“It’s just like anything in life, if there’s something you can’t have, you want it even more,” Olsen told the radio hosts. “Maybe we do need to make it harder and that that in and of itself would increase participation.”

The California Republican Party is in poor shape, but they can still hold their own when it comes to inane talking points and odd fixations. Here's the State Assembly's Republican Leader Kristin Olsen explaining why she and the party oppose state bills allowing election-day registrations and auto-enrolling voters at the DMV. It's for your own good, you see. The harder we make it to vote, why the more people would want it There are so many ways to go with this. Do we think she truly believes making it harder to vote will make more people vote? Did one of her fellow Republicans dare her to say it? We can presume she's never heard any of the stories about longtime voters that are now being denied because they cannot jump through all of the paperwork hoops that Republicans have installed in the last few election cycles—or she considers it a small price to pay, or a character-building exercise? God only knows.

Meanwhile in the real world, we learn that new Republican voting restrictions put in place elsewhere are disproportionately suppressing the votes of black Americans, just as critics noted they were designed to do. This seems to put a dent in Rep. Olsen's theory, and that would be a very big problem if she or any other Republican actually gave a damn. Like climate change, tax rates, Middle East wars, drug policies, gun violence and whether or not the sitting U.S. president is really an American citizen, however, evidence is for liberals.

