As we experience the ridiculous spectacle of judges telling us that expecting people to demonstrate they are who they say they are in order to vote is “voter suppression”…
…here is an example of real voter suppression. As conducted in New York State.
That’s right, New York.
Excerpted from Francis Barry’s article at bloomberg.com:
Democrats are celebrating the Supreme Court’s refusal to review an appeals court decision striking down a North Carolina law for violating the Voting Rights Act. Some liberal media outlets called it America’s “worst voter suppression law.” I was happy to see it go, too. But “worst” in the nation? As a New Yorker, I take exception.
A fair examination of the record shows that no state does a better job discouraging voters from going to the polls than New York.
Some states with open primaries require independents to join a party when they arrive at the polls. In New York, independents must join a party 11 months in advance of state primaries. No other state sets such a distant deadline. Many of Senator Bernie Sanders’s supporters found that out the hard way last year.
It’s not just independents who face challenges in New York. The North Carolina law struck down by the courts would have reduced early voting to 10 days from 17. But New York (like a dozen other states) has no early voting at all. If you’re counting at home, 10 days of early voting is a voting-rights violation, but zero days of early voting is just fine with the federal courts.
The New York City Board of Elections invalidated 78,000 affidavit ballots cast in last November’s election — without giving voters a chance to contest the ruling, as state law requires. To put that in perspective: More New York City voters had their ballots invalidated than the total number of voters in 86 of North Carolina’s 100 counties. “The ballots made no result,” New York’s infamous Boss Tweed once said. “The counters made the result.”
New York’s efforts to make it as difficult and unappealing to vote as possible are working quite well. In 2014, based on eligible-voter population data, New York had the second lowest voter turnout rate in the nation — 28 percent. North Carolina (41 percent) wasn’t even close.
Yet Democrats and voting-rights advocates have tended to see voter suppression almost entirely as a red state problem, with minority voters as the target.
If you are against actual voter suppression – as opposed to the concocted, racially insulting definitions used by the left to make sure voter fraud is maximally easy to accomplish – New York State’s laws should appall you.
And you should be every bit as appalled over the fact that, with all the media attention to voter ID laws that are supposed to be racist in nature (i.e. Black people, as a group, are less capable of getting a voter ID than White people, therefore we have to help them out by having no ID laws at all – that’s not racist?) there has been virtually no coverage of the genuinely suppressive laws in supposedly elevated New York State.
And let’s not forget that the information Francis Barry presents here is, and has always been, every bit as available to journalists everywhere as it is to him. So how come we never hear anything about it from them? How come they are not energizing people to protest real voter suppression? Agenda, anyone?
My thanks to Mr. Barry for providing this information.
And my contempt for all the journalistic social justice combatants whose interest in voter suppression begins and ends at attacking common sense voter ID laws.
