Stealing the election

This is a Republican congressman admitting that Wisconsin's new law requiring voters to show a photo ID is politically motivated.*

Of course, everyone knows that's the case. Republican politicians are supposed to pretend that it's about combating in-person voter fraud, but since that doesn't exist (and it would be very, very easy to discover if it did exist, not to mention being ludicrously useless in affecting elections), even they have trouble sometimes remembering that they're not supposed to tell the truth.

This is about trying to win elections as a minority party. This is about stealing elections through the manipulation of voting laws (not just gerrymandering, which Republicans have also been shameless at pushing), because you can't convince the majority of American citizens that you're the person they want representing them.

This has been happening all over the country, wherever Republicans have the political power to push it through and the political need to do it. (Here in Nebraska, Democrats aren't going to get elected, anyway.) But here's another example from Wisconsin:

A former top staffer for a Republican legislator in Wisconsin suggested this week that GOP legislators were motivated to pass the state’s tough photo voter ID law because they believed it would help them at the ballot box, an account he expanded on in a Wednesday interview with TPM.

Todd Allbaugh, who served as chief of staff for state Sen. Dale Schultz (R) until the legislator retired in 2015, first made the claims in a Tuesday Facebook post that caught the attention of national voting rights experts.

In the post, Allbaugh recalled a 2011 caucus meeting of GOP state senators about the voter ID legislation. Allbaugh said during that meeting, some Republicans were “giddy” over the legislation's "ramifications" and the effect it would have on minority and young voters.

Once he left politics, Allbaugh opened a Madison, Wisconsin, coffee shop, where TPM reached him over the phone and he elaborated on those claims.

“It just really incensed me that they started talking about this particular bill, and one of the senators got up and said, ‘We really need to think about the ramifications on certain neighborhoods in Milwaukee and on our college campuses and what this could do for us,’” Allbaugh said. “The phrase ‘voter suppression’ was never used, but it was certainly clear what was meant.” ...

“It left a pit in my stomach to think that a party that I had worked for for years and years and years was literally talking and plotting to deny someone, a fellow citizen, their constitutional right,” Allbaugh said.

That's a Republican, sickened by what his own party is doing. And rightly so.

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*PS. Frankly, I'm mad as hell that the reporter in the video above didn't even ask a follow-up question when Rep. Grothman accidentally admitted what their new voter ID law was meant to accomplish. What has happened to journalism in America?