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" On election night, when the president did that little drop-in during his victory speech about the barriers erected around the country against the full exercise of the franchise, many people were elated that somebody was finally taking seriously the fact that, here in the World&amp;#039;s Greatest Democracy, we run out elections on blueprints apparently drawn up by the Marx Brothers. Now, of course, the matter has moved into the World&amp;#039;s Greatest Deliberative Body, wherein the elves and mountain dwarves are busying themselves with the task of burying the whole thing in persiflage, a substance more thick and gooey than oatmeal, but not anywhere near as tasty. With studies suggesting that long lines at the polls cost Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes in November, party leaders are beginning a push to make voting and voter registration easier, setting up a likely new conflict with Republicans over a deeply polarizing issue.  Deeply polarizing. Voting. In the United States, in many ways, it is always 1857. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis determined that blacks and Hispanics waited nearly twice as long in line to vote on average than whites. Florida had the nation&amp;#039;s longest lines, at 45 minutes, followed by the District of Columbia, Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, according to Charles Stewart III, the political science professor who conducted the analysis. The gob remains unsmacked. But getting anything passed without Republican support will be impossible, Democrats acknowledge. And so far, conservatives have complained that Democrats are politicizing an issue that should be handled by the states, not the federal government. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s ridiculous to stand in line a couple of hours to vote,&amp;quot; said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. &amp;quot;But I think it&amp;#039;s also ridiculous to make a political issue out of it when it&amp;#039;s very easily handled.&amp;quot;  It shouldn&amp;#039;t be necessary to point this out to Senator Grassley \u2014 who, when they handed out the stupid, admittedly got in line twice \u2014 but the simplest solutions to this problem are the ones that he and his party are fighting most vigorously against. The simplest one of all is for various state legislatures to stop enacting laws for partisan purposes that make it harder for people to vote. The simplest solution is to change the legislative emphasis to expand the franchise and, if your ideas do not prevail in that expanded electorate, then simply to re-examine whether your ideas are worth having. Yeah, right. If we can&amp;#039;t get a governing consensus in 2013 that, when more people vote, our system works best for the most people, then we&amp;#039;re absolutely nowhere as a country. And it shouldn&amp;#039;t be necessary to point out to anyone over the age of four that leaving things up to the states in this regard is a bad idea at the moment, and looks even worse in historical retrospect, especially with conservative lawyers right now gearing up to try and get the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act.Because, as we know, the country&amp;#039;s far beyond all that nasty stuff that happened in the 1960s. That&amp;#039;s history, which doesn&amp;#039;t count any more. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18866/voting-rights-get-bogged-down/?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_6842643>