The Erickson Report for September 16 to 29, Page 2: But wait, there's more!

Moving on to another issue raised by the summer, one equally happy.

I must tell you this bluntly: Our democracy is at risk. It is at risk of becoming - at least at the national level - just a shell, a facade of demonstration elections with outcomes predetermined to benefit those who already need no benefits, a game we play, a story we tell ourselves.

Understand I do not say this lightly. But what we need to realize is that we do not have to become an overt right-wing police state in order to make our elections meaningless. It isn't necessary for the right-wing to control everything about our elections - it's only necessary for them to control enough. Enough electoral votes to keep the presidency in their control, enough precincts in enough states to keep the Senate in their control, enough state legislatures to control redistricting to keep - or at the moment, regain - enough House seats to control that as well.

The weapon being used is voter suppression because in each case, at each level, the key for them is not winning enough votes but controlling who can vote, striving to ensure that only those most likely to vote as they would desire be able to vote and those least likely to support them be prevented from doing so. Which means, ultimately, keeping minorities, students, and the poor away from the ballot box.

This actually is not new. Not by any means. In her recent book One Person, No Vote, Professor Carol Anderson, Chair of African-American studies at Emory University, described how ever since the 15th Amendment, which banned preventing people from voting on account of race, racists, especially but not exclusively in the South, have been trying to find ways to exclude blacks from voting while being able to claim it has nothing to do with race. And every time one method was struck down, they came up with another one. Some of those methods persisted into the 1960s: Literacy tests were around until the Voting Rights Act in 1965; poll taxes persisted until the adoption of the 24th amendment in 1964 and a Supreme Court decision in 1966.

It's nothing new. Only the methods have changed. Now it's ID laws that just by chance of course, affect far more blacks than whites and far more of the poor than those wealthier, it's voter purges that just by chance of course, wind up kicking far more blacks than whites off the voter rolls, it's "provisional ballots" to make people who have been challenged that they have voted when they haven't.

And this year, something new has been added: With the prospect of a massive increase in mail ballots, we have "administrative reforms" in the US Postal Service which, and always just by coincidence of course, threaten to significantly slow down the delivery of mail-in ballots, which just by coincidence of course are more heavily used by Democratic voters than GOPper ones.

If you intend to vote by mail, do it as soon as possible, in fact do it now!

And this: I normally tell people in presidential elections that if you live in a safe state, one that will certainly go red or blue, then vote for a third party. But this year - and I feel really creepy saying this - I'm telling you to vote for Joe Biden. Because I want President Tweetie-pie to not only lose the electoral vote, I also want him to lose the popular vote by such a margin that even he could not rationally claim the result was rigged - because I truly fear that if he can make such a claim no matter how far-fetched, he will and I fear even more what could come of that.