The Brennan Center stated:
"As the country prepares for the 2020 election, election administrators should take steps to ensure that every eligible American can cast a ballot next November. Election day is often too late to discover that a person has been wrongfully purged."
Just before the 2016 election, North Carolina permanently closed 158 polling places in the 40 counties comprising the most African American voters.
In 2018, the nation's highest court decided in favor of the Eighth Circuit Court's decision allowing North Dakota to require voters to maintain residential street address, not post-office boxes, and an accepted form of identification stating that address, a move that blatantly targets indigenous voters since many live on reservations with P.O. boxes instead of street addresses.
It also ramped up Republican voter-suppression tactics when it decided in a split 5-4 decision along partisan lines to permit Ohio's system for stripping voters from the rolls to proceed.
Last August, it took the two-member Randolph County, Georgia elections board under one minute to vote to shutter seven predominantly African American polling places.
More than 85,000 Georgia voters were purged from rolls in just the three months leading up to election day in 2016, in what National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president Derrick Johnson called "textbook voter suppression."
And then there's Florida, where then-Republican Governor now U.S. Senator Rick Scott teamed up with Donald Trump to accuse elections in danger of being "stolen" after Secretary of State Ken Detzner ordered recounts in the Senate and gubernatorial races when unofficial results fell within the margin to legally trigger a recount.
As progressive talk show host and author Thom Hartmann wrote in "American Democracy Is on the Brink:"
"If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains."
Republicans talk a good game about democracy and patriotism.
When it comes down to it, though, waving a flag is meaningless when one's actions belie the very principles he or she claims to uphold.
Republicans do not want democracy.
They want an oligarchy.
But they know Americans outside the extremely wealthy do not.
So to maintain their wealthy donors' hegemony, they try to prevent voters from exercising their fundamental right to choose whom they want to represent them.
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