Op-Ed: A big reason the South goes red? Gerrymandering and voter suppression…
Today was another big day at the University of Virginia in Blacksburg, Virginia. They had their second of three open forums around the country, this one focusing on voter registration. I was working at the first one, which was set up in the Student Union of my alma mater, James Madison University, so I was happy to be involved, and I think I made some good points in what turned out to be a very interesting talk.
This one was a little lower profile, although the topic was very much the same as the one in Charlottesville – the need for more voter access and the importance of the South going red.
I’ll start by stating something that has been brought up a lot about the South this year – the importance of voter registration. But voter registration is not the only way to register.
And as for those of my Southern friends who say that the South is going to go red? There are two different types of voting that the South has to tackle. The first is the voting system that is a “Democrat-lite” – basically a choice between two candidates who aren’t really going to change much. That is what the Democrats have been promising for a very long time and have failed to deliver.
The other type of voting is very different. It is the type of voting that the South needs to be doing. The voting system that is required to make a constitutional amendment happen in Virginia – for example – will be a type of voting system that is more like the voting system in France in the 1970s.
It didn’t feel that way in the beginning, but as the “Third Way” got more popular, as the public got more educated about the problems of the voting system in the USA, as more people looked at the voting system through a new lens – voting systems that worked in other countries – the public started to realize how wrong they had been about it.
The public was tired of having to wait in line to see a box that you had to put a stamp on to prove that you were indeed registered. The public was also tired of having to jump through hoops to verify that the information in the box