s not clear whether Democrats’ assumptions about the impact voting laws have on turnout are correct). In Congress, Democrats are prioritizing legislation called the For the People Act, or H.R. 1, which seeks to curb GOP efforts to suppress voting. The bill would set national standards to loosen photo-ID requirements, guarantee early-voting and voting-by-mail options, and mandate automatic and same-day registration. Although Democrats have focused on how the bill would rein in red states, H.R. 1 would hit some blue states just as hard, if not harder. *** Unlike Delaware’s restrictions, Rhode Island’s voter-ID law can’t be described as antiquated: The statute is just 10 years old and won adoption under a Democratic majority with support from powerful Black elected leaders. Voting-rights advocates trace the law’s passage to the conservative bent of the state’s Democratic Party and tension that pitted Black and white Democrats against the state’s rising Latino population. Backers of the bill included the first Black speaker of the General Assembly. They shared stories of voter fraud they had witnessed, but opponents of the law saw it as an effort to suppress Latino turnout in Providence. “It was bizarro,” said John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, the state affiliate of the national government-watchdog group. “Ten years later, I still don’t know how it happened.” Rhode Island Democrats have proposed legislation to expand voting by mail and early voting, including a repeal of the requirement that absentee ballots have two witness signatures. But they’re not likely to touch the voter-ID system. “Repealing voter ID was a nonstarter,” Steven Brown, the executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island, told me. “So there was no point in putting it in the reform bill.” Rhode Island’s critics of the ID requirement now find themselves in the same unenviable position as their progressive allies in red states: hoping the federal government will override a restrictive law that their own leaders—in this case, fellow Democrats—refuse to change. more at the link
Heritage Foundation director, in her pitch to big donors, talk about their coordinated effort throughout the country with Republican State Legislators in leaked video. Giving "marching orders for week ahead". "In some cases, we actually draft them for them... or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe". Made possible by the Big Lie and @Os Trigonum whataboutism
Well if this doesn’t sum up 2020-2021 I don’t know. You’ve got the mask there and everything. Merica’
...well... ...I suppose that's one way to get out the dead vote. Level the playing field, since all the Democrats are doing it, too. Maybe this is part of that whole principled, true conservative approach I've heard is trying to get resurrected. Why bother with all the fuss and trouble of conjuring up fake dead voters and putting them on the rolls... ...(not to mention the uncomfortableness of actually having to stand in voting lines with a bunch of zombies who've got no problem at all cutting in line)... ...when you could just ACTUALLY kill somebody and cast their vote for them? ...and as morbidly funny as I think this thing is... ...I REALLY hope and pray to Moloch that this doesn't catch on and become a thing. ...I mean, child sacrifice is one thing...but THIS???
I don't see voter suppression said folks like @Os Trigonum Well, perhaps we can go back to the 1980s, and remember what Paul Weyrich, religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, who yesterday we found its director has been coordinating with the Republican Legislation to pass legislations to suppress voting, said... “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
He rarely if ever gives his actual opinion on anything...for debate and discussion forum he does very little of either.
@Os Trigonum thoughts? Does anyone see the danger of the legislative branch controlling elections to this level? This effort is spreading across the nation by Republican legislators to take over the process. This is what I call legalize cheating. She Was a Black Election Official in Georgia. Then Came New G.O.P. Rules. - The New York Times (nytimes.com) LaGRANGE, Ga. — Lonnie Hollis has been a member of the Troup County election board in West Georgia since 2013. A Democrat and one of two Black women on the board, she has advocated Sunday voting, helped voters on Election Days and pushed for a new precinct location at a Black church in a nearby town. But this year, Ms. Hollis will be removed from the board, the result of a local election law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican. Previously, election board members were selected by both political parties, county commissioners and the three biggest municipalities in Troup County. Now, the G.O.P.-controlled county commission has the sole authority to restructure the board and appoint all the new members. “I speak out and I know the laws,” Ms. Hollis said in an interview. “The bottom line is they don’t like people that have some type of intelligence and know what they’re doing, because they know they can’t influence them.” Ms. Hollis is not alone. Across Georgia, members of at least 10 county election boards have been removed, had their position eliminated or are likely to be kicked off through local ordinances or new laws passed by the state legislature. At least five are people of color and most are Democrats — though some are Republicans — and they will most likely all be replaced by Republicans. ... “I think it’s all a part of the ploy for the takeover of local boards of elections that the state legislature has put in place,” Ms. Butler said. “It is them saying that they have the right to say whether an election official is doing it right, when in fact they don’t work in the day to day and don’t understand the process themselves.” It’s not just Democrats who are being removed. In DeKalb County, the state’s fourth-largest, Republicans chose not to renominate Baoky Vu to the election board after more than 12 years in the position. Mr. Vu, a Republican, had joined with Democrats in a letter opposing an election-related bill that eventually failed to pass. To replace Mr. Vu, Republicans nominated Paul Maner, a well-known local conservative with a history of false statements, including an insinuation that the son of a Georgia congresswoman was killed in “a drug deal gone bad.” ...
not really, other than to note the irony of complaints against state governments taking control of local election boards being made by people who claim to want the federal government taking over control of local elections
The federal government oversaw elections in the south for how many years without any issues? It’s also within their congressional authority to do so.
There is a constitutional mandate for the federal government to protect the voting rights of Americans. So if a region has a history of trying to supress a certain type of voting demographic, it's the obligation of the government to prevent that supression.
