Hillary Clinton’s call in a Thursday speech for federally mandated automatic voter registration and a minimum of twenty days for early voting won widespread applause in the lefty blogosphere. So did Clinton’s blasts in the same speech at alleged Republican efforts to throw a wrench into the ballot works for certain Democratic-leaning groups.
Two ringing endorsements of Hillary’s proposals and rhetoric came from The Week’s Paul Waldman and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. Waldman lauded Clinton’s statement that voter-ID laws are designed to “disenfranchise and disempower people of color, poor people, and young people" and added that it’s a lead-pipe cinch that GOPers will oppose Hillary’s new ideas (bolding added):
Let's cut through the baloney and be honest for a moment: Republicans don't like early voting or universal voter registration for the same reason they want voter ID laws. They know that the easier voting is, the more Democrats will turn out. Republican voters, on the other hand, are more likely to be older, wealthier, and whiter — the people for whom the kind of restrictions Republicans have sought to impose are less of a hassle…
…[W]ith both of [Hillary’s] proposals, Republicans don't even have the fig leaf of "voter fraud" that they use to cover their vulgar motivations in advocating voter ID.
And it really is just a fig leaf. The justification Republicans offer for their enthusiastic pursuit of voter ID laws — that they are only concerned about stamping out the crisis of in-person voter impersonation that threatens the integrity of our elections — may be the most transparently disingenuous argument made in American politics today, with the possible exception of the one saying that abortion restrictions are intended to safeguard women's health and emotional well-being.
The fact is that in-person voter impersonation is vanishingly rare…
…[I]f it's fraud Republicans are so concerned about, they should at least embrace early voting: We'd be more likely to catch one of those elusive impersonators in the more leisurely voting traffic of an extended vote period…
…[E]very other advanced democracy manages to carry their elections off without the kinds of problems we face. It isn't because it's such a daunting technical problem. It's because our voting system sucks, and there are people who have an interest in keeping it that way.
Chait contrasted Hillary’s proposals with conservatives’ supposed preference for keeping the unwashed masses from the polls and concluded that Republicans don’t respect the “rights as citizens” of the Democrats’ “core constituents” (bolding added):
[V]oter impersonation is vanishingly rare — since 2000, 31 instances of it have been found, out of a billion ballots cast. But the true nature of [the GOP’s] concern reveals itself most clearly when the party’s mania for suppression can be detached from its professed concern for preventing voter fraud and examined in naked isolation…
…[C]onservatives bothering to express their knee-jerk hostility have fallen back on actual conviction, which is that voting should be restricted to a better class of people. An additional registration requirement, writes National Review’s Daniel Foster, “improves democratic hygiene because the people who can’t be bothered to register (as opposed to those who refuse to vote as a means of protest) are, except in unusual cases, civic idiots.” People who don’t have the flexibility to take extra time away from work to jump through whatever bureaucratic hurdles the Republicans throw in their path, or the familiarity with local agencies to navigate them smoothly, are too shiftless and ignorant to be trusted with the franchise.
…Clinton’s embrace of voting rights may not have any plausible near-term prospects for enactment. But it serves to demonstrate to the party’s core constituents something elemental, and true: At the current moment, there is only one party that respects their rights as citizens.
