I beg to differ

I was surprised by this New York Times letter writer's lack of awareness of Republican moves to suppress voting so I sent in the following response...

Ms. Goldberg (Letters, Nov. 7) laments long lines to vote and posits that all sides will agree that it should not take hours to cast a vote.  But Republican-controlled state legislatures and Republican election officials demonstrated just the opposite.  Two of the more extreme examples were in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio. In Florida, Governor Rick Scott refused to reinstate early voting on Sunday in the face of intolerably long lines.  In Ohio, Republican secretary of state John Husted tried, unsuccessfully, to ban early voting during the final days before the election. Across the country, Republicans worked to erect barriers to voting. Ms. Goldberg’s assertion does not stand up to the facts. 

The letter I responded to:

To the Editor:

I write this letter with icy cold hands after spending more than an hour on line outside my polling place. How can our nation invest so much time and money on federal elections, only to have the voting process be managed so ineptly?

I suspect that this is one point on which all sides will agree: It should not take hours to cast a vote in a country where we have more than 200 years of experience at the polls.

SUZANNE B. GOLDBERG
New York, Nov. 6, 2012