For those of you who missed this week’s episode, not to worry! Here’s the show, in its entirety!

And for those of you who watched last week, here’s an update from Margaret Montoya:

I misspoke during last week’s episode of The Line when we were talking about voter registrations in the national election. I said that only one out of four eligible voters is registered when I meant to say that one out of four is NOT registered. Actually upon closer examination the correct ratio is one out of five, the numbers look like this: 169 million are registered out of 213 million who are eligible (or about 79%).

During the taping I also commented that Republicans don’t want a lot of people to vote. I was challenged by Whitney Cheshire and relied that I would explain on line. There is a rationale to the Republican’s strategy and it was spelled out by Paul Weyrich.

Weyrich, a principal architect of today’s GOP and co-founder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, infamously said, “Many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo-goo’ syndrome – good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

The nonpartisan Brennan Center at NYU has done a recent comprehensive study of voting suppression. Readers can learn for themselves about the role of the political parties in facilitating voting or in preventing voting.

When I say that Republicans don’t want a lot of people to vote, I am recalling what Republicans have opposed policies that extend the franchise (such as their opposition to the 2006 extention of the Voting Rights Act).

Republicans have supported policies that create significant barriers for voters (such as Indiana Voter ID Act, both and other [bipartisan] legislation passed here in N.M. that limits voter registration drives.)

Republicans have failed to enforce laws that protect voters’ rights.

From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

Republicans have used practices that encumber the right to vote and unnecessarily involve the federal courts in protecting voters.

THE PUBLIC AFFAIRS TEAM

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under nmif. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.