Honest November elections?
Although Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential electoral vote he was over two million votes short of having a popular majority. He claimed this was due to “millions of cases of voter fraud.” But like the rest of his off-the-wall accusations, there is no real evidence to support his claim.
No more than a half-century ago voter impersonation/fraud was fairly common in some northern big city political machines and southern small-county political oligarchies. Both, I might add, were heavily Democratic. The mantra back then was “Vote early — and often.”
But with modern electronic voter registration verification and ballot counting, voter fraud today is so rare as to be almost nonexistent. In 2006 for the first time there were no reported cases of attempted voter fraud in the Georgia general elections. And in 2014 a federal judge ruled that Wisconsin’s restrictive voter photo ID laws were unconstitutional due to virtually no history of voter fraud attempts in that state. In the same period only three fraud attempts were reported in Texas.
Although our president tells us voter fraud is still rampant, from the official records it appears common nowhere and rare everywhere. Couldn’t the president’s accusations of voter irregularities themselves also be considered fraudulent?
But we have another serious problem: voter suppression. It is generally known that seniors, low-income people and ethnic minorities tend to vote for Democrats. To dilute their votes,
GOP operatives have invented ingenious ways to keep these people away from the polls on election day. These include reducing the number of polling places in heavily Democratic areas, failing to repair malfunctioning voting machines, opening polling sites late, having an insufficient number of paper back-up ballots and by applying unreasonably strict voter photo ID requirements. In Atlanta’s Union City polling center in a recent election the last voter reportedly walked out early Wednesday morning. The quality of our voter participation in Georgia depends on where we live. Somebody should be held accountable for this.
One observer reported: “The systemic under-resourcing of polling locations in predominantly black communities like Atlanta is an obvious method of voter suppression by the Republican-led state legislature. Underfunding elections while at the same time spending millions on unnecessarily brutal police tactics and mass incarceration might also provide a clue as to why people are hitting the
It is generally known that seniors, low-income people and ethnic minorities tend to vote for Democrats. To dilute their votes, GOP operatives have invented ingenious ways to keep these people away from the polls on election day. These include reducing the number of polling places in heavily Democratic areas, failing to repair malfunctioning voting machines, opening polling sites late, having an insufficient number of paper back-up ballots and by applying unreasonably strict voter photo ID requirements.
streets demanding we reduce police funding and invest more in community needs like safe streets, decent schools and honest elections.”
The time to act is so short and the resistance to change so well-organized and financed that there can be no assurance of an honest presidential election November 3. And while President Trump continues to attack voting by mail as an invitation to fraud, as usual, he offers no supporting evidence.
The U. S. Senate Republican majority, of course, shows little interest in addressing this problem. But a solution must be found soon if we are to avoid another electoral crisis like that of 2000 when Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia, a Republican appointee, arbitrarily halted the Florida voting recount before it was completed and declared George W. Bush the winner. The results? Over 3,000 American lives lost in Bush’s unjustified costly war in Iraq, unbalanced tax cuts for the wealthy, unbridled deficit spending and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. All these were messes inherited by President Obama in 2009.
George B. Reed Jr., who lives in Rossville, can be reached by email at reed1600@ bellsouth.net.