ingliz wrote:Perhaps not but that doesn't negate the gist of my argument - namely, that Republican party policy is to suppress the vote and they are suppressing the vote.
Republican Party policy is to enforce reasonable election laws easily adhered to by voters paying attention. And actually, in this case it does negate your argument. If you are going to argue that voters are being denied a reasonable opportunity to vote due to the extreme tardiness of the USPS, you need to point to a situation where that extreme tardiness exists and voters are still required to get their ballots in by Election Day. And that tardiness does need to be
extreme, because politicians and the media have been banging the drums for months over the need get our votes in early to make sure they’d be counted.
It's been their policy for many years...
“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.”
— Paul Weyrich, founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of conservative politicians and business groups founded in 1973
Sure, I don’t want everyone voting, either—if someone can’t be bothered to pay attention to issues and events, I don’t particularly think they should be casting a vote. Mind, they have the right to cast that vote and I’ll fight any attempt to take that right away from them without just cause—such as serving a sentence, or IMHO extreme ignorance—but neither do I think we should go out of our way to to make things even easier for those that can’t be bothered to make an effort to vote.
Also, think of what Weyrich’s statement meant at that time (whenever it was). Every nation based on democratic institutions is going to have a base that shows up at the polls election after election even when times are dull or the election is a foregone conclusion, because it is their civic duty. These voters are also the ones most likely to pay attention to what’s going on politically and cast an informed vote, because that is also their civic duty. Then there’s a mass of citizens that only vote when things get exciting. These are the voters least likely to be educated on the context, mostly likely to base their votes on slogans and buzzwords—to quote Kipling, “lured by the loudest throat.” So what does it say about Republicans and Democrats, that Democrats do better when circumstances energize those that normally don’t bother?
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke