Who wants to end early voting in Nevada?
Submitted by Kirk Caraway on Sat, 03/19/2011 - 4:44pm
I missed this one yesterday, that Assemblyman Cresent Hardy (R-Mesquite) introduced a bill to eliminate early voting in Nevada.
Huh?
Considering that early voting is hugely popular, accounting for about half of the votes in the last election, why does Hardy have a problem with this?
According to him, some group in Las Vegas who he will not name asked him to introduce the bill. Why would this group not want to be named?
Hardy said the group was concerned about "voting violations," though Hardy said he didn't personally know of any violations.
Nor does anyone else, it seems. If there is some actual evidence of violations happening because of early voting, perhaps someone in this secret group can crawl out from under their rock for long enough to present the evidence.
Or maybe Hardy, pretending to be an effective legislator, could maybe have done at least a modicum of due diligence and dug up even one suspected violation before wasting taxpayer resources introducing this bill.
And speaking of wasting tax dollars, counties would have to spend millions of dollars they don't have on additional voting machines if this bill were to somehow pass. Guess Hardy didn't get the memo about the giant hole in the state budget. He's still partying like it's 1999.
So it seems the real deal here is this secret group just wants to make it harder to vote. Hardy basically admits to this. He is quoted in the story linked above as saying, "Some will say (his bill) will make it harder to get people to vote, but if you are dedicated you still will vote."
This seems to be part of the agenda for a certain group of people (Tea anyone?) who think only those who are "dedicated" enough should vote.
It's not just here, but other places as well. In New Hampshire a bill was introduced that would have prohibited college students from voting in their college towns unless they were registered there before enrolling. In other words, it would have forced most students to run back to their home towns on election day to cast ballots. It was a clear case of a certain political party trying to take the vote away from a group of people who tend to vote the other way.
Gee, that's a great way to teach democracy to our young people, isn't it?
Then you have the Tea Party leader who wants to roll back voting rights to allow only landowners to cast ballots.
Talk about taxation with representation. Or, does this mean non-landowners don't have to pay taxes?
Each party wants to get their people to the polls. That's a good thing, encouraging people to become part of the process.
But trying to restrict certain groups from voting is outright un-American, un-democratic and shameful. This secret group that persuaded Assemblyman Hardy to sponsor his bill to kill early voting know how shameful this is, which is why I suspect their members don't want to be revealed.
Assemblyman Hardy, unless your secret friends come out of the shadows and present some evidence to support these accusations of voting violations, you should do the honorable thing and withdraw the bill.
Or maybe you can buy one of those powdered wigs and pretend like you are serving in the House of Lords circa 1770 instead of the 2011 Nevada Legislature.
