September 12, 2017

States bucking Trump voter suppression

Guardian - Rhode Island recently became the ninth state to enact AVR – automatic voter registration – and on 28 August Illinois became the 10th when its Republican governor signed the bill into law. While the federal government perpetuates myths and conspiracies in an effort to justify taking the vote away from citizens, more and more states are taking local action to strengthen and protect this most fundamental democratic right.

Roughly 41% of eligible voters didn’t vote in the 2016 election. Such low voter participation is a significant dent in the credibility and legitimacy of our elections. Our government gains its legitimacy by being representative of the people, but if the reality is that it only represents a little more than half of eligible voters, that premise is shaky.

We cannot make people vote, but we can certainly make it easier for them to do so. And it can be achieved without pillaging state voting records to build a national voter database that is susceptible to abuse and hacking.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A genuine, benevolent socialist dictatorship is far superior to an exploitative fascist dictatorship which is falsely promoted as a democracy, such as we see in the USA.
(see Plato's Republic)

Anonymous said...

Even if everyone were forced to vote we would still not be a democracy because candidacies for the more powerful offices require plutocratic sponsorship. Why people don't vote is because we aren't a democracy. Unlike the old eclipsed Jeffersonian system where there is one democratic party, under the current Nixonian system there are no democratic parties. The only access to democracy would be for voters to organize on issues of reinstating democracy and hold the parties hostage as did the Anti-Saloon League around prohibition. And that isn't democracy but it is the access to recovering it by voting only for candidates who will get money out of politics, Jefferson's generational revolution.