The Republican Party is mired in a series of controversies involving accusations of voter suppression.

The Republican Secretary of State who is running for governor of Georgia is taking a lot of public relations and legal heat for purging 53,000 people from the voting list for the Nov. 6 election. Most of these newly disenfranchised are people of color.

New Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh cast the critical swing vote in favor of removing Native Americans from voters’ lists in North Dakota because they have box number addresses rather than the customary street addresses, at the request of the federal government.

And there are reports of voters disappearing from the lists of the eligible in Florida, with the GOP at the forefront of the controversy.

Though I am personally appalled at what I consider attempts to rig the only game in which the common riff-raff have any power, theses kinds of shenanigans have been documented in days gone by. Who can forget the poll tax, the voting literacy test and many other attempts to limit the numbers of certain kinds of voters, the poor, women and people of color, particularly in the deep South?

But I hear tell there’s a story about “town and gown” voting issues in Texas that are very close to what I experienced as editor of the Albion Evening Recorder almost 40 years ago.

It seems a predominantly white town is home to Prairieview A & M University, a predominantly black college. The town spent many years trying to keep those black students away from the polls at election time because they only temporarily live here and they don’t reflect the values and opinions of the local folks.

Townsfolk have held that their local elections shouldn’t be decided by the influence of young people who won’t be living here in years to come, so they aren’t affected by decisions of today. The college students insist it’s a matter of being disenfranchised just because of where they live for nine months out of the year.

It is very inconvenient to insist college students travel to their home towns to vote on one election day. It’s also not right to make them jump through hoops others don’t have to, such as making arrangements for absentee voting in their home towns.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled consistently on this issue through the years and has sided every time with the students.

I remember in 1980 the Albion Public School system failed three times to pass a sorely needed millage request. It was in the fall of 1980 that the request was finally approved. The reasons were the asking price was lowered and the participation of Albion College students.

A hue and cry went up against the millage results, with opponents accusing the school officials and their allies of getting college students to the polls to saddle district residents with taxes they won’t have to pay.

But it needs to be said that just about the only power people have in a democracy or a constitutional republic is at the ballot box. And I can’t get over the nagging feeling that the people currently in power want to keep things that way and will defend the status quo to the hilt.

My biggest problem with the entire process is the realization that if voting is the only power the people really have, the rich and powerful will use very effective means to get what they want. They do it with marketing and advertising. And folks, they are very good at it.

If slick marketing and advertising can get us to buy bottled water when the critical substance is essentially free otherwise, we are in big trouble.

I don’t know who said it, but I read somewhere about 30 years ago the argument that people in a democratic society eventually will vote away all their freedoms. All it really takes is clever marketing and advertising.