From Glenn Smith at Firedoglake

“In a democracy, voter suppression should be made a high crime on a level with treason.

In fact, I don’t think a system can even be called a democracy unless it treats as a great and terrible crime the suppression, intimidation or exclusion of citizens from elections. When voter exclusion is tolerated, voting can become little more than a pretty curtain drawn across the muscled efforts of authority to have its way no matter what the citizenry might prefer.

But in America, exclusion has a cultural and political advantage over inclusion. It took 140-plus years for women to earn the franchise. It was 1965 before formal and legal barriers to African-American participation in elections were removed by the Voting Rights Act. Demonizing a group by color, religion, geography or even political preference and then taking steps to keep the demonized group from voting – where’s the news? It’s been done since the founding of the nation.

How people of the Right manage to square their avowed love of democracy with actions that subvert it isn’t really that big a mystery. In the conservative worldview, only certain people – Calvinists knew them as the Elect – should be regarded as full citizens. The non-Elect aren’t full citizens because they are less favored by God or the town fathers. In authoritarian minds, suppressing the voting rights of their neighbors becomes essential to protecting legitimate authority within a democracy. The successful disenfranchising of the non-Elect is then taken as a sign that God or more earthly authority looks down upon the victims of suppression. It’s a neat little self-justifying merry-go-round of logic.

To all you conservatives busy caging votes, passing along voter purge lists, contributing money to pay for racist robocalls, hiring private-duty cops to patrol the polls to intimidate would-be voters, rigging voting machines and on and one, I say this: you belong in prison.”

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