Damn right the election is rigged
By 2012, 93-year-old Vivette Applewhite had voted in every Presidential election since 1960. But under Pennsylvania's new voter identification law, she would be barred from the ballot. She sued for her right to vote without a state-issued photo identification card — and lost. Determined to let her voice be heard on Election Day, she was left with no option but to obtain a state-issued ID.
It wasn’t easy: The wheelchairbound survivor of legal segregation had to take two public buses to get to her closest state Department of Motor Vehicles. When she finally trekked all the way to the DMV, she was told she didn’t have sufficient proof of who she was.
Her notoriety helped and she ended up with an ID — but technically she lacked sufficient proof, and it was more work than most people are able to put in to vote. And that’s just one of many cases of election rigging in America today. In 2008 no state required any form of identification to vote and there were only a handful of cases of alleged voter fraud.
Since 2010, 20 states have passed voting restrictions, making it significantly harder for many eligible Americans to vote. That includes 14 states that have imposed new restrictions since the 2012 election alone.
These restrictions, most notably newly restrictive voter-ID laws and the elimination of early voting, have widely been seen as a strategy to stealthily prevent black people from voting.
In fact, just this year, a Republican congressman admitted voterID laws would help suppress Democratic votes. One new study estimates a sizable impact on voting by black and Latino voters in states with strict photo-ID laws compared to states without them.
Some estimate that over a million voters will be disenfranchised in swing states by new voting restrictions in this election. And that estimate doesn’t include the 6 million Americans who have been permanently disenfranchised, despite having already served their time for felony convictions.
The point: Election rigging has been going on for some time, just not in the way Trump is claiming.
For someone whose entire persona is predicated on the notion that he is a winner, it’s no surprise that Trump is already trying to place the blame for his impending defeat on anyone he can. Of course, his loss couldn’t possibly be because his strategy of insulting everyone, speaking impulsively and dividing the nation has alienated voters — no, it must be because the fix is in.
Despite reams of research that voter fraud is extremely rare, Trump has continued to perpetuate the dangerous myth that the dead are voting. And that in certain precincts like Philadelphia — predominantly black areas — fraud is rampant. And that there is an epidemic of illegal immigrants voting “all over the country.”
There is nothing new in Trump’s trumped-up claims. He first leveled them in 2012 to decry President Obama’s reelection.
This time around, he began sowing the seeds of his stolen election narrative at the first signs that he was going to lose. In late summer, as Trump began falling behind Hillary Clinton in the polls, he said at a rally, “People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote 10 times, maybe, who knows?”
Trump has never manned up and taken responsibility for anything. Why should this election be any different than any other situation in his life?
Plenty of conservative leaders, including Sen. Marco Rubio, Charles Krauthammer and Laura Ingraham, have denounced Trump’s fact-free fearmongering about a stolen or rigged election.
What they don’t say is that they’ve been making versions of the very same unsubstantiated claims themselves for years, and using those claims to disenfranchise black and Latino voters.
Rubio voted for a bill restricting early voting when he served in the Florida House of Representatives, and backed voter-ID laws on the campaign trail with Mitt Romney in 2012. Krauthammer and Ingraham have voiced support for similar voting restrictions that disenfranchise millions.
Still, it’s good a few Republicans are finally denouncing Trump’s dangerous and outrageous claims of a rigged election. As we might say about the impending end of Trump’s campaign, better late than never.