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The Media’s Failure with Voter Suppression

There isn’t “both sides.”

Peter Ramirez
3 min readNov 2, 2020
Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

Sometimes, politics can be difficult. What is the appropriate tax rate for those making a certain amount of money? What should the role of the government be in our lives?

Other times, politics is easy. Voting should be encouraged in a democracy, and those who seek to disenfranchise eligible voters ought to be exposed.

Instead, for reasons I am not quite sure of, the media falls into the all-too-familiar trap of “both-sides”-ing a discussion about voting. Democrats want to make voting more accessible to American citizens, pushing for measures like automatic voter registration, early voting periods, and mail-in ballots. Republicans want to restrict voting, because voting is a privilege for certain kinds of citizens, and they support tactics like gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, and deploying a single ballot drop off box for a county of over two million Texans.

One side wants you vote. The other side doesn’t. It’s that simple.

The media assigns some sort of moral equivalency to both stances, despite no such equivalency existing. To them, this is another neutral issue, with liberals wanting one thing, and conservatives wanting another.

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Peter Ramirez
Peter Ramirez

Written by Peter Ramirez

political science researcher. former valedictorian. reader/writer. host of “Politics Mostly” podcast.

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