War on Voting Rights Never Going Away Because It's Not About Voting Rights

One guess what it is about.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

... the War on Voting isn’t just a coolly calculated gambit that would go away if it were not perceived as effective or efficient. It’s closely integrated with contemporary conservative ideology.

For one thing, the highly prominent Constitutional Conservative wing of the GOP considers democracy itself—if it aims at or even allows erosion of the Ideal Governing Scheme of states rights and property rights and religious rights (and for many ConCons, fetal rights) established by the Founders—as essentially un-American (This is a republic, not a democracy, they never tire of saying) and requiring significant restrictions.

Anything that makes exercise of the franchise more difficult—especially by those people who so poorly resemble the white yeoman farmer property owners of the early Republic—is presumed to be a good idea in itself.

But even short of the Con Con ranks, the kind of thinking that produced Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks is deeply entrenched in the GOP, and its root idea is that voting by people who benefit from an active federal government (and don’t pay income taxes!) is corrupt. So you can talk all day about the non-existence of voter fraud in the legal sense of participating in elections without eligibility. For a large number of Republicans, “voter fraud” means Democrats trading other people’s money (their money) for votes, and being technically eligible to cast a ballot cuts little or no ice.

So long as these habits of thinking persist on the Right, then the War on Voting will persist as well, whether or not it’s “working” in the sense of producing a tangible positive net effect for the Republican Party.