peoplefor
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2017–2022
0:41 · 319K views · Jun 8, 2007
A 1980 clip of conservative strategist Paul Weyrich telling a religious audience he does not want everybody to vote. He says elections are not won by a majority and that leverage rises as turnout falls.
HN cites it as a primary-source quote in discussions of voter suppression.
3 comments from Hacker News
We weren't supposed to have a standing army either, much less one like we have today with an inflation-adjusted budget as high as during WWII, but here we are. Madison would be appalled, Washington would be ok with something but not that. Conveniently, the far-right in the US omits the military from balanced budget debates, since any reduction in military spending would disrupt the status quo. I feel that we haven't had civic discourse around this stuff since Newt Gingrich started his Contract with America. Or maybe before that with Paul Weyrich's New Right religious conservative movement with Reagan: this video The fallout of that ideology today is gerrymandering and various other forms of disenfranchisement to maintain minority rule by the religious right and moneyed corporate interests. Which doesn't align with the separation of church and state, but again, here we are. So you're correct that our history of denying aid to people in need goes way back. But we should also remember that women lived under subjugation until their right to vote was recognized in 1920, and people of color lived under segregation until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We probably shouldn't use the term "aid", because reparations to repair the theft of those peoples' livelihoods would be an astronomical number, easily into the tens of trillions of dollars. The same people who thought those progressive movements were crazy continue to call aid to those in need "redistribution" today. These are heated enou
How about if by "significant" I mean "has enough impact on elections to merit countermeasures that have been statistically shown to disproportionately reduce election participation [oh noes!] by brown people and people with lower incomes (regardless of race)?" How about if by "significant" I mean "has enough impact on elections to merit countermeasures that cost at least tens of thousands of dollars per fraudulent vote, but probably hundreds of thousands of dollars per fraudulent vote?" Is there truly no more cost-effective way to spend that money on ensuring election integrity? Perhaps with little things like voter-verifiable paper trails that actually allow auditing of results? Why, it's almost as if the oh-so-unfortunate side effect of minority and poor disenfranchisement is the purpose and "preventing vote fraud" is just the excuse. I'm sure Paul "our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down" Weyrich would have been heartbroken by that. this video I also looked through the report cited and found it remarkably light on actual facts. They make a big point of Maureen Erickson's cancellation for being a non-citizen in 2012 and her providing a Guatemalan address. They also note that she'd voted in 14 elections. Honestly, I'm surprised that they also included that the most recent of those was in 2008, 4 years before her registration was cancelled. So what happened in those intervening 4 years? Did this obviously Hispanic woman get thrown ou
Conservatives have admitted in the past[0] that they win by suppressing the vote. That happens while Liberals usually win by getting out the vote. Saying "both sides do it" is just plain unfair and borderline propaganda. [0] this video