 |
LA Times
Wisconsin voters in the time of COVID-19 |
And, every other shit-hole state practicing voter suppression to maintain Republican control of the country.
In this pandemic age, it makes zero sense to force voters to stand in line for hours to possibly infect scores of other citizens with the dreaded COVID-19 virus.
That's exactly what you get from Republicans: no sense.
They continually throw up roadblocks to enfranchisement because they know that when more people vote the less they like Republican ideas or candidates.
In Oregon, the first state to enact statewide vote-by-mail more than 20 years ago, the results rock the vote. We have more citizens participating in democracy and consistently have some of the highest voter turnout numbers in the country. Also, there is nearly zero voter fraud, which is a canard conjured up by the GOP. In fact, the only widespread voter fraud occurred in 2018 with absentee ballots in North Carolina by Republicans.
Washington, Colorado, Hawaii and Utah eventually followed Oregon's lead in statewide vote-by-mail. At least another 21 states have a hodgepodge of absentee balloting.
This confusing patchwork of voting options demands a federal response to provide guidance and consistency in voting for president.
Yet, we have Oregon's lone Republican representative, Greg Walden - 2nd Dist., claiming that it would be "a recipe for disaster" to have all states vote by mail.
What a goddamn liar.
He knows that in the 1990s, Oregon struggled to get out timely results because about half of voters requested absentee ballots while the other half voted in person. (Wisconsin won't know its results from Tuesday's primary until next week because of this type of setup.)
Naturally, Republicans still had some clout in the Oregon Legislature last millennium and resisted attempts to allow statewide vote-by-mail. Thankfully, voters overwhelmingly (69 percent to 31 percent) approved vote-by-mail in 1998, which ended the absentee/vote-in-person ballot chaos.
Since then, Democrats have won super-majorities in the state Legislature and only two Republicans have won statewide office because voters know they're out of touch with reality.
In that time, Oregon moved away from its longtime timber-based economy to a more diversified one that yielded its lowest unemployment rate ever during President Obama's era. That rate improved marginally under Trump, but those numbers are now gone with the broken wind thanks to the Mango Mussolini's initial dismissal of the coronavirus.
If we ever expect this country to rise above its white-supremacist origins and its current representation by a minority of racists, we must expand voting access to all citizens old enough to vote.
Hey, America, vote by mail. You'll be glad you did.
