Institutionalised Racism and Class war in the USA

Quote:

In 2012, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told a gathering of Republicans that their recently passed voter identification law would "allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania." In 2011 alone, after the Republicans won control of many states in the 2010 midterms, 34 states introduced voter ID bills to require voters show a photo ID. Fourteen of those states already had voter ID laws, but legislators sought to make them stricter. Turnout is also suppressed by reducing access to polling places. In the US elections are held on Tuesdays rather than on weekends. As a result employees with less control of their working lives – poorer workers who trend Democratic – find it harder to the get the polls. African-Americans waited about twice as long to vote in the 2012 election as whites – 23 minutes compared to 12 minutes, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice. Whites who live in nearly all-white neighbourhoods waited only seven minutes to vote in 2012. The poorer and more black a voting district is, the longer the wait time. South Carolina's Richland County, home to 14 per cent of the state's African-American voters, forced some people to wait more than five hours to vote. Expanding the voting period from one day to several weeks would boost turnout, but Republican-dominated states tend to restrict this. Florida, ruled by a Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature, has fought hard to limit voting to just one day . The 2012 election study showed that long lines in Florida, almost always in poorer areas, kept 49,000 people from voting. Thirty thousand of those votes would have been cast for Barack Obama. The former Republican Party chair in Florida, Jim Greer, told the Palm Beach Post that the point of limiting early voting is suppression of the Democratic vote. "The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It's done for one reason and one reason only ... 'We've got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us'.

http://ift.tt/1to4Ou1



Looks pretty clear to me.