Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
I think this is the question OP should have been asked--can you convince us that voting
restrictions are needed?
An audit of Georgia elections covering a 25 year period found not a single incident in which a non-citizen cast a vote. There were a few attempts which were caught. Yes, in the early 1900s there were spectacular instances of voting fraud (Smithsonian magazine had a recent article about the amazing elections in Terre Haute, IN, and of course Tammany Hall). And of course Jim Crow, which was a permanent assault on the right to vote for decades. But even in Indiana, it simply took some committed women (who themselves could not vote) to monitor the registration rolls and the voters to uncover spectacular fraud, with paper and pencil the only technology available to them.
I thought part of the philosophy of conservativism included the idea that you don't pass unnecessary laws which also have the effect of expanding government (all these hand counts in Georgia which are surely not going to match up--when's the last time you and someone else counted thousands of something and got your counts to come out right?). Why go to the extreme efforts to create districts intended to eliminate minority candidates?
OP, you ask us why GOP states shouldn't have been passing all these laws, but why not ask yourself why should they? The answer is two-part--create as many barriers as possibly to people who are more likely to vote Democrat; persuade the center that 99 kinds of fraud are going on and it is their patriotic duty to help make it stop by voting GOP.