NAACP to call on UN to investigate voter disfranchisement in US

From the UK Guardian courtesy of BuzzFlash:

The leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, will travel to Geneva next week to tell the UN human rights council that a co-ordinated legislative attempt is being made by states across America to disfranchise millions of black and Latino voters in November's presidential election.

The delegation, headed by the NAACP's president, Benjamin Jealous, will address the council on Wednesday and call on the UN body to launch a formal investigation into the spread of restrictive electoral laws, particularly in southern states. The NAACP intends to invite a UN team to travel across America to see for itself the impact of the new laws, which it argues are consciously designed to suppress minority voting.

The UN has no power to intervene in the workings of individual American states. But Jealous told the Guardian that the UN had a powerful weapon in its armoury: shame.

"Shame alone is effective. The US, and individual states within the US that have introduced these laws, have a vested interest in maintaining the opinion that we are the world's leading democracy. That means something," Jealous said.

More here.

Yeah, shame is right because that's what this is, a fucking shame.

The notion of the NAACP having to go to the United Nations, hat in hand, like a despised and oppressed minority in some fucked up third world dictatorship is the shame of the United States. All these Republican voter ID laws are just sickening. I mean, their ostensible purpose is to fight "voter fraud," and I have no doubt that many of the rank-and-file believe exactly that. Of course, what these Republicans don't realize is that there is no problem with voter fraud, at least, not the kind these laws are aimed, ostensibly, at combating. I mean, sure, there are some screw-ups here and there, a few assholes who just like fucking with the system, but nothing, nothing at all, in the way of fraud that would actually change an election--there's just no evidence of this anywhere.

So it really is about suppressing minority votes. It may not even be directly racist in terms of whites just not wanting people of color to vote simply because they're not white; it may be that the GOP doesn't want minorities to vote because they usually vote for Democrats. But whatever the motivation, the outcome is racist, pure and simple, the kind of thing we haven't seen since Jim Crow. And there is seemingly no help on the horizon here at home. So the NAACP is off to the UN, and every American should hang his head in shame.

Of course, even though there is no problem with voter fraud, there is a problem with election fraud, the kind of thing where the GOP works around the electoral edges, tweaking and adjusting, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, as with electronic voting machine tampering, or placing shoddy ballot equipment in Democratic precincts when Republicans control the electoral process, that sort of thing.

This is probably the grossest example, and it has affected malevolently the course and trajectory of US and even world history. Scum bag Republicans.

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