In the interest of fairness, I must admit that I was wrong. Last week, I reported that the GOP suggested my spouse go to several sites out of the city for early voting. My naive belief in the basic intelligence and rationality of most humans, even GOP party leaders, led me to interpret this as an attempt to discourage a registered Democrat from early voting by sending him to the most inconvenient locations. Alas, I was mistaken. Today, a GOP flier arrived at our door, addressed to the previous owner, a good little Republican lackey. The flier urged him to vote early, and sent him to Jacksonville, Sherwood, and Maumelle to do so. It seems to be too much work for the Grand Old Party to send zip-code appropriate fliers.
And so it is that I must admit my error. It wasn’t GOP chicanery (this time) but GOP stupidity that was at play. I stand corrected.
Ya Es Hora (It’s Time!) is a campaign to empower Latinos to participate fully in the US political process through naturalization, census form completion, and voting. The campaign provides non-partisan information to voters in the hopes of overcoming the two biggest barriers to Latino ballot participation: lack of engagement and lack of access. Some Latino voters of the GOP persuasion would like to walk back Latino progress. The group Latinos for Reform is running ads in Nevada urging Latinos to abstain from voting in this midterm election. The stated rationale of the ads goes something like this:
Democrats haven’t pushed through immigration reform yet. Therefore they don’t deserve your vote. Therefore don’t vote.
The ads pointedly do not mention the abysmal GOP candidates from the state of Arizona this year, nor do they raise the issue of Republican obstruction of any meaningful reform.
The group almost certainly knows that GOP success at the ballot box this year is inversely proportional to voter participation. Conservatives are touting low voter turnout among Democratic voters as the means to the win this year. The leadership of Latinos for Reform are smart enough to know they can’t openly endorse Republican candidates with extreme anti-immigration positions, like Sharron Angle. However, encouraging Latino voters to stay home increases Angle’s chances of victory, and this cynical group knows it.
Thankfully, Univision has decided not to run the ads in the wake of public outrage after it was announced that the network would air them for $80,000. At least one player in this distasteful drama that the American political process has become has a conscience, it seems.
Abdicating the right to vote is never the answer to oppression in a democracy.
(Full story at ThinkProgress).
Chicanery: Paid for by the GOP
My spouse, also a registered Democrat, received not one, but two, fliers from the GOP today. Both mailers urged him to vote early, and helpfully provided voting locations in Sherwood, Jacksonville, Maumelle, and the farthest reaches of Little Rock. (Our zip code, as you can see, is 72227. ) Sure, he can vote in Jacksonville or Maumelle, but it would be one hell of an inconvenience to do so, when there are several polling places closer to home. One might call this misdirection an oversight. I call it chicanery. It looks, for all the world, like an attempt to discourage him from getting out to vote early.
While this type of deception is not outright fraud (after all, if he makes it to Jacksonville they will let him vote), it is certainly unethical. Where is Jimmy Carter? He doesn’t have to go to developing nations to find voting irregularities anymore. We have a political party right here in this country that will not hesitate to mislead voters to achieve its goals. That such a party can exist and get candidates elected to high office makes a mockery of our electoral process. It’s time for the rank and file of the GOP to stand up and demand accountability from their leadership.
For the rest of us, it’s time to repudiate this party! Vote early, vote Democratic.
(Don’t trust propaganda. Find your early voting locations at your County Clerk’s office or look-up statewide polling locations by county here.)
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