Op-Ed: Why book bans and voter suppression go hand in hand
I am a liberal Democrat. My party stands for the rights of people to vote—though they need not vote for us. We are not a party for those who want to turn a page or turn back the clock on our progress toward greater electoral participation, greater democracy and the end of systemic racism.
We don’t endorse voter suppression—a system under which people are prevented from voting because they are black, Latina or Asian. But we endorse the idea that people have the right to vote, as long as they are not acting as a poll tax tax or a poll tax—a voter ID tax. We stand for the idea that people have a right to vote, on the basis of who they are and not what’s on a piece of paper. We call on our states and our federal government to make it easier for people to vote.
And then to have the audacity to say that Republicans are the bad guys? No one is saying that we are the good guys. We are the good guys.
That’s right, folks. Republicans are not the good guys. The bad guys are not Republicans. The bad guys are the liberal Democrats who want to take away people’s rights to vote—and the ones who fight to make it harder for them to exercise their right to vote.
And we’re still not done.
We are still not done.
The latest case of voter suppression is out in Pennsylvania, where a county election official has had his hands on the voter list for some time. He has removed people with names like “Joe” from the voters’ list, along with other people who are not African-American, such as “John.”
The list he removed is the voter list for the people who signed up to vote after the last election. Those people’s names were on the list all along. But someone had a little too much time on his hands.
The official didn’t delete anyone’s name or their information. He just didn’t put the information on the list. He did what we do: We check the information on the list with the voter rolls—so that the actual voter would know who they were voting for, and they wouldn’t have to go to the polling place to vote.
Why did it take some time
