The Tea Party vs. Ohio Voters

From Think Progress:

Members of an Ohio tea party group are taking it upon themselves to individually police alleged voter fraud, launching challenges to a targeted list of voters that includes hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. In all, the group has sought to remove from the voter rolls at least 2,100 registrations in 13 Ohio counties, nine of which Obama won in 2008, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The alleged perpetrators of this voter fraud include Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old recovering from cancer, whose apartment for the past seven years was allegedly listed as a commercial property; and eight members of an African American family, whose four-bedroom home where the family has lived since the 1980s was allegedly listed as a vacant lot. The group has also focused on challenging college students for failure to specify a dorm room number, a claim that every election board has thus far found invalid.

Incidents of voter fraud generally are few and far between. Ironically, many of the genuine incidents are perpetrated by the political right, like the woman who was recently exposed as only registering Republicans to vote for example. Many of the victims of these purges are alive and well, college students, elderly, racial minorities, and so forth. These voter purges and voter ID laws are the right's attempt at disenfranchising those swaths of society that are more likely to vote against them. It is purely political and not at all based on principle.

Throughout this country's history, we have tried to be a more perfect union. This includes expanding voting rights so that we have a more representative democracy. Voting rights were originally for a narrow few, but we expanded those rights to racial minorities, women, non-landowners, those between 18-21 years of age, and so on. Many on political right are trying to turn back the clock on voting rights, which is just another policy area where the right shows itself to be regressive. It is patently un-American.