6 Other Times Republicans Admitted Voting Restrictions Are Just About Disenfranchising Democrats

“This country has many distinctions as a democracy,” The Nation‘s Ari Berman writes in his new review of Gary May’s Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. “The saddest is that it is the only advanced democracy ever to disenfranchise, enfranchise and disenfranchise again an entire segment of the population. What should be its most settled right—the right to vote—remains the most contested.”

Since 2010, Republicans, mostly in states that made up the Old Confederacy, have passed a torrent of laws designed to make it harder to vote. The echoes of these new restrictions to the poll taxes and grandfather clauses made illegal by 1965?s Voting Rights Act were obvious to most in America’s civil rights movement. The truth is that though racial animus may fuel the drive for new voting restrictions, the motivation is more partisan than racial. That’s why Texas’ new voter ID law, for instance, makes it harder for not just racial minorities, but also women and students. Hundreds of thousands of Texans will face new burdens on voting for a law that might have stopped four — FOUR — cases of fraud since 2004.

Republicans generally argue that restrictions on registering and voting are about the “integrity” of elections, but have never been able to prove that any American election has been stolen by in-person voter fraud. However, occasionally, a few overly honest Republicans let their true motives slip out.

That’s what happened when Don Yelton, a now-former North Carolina Republican official, spoke to The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi.

Read more: http://www.nationalmemo.com/6-other-times-republicans-admitted-voting-restrictions-are-just-about-disenfranchising-democrats/