The Republican Party is throwing a temper tantrum after one of their own candidates was purged from the Arkansas voter rolls, and they only have themselves to blame.
Leslie Rutledge is the GOP candidate in the race to become Arkansas’ next Attorney General. Well, she used to be anyway. As it turns out, the state constitution requires candidates for public office to be registered voters, but because of voter suppression laws passed by the GOP, Rutledge has not only been disqualified as a voter, she could be disqualified as a candidate because of it.
Pulaski County Clerk Larry Crane booted Rutledge’s name off the voter rolls because she failed to follow proper procedure. She failed to cancel previous registrations in Washington DC and Virginia before she moved to Pulaski County, where she failed to re-register to vote.
Of course, this caused Republicans to accuse Crane, a Democrat, of engaging in “dirty tricks,” but Crane says he was legally bound to remove Rutledge’s name from the rolls after receiving a letter about the issue of her registration.
Rutledge isn’t the only person in Arkansas to be tossed from the voter pool. Thousands of Arkansas voters have faced the same treatment. They’ve been thrown off the voter rolls, interrogated about their personal information, and had their legal vote discarded entirely due to restrictive anti-voting measures passed by Republicans. But because their own laws are affecting one of their own, only now are they upset. In fact, Republicans are so pissed that karma came back to bite them in the ass that they’re complaining about a tactic that they themselves have defended ruthlessly for months across the country. In short, they’re being hypocrites.
The chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association decided to defend Rutledge by whining about her being “systematically removed from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election.” He also claimed that Democrats were responsible for this voter suppression.
The fact is that it is a clear and unmistakable attempt at the most harmful kind of voter suppression in violation of federal law – removing a qualified female voter from the rolls notwithstanding her valid registration and actual votes in the last 4 elections in violation of her civil rights. Democrats should be embarrassed.
Democrats, however, are not the ones who have pushed voter suppression laws in states around the nation. The Republicans did that. Where were they when citizens who have been voting for decades were denied their right to vote because of the laws they themselves passed? Oh, that’s right, they didn’t give a damn because the laws they passed are supposed to target Democratic voters, not Republican voters.
But in this case, the voter suppression laws enacted by the GOP not only affected a Republican voter, it took down a Republican candidacy. And now they’re throwing a fit and accusing Democrats of voter suppression. Unfortunately for the GOP, Democrats are not to blame for their own misfortune. They already know who the true culprit is, all they have to do is look in a mirror.
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