Voter Suppression in Florida: Why am I just now hearing about this?!

The GOP: stepping on Minorities for 40+ years

I will freely admit that I'm not the most informed person when it comes to the news.  It is quite surprising that I haven't heard much about this story coming out of Florida. Were it not for blogs and minor online news sites, I'd not know anything about this. The Republican Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, is under fire for attempts to suppress votes which included laws that would require voter ID cards, cut early voting hours, and the purging of voting rolls. This all happened BEFORE the 2012 election. What I'm shocked at hearing right now are the whistleblowers within the Republican party that freely admit these laws were attempts to suppress the votes of Blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities.

In the past, whenever anyone claims voter strategy in the Republican party is based on racist ideology towards minorities, they will shout you down claiming they frequently reach out to minorities during political campaigns. To hear actual Republicans say "yeah, we want to keep them from voting because they'll always vote Democrat" is astonishing, to say the least. The former chair of the GOP, Jim Greer  and former Governor Charlie Crist are the main sources of these claims. Crist alleges that GOP leaders came to him during his last term in office in an effort to convince him to change early voting so to suppress the Democratic vote. The panic in the Republican party that has led them to illegal and unethical practices with voter suppression is a direct response to the 2008 victory of President Barack Obama. The unprecedented turnout of Black voters convinced the GOP that minority voters were a threat, not a potential asset, to the party. “The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer said. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only… to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.”

Greer has stated the defense for the voter IDs was simply a "marketing ploy" to push the Republican agenda. The claim that rampant voter fraud necessitated these preventative measures was a means to an end in order to suppress Democratic votes. Following both his and Crist's refusal to aid in implementing voter suppression tactics, they were effectively abandoned by the Republican party and they both have since left the party. Crist is even toying with the idea of running for political office again, but this time, as a Democrat.

If what they say is true and I believe without a shadow of a doubt that it IS true, then a federal investigation needs to be looked into for the actions of the GOP in Florida and other states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas. If you are an American citizen then you have the RIGHT to vote, regardless of your political affiliation. The idea that a political party fears the votes of the very people they once oppressed so much that they would even attempt to ensure those persons' would be unable to vote is just heinous and spits in the face of everything our Founding Fathers stood for.