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The South kept blacks from voting until the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Many Southern states were so egregious in denying blacks’ voting rights that an amendment was passed to forbid those states from changing their voting rules without federal permission. The Republican Supreme Court, in a strikingly biased decision, rescued those states and other Republican states from those cumbersome rules and made it seem like a rerun of 1964 all over again.
- There are no voting issues for blacks, poor people, legal immigrants, the elderly and students in blue states — only in Republican states. Demographic results for all of those groups say they overwhelmingly vote Democratic.
The new red-state voting issues include purging voting rolls, shortening early voting days and hours to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday (one would have to take time off work with no pay to vote early), removing registration and polling places from university campuses, reducing the number of polling sites in certain districts and moving polling places to remote areas. It’s not a voter-ID issue; that’s Republican imaginary propaganda of voter fraud. It’s an issue of suppressing a select group of voters.
Several red states, including Indiana and Arkansas recently, wanted to pass laws making discrimination legal. The public protest was immediate and well-deserved. Abortions in red states are almost impossible although abortions are legal (Roe vs. Wade). Same-sex marriages are difficult to get in red states. Preventative treatments are covered at no cost in the Affordable Care Act, but contraceptives (a preventative treatment) for women are difficult to get in red states. Expanded Medicaid to provide some basic level of health care for the poor was turned down by many red states’ governors even though it cost the state nothing. The Republican Party is trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare to further burden seniors and to pay some hedge funds megabucks to administer the programs.
I trust all the people discriminated against by the Republican Party — including blacks, college students, LGBT folks, the poor, legal immigrants, women, union workers, government workers and seniors — will remember to vote for anyone but a Republican in 2016.
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