You say 'voter purge' like it's a bad thing...

"'Make America great again,' I didn't say
anything about American protectorates."

-Trump, actual quote*

Ok, so the GOP's cynical yet spiteful attempt to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something objectively terrible just to have a win, has failed (for the moment), the President's nutty pick for the Senate was beaten in a primary runoff by an even nuttier pick and instead of doing anything about the 3.4 million Americans in Puerto Rico without water or electricity, he's busy shouting 'you're fired!' at people who have the temerity to protest the epidemic of police violence against African American men. Did I miss anything?

Oh, and Robert Mueller is going to start interviewing White House staffers about that whole Russia thing. That's all of it, right?

I mentioned the whole declaring war via Twitter thing, right? No?
Oh, well it looks like he may have declared war via Twitter too.

"Wow, it sure is easier to win when
you don't let people who don't
like you vote, right guys?"

-The Wisconsin GOP

Anyway, surely this unmitigated shitshow will result in Trump and the GOP getting their collective ass handed to them in the next election, right? Eh...well here's the thing: according to a new study published by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that state's super-strict voter ID laws may have deterred tens of thousands of voters in the 2016 election...in a state that Trump won by just under 23,000 votes. Deterred here refers to otherwise eligible voters who didn't have the correct government issued photo ID and were either turned away at the polls, or just didn't show up in the first place.

"Hey, we totally have the best interests
of-of-sorry, I can't even get though that
with a straight face...best interests..."

-Republicans

'Boo-hoo' you say, 'they should have got their shit together sooner if they wanted to vote so bad' you continue. Whatta jerk. Sorry, that's a hypothetical proponent of the ID law that I'm pretending to quote there, not 'you' you. Anyway, the law went into effect in 2011 when Republicans got control of the legislature and since the GOP's strategy these last few years is to use shady tactics and redistricting to gain and maintain power rather than the traditional approach of having the best interests of your fellow Americans in mind, it's not outlandish to suggest that voter ID laws are motivated by politics rather than their stated aim of combating voter fraud.

Hang on, I know this one...

In fact, according to the study's lead author Kenneth Mayer:

"The number of people who were deterred from voting is many thousands of times greater than the number of cases of voter impersonation that are prevented by this law."

-Kenneth Mayer-wait, what's

ten thousand times zero?

"Hate to say I told you so, but..."

-Winner of the 2016 popular 

vote, now doing a book tour

That might sound like a figure of speech, but this is a political science professor who just published a survey about statistics, so I'm willing to believe that 'thousands of times greater' refers to a literal fact and not hyperbole. Thousands of times. Of course 'weren't able to vote' isn't necessarily the same thing as 'voted for Hillary Clinton instead of that unbalanced gameshow host that's Tweeting us into World War III', but Mayer also point to data showing that voter ID laws disproportionately prevent people of color and people with lower incomes from voting so yeah, Clinton voters.

So in many ways, a fraudulent vote in the mind of the people who crafted this law would be a vote for a non-Republican. Maybe we should vote them out next elec...oh, right...

"You got it sport!"

-Wisconsin governor Scott Walker

*sure, let's say that's real.