Daily Kos is probably the most-read political blog in the U.S (www.dailykos.com). On August 1, it headlined an item “Pa-Sen: Greens Working for Santorum”, and linked to Pennsylvania newspaper stories that say the only reason the Green Party was able to obtain 100,000 signatures on its ballot access petition was that Republicans donated to the Green Party and its nominees. Underneath the quotes from these stories, DailyKos summarized the story with this sentence, “The Greens Are Now Actively Working to enable Santorum and the GOP Agenda.”
There are three groups of partially or wholly disenfranchised adult citizens in the U.S.: (1) inhabitants of the territories and commonwealths, who are unable to vote for president or congress even though they must obey the laws passed by congress; (2) ex-felons and felons in certain states; (3) members of minor parties in certain states.
DailyKos does not hold itself out to be a blog about election law. Daily Kos seems never to have expressed any concern about the voting rights of any of the three disenfranchised, or partially disenfranchised, groups of adult U.S. citizens. However, when any influential medium attacks a political party for running candidates, on the grounds that such candidacy hurts the Democratic Party’s nominees, that provides fuel for Democratic state legislators around the nation to make the ballot access laws stricter.
