We start with voting.Last time I briefly mentioned the issue of voter suppression, the attempt to establish self-perpetuating reactionary control of government by controlling and limiting who is allowed to vote, who is able to vote.
That is how the racists, most particularly but not exclusively in the South, maintained their power for so long: by preventing black people from voting by means such as poll taxes, aimed at poor people in general but particularly poor blacks, literacy tests with the results judged by the very white racists using them to keep their power, and whenever those failed, there was always outright physical intimidation and murder.
The methods now are more subtle but also effective. A primary one, as again I noted last time, are voter ID laws, laws which by pure coincidence, of course, demand forms of ID that minorities and the poor and students - three main groups the right-wing wants to keep away from the voting booth - are less likely to have. In fact, for example in Texas, an NRA membership card is acceptable as ID but a student ID at a university in the state is not.
These laws, which could disenfranchise millions of people across the country, are, it's invariably claimed, to prevent in-person voter fraud, where someone pretends to be someone else at the polls - the incidence of which is so vanishingly small that it is literally hard to even measure. A study by Justin Levitt, a professor at the Loyola School of Law and an expert in constitutional law, looked at local, state, and federal elections between 2000 and 2014, covering more than a billion votes could find only 31 credible accusations - not convictions, not even prosecutions, but mere accusations - of such fraud.
That's not the only evidence that claims of widespread election fraud are totally false. The right-wing Heritage Foundation maintains an online database of election fraud cases in the US covering the last 20 years and even that shows fewer than 1,300 cases of voter fraud in all forms, resulting in 1,100 criminal convictions, over that time.
Revealingly, while playing up the number of cases, the Foundation provides no information about the number of votes involved. Which is probably because counting only presidential elections, not state or local or for other national office, but only votes for president, there were about 630,000,000 votes cast 2000-2016, so 1300 cases makes for a fraud rate of at most 0.0002% - that's 2/10,000 of one percent.
In fact, studies by various researchers have repeatedly, insistently, reliably, come to the same conclusion: Voter fraud in the US in all forms is so rare as to be essentially nonexistent. Even Tweetie-pie's hand-picked Election Integrity Commission failed spectacularly in 2018 at sniffing out the supposed "widespread fraud" and his own FBI director told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on September 24 that "we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”
That last bit is important because this year, mail-in balloting is going to be particularly important and the same claims about rampant fraud, claims that the right-wing has been peddling for decades without any proof or truth, are being loudly and daily made about mail-in voting in particular, with the same measure of truth.
Consider: Over the past 20 years, about 250 million votes have been cast by a mail ballot nationally. That same Heritage Foundation database shows merely 204 cases involving the fraudulent use of absentee ballots over that time, 143 of which resulted in criminal convictions. That is a fraud rate of at most 0.00008%.
Meanwhile, Oregon started mailing ballots to all voters in 2000. In the years since, there have been over 50 million ballots cast, leading to precisely two convictions for mail-ballot fraud. That is 0.000004%. Your chances of getting hit by lightning are five times greater.
But then again, bogus claims of "fraud" are just that - bogus and lies. Even those making the claims cannot believe them, cannot take them seriously. They may be fanatics but they are not stupid. The claims of fraud are just an excuse, just a tactic - or considering how long they've been at it, maybe strategy is the better word. It has nothing to with fraud, nothing to with "protecting the integrity of voting" and everything to do with undermining faith in the process of voting, everything to do with destroying the very concept that voting means anything, carries any value.
They - and by they I mean the political right wing in this country, including the associated concentrated wealth and economic power - they want you to think that fraud is so rampant that the results of elections simply cannot be trusted so why bother, want you to become so discouraged, so disenchanted with the very idea that self-governance can function, the very idea that you can have a say in governance, so discouraged that you will simply give up trying and leave the field to the reactionaries.
And if they can't discourage you that way, they'll block you with another, a different means of voter suppression, such as voter list purges.
Voter list purges are supposedly merely a bureaucratic exercise intended to keep voter rolls up to date by removing those who have died or moved out of the district. They are not intrinsically evil but are still something that has been weaponized as another means to suppress voting.
To see why, first realize that minorities are disproportionately poor and that poor people, compared to those richer, are more likely to be renters than homeowners and so they tend to move more often. So right at the start they are more likely to be the target of a purge.
In fact, these "purges" always make me think of "pograms," especially because minorities are so often the target of these attacks on their rights, purges which - oh my what a coincidence - primarily disenfranchise minorities and the poor.
The problem - more accurately the opportunity for the right - is that such purges or often riddled with errors affecting scores of thousands of voters who may not even know they have been purged until they get to the polls and are turned away.
For example, this year Wisconsin attempted to purge 129,000 voters from the rolls on the claim that they had moved away only to have an independent analysis show 38% of those people had moved within the county - which should not have removed them from the rolls - and another 26% hadn't moved at all!
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist who has been on the voter suppression beat for years. In fact, he was responsible for arranging for that independent analysis in Wisconsin. As part of his recent book How Trump Stole 2020, he goes into how and why voter purges became a favorite tool of the right wing, not even despite the numerous errors but because of them, because even if the voter can correct the errors, it likely will not be before election day and so their vote is lost anyway.
And even these are not all the means the right wing is using and is talking about using to deny people the right to vote, to - to be direct - steal the election for Tweetie-pie and institute what amounts to authoritarian rule.
Populist Jim Hightower list a number of ways the right wing is trying to undermine the right to vote - that is, steal the election this time and eviscerate the meaning of voting along with it. In addition to what I've mentioned, he has "unleash the lawyers," with the blizzard of lawsuits challenging every attempt to make it easier to vote, "advance thuggery," noting that a consent decree that blocked most forms of voter intimidation expired in 2018, "shut the doors," suppressing the vote by closing polling places and reducing the number of voting machines in minority precincts, "kill the post office," to screw up mail-in voting, and "supreme suppression," using the Supreme Court to disenfranchise undesired voters.
And to push these anti-democratic claims, to try to advance this fundamentally un-American line of crap, no lie is too big, no hypocrisy too much. You want an example? Here's one:
You likely heard about the "NINE TRUMP BALLOTS WERE THROWN OUT! OMG! THE DEMOCRATS ARE STEALING THE ELECTION!" hysteria generated by the right wing. If all you heard was the headline, your reaction was likely along the lines of "what's going on there?" - or, if you're a Trumpster "I told ya so!"
But go a little deeper, read past the headline, and this is what you get: First, it turned out there were nine ballots, but only seven were for Trump. It's "not known" who the other votes were for. Exactly how they can know that seven were for Tweetie-pie without knowing who the others were for I don't understand and I expect neither do you beyond the obvious conclusion that they do know but just didn't want to say his name because we certainly don't want to suggest that screwups could affect anyone other than Tweetie-pie, because that would hinder the spread of the "THEY'RE STEALING THE ELECTION!" meme.
Oh, quick sidebar: It was improper for the DOJ to announce such an investigation this close to election day. And it was improper to say what candidate was potentially effected. They don't care.
Okay. Absentee ballots usually involve two envelopes, an inner one with your actual vote and an outer one with your information. The idea is simple: The other envelope contains the proof that you are you and that you voted, while your actual vote remains anonymous, put in a pile to be opened with the rest of the pile of mail-in ballots on election day. By the way, I assume I do not have to explain that there is no difference between an absentee and a mail-in ballot, that they are the same thing.
What happened is that there were absentee or mail-in ballots coming in and there were also requests for such ballots coming in. The envelopes look similar and some of the ballots were opened my mistake, thinking they were requests. If a mail-in ballot envelope is opened and the vote card is not inside the inner envelope, it's called a "naked ballot."
The incident in question happened in a county in Pennsylvania. According to reports at this point, the ballots in questions were naked ballots and in accordance with the rules, not counted, because that's what was done with naked ballots. (It appears they should not have been discarded but preserved for later canvassing, but that does not affect the fact that they would not have been counted.)
Okay, and here's the punch line: Why were those the rules? Because the Tweetie-pie campaign and the Pennsylvania GOPpers had won a lawsuit in the state Supreme Court saying that naked ballots should not be counted! So the GOPpers are now claiming election fraud based on following the very rules they insisted on.
But again, they don't care. They are transparent hypocrites. They don't care. They are transparent liars. They don't care. They are a disgrace to what it means to have a free society. They don't care. Nothing means anything to them other than what maintains and increases their power.
But don't think mere hypocrisy or lying is as far as it goes. Don't think mere voter suppression or purges or any of the rest of it is enough. There has been open talk within the right about two ways to simply ignore the election and literally hand the election to Tweetie-pie.
One is based on the fact that the constitution leaves it to each state to determine how to choose their electors to the electoral college. The idea is that states with GOPper-controlled legislatures would scream about fraud spreading through the vote like wildfire to the point where the legislature claims that it is impossible to determine the will of the people so they are simply going to appoint electors to - guess what - go vote for His High Orangeness.
The other is to use the 12th Amendment. First, right-wing goons set about creating chaos on election day and the days leading up to it. Enough right-wing legislatures use that as an excuse to say there's so much disorder, the elections can be held of there or the ballots can't be accurately counted and so the election can't be certified, with the end result that no one gets 270 electoral votes. At that point, under the 12th Amendment, the issue goes to the House. Good? No - because in that case, each state gets one vote. Wyoming counts the same as California, Alaska the same as New York.
This does not mean that either of these two scenarios is likely but the very fact they are being seriously discussed, the very fact that the right wing feels comfortable considering them, feels safe openly discussing how to literally ignore the results of elections, shows how far gone things are, how wildly power-hungry the right wing has become as it senses true lasting dominance possibly within its grasp, show how great is the risk.
The battle, I need to emphasize now, is not lost. There are groups waging the fight in the courts, there are other groups doing public education and working on ways to make sure people can get to the polls.
As individuals, right now, the best thing we can do now is, bluntly, to vote. To not let them deter or discourage us. To vote and to make damn sure it counts. Which means if you're going to vote by mail, do at ASAP. Do not wait a single day.
And if you vote in person, either early or same-day, be prepared for a wait. Bring a folding chair. Bring a book. Bring a bottle of water. But don't be stopped.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment