The GOP Plan To Suppress Votes

The chart above is from the Houston Chronicle. That newspaper decided to find out just how big an effect on voting the new Republican Voter ID law would have. The results are startling. They found it could suppress the voting of from 10% to 38% of the registered voters in Texas' ten largest counties. In Harris County (Houston) it could affect 19% of voters, in Dallas County (Dallas) it could affect 20% of voters, in Bexar County (San Antonio) it could affect 22% of voters, and in El Paso County (El Paso) it could affect 38% of voters.

And those are just the biggest counties in the state. Texas has a total of 254 counties, and statewide the new Voter ID law could suppress as many as 2.4 million of the state's 12.8 million registered voters (or about 18.75% of the state's voters). In other words, the law will probably do just what the Republicans wanted it to do -- suppress a large percentage of votes statewide.

The Republicans have claimed the new law is to prevent voter fraud. But the truth is that there is no widespread voter fraud in Texas (or any other state for that matter). The Republicans have tried hard to find instances of verifiable voter fraud, but have been unable to do so. In the final analysis, they just gave up and started throwing out numbers unsupported by any facts.

The real truth is that the Republicans see their grip on Texas slipping away in coming years, as the minority population becomes a larger percentage of the state's total population with each passing year. In the last ten years the population of Texas grew enough to provide the state another four seats in Congress. Over 90% of that growth was among minorities (mostly Hispanic). Minorities already comprise a majority of school children in Texas, and it won't be too many more years before they also comprise a majority of the adult population.

This is a big problem for Republicans, considering their racist and anti-immigrant policies and attitudes. They had a choice. They could change their policies and attitudes to be more inclusive of minorities, or they could suppress as many votes as possible. They chose the low road -- suppressing votes. That's no surprise. They're just playing to the racist (not to mention homophobic and misogynistic) base of their party.