Disenfranchisement is a feature not a bug
by digby
Courtesy Right Wing Watch, here’s the godfather of the modern conservative movement spelling out the conservative position on the voting franchise:
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
That was 30 years ago. It was the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition that gave them their biggest jolt and they have been institutionalizing vote suppression wherever possible ever since then. The very successful “vote fraud” myth was only made possible with the emergence of a full blown right wing mass media that could run parallel narratives without any overlap. The result is a vast number of people who can be lied to about easily disprovable facts without challenge.
For instance, Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller gathered a bunch of election predictions from their writers. Here’s an example of what they are saying:
I think Romney will take Ohio. The differential between his massive early- and absentee-vote advantage in 2008 and this year’s ground truth is already enough to wipe out his previous margin of victory in the Buckeye State. Colorado, Iowa and Nevada are probably lost causes for the GOP, but Pennsylvania will flip into the red column — partially because Hurricane Sandy will depress some turnout in Obama-friendly Philadelphia, and because the new Black Panthers have been warned this time.
I don’t know how many people believe that the Black Panthers kept decent white people from voting in Pennsylvania but the fact that it has persisted despite innumerable debunkings is a testament to how well this works.
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