The struggle for a free and fair election
By Jim Hightower for Creators.com
Is it really so hard? Voting, I mean — smooth democratic elections with all citizens able to easily cast their ballots and with every ballot fairly counted. Is that too much for people to ask?
After all, the mechanisms for assuring universal suffrage are well known, and the logistics are not exactly rocket science.
Speaking of which, modern technologies could be our friend here — helping us vote by mail, or even by email.
That's what David Wolf did back in 1997 when he became the first astronaut to upload a secure email ballot from space to Mission Control in Houston, which passed it to his local election officials.
Hello ... if
astronauts can express their democratic choices while whizzing around Earth,
shouldn't the rest of us be able to have our say in neighborhood polling places
or, if we choose, from our own homes?
Of course — that's democracy. But it's one thing to have voting
rights and quite another to be able to exercise those rights. Today, in a
coordinated, methodical, richly funded scheme, corporate-minded and right-wing
candidates are being "elected" not by winning votes but by preventing
votes.
One of the GOP's tried-and-true vote-suppression techniques is deploying squads of partisan muscle into non-white, immigrant and other Democratic-leaning neighborhoods and precincts. These "poll watchers" single out voters they view as "suspicious" and accuse them of trying to vote illegally. They aren't subtle.
Sometimes packing guns, badges, cameras, arm bands, etc., to pose as official ballot police, they literally pull people out of line to loudly demand proof of eligibility. It's ugly and frighteningly autocratic ... and yet legal in many states.
And it's going to be bigger than ever this November because its one legal restriction has been lifted. Back in 1982, Republican thuggishness had gotten so out of hand that a federal judge imposed a consent decree to stop some of the crudest intimidation methods.
But, with the Trump campaign's
support, that ban was withdrawn in 2018, and this year's presidential election
will be the first in four decades to allow no-holds-barred voter intimidation.
The national GOP has been recruiting and training up to 50,000 partisans to confront voters in 15 key states! Adding to the mayhem,
True the
Vote, a manic fringe group of Trumpeteers, is signing up a freelance militia
that includes off-duty police officers and veterans to enforce "ballot
security" in communities of color. The group leader explained the scheme
at a February meeting of Republican operatives: "You get some Seals in
those polls and they're going to say, 'No, no ... this is how we're going to
play this show."
Don't want Black people to vote? Or tribal members on reservations? Or students on campus? Simple: Eliminate their polling places. Or just slash the budgets for voting machines, poll workers and early voting in their precincts, creating punishingly long lines and waits.
COVID-19 can turn
this systemic disenfranchisement lethal. In Georgia's June primary, for
example, poll closures and machine malfunctions created seven-hour waits for
many Black citizens to vote.
We were puzzled over President Trump's crazed hostility toward
the U.S. Postal Service. But now we see why: USPS workers could securely handle
our ballots in the coming election, making it easier and safer for America to
vote. But that would increase turnout and democracy — two things Trump hates.
Vote by mail totally discombobulates Donald.
Desperate to save himself from letter carriers, he personally killed a bipartisan congressional provision in March that ensured America's crucial mail service would survive the pandemic and installed one of his rich funders as postmaster general in May.
Louis DeJoy's first action was to sabotage timely mail delivery by
drastically cutting postal workers' hours and then removing mail-sorting
machines and street-side letter boxes. Thus, America's globally admired mail
system is being wrecked by an unhinged president determined to keep you and me
from using it to vote.
The Sightline Institute has state-by-state resources for what
you can do to protect mail-in voting in your state. Check out its website at
SightLine.org/VoteByMail2020.
Jim Hightower is
a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the
book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With
The Flow. Hightower has spent three decades battling the
Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working
families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.