The GOP’s shameful war on voters
As a general rule, I don’t agree with Republican lawmakers, since they’re generally wrong. But after looking into one of their main issues, I have to agree with them: Our elections are being rigged.
Anyone who takes an honest look can see that the electoral process all across the country is being stolen in broad daylight — by Republican lawmakers. In state after state, GOP governors and legislators are on a rampage to rig the system so you can’t vote. By “you” I mean African Americans, Latinx voters, Asian Americans, indigenous peoples and practically all other nonwhite citizens. And seniors, union members, poor people, students, immigrant families and others with a tendency to vote for Democrats. By fraudulently shouting that “you people” are engaged in massive, orchestrated campaigns to vote illegally, GOP officials insist that they must steal your democratic right to vote in order to protect the “sanctity” of the vote!
Bizarrely, they are actually confessing their own embarrassing weakness and political ineptitude. In short, they are practically shouting, “We can’t win!” Their lineup of squirrelly, increasingly kooky candidates — and their anti-people, corporate-serving agenda — have no ability to draw majority support. So, their only hope to be elected is to jerry-rig America’s democratic process with a slew of barriers, locks, red tape, bans and other gimmicks and shut millions of citizens out of their polling places.
It’s both pathetic and disgraceful, but their 7 million-vote defeat in last year’s presidential race has spooked the Republican majority into a stampede of voter-suppression initiatives this year, pushing new proposals in Congress, the courts and state legislatures. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that at least 235 bills have been introduced in 43 states to further obstruct Americans from casting ballots.
The new schemes are aggressively repressive, aimed at preventing absentee voting, cutting early voting, eliminating mail-in voting, restricting the number and convenience of polling locations, and otherwise making it hard for people to exercise their most basic right of citizenship. Some proposals target specific groups, such as disallowing voting booths on college campuses and preventing early voting on Sundays (when many Black churches provide rides to the polls following services). And some are flagrantly autocratic, such as an Arizona bill allowing legislators to toss the voters’ choice in presidential candidate and declare another candidate the victor.
In February, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was roundly denounced for running off to a sunny luxury resort in Cancun, Mexico, during the deep freeze that devastated millions of his constituents. But I wasn’t mad that Ted fled; I was mad that the government let him back into our country.
Cruz is, after all, the two-legged, maniacal, self-aggrandizing ego who arrogantly tried to discard the ballots of millions of voters in the presidential election. Then, in January, he amplified claims of voter fraud along with then-President Donald Trump, who duped a crowd of Trumpeteers into storming our nation’s Capitol in an attempt to seize control of our government by force. Now, having failed to pull off his coup of clowns, the extremist wannabe autocrat is asking the Supreme Court to suppress the people’s democratic will.
In particular, he has teamed up with the sour old corporate plutocrat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to insert themselves into an Arizona case involving discrimination, specifically meant to disenfranchise Latinx, indigenous Americans and Black voters. Cruz and McConnell demand that the court’s six Republican justices kill America’s landmark Voting Rights Act by excising Section 2. It prohibits states from altering election rules to give minority voters less opportunity than Anglos to participate in the political process.
In 2016, Arizona’s Republican lawmakers passed a nasty provision declaring that any ballot cast in the wrong precinct, no matter how valid the ballot, must be tossed in the trash, rather than merely being allocated to the voter’s correct precinct. This almost entirely affects people of color, for GOP election officials play partisan games with them by frequently
moving their voting places, often at the last minute with little notice. Ted and Mitch, however, see nothing nefarious in this sneaky cheat. Indeed, they want the court to nullify Section 2, allowing states to change the time, place and manner of voting whenever they want, even if the changes hurt minority voters.
The theft of our democracy doesn’t happen in a violent coup but in a thousand legalistic cuts by crooks like Ted Cruz. He’s just one example of the gross, repugnant thievery by political thugs who’re not just stealing people’s birthright but stealing from America itself. To help reject their depravity — and see what they are doing in your state — go to CommonCause.org.
Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites.