Last week, Senator Warner took his turn as left wing demagogue comparing long voting lines to de facto poll taxes. Starting at about minute 37:00 of the Senate hearing, Warner responds to Boxer’s over the top presentation on voting lines: “This (long voting lines) becomes a de facto poll tax. Those who can afford to stand in line for hours can do it, those can’t afford, can’t. .
It is surprising that Senator Warner is attacking others for long voting lines and comparing them to racist poll taxes since he once served as the Governor of Virginia from 2002 to 2006 and presided over the longest lines in 20 years, according to USA Today. The Senator may not have remembered the long lines of the 2004 Presidential Election where USA Today reported on a record numbers of Virginia voters who suffered from his very own de facto poll taxes.
By all signs, voters were engaged. At one polling place in a Virginia suburb of Washington — where there was no hotly contested local race to spur interest — nearly 100 people were in line when the polls opened at 6 a.m., in a turnout that one voter was the largest she had seen in 20 years of voting at the location.…There were long lines at polling places, and officials predicted record turnout in the first wartime election in a generation.
Instead of rational discourse to fix the issue of lines, Senator Warner offered an emotional partisan outburst that is contrary to the findings of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration that found the long lines were limited and the result of polling place management and other administrative reasons, not a result of racial discrimination. Warner wanted a boogeyman; instead he saw his reflection in the mirror.