One party is on record as saying that their own successful efforts in voter suppression last election won them the rust belt and as a result the presidency.
After seeing it being so successful at tipping the scales last time it appears it will be even more heavily relied on this year.
There are the most recent familiar hints in the news regarding mail in ballots, but so many more examples since the overturning of the voting rights act. How this isn't more of a scandal our democracy is frankly shocking.
It's extremely difficult to talk about this in a purely non-partisan way because there really a case of "both sides are doing it". One party is effectively utilizing this to obtain, maintain and increase their hold on govt positions.
> None of this is a coincidence. Republicans responded to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 not by trying to broaden their own base or appeal to a changing nation, but by modernizing voter suppression tactics out of the old Jim Crow playbook. Chief Justice John Roberts’s shameful 5-4 decision in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder ripped the heart out of the prime enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts argued that the South had changed, and such protections were no longer necessary. 1965, Roberts suggested, was a long time ago, in a different nation, across a changed South. The tens of thousands of Georgians whose voting precincts were closed, forcing them to endure six-hour lines to vote during a pandemic would like a word with him Roberts’s calamitous ignorance has done grievous damage.
"Crosscheck" app/system which is frequently run against democratic counties was found to have a 200 to 1 false positive to true negative rate. It's still being heavily pushed.
> Crosscheck is a national database designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives.[108] Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights organizations for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas.
> Often, voter fraud is cited as a justification for such measures, even when the incidence of voter fraud is low. In Iowa, lawmakers passed a strict voter ID law with the potential to disenfranchise 260,000 voters. Out of 1.6 million votes cast in Iowa in 2016, there were only 10 allegations of voter fraud; none were cases of impersonation that a voter ID law could have prevented. Only one person, a Republican voter, was convicted. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill, admitted, "We've not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa."
We're reaching a very concerning threshold of election integrity that is being under appreciated. Our image of ourselves versus our reality is starting to diverge drastically.
https://time.com/5852837/voter-suppression-obstacles-just-am...
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/new-postal-service-p...