Today’s Republican Party, placed along the spectrum of political viewpoints found during the American Revolution, is closer in thinking to the Monarchy of King George III than to the beliefs of the American Patriots.  The American colonists began the process of winning and then expanding the right to vote.  Today, the Republicans are trying to restrict the suffrage by ill-advised efforts to reduce the number of voters among poor people and minorities; particularly in Republican held states (governor and/or legislature) here are a few examples:

  • They have supported unnecessary photo ID law (cases exist of elderly Americans, voters their whole lives, who now find themselves unable to vote);
  • The GOP in some states reduced the number of days and hours available for voting (particularly eliminating the Sunday where Black churches had established a proud tradition of aiding congregation members and community residents in large numbers to reach the polling stations);
  • They have reduced the number of polling places available and created situations where artificially-created difficulties prevent some voters from getting to their new polling place;
  • They improperly disfranchised 160,000 voters in Florida who belonged on the rolls; they have practiced “purging” rolls and challenging suffrage rights for citizens absolutely qualified to vote.  (These deplorable and nefarious tactics helped them steal Florida in the highly disputed 2000 presidential election when an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, ignoring legal principles, handed Florida to the Republicans on a silver platter and hence the election itself*);
  • They have been gerrymandering districts within Republican-controlled states for the last couple of decades, re-drawing maps in such a way as to give themselves unfair advantages in state and Congressional elections (which in turn also unduly favors their number of electors in a presidential election year);
  • Republican presidents have appointed Supreme Court justices so conservative that they thought it helpful to continue the fiction of calling corporations “persons” in order to allow these corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence and buy desired election results;

The list continues and is being expanded constantly by Republican tricksters and manipulators.  These tactics remind one of the poll tax and “understanding clause” of the Southern states during the heyday of Segregation and rampant racism.  The new tactics are perhaps more subtle and hidden, but the end game is the same.  It is political hucksterism, pure and simple, looking for subterfuges based on hypocritical double-dealing to reduce and eliminate voters to gain an electoral advantage.  Such tactics go against the very essence of Democracy where each individual is considered equal to every other (regardless of color, wealth, or station in life) and shares the same rights to the fullest degree possible.

Elections are not just for rich white Republican conservative men and women; elections should afford an opportunity for the widest popular participation possible, and yet the GOP by its actions has shown a growing resistance to allowing the people to speak through their vote—an egregious insult and injury to the First Amendment’s right of freedom of speech, as well as a deliberate sabotaging of the inalienable right of all Americans to be heard through voting for their chosen elected representatives.  This is crass Republican oligarchic elitism of the worst sort!

The new Republic sought to expand the voting rolls, not restrict them. The seed thus planted took deep root and blossomed as the young country grew.  From 1776 until today, groups once left out of the suffrage (most notably Blacks, women, and Native Americans) are now included in this most basic form of citizen equality: all adult citizens over the age of 18 years have the right to vote**. This viewpoint is represented best by the modern Democratic Party which seeks to be as broadly inclusive as possible and encourages all Americans to exercise their right to vote without hindrance or challenge.

It is a fundamental principle of the American Revolution that Americans should have the right to govern themselves.  Men and women fought for this right and many were imprisoned, wounded, or made the supreme sacrifice so Americans could be free.  Every American today should support fully the right of all eligible Americans to cast their vote with the least amount of restrictions possible being put in their path.  To think or act otherwise is to roll back American currents of progress; it is to go backward in time, when fewer people had the right to vote, rather than forward to complete and meaningful universal suffrage.

We are not waiting for the Republicans to propose bringing back the Monarchy where no one “votes” save the king; we are a democracy and the rule of the people, not a political or financial elite, must determine in fair, open, and all-inclusive elections who our leaders are.  If the Republicans have forgotten this lesson due to selfish motives, then they have strayed too far away from a fundamental principle of our American democracy.

Placed along the spectrum of views found at the time of the American Revolution, today’s GOP has become increasingly anti-democratic in its actions and thoughts; their electoral chicanery is but one example among many that could be cited.  They are trying to buy, cheat and steal elections and that is not right, fair, or proper.

It is time for the American people to offer them a necessary correction in order to jolt them back to their senses.  We must insist they honor and respect the right of all Americans to vote through fair, peaceful, and all-inclusive elections.  Hopefully, it is not too late to do so!

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* See Vincent Bugliosi’s excellent book The Betrayal of America

** With a few exceptions, such as felons, etc. Amendment 26 (1971) lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.