How Republicans rationalize voter suppression

By Jamelle Bouie
Slate
Tuesday, April 8, 2014, at 12 a.m.

Since 2011, Republican lawmakers in swing states have pushed hard for new restrictions on voting, from voter identification to new rules on early voting and ballot access. “Nine states have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013,” noted the New York Times, and other states “are considering mandating proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or passport, after a federal judge recently upheld such laws passed in Arizona and Kansas.”

Voting-rights advocates have attacked these laws as blatant attempts to suppress the votes of low-income and minority voters, but Republicans defend their actions as justified to protect “voter integrity” and ensure “fairness” and “uniformity” in the system.

Here’s Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman on a bill – signed recently by Gov. Scott Walker – to end early voting on weekends. “Every city on Election Day has voting from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. The idea that some communities should have weekend or night voting is obviously unfair,” he said. “It’s a matter of uniformity. I don’t know what all the hoopla is over,” he told Reuters.

The fact that some communities have a greater demand for voting than others reduces Grothman’s logic to obvious nonsense. To wit, under the constraints established by the new law, voters in the cities and large suburbs of Wisconsin are at a disadvantage compared with their rural counterparts. For example, Republicans have limited total early voting time to 45 hours during the week. To accommodate the number of early voters in 2012 under that time limit, explained Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, you’d have to have a voter cast a ballot every nine seconds. Areas with fewer voters, of course, would have an easier time ...

http://www.kansas.com/2014/04/08/3391449/jamelle-bouie-how-republicans.html