Who Deserves to Vote?

When someone challenges your right to vote by demanding you prove that you are a citizen, there is one and only one answer:

"Prove I'm not, motherfucker."

Voter suppression has gotten completely out of hand. In a rational democracy, people could register when they arrive at the polls to vote and you'd only have to prove your identity the first time and your signature would suffice from then on. Polls would be open 24-7 for an entire month, so everyone could vote at one's personal convenience.

But no.

Forget the first-Tuesday-after-the-first-Monday nonsense when the rest of the world votes logically on weekends - that one involves freakazoids and horses and is too stupid to discuss.

First came the for-no-reason separation of registration and voting, with senseless deadlines and inconvenient locations.

Then we had to show ID at the polls even when we've been voting at the same place, with the same people, for 50 years.

Then it had to be a picture ID. No, a government-issued picture ID. No, just one particular kind of government-issued picture ID, available only in far-flung suburban neighborhoods one hour per month, on a rotating schedule posted in the members-only section of the country club.

And yet, somehow, Democratic-voting minorities, students and old people still manage to leap all those hurdles and cast actual votes.

But nothing stops Florida Voldemort impersonator Rick Scott in pursuit of illegal profits election fraud protecting democracy.

He just ordered his minions to read down the list of registered voters and cancel everyone who is black, Hispanic or a registered Democrat.

Ta-DA! Repug victory, guaranteed.

Ed Kilgore nails it:

Add 35,000 to the votes removed from the ballot by the earlier disenfranchisement efforts, and project it to a very close election in a state Republicans believe they must win to take back the White House, and it could be a pretty big deal. But what’s really maddening is how blase Republicans have become about disenfranchisement: voting isn’t being treated as a fundamental right, but as a selectively protected privilege that some categories of Americans are repeatedly forced to prove they deserve. Perhaps this attitude comes from the “constitutonal conservative” belief that government as Calvin Coolidge envisioned it is a divine institution that voters should not have the power to modify. Perhaps it has been influenced by the Randian view of poor people as looters who really shouldn’t be allowed to “vote themselves welfare” in the first place. But it’s there, it’s more blatant than ever, and it could have a big impact on what happens this November.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

It's worth appreciating the fact that the purge isn't dying down or being scaled back in the face of public criticism; it's intensifying.

Chris Cate, a spokesman for the state Division of Elections, defended the state's actions. "It's very important we make sure ineligible voters can't cast a ballot," he said in an email to the Herald on Tuesday.... "I don't have a timetable on when the next list of names will be sent to supervisors, but there will be more names."

Cote said the state will try to rely on updated information, but as Judd Legum noted, "It's unclear how the new procedures alluded to by Cate will solve the systemic problems with the voter purge list. There have been several individuals targeted by the list that have been citizens their entire lives. Therefore, there seems to be major problems beyond outdated citizenship information."

In response to demands from state and national civil rights groups, the commiemuslinterrists at the U.S. Justice Department told Florida to cut it the fuck out.

Florida responded in kind: fuck off and die, DOJ.

This criminal, unconstitutional, un-democratic, un-American election-fraud-by-voter-suppression is not confined to Florida; there's hardly a state left that doesn't do something to make it harder for Democratic-leaning voters to vote.

But it looks like Florida is where this shit is finally going to hit the fan.