A long standing tactic

Republicans and voter suppression are just adapting the Southern Democratic Party model of the South of the late 19th century...much like the rest of the Dixiecrat Agenda (good ol' Trent Lott just exposed it publicly). In the post-Civil War period, especially after the negotiation that allowed Rutherford Hayes to become President over Tilden in return for "Reconstruction" ending, the Democrats of the South came up with a novel idea for black voting. The did not let them vote, unless they wished to imagine their vote as having been for a Democrat. Thus the election returns from the South are generally unreliable from about 1868 to about 1968, a century of voter suppression. But what is old is new again in the intellectual successor of the old Rebels, the world's most ironic party the Republicans.

Voter suppression is not some fantasy or conspiracy theory. It is a real tactic. Campaigns want to “get out the vote” but among only their voters. The other guys’ voters? Well, maybe they can be discouraged a little. Shortly after one Election Day, a group of top Republican legislative aides met on Capitol Hill to discuss the future. “The whole point was, how can we stop, how can we suppress their people from voting?” a disgusted Republican staffer who was at the meeting told me. “It’s just so stupid.” The staffer believed the future of the Republican Party should be to win over Democratic voters, especially minorities, instead of suppressing their votes. “Why don’t we give that a shot?” he asked me. “We could poll-tax them,” he added sarcastically. “And giving them sh—ty voting machines seems to be the latest tactic.”

They've done half of that, and would love to do the other.