Project Wonderful

Friday, December 27, 2013

Today in Voter Supression: Well, Duh.


Political scientists at Cambridge University have concluded that laws supposedly aimed at preventing voter fraud (for example voter ID, and bans on same day registration) are actually partisan, specifically Republican, efforts at voter suppression.

In an effort to bring empirical clarity and epistemological standards to what has been a deeply-charged, partisan, and frequently anecdotal debate, we use multiple specialized regression approaches to examine factors associated with both the proposal and adoption of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006-2011. Our results indicate that proposal and passage are highly partisan, strategic, and racialized affairs...

Rather, we argue that the Republican Party has engaged in strategic demobilization efforts in response to changing demographics, shifting electoral fortunes, and an internal rightward ideological drift among the party faithful.We situate the most recent round of electoral reforms--far from historically unique--among other measures trumpeted as protecting electoral legitimacy while intended to exclude the marginalized for a particular political party's advantage.


Devotees will note my disdain of political science for complicating and restating that which is obvious to everyone who works on campaigns and then passing it off as new findings, but there you go voter fraud liars, in addition to lying about voter fraud and climate change, you can now also lie about the findings of this study.

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