Voting Mountain Breakdown
"Dude, I'm so sorry, but we've been using our voting machine real hard for the last two weeks, so it broke down today and we didn't get time to fix it." That would be a really strained excuse for someplace that has early voting. Maybe it's a half credible excuse for states that just started doing early voting and haven't figured out how much traffic they're going to get.
But what the fuck is the excuse for voting machines breaking down in places with no early voting? "We're sorry but it was used so hard twelve months ago that it broke, and 364 days wasn't enough time for us to get it fixed." ???
"We're sorry but we didn't want to test the machines thoroughly last week in preparation for the big day, because we fucking hate poor people and we want to make it less likely they'll vote today."
Rachel Maddow's description of it is spot-on: Long lines are "the new poll tax." If you want to disenfranchise poor people across the board, one easy way to do it would be make sure it's going to take them a long time to vote, knowing they may have to miss work, while other people can afford to spend a vacation day on Nov 4 or don't work in the first place. Even people on disability who don't have to work have to arrange transportation, can't run around with as much convenience as a rich person.
If you were a conniving son of a bitch, you wouldn't have to go out of your way to make this happen. You just argue against buying or maintaining more voting machines in your area, and the fact that it systematically disenfranchises poor people is a pleasant side-effect.
But what the fuck is the excuse for voting machines breaking down in places with no early voting? "We're sorry but it was used so hard twelve months ago that it broke, and 364 days wasn't enough time for us to get it fixed." ???"We're sorry but we didn't want to test the machines thoroughly last week in preparation for the big day, because we fucking hate poor people and we want to make it less likely they'll vote today."
Rachel Maddow's description of it is spot-on: Long lines are "the new poll tax." If you want to disenfranchise poor people across the board, one easy way to do it would be make sure it's going to take them a long time to vote, knowing they may have to miss work, while other people can afford to spend a vacation day on Nov 4 or don't work in the first place. Even people on disability who don't have to work have to arrange transportation, can't run around with as much convenience as a rich person.
If you were a conniving son of a bitch, you wouldn't have to go out of your way to make this happen. You just argue against buying or maintaining more voting machines in your area, and the fact that it systematically disenfranchises poor people is a pleasant side-effect.
posted by Robert T. Northrup @ 11/04/2008 05:00:00 PM
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