Similar to the saying about the only certain things are death and taxes, one certainty when covering the liberal media is that MSNBC will complain about voter ID laws and little to no early voting being voter suppression efforts and Tuesday night was no different with the culprits being Rachel Maddow and disgraced former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams.
Williams set the scene early in the network’s Super Tuesday 4 coverage by commenting that there are so many young liberals backing Bernie Sanders as a way of bucking the establishment, but have faced stiff opposition. In mid-sentence, however, Williams seemed to lose his train of thought, but not before Maddow gave him an assist.
Being a helpful co-host, Maddow ruled that “the nuts and bolts reason” that young voters have been resistant to participating in the voting process is due to “the impediments to voting” being “so frustrating.”
As Williams nodded in agreement, Maddow went on a tirade lamenting first how “some of the impediments to voting, I think, are on purpose, things that just make voting harder to make it harder, taking away same day registration and taking away early voting days and voter ID and all that stuff.”
The primetime host of her eponymous show continued by wallowing over the need for voters in closed primaries to have a deadline to register with one particular party and utterly ignored the idea that voters should be aware of these deadlines and make a decision so they can be as best an informed member of the citizenry as possible.
Applying the analogy to voting as, say, taking a test, a student doesn’t cry foul when they don’t ensure that they show up to take a test on a certain day or arrange a time/place with the teacher to take it some other time (i.e. voting absentee.). Of course, this thinking falls on deaf ears for the left.
“In a lot of states it's like the hoops they make people jump through that so many of the states are voting for, you had to have changed your party to the party in which you were going to vote for in the primary tonight by the end of March or by the beginning of April because they needed to make sure that you were put in your lane well before anybody campaigned in your state or you got interested in this contest,” Maddow complained.
Coming to her conclusion, Maddow argued that showing poll workers that you are the person you say you are is why young people don’t vote: “[T]hose kinds of both bureaucratically and politically motivated hurdles are the things that turn young people off who could otherwise be enthused about this stuff. It makes me crazy.”
A few minutes later, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd stated his support for Maddow’s short commentary and placed blame for voter ID laws, no early voting, same day registration, and closed primaries on “old fashioned urban machine politics” (read: Democratic Party mayors):
And by the way, if you're upset at how these voting laws work, we can blame old fashioned urban machine politics from 30, 40, 50 years ago where they wanted to do all that straight ticket business and they did want to make it hard for new voters to show up and participate. These old, urban mayors ought now — these new ones, ought to get rid of the laws. I think you’re right, Rachel.
The relevant portions of the transcript from MSNBC’s The Place for Politics 2016 on April 26 can be found below.
MSNBC’s The Place for Politics 2016
April 26, 2016
6:42 p.m. Eastern
BRIAN WILLIAMS: There are so many topics, really that we need to get to tonight. One of them? Young, first time voters for Sanders. To hear the grown-ups talking on cable and other places move on, get with it, fall in line. No. They're not wired that way. They just came to the process for — I know I'm not the first person to say that, but —
RACHEL MADDOW: No, but it’s important and actually, that's the nuts and bolts reason that the impediments to voting are so frustrating
WILLIAMS: Absolutely.
MADDOW: And some of the impediments to voting, I think, are on purpose, things that just make voting harder to make it harder, taking away same day registration and taking away early voting days and voter ID and all that stuff. In a lot of states it's like the hoops they make people jump through that so many of the states are voting for, you had to have changed your party to the party in which you were going to vote for in the primary tonight by the end of March or by the beginning of April because they needed to make sure that you were put in your lane well before anybody campaigned in your state or you got interested in this contest and those kinds of both bureaucratically and politically motivated hurdles are the things that turn young people off who could otherwise be enthused about this stuff. It makes me crazy.
(....)
6:46 p.m. Eastern
CHUCK TODD: And by the way, if you're upset at how these voting laws work, we can blame old fashioned urban machine politics from 30, 40, 50 years ago where they wanted to do all that straight ticket business and they did want to make it hard for new voters to show up and participate. These old, urban mayors ought now — these new ones, ought to get rid of the laws. I think you’re right, Rachel.
