I spent yesterday collecting dozens and dozens tweets describing the difficulties faced by people attempting to vote in the Democratic primary here in New York. Many of those people appear to have been purged from the rolls altogether.

I started this thread after first noticing reports of people running into trouble at the polls yesterday morning, hours and hours before the polls closed and we knew who won. It’s not about “making excuses” for Nixon’s defeat. It’s about chronicling voter suppression. Did these incidents decide the election in Cuomo’s favor? Unlikely, given the numbers. Nor were the Watergate break-in or ratfucking the Democratic primary responsible for Nixon’s landslide win in 1972. That doesn’t mean those crimes didn’t happen, or that they didn’t matter.

New York has one of the highest numbers of registered voters and is consistently near the bottom in electoral turnout. The absurd rules for registering and voting in the primaries are part of that. So is the culture of chaos around what can happen to you when you *try* to vote. “People who want to vote should be able to vote” ought to be the least controversial statement it’s possible for people in a democracy to make. Yet the official position of New York State—and based on yesterday, the passion project of its now-reelected governor—is to ensure otherwise.

Side note: I see a quote going around in smug centrist circles about Nixon’s campaign “complaining” about turnout. If you can find an actual complaint about turnout in that quote, which is about Cuomo’s money funneling overall anti-Trump fervor to the polls, be my guest.

You can’t mock that statement *at the same time* that you mock people saying they couldn’t vote because of funny business at the polls or ridicule the whole idea that New York’s primary system constitutes voter suppression, as centrist/liberal pundits have done for years now. The harder it is for people to vote in the primary, the less likely they’ll be to try again. It’s a vicious cycle, by design.

People who want to vote should be able to vote.

Tags: real life

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2018 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.