Obama won re-election in spite of Republicans suppressing the vote

Can the GOP recover?    Not just from losing the election.  Not just from their ideological split.   Not just from the dumbing down of their party and letting the far right wing pull them their way.  Not just from having run a campaign based on distortions, lies, non-disclosure, and hypocrisy.

I'm thinking today about what must be a deep-seated collective shame from having tried, once again, to steal the election.   Or are they incapable of shame?   Most of us, I think, would be ashamed if the only way we thought we could win is to lie, distort, cheat, and suppress the opposition vote.

Now we have some objective evidence to back up what we all knew:   that Republican controlled states were going all out to suppress the voting of those likely to vote for Democrats.

Assistant Professor Theodore Allen of Ohio State University has studied the voting day experience and determined that as many as 49,000 voters in Central Florida alone did not vote because of problems at the polls.   If they had, Obama's margin of victory over Romney would have been 11,000 higher.

Beyond the voter ID laws, the most egregious of these suppression tactics led to some people having to wait in line as long as 9 hours.   Many, of course, simply did not/could not wait and did not vote.   This affected working class people and African-American and Hispanic voters most of all.

Several things contributed to this:   Florida decreased the number of early voting days by almost half, and they had an excessively long ballot, cluttered with meaningless trivial referendums, apparently designed to make it take much longer to vote, thus causing the lines to back up and up.

Needless to say, Obama won anyway.   So this both proves that decisions by the election board did suppress the vote -- and that President Obama won re-election anyway.   But it could have flipped the vote if it had been closer, not only in Florida but also in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which also had similar problems.

Yes, Republicans lost overall in the national elections -- but they still control the state houses.  So we're not done with this problem yet.

Ralph