Trump, GOP & Voting Rules: Skip the Fair, Open, Honest, and Just System For Theirs

Trump and GOP Polling Place for 2020

FYI Mr. Trump and Mr. & Mrs. GOP 

(The people are a lot smarter than you)

Note: The following post has been updated - minor additions.

Simple Premise: Our voting process should be simple, convenient, and fair for everyone. But millions of Americans never make it on the rolls or to the polls.

There are frequently now more hurdles like long lines, limited voting times, malfunctioning voting equipment, and possibly illegal voter roll purging and a few other devious methods to hamper the process – including false statements and myths about “voter fraud” which is NOT factor despite the hype otherwise from the experts on this subject.

America a democracy, but why do some elements work so hard to deny millions of Americans their constitutional right to vote? 

Many Republicans admit that voter disenfranchisement is their centerpiece strategy time and time again (call it fancy footwork or just routine GOP historical dirty tricks). 

Because he says those things doesn't make them true

(Maybe he is the fraud, fake, and conspiracy nut)

The simplicity of any GOP plan, and the shamelessness with which they pursue it, has turned the current coronavirus crisis into a genuine threat to our democracy. Recent elections in Georgia and Wisconsin make that starkly clear.  Just recently, voters had to wait in line to vote for up to seven hours in Georgia.

Now no funding for USPS on the table as mail-in ballot issue picks up steam.

History thus far on the common talking point from Trump: Voter fraud is real, illegals are voting by the thousands, mail-in ballots are corrupt, and the “fake media” won’t tell truth – they are the enemy of the people not me or the GOP.

There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud for example in Wisconsin recently. And, nation-wise practically non-existent (see link above same subject).

The dispute about purging voters is the latest in a series of voting rights brawls in Wisconsin, considered one of the most important states in the upcoming presidential election. 

In recent years, Republicans drew electoral districts that severely benefitted their party, unsuccessfully tried to limit early voting, and implemented a strict voter ID law. The law discouraged as many as 23,252 people in the state from casting a ballot in 2016, one estimate found.

WI Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said in reaction to various comments: “If there’s bad behavior on the part of one side or the other to prevent people from voting, this is bad for our democracy.” 

WI AG Democrat Josh Kaul, who also represented the DNC in the 2016 NJ lawsuit that argued the GOP was coordinating with Trump to intimidate voters. Kaul argued then that Trump’s campaign “repeatedly encouraged his supporters to engage in vigilante efforts” in the guise of ferreting out potential voter fraud. The Republican Party of course, disputed any coordination.

Also just recently, Georgia proceeded with a mass purge of 300,000-plus voters from the rolls, despite an activist group founded by Democrat and former GA Gov. candidate, Stacey Abrams who was asking a court to halt the SOS and GOP candidate, Brian Kemp’s plan (see more on that below).

Voter suppression as a tactic – from strict ID laws to closing polling places to purging voter rolls – is deliberately making it hard for minority communities in America, which traditionally lean towards the Democratic party. 

Disenfranchisement of minority voters:

Recent reporting has revealed indisputable voter suppression efforts in ND and GA and appear to specifically target Native Americans and Black Americans. While these racist disenfranchisement efforts are obviously notable in the lead-up to next month’s midterm elections, the media continues to fail the public when they simply focus on the impact in the short-term and turn the story into another horse-race conversation rather than the long-term, conservative-led effort to systematically dismantle voting rights for people of color, and their effort won’t go away after November 6, 2018, either – believe it.

On October 9, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to suspend a lower federal court ruling that requires ND voters to show identification with a residential address in order to vote. This effectively disenfranchises Native American tribal residents, as many do not have the acceptable identification or don’t list residential addresses on their IDs.

But, as their lawyers explained for them as the plaintiffs in the original court case explained here, the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t deliver to residences in rural tribal communities so residents instead list P.O. boxes on tribal IDs and ND does not allow that a valid address.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that “the risk of disfranchisement is large” in clearing the way for the state to enforce this voter ID requirement after it had previously been blocked during primary voting.

Ironically, and on the same day, The AP reported that Georgia SOS Brian Kemp, who is also running for governor on the Republican ticket, actively purged “over 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012,” and he still has “over 53,000 registrations sitting on hold.” 

AP’s analysis revealed that nearly 70 percent of the 53,000 “on hold” registrations were those of Black voters, an astonishing statistic when the state population is only 32 percent Black. The reasons for holding a registration vary, and can include simple errors in entry or “a dropped hyphen in a last name, for example.”

Both of these efforts began well before the current election cycle. Mother Jones reports that ND Republicans began tightening state voter ID laws after Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D) was first elected in 2012.

Kemp was first elected in 2010, but his office began its purge as early as 2012 as well. It’s not the only move he has made either to suppress votes in GA recently. Both of these cases fit into the broader systemic dismantling of voting rights in America, signaled by the Supreme Court’s gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling. That and subsequent rulings granted states greater freedom to dictate their own election maps and voting requirements – tools that some states have used to create stricter barriers to voting access for communities of color.

Right-wing media have been cheering on the conservative voter suppression campaign for as long as it has been underway, helpfully propping up bogus claims of widespread voter fraud to justify this clear and targeted racist disenfranchisement.

Media silence about the systemic dismantling of voting rights – as was the case for coverage of the 2016 races should not be an option. Instead, media’s responsibility is to present the full context and actively counter the decades-long trend in voter suppression perpetrated by the right-wing’s political and media ecosystem.

Media coverage ought to focus on conveying the message that instances of voter suppression are both far from isolated, and far from random in the communities they affect. And even summing up in-depth reports that do provide this context with narrow midterms-focused headlines, like those above is itself a disservice.

My 2 cents: Well so, it begins. And, the worst from Trump 2020 is yet to kick into high gear. When it does, “Katie Bar the Door.” 

This regardless of previous predictions about such and such election being the worse ever – 2020 without any doubt will the nastiest, ugliest, meanest, and probably most expensive ever and Trump will personally see to that. His first great insult was his impeachment and now if he gets no second term that will be the top of the list. 

That would be by far the greatest rebuke of him in the public eye, and, well-deserved – he earned it. 

Bolton’s new book proves that beyond any doubt and further it clearly shows how bad he truly is, how unfit for office he is, and how uncertain about most anything to do with government operations or constitutional law he truly is. 

Now some three years late that fact is as clear as a bell. 

Thanks for stopping by.