We begin today's roundup with The New York Times and its take on Hillary Clinton's voting rights push:
In addition to pushing needed and long-overdue reforms, the speech highlighted the yawning gulf on voting rights between Mrs. Clinton and the Republican candidates for the White House, many of whom have been cynically committed to making voting harder for the most vulnerable citizens. “What part of democracy are they afraid of?” Mrs. Clinton asked.
Most significantly, Mrs. Clinton called for universal and automatic voter registration, which would register every American citizen at 18. This would be a transformative step toward modernizing the nation’s archaic, error-filled approach to registering voters. [...] The 2016 election will be about many important issues, from income inequality to immigration to health care to education, but at its core it will be a test of two ideas of what it means to be a democracy. One is currently embodied by what Mrs. Clinton called “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other.”
The other, as Mrs. Clinton put it, is that, “We should do everything we can to make it easier for every citizen to vote.”
Paul Waldman at The Week:
Let's cut through the baloney and be honest for a moment: Republicans don't like early voting or universal voter registration for the same reason they want voter ID laws. They know that the easier voting is, the more Democrats will turn out. Republican voters, on the other hand, are more likely to be older, wealthier, and whiter — the people for whom the kind of restrictions Republicans have sought to impose are less of a hassle. You could argue that Democrats are just as motivated by their partisan interest in taking the position they do, but that doesn't change the simple fact that Democrats want to make voting easier and Republicans want to make it harder.
[...] Fifteen years after the hanging-chad debacle in Florida, we still haven't found a way to make voting easy, simple, secure, and accurate. Yet somehow every other advanced democracy manages to carry their elections off without the kinds of problems we face. It isn't because it's such a daunting technical problem. It's because our voting system sucks, and there are people who have an interest in keeping it that way.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Jamelle Bouie at Slate:
Overall, 21 states have put voting restrictions in place since the 2010 elections, including swing states like Florida, New Hampshire, and Virginia. Next year, in 14 of these states, those laws will be in effect for the first time. And tellingly, the prevalence of those laws has a lot to do with the demographics of the state. “Of the 11 states with the highest African American turnout in 2008, 7 have new restrictions,” notes the Brennan Center for Justice. “Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, 9 passed laws making it harder to vote.” [...]
Clinton didn’t shy away from that connection. “It is a cruel irony, but no coincidence, that millennials—the most diverse, tolerant, and inclusive generation in American history—are now facing exclusion,” she said, in reference to restrictions on student voting. Likewise, she explained, “Minority voters are more likely than white voters to wait in long lines at polling places. They are also far more likely to vote in polling places with insufficient numbers of voting machines … This kind of disparity doesn’t happen by accident.”
Jim Newell at Salon:
One other proposal that I’d like to hear from Clinton: flooding densely populated and congested polling stations with voting machines. It’s no coincidence that in some states controlled by Republicans, urban and suburban polling stations that are expected to go highly Democratic have relatively few machines, which means long wait times, which means voters might get frustrated and not bother voting. I reported from polling stations in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. on Election Day 2012 and what I saw was scandalous: multi-hour lines throughout Arlington, Fairfax and other counties, where there were only a handful of machines that would occasionally break. Had voters not been so patient — waiting in line several hours, late into the evening past scheduled poll closures — Romney may well have won that state. It shouldn’t have to be that way, though I’d welcome an explanation for why it should.
Greg Sargent at The Washington Post:
In political terms, Clinton’s call for universal voting registration appears to be a bid to energize millennial voters. As it is, the broader voting access push — like her recent moves leftward on immigration, climate change, and sentencing reform — is partly about mobilizing core Obama coalition groups, including minorities. Today’s proposal is more heavily focused on the young. After all, one of the key unknowns of the cycle is whether Clinton will be able to turn out Obama voters on the same levels he did, and young voters — who were excited by the historical nature of Obama’s candidacy — are key to that.
“There’s a good policy reason why Clinton might support universal voting, but there’s also a good political reason,” Rick Hasen, a voting law expert, tells me. “These are issues that motivate the Democratic base. Talking about Republicans suppressing the vote gets Democrats excited, just like talking about voter fraud motivates Republicans.”
Charles P. Pierce:
Make no mistake. This is a fight worth making and a debate worth having. The Republican party considers its efforts to restrict the franchise an unalloyed triumph. It helped get Greg Abbott elected governor of Texas. Scott Walker never shuts up about the grotesque law that he and his pet legislature enacted in Wisconsin, the state that gave us so many of the mechanisms by which the money power first was struck from our elections. And, in where-the-fck else, Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback may allow his secretary of state, Kris Kobach, the man behind the Papers, Please theory of immigration law, to prosecute "voter fraud" cases that state prosecutors had declared non-starters. Voter suppression is a litmus test on the political Right now, and it is a central pillar of Republican politics general, and it has been ever since Karl Rove used it as the casus belli in his purge of U.S. Attorneys nine years ago. It is a long game they've been playing.
As hard as it may be for the likes of Chris Cillizza to understand, there is considerable merit in taking on important issues that do not necessarily poll as well as "Eeek! Moosssslims!" does. The corruption of our politics by the money power, and the new mechanisms enacted to safeguard it, is the fundamental issue of our time because, unless it is reversed, and soon, all of the other issues won't matter because no real solutions will emerge from the one place where they are supposed to emerge. Ms. Rodham Clinton seems to get this. Good on her for bringing it up.