Paul Weyrich, Father of the Reagan Revolution, Founding Father of the Social Conservative Movement, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the
Free Congress Foundation speaking in a church to Republican activists (and probably not knowing he was being recorded) said this:
How many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome? Good government.
They want everybody to vote!
I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now.
As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as voting populace goes down. On edit: The GOP has been carrying out Weyrich's strategy in every election since Reagan, Rove has been a leader in the effort as has Tom Delay. The GOP has now passed laws across the country to take control of voter rolls which resulted in the theft of two Presidential elections:
Thousands of African Americans were disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.
Tens of thousands of African and Hispanic Americans were disenfranchised in 2004.
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Look how the message he delivers in public differs: Easy voting brings low participation web posted August 6, 2001
"Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter have come up with a series of recommendations aimed at increasing participation in national elections. Among the proposals the former presidents have put forth are (a) to hold elections on a national holiday, such as Veterans Day; (b) to make convicted felons eligible to vote after they have served time; (c) to permit people who aren't on the voter rolls on Election Day to vote, sorting out their eligibility in the days after the election. There are other recommendations as well.
With all due respect to these former rivals, I don't think any of these ideas has merit. I was glad to see that President George W. Bush gave these ideas only a lukewarm reception. He called the Ford/Carter report "a framework for election reform.
The truth is simply this: The easier we have made it to vote, the lower the voter participation. It stands to reason. The vote used to be regarded as a privilege. A citizen had to be 21 years old to participate. That citizen had to be registered. Often registration rules were fairly strict. They varied from state to state. Some states required that the voter be registered 90 days before the general election. Many states purged voters rolls often, so if a voter claimed to live at a certain address and didn't, he would find himself unable to vote at the next election. Despite all sorts of restrictions, voter participation was generally high."