Conservative Columnist: Poor People Shouldn’t Vote

By Emily Crockett, Campus Progress; September 7, 2011 - AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/662491

This is one of those moments in politics when an ideology unleashes its id. In a stunningly out-of-touch recent column, right-wing commentator Matthew Vadum said that poor Americans — or what he calls “nonproductive segments of the population” — really just have no place voting.

The column published in the conservative on-line magazine American Thinker opens with this gem:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. [Emphasis in original]

Vadum’s conspiracy-theory nonsense of a thesis is this: registering welfare recipients to vote amounts to a targeted effort to undermine American democracy because Richard Cloward and Frances Scott Piven (who are also long-time targets of Glenn Beck) tried to overwhelm the welfare rolls of New York City to prove a point — in the 1970s.

“Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor,” Vadum writes. “It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money."

It’s a stomach-churning argument that dismisses the disadvantaged and the unemployed as pawns whose interests don’t matter. While Vadum’s argument is extreme, it sheds an ugly light on conservative motives for passing restrictive Voter ID laws. Such laws disproportionately affect low-income persons as well as young people, people of color, older Americans, and the disabled.

Conservative officials across the country say the laws are intended to reduce voter fraud but, as Campus Progress has revealed, they actually result in mass disenfranchisement of disadvantaged populations.

(Voter ID Laws: Fake Solution to a Fake Problem)

As TPM notes, “Vadum's column is notable because he isn't just pretending to be worried about the nearly non-existent threat of in-person voter fraud -- he just doesn't think poor people should be voting.”

In a follow-up post, Vadum says:

"Of course those who are legally qualified to vote should be allowed to vote but our tax dollars shouldn't be used to underwrite the destruction of the republic."

Translation: “I’m not saying poor people shouldn’t vote. I’m just saying they shouldn’t vote.”

Presumably, Vadum would see no problem with voter registration drives at country clubs, nor with rich people “voting themselves more benefits” in the form of corporate tax loopholes.

And it’s been a few years since the recession started, so Vadum’s probably forgotten that when Wall Street bankers “helped themselves to others’ money” in the form of wild speculation, it made a whole lot more people “non-productive” than before.

It is clear that Vadum doesn’t trust the poor at the polls, just as other conservatives don’t seem to trust students or multi-lingual Americans.

Talk about paternalism.