Progressive Opinion

prospect.org — For once, the Republicans were right. They have been obsessively claiming that voter-suppression measures are necessary because of widespread “ballot fraud.” However extensive investigations by the mainstream media have shown that ballot-fraud is a convenient myth. Even the Bush administration, in an extensive five-year search, turned up no evidence of the kind of voting fraud—fake IDs, voting in the name of dead people, folks being bribed to vote—that the Republicans routinely allege. Now, however, Republicans can claim some vindication. Serious voter fraud has emerged in Florida. But the ballot fraud is being perpetrated by Republicans!

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mcclatchydc.com — President Barack Obama has received unexpected help from the unlikeliest of quarters: The Republican National Committee. Devoted to bashing Obama, the RNC gave the president’s reelection campaign a political contribution of sorts by insisting that state parties, such as Florida’s, hire a vendor that’s now under investigation for voter-registration fraud by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in as many as 10 counties involving at least 220 suspect forms. Remember all that talk from Republicans about voter fraud? Well, it ain’t just for ACORN anymore. Now, instead of being on offense against Obama, Republicans are playing defense over voter-registration fraud. Some organized Republican voter-registration drives have virtually ground to a halt as Republicans fired the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, in seven battleground states. It’s such a mess that the Republican Party of Florida has filed an elections complaint against the Strategic Allied Consulting, which then turned around and bashed…. The Republican Party of Florida.

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thenation.com — The American experiment began on an exclusive note: only white male property owners who paid taxes, met religious prerequisites, and were 21 or older were allowed to vote. The next 200 years saw a fight over the franchise that pitted progress (elimination of religious tests and property requirements, passage of the Fifteenth Amendment) against reaction (Jim Crow literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses). It was only in the twentieth century that Native Americans, African-Americans, women and 18-year-olds were accorded the place in the democratic process that should have been theirs at the founding of the Republic. What is so alarming about voting in the twenty-first century is that the forces of reaction are again on the march. Unsettled by their inability to “manage” an expanded and changing electorate, the corporations that fund the American Legislative Exchange Council and other right-wing groups are waging a war on voting.

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prospect.org — It's a lot easier to talk about a law—and pass one—than to implement it. Just ask Pennsylvania lawmakers—and Pennsylvania citizens, and judges, and voting-rights activists.  The state's voter ID law, passed by Republican lawmakers in March, is best known for threatening to disenfranchise more voters than laws in any other stae. But in mid-August, Pennsylvania Judge Robert Simpson refused to grant an injunction to stop the state from implementing the law in November. The judge said that he believed state officials' assurances that they had plans in place (though some were still not in action) to prevent widespread disenfranchisement.  Those promises are not enough for the state supreme court.

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salon.com — You already know that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have radically different positions on Medicare, abortion rights and rebuilding the economy. What’s less clear is how effectively they’ll be able to implement their agendas. While the makeup of the next Congress remains unknown, a recent report from the Center for American Progress (and a nifty corresponding infographic, below) lays out what a single Obama — or Romney — appointee could mean for some of the Court’s most contentious rulings. Chief among them? Citizens United. It was, after all, only a 5-4 vote that allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. An Obama second term — and his third SCOTUS appointment — could mean the highly polarizing, highly influential case might be reconsidered — and overruled.

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billmoyers.com — The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and Jamie Raskin, constitutional law professor and Maryland state senator, join Bill to discuss how the uncontested power of the Supreme Court is changing our elections, our country, and our lives. The two joined forces for a special upcoming issue of The Nation entitled “The One Percent Court.” “We wanted to bring attention to how this court has empowered the 1% at the expense of the 99%,” says vanden Heuvel. “How it is now working for big business, for corporate power against the interests of ordinary citizens in this country.”

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progressive.org — The problem in America’s democracy that Citizens United has come to represent can be simply stated: The People have lost faith in their government. They have lost the faith that their government is responsive to them because they have become convinced that their government is more responsive to those who fund your campaigns. As all of you, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, find yourselves forced into a cycle of perpetual fundraising — spending anywhere between 30 percent and 70 percent of your time raising money to get back into office or to get your party back into power — you become, or at least most Americans believe you become, responsive to the will of “the Funders.” But “the Funders” are not “the People.”

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salon.com — One of the oldest dirty tricks in politics is running candidates in your opponent’s primary to distract them from the general or even potentially knock them out entirely. The FBI is reportedly investigating Rep. David Rivera for backing a fake Democrat with envelopes stuffed with cash, and Republicans in Wisconsin openly supported “fake Democrats” there in order to give Gov. Scott Walker an edge in the election’s timing. But the rise of super PACs has opened up a new venue for this tactic, allowing operatives to anonymously deploy hundreds of thousands of dollars of ads while deceitfully pretending to be partisans of the other side.

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alternet.org — The Republican Party’s war on Democratic voting blocks is like a game of three-dimensional chess in which their strategies are intended to remain dormant until Election Day, and in the following days when votes are officially counted. But their game plan is simple. They want to discourage voters by complicating every step for new and existing voters from specific blue cohorts, such as students, poor people and minorities. While most of the GOP’s voter suppression strategies are designed to erupt in November, it is now possible to identify at least three major areas where hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic votes have already been thwarted—and where steps to reverse that process, if possible, must be taken soon before fall voter registration deadlines kick in.

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theroot.com — In states from Florida to Pennsylvania, Republican Party efforts to diminish minority voting strength for this year's presidential election are a sobering reminder that the struggle for full civil rights is not over. But it's not only black voters who should be concerned about Republican voter-suppression tactics. The GOP's war on voting is a serious attack on the fundamental workings of our democracy. It is, at its core, an attempt to negate the important victories of the early 1960s that laid the foundation of our modern representative democracy. To understand the breadth of the threat represented by voter-ID laws and other new practices, it's important to realize that the effort to dismantle obstacles to voting rights for black voters in the South during the early 1960s did more than just enfranchise African Americans. It exposed the myriad ways in which key aspects of the American electoral system were fundamentally unfair for all voters.

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