Greetings!
Federal employees take an oath to support and defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It appears in the oaths of Representatives and Senators, members of the military, and most police organizations. (Interestingly, a President’s oath doesn’t have the same wording because their oath is defined in the Constitution.) To me, few things fit “domestic enemy” better than any group trying to steal your vote, or the vote of any American.
Of course, US voter suppression is nothing new. One ruthlessly effective example is the suppression of the Black vote under Jim Crow, but people have been barred from the polls through violence, threats, and lies since our founding. Gerrymandering is just another kind of vote theft, but it’s gleefully practiced by every politician in power and is almost seen as traditional politics. But while ‘both sides’ play hardball, what started years ago in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Wisconsin, and Kansas has grown to the point that it’s not traditional politics at all anymore. Unless it’s a return to that Jim Crow tradition.
With just days until Election Day, instead of either preaching to the choir or trying to convince the unconvinceable, I want to think about something that’s not about Donald Trump specifically. It seems even the mythical ‘both sides’ should agree on it, but they don’t… the fundamental bedrock principle of The Vote is under threat. An American political party is actively, openly, and successfully depriving Americans of their Right To Vote. Let that sink in…
An American political party is openly stealing the Right To Vote from real Americans.
By the tens of thousands. By the millions.
Today’s Vote thieves are Republican, not necessarily Trumpian. He’s reaping the benefits, but these Republican efforts were going on long before Trump. Republican policies designed to serve the Rich and White don’t poll well in an increasingly Poor and Not-White country, which they’ve known well before the Republican Autopsy of 2013 spelled it out. But rather than adapting they’ve chosen to respond to an ever-narrowing slice of the populace.
Now they just can’t appeal to enough people to win. Paul Weyrich is one of the Republicans who occasionally says the quiet part out loud… “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Wielding the fiction of voter fraud, something that affects .0003 percent of the vote in the real world, Republicans have targeted thousands, hundreds of thousands, MILLIONS of people to scrub even the possibility of their vote. And for the Republicans who may think stealing Democrats’ votes is OK… these weren’t the votes of ‘Democrats’. They were the votes of Americans. The Vote Theives scrubbed huge swaths of voting rolls with no way to know how any of these people planned to vote, just suspicions. They knew that huge numbers of ‘their’ people would lose their rights as well, but hey… collateral damage be damned.
I know the election is less than a week away. I want nothing more than to see the Mango Mussolini removed. But amid all the abominations that came along with Trump, not all of them are because of him. No matter who wins, that’s something that can’t get lost in January.
Make a great day,
Digging Deeper…
Texas Supreme Court rules in favor of limiting ballot drop box locations, Tal Axelrod in The Hill, Oct 27, 2020
Timeline: Voter suppression in the US from the Civil War to today, Terrance Smith on ABC News, Aug 2020
How Democrats Suppress The Vote, Eitan Hersh on FiveThirtyEight, Nov 2015
An “Epidemic” of Voter Suppression (in Wisconsin), Bruce Murphy in Urban Milwaukee, Nov 2016
Crist and GOP Officials Acuse Republicans of Voter Suppression, Gavin Aronsen on Mother Jones, Nov 2012
Let People Vote: Our Fight for Your Right to Vote During 2020, Dale Ho, ACLU, Oct 2020
“I Do Solemnly Swear That I will…”, Jeff Neal on FedSmith, Jan 2017
Report: Trump commission did not find widespread voter fraud, Marina Villeneuve, AP, Aug 2018
Turzai’s voter ID remark draws criticism, Laura Olson in Post-Gazette Harrisburg Bureau, Jun 2012
What You Need to Read in the RNC Election-Autopsy Report, Garance Franke-Ruta in The Atlantic, Mar 2013
A Voting-Rights Debate Reveals Why Democrats Keep Losing, David Graham in The Atlantic, Apr 2019
Trump 2016 campaign ‘targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting’, Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian, Sep 2020
Kris Kobach’s Voting Sham Gets Exposed in Court, NYTimes Editorial Board, Mar 2018
Unsealed Documents Show That Kris Kobach Is Dead Set on Suppressing the Right to Vote, ACLU, Oct 2017
How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed, Jessica Huseman on ProPublica, Jun 2018
The lawsuit challenging Georgia’s entire elections system, explained, PR Lockhart on VOX, May 2019
U.S. House investigation targets Kemp and Georgia voting problems, Mark Niesse in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar 2020
The Uncounted: America’s Ghost Voters, Greg Palast, GregPalast.com
Midterms 2018: Brian Kemp Is the Martin Shkreli of Voter Suppression, Eric Lach on The New Yorker, Nov 2018
U.S. House report: Kemp mocked allegations of voter suppression, Robin Bravender on Georgia Recorder, Feb 2020
Here’s a History of Rick Scott’s Attacks on Basic Democracy and Voting Rights, Jerry Iannelli in Miami New Times, Feb 2019
Rick Scott has made enemies over voting rights during the last eight years, Steve Bousquet in Tampa Bay Times, Apr 2018
Case Studies in Voter Suppression: Profiling Voter Suppressors, Danielle Root and Aadam Barclay in Center for American Progress, Nov 2018
Republicans’ Massive Voter Purge Designed to Steal 2020 Election, Interview with Greg Palast, Between the Lines, Jul 2020
Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions Is America a democracy? The Guardian, Nov 2019
