Both Sides Do It

Charles Pierce nails it, as usual:

We don't use dogs any more, or clubs, or firehoses. We have Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell and (ultimately) Antonin Scalia. We don't even ask people any more to recite the Alabama state constitution backwards in pig-Latin. What we do is develop shoddy "scrub lists," move the precincts around, mail out ballots that mysteriously forget to include the Democratic ticket, set up phony registration centers that ash-can the Democratic applications, buy off some ministers, produce phony "warnings" about being arrested at the polls if you have overdue parking tickets, and rotate these sharpers out of South Dakota and into Illinois when the heat rises around them. And, later, it's judged purely as tactics -- did it work or didn't it? -- with no historical or ethical context because, as we all know, Both Sides Do It.

Look, I don't believe that either Mary Poppins or Daffy Duck should be allowed to vote in Ohio. First of all, Ms. Poppins is an illegal alien and Mr. Duck is, well, a cartoon duck. But that kind of thing has its roots in the way that the old urban machines did business, and they had the effect of extending the franchise to millions of new immigrants, who formed the habits of democracy within their communities, albeit in many cases imperfectly. (That it also occasionally extended the franchise to persons either largely fictional or entirely deceased was, admittedly, a problem.)

But voter-suppression rises from a more fetid historical backwater. Morally, down through the years, it has been responsible for more blood and more chaos than was ever produced by the Daley-Curley-Tammany vote-early-and-often ethos. It is the legacy of a political class restricted to the propertied white male. And anyone who engages in it is no better than Bull Connor with a briefcase, Donald Segretti with a platinum card. They are unAmerican in the fullest, rankest sense of the word.