When you think of the ugly term "voter suppression," you may think of tactics such as denying people the right to vote based on their race or some other unjust factor, or perhaps imposing a poll tax with the goal of keeping the poor from voting.
But in a bizarre reinterpretation of the term "voter suppression," the ACLU and another liberal organization have sued in Florida because the state supposedly does not have a long enough period for early voting. A new Florida law reduces from 14 down to eight the number of days on which voters may cast ballots in advance of a given election.
According to the ACLU, giving voters "only" eight days, in addition to Election Day itself, to cast ballots amounts to "voter suppression." A Democrat senator in Florida told McClatchy Newspapers the law was "un-American," "an abomination" and "unconscionable."
Really? Is it so terribly burdensome to ask voters in this, the freest nation in the world, to take a tiny bit of time out of their schedules, during either eight days of early voting or on Election Day, to exercise their extremely important right to cast ballots?
To the contrary, we wonder sometimes whether some of our citizens may not value voting as highly as they should, precisely because all the emphasis the past few years has been on making voting as convenient as possible.
Undue barriers to voting are very much to be avoided.
But not dragging out early voting for weeks on end is hardly "voter suppression."