This week’s Herald column: GOP gaming the vote

A clip:

An insidious trend has emerged over the last several election cycles, whereby the Republican Party, faced with looming demographic Armageddon, has found ever more creative ways to kneecap the opposing team. In shorthand: The game is that if you can’t convince people to vote for you, then reduce the number of people who are eligible to vote against you.

Gov. Rick Scott has waded into that territory with his gambit to rid the state’s voter rolls of phantom, foreign voters. This, despite the lack of any evidence that noncitizens have been storming the voting booths. (Foreign money, meanwhile, still has a pathway into our elections, thanks to Citizens United and the potential for multinationals to purchase the candidates of their liking.)

Scott’s purge is of a piece with other GOP drives to make it harder for the kinds of people who tend to support Democrats: union members, young voters, people with Hispanic (or for that matter, Haitian) surnames, to cast a ballot. And whether it’s voter ID laws, snuffing out “souls to the polls” on Sunday; firing U.S. attorneys who wouldn’t go along with trumped-up voter fraud probes, as happened during the George W. Bush years; or harassing would-be balloters by comparing their names to lists of felons (thanks, Jeb!) or lists of supposed foreigners, the goal is the same. It’s about combating the coming doom that awaits a political party increasingly dependent on a diminishing commodity: older, white voters. They, along with corporate bosses and highly religious white working-class men and their wives, form the three-legged stool upholding the GOP.

Read more here.

UPDATE: TPM reports the Justice Department has ordered a halt to Scott’s voter purge. (Original report here.)