Woozle/2022/10/25

50 Years (at least) of Vote Suppression

I discovered this last night in a boxed LP set I bought (used) right at the end of the last reasonably-calm phase of my life, and I never had the chance to really go through it or even *listen* to it. (I still haven't listened to it; I don't have a good place to set up a turntable right now.)

This was apparently released shortly before the 1972 election -- which kinda shows just how long they've been trying to do this. The bad guys (The System) keep trying to keep us from voting, and the good guys keep trying to fix that.

[transcript]

The Return of the Power of the Vote

Last year, The System made a mistake. It gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote. But The System doesn't like to make the same mistake twice. So they're making voter registration a little difficult, a little confusing, and a little ludicrous.

How?

In some states, you have to register where your parents live, not where you live. In others, you can register in your precinct only two days out of the year. Voter registration in many areas is controlled by that old American tradition -- machine politics.

The System knows the power of the eighteen-year-old vote. There are potentially twenty-five million new young voters in the United States. In 1968, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey each received thirty-one million votes for the Presidency. There is practically one new voter for every vote Richard Nixon received in 1968. Add to this the forty-seven million American who were not inspired to vote in that election, and we would have had a whole new ball game -- whoever runs -- and a whole new politics.

You can elect the next President of the United States -- you can create a responsive base of power in your community -- only if you register to vote.

And since The System would like to make it difficult for you to register, we're going to make it a bit easier.

[/transcript]

(This is the front of a gatefold pamphlet; the inside consists entirely of a state-by-state listing of voter registration laws.)

...and here we are, 50 frackin' years later, still fighting this same battle -- only now they're not just trying to make it more difficult to vote (although they are certainly doing that, having nullified most of the voting rights won since then) they're trying to just take over the process so they can decide who wins regardless of what we want.

...and a lot of so-called "patriots" and supporters of "freedom" seem to be just fine with that.

I don't understand people.