Do You Feel the Hysteria Rising on the Right?

An editorial in the Raleigh News & Observer calls out the voter suppression bullshit of the State Board of Elections, which enabled and ratified the voter suppression bullshit of the Watauga County Board of Elections when it removed last year a long established Early Voting site from the Appalachian State University campus.

The editorial fingers the reason that the State Board of Elections has now gone pleading to the NC Supreme Court and its gang of conservatives for an emergency hearing to overturn Judge Donald Stephens' order in Waker Superior Court: "The GOP doesn’t think it can maintain power on a level playing field." So it stacks the cards against ballot access for young people because Republicans can't win their hearts and minds, let alone their votes.

If Judge Stephens' order prevails and ASU students get their polling place, the editorialist points out, "the impact could be significant elsewhere."

Can't you hear the sharp intake of breath in conservative circles at that thought? OMG! Why, students at other universities and colleges in the state might get the idea that they deserve easy voting opportunities too! And there goes the ballgame.

A reader posted a comment under that editorial, reminding me of what conservative guru Paul Weyrich famously said (and he said it on-camera to boot): "So many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Yeah, we got that.