Polling station sign in East Greenwich, R.I., advises voters that identification is required in this year's April primary. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)WASHINGTON -- Four years ago, on the Sunday before Election Day 2008, members of predominantly African American congregations in Cleveland went straight from celebrating God to rejoicing in their right to vote."We had buses at every church that Sunday," recalled the Rev. Emmitt Theophilus Caviness, the 83-year-old pastor of Cleveland's Greater Abyssinia Baptist Church. "As soon as we left church, we got on the bus and went down to vote."At the board of elections office, Caviness told HuffPost, "you would have seen long lines wrapped around corners. People were enthusiastic. They were having fun."Four years earlier, the November election in Ohio was a debacle. Shortages of voting machines in some minority neighborhoods led to thousands of voters giving up their franchise rather than waiting for as long as 10 hours for their turn. Other votes went uncounted.But early voting was apparently too much of a success for some people. In Ohio and four other states -- Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and West Virginia -- Republican-led legislatures have dramatically reduced early voting in 2012 as part of what can only be explained as a concerted effort to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning voters. Other parts of that effort include voter ID bils, intimidation of voter registration groups and the purges of voter rolls.
in realization of a "what just happened", moment we get the right wing brazenly setting about usurping the rights of have of the electorate, showing the dishonesty andprejudice's that have permeated that party since it's inception. they talk about get "their country back" when in reality is "take back that which was an American staple, right to vote and prevent all that hoopla that got a Black man in "their WH.
After the GOP won control of many statehouses in 2010, rolling back early voting became a top legislative priority. That meant reducing the period for early in-person voting in Florida from 14 to 8 days, and in Ohio, from 35 to 11. And no voting on Sunday before the election.
"I try to be an objective observer," said professor Paul Gronke, who runs the nonpartisan Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Oregon. "But the objective facts indicate there seem to be partisan motivations behind the ratcheting back of early in-person voting."
there is, sore losers that want to prevent ever again their party ideology will not be the suppression of "we the people", and that big business is the rule of the land
