Martin Longman asks this question:
Here’s a question. Is the current situation in which the Republicans are systematically trying to limit how many people can vote (and the Democrats are trying to make it easier for people to vote) a natural byproduct of America’s two-party system?
In other words, would it really ever be in the interests of a major political party to restrict voting in a multi-party system?
I don’t know if it’s strictly in their interests, but the Conservatives in Canada (a multi-party system) are trying the same thing:
And so we face the likelihood, as incredible as it sounds, of the government using the majority it won in the last election to pass a bill widely perceived as intended to fix the next — and contesting that election in the shadow of illegitimacy the bill would cast. It will do so, what is more, not in spite of the opposition it has aroused, but because of it: because it has convinced itself that all such opposition, from whatever source, proceeds from the same implacably partisan motives as its own.
This is how you get to 28% in the polls: when every criticism is only further proof that you’re right. It’s one thing to fleece the rubes in the grassroots with this nonsense —They’re all out to get us! Please send money! — but when you start to believe your own rhetoric, your brains turn to mush. It makes you incapable of acknowledging error, or even the possibility of it. And so it blinds you to the train wreck to which you are headed.
Apparently after you figure in the exchange rate 27% in the US is 28% in Canada.
(That Canada link is from Jay Rosen.)