Rachel Maddow Exposes Another GOP Plot In Texas To Suppress Democratic Voters

Rachel Maddow exposed yet another Republican plot – this time in Texas – to suppress Democratic voters in the state.

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According to the MSNBC host, Texas Republicans are intentionally slow-walking voter registration applications so that they can’t be processed in time for election day.

“When you’ve got Republican control of the legislature and the state government like Republicans have in Texas, they know it’s to their own advantage to keep the elections process, to keep the voting process, to keep the voter registration process slow and screwy,” Maddow explained.

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Rachel Maddow said:

In the Texas capital city of Austin, we also saw some new reporting today about a very large number of voter registrations coming in there. This is from ProPublica: Travis County, Texas, the home of Austin, Texas, has experienced a massive spike in voter registrations this cycle, which officials will attribute to the heightened interest in the state’s competitive Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke. The county received around 35,000 registrations on the final day to submit them this year. That’s 10,000 more than on the same day in 2016, which was a presidential year. Texas is one of only 13 states not to have online voter registration, so now, about a dozen county employees are sifting through thousands of applications, verifying them and entering them into the state’s voter rolls by hand. Of the 35,000 registrations received on the last day of registration, October 9th, 25,000 of those 35,000 have yet to be processed. And that’s with early voting starting in that state on Monday. You think they’re going to get them all processed in time? Why do they have to process every voter registration application by hand? In a state that has tens of millions of people living in it? Why on Earth would you make it so hard? Not only for people to register, but for those registrations to be processed, why would you make it so cumbersome? So that it honestly can’t get done before voting starts. Well, the more people vote, the more people who get their votes counted, the worse Republicans tend to do in U.S. elections. So when you’ve got Republican control of the legislature and the state government, like Republicans have in Texas, they know it’s to their own advantage to keep the elections process, to keep the voting process, to keep the voter registration process slow and screwy. Because that works for them just fine. More people trying to register, more people trying to vote? That’s scary to them.

Republican voter suppression efforts are exploding across the country

The news out of Texas isn’t even the first example of voter suppression in the state that we’ve seen over the past week.

As Rachel Maddow pointed out last Thursday, officials in Texas are also trying to make it more difficult for African American students in parts of the state to vote. Which party do you think will benefit from that tactic?

All across the country, from Texas to Georgia to North Dakota, Republicans aren’t waging a war of ideas. They aren’t trying to inspire people to turn out to the polls. Instead, they are waging a war on voting rights. They know the fewer people who vote, the better their chances are of preserving their power.

Luckily, as Rachel Maddow pointed out on Wednesday, most Americans are starting to see through this charade. In some areas where suppression tactics have been most heavily used, registration applications and early voting numbers have skyrocketed. 

It remains to be seen whether the voters most targeted by the GOP will be able to overcome these suppression tactics, but at the very least, Republicans are beginning to realize that Americans value their rights most when someone is threatening to take them away.

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Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.