To hear the American Right talk about rigged elections and voter fraud you would think that the Democrats are evil cheaters who can only win by cheating and the Republicans are honest angels who would never do anything wrong.
As usual
the truth is exactly the opposite of what you hear on Fox and related sources.
Thom
Hartmann in one of his posts a year or two ago made the remarkable statement
that the last Republican president to win an election honestly was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was president in the 1950s before I started school. One
of these days I will share that with you. Today I want to explain who is
cheating and how.
Greg Palast, writing for the Hartmann
Report, makes the case that Trump lost the 2024 election – it was voter
suppression that won.
Trump
lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal
ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin,
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won
the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
And,
if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass
disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass
“vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least
another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2
million.
Gerrymandering
Elections,
including federal elections, are run by the state so whoever runs the state
government has a lot of control on election outcomes. Each district in a state
elects its representative in the House. Careful drawing of the district
boundaries, called gerrymandering, can change the number of Democrats or Republicans
elected by concentrating or diluting the voters. This used to be illegal but
the Supreme Court legalized it in a 2013 ruling which gutted the 1965 Voting
Rights Act.
Most
Republican controlled states practice gerrymandering (because they can); most
Democratic states do not (because it’s not fair). Hartmann estimated that
without gerrymandering in the 2024 election, 10 seats in the states of N.
Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio and Utah would have
flipped to Democrat. Consider the damage the Republicans are doing now with a 5
seat majority.
Voter Suppression
Since that
Supreme Court decision Republican states have passed hundreds of laws making it
harder to vote, especially for poor, Black, disabled and elderly voters (who
happen to vote largely Democratic). On the other hand Democratic states have
passed laws making it easier to vote. Of course the Republicans justify their
actions as preventing voter fraud. Some of the methods:
· Ban or restrict mail in voting
· Disqualifying mailed in ballots for technical reasons, like the address didn't exactly match the one on record
· Strict
signature matching
· Requiring
ID documents like a driver’s license, passport or birth certificate
· Reduce
the number of voting stations and the hours they are open in poor working class
areas
· One
law in Georgia even made it illegal to give food or water to those in line
· Prison
penalties for trying to vote if not eligible
· White
supremacist militia gangs hired as “poll watchers” to intimidate Black and poor
voters
Voter Purging
But the favorite and most effective method of voter fraud is purging the voter lists. Millions of eligible voters are removed every election year on flimsy excuses. In the two years leading to the 2016 elections more than 14 million people were purged; before the 2018 election 17 million voters were purged; between 2020 and 2022 19.2 million voters were purged. Most of these take place in “blue” cities within “red” states. Most of these were in fact dead or moved but millions were not and no attempt was made to determine which. A study in Georgia found the error rate of the purges was 63%.
In 2000 George W. Bush won the presidency over Al
Gore by 537 votes in Florida, just a few months after his brother, Florida Governor
Jeb Bush, purged over 90,000 Black voters. Jeb’s pretext was that their names
were similar to those of convicted felons in Texas. Post-election investigation found not even one was an illegal voter.
A favorite trick is the postcard scam. Postcards, disguised to look like junk mail, are mailed to voters in selected areas where poorly-educated people live. If the cards aren’t returned, as instructed in fine print, the people are assumed to have died or moved away and are removed from the voter list.
The Republicans are hard at work rigging the next election. Remember Trump's words to his "beautiful Christians" asking for their votes in 2024 - "Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote any more". You can be sure there are more purges planned before the next election.
Save Us from SAVE
A new bill in the works called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) will require all new voters to prove citizenship by providing a birth certificate, passport or citizenship. Anyone updating their registration will be required to register in person with their documents. Millions of Americans do not have ready access to these documents nor can afford the time to wait in what will undoubtedly be very long lines. This act will also affect women who changed their surnames when they married but did not change their name on their documents. This will prevent millions of Americans, especially young first-time voters, and married women.
Where are all the Illegal Voters?
The rationale for all these voting restrictions is the news of millions of aliens the Dems have smuggled into the country who are voting. Where did these stories come from? Turns out they originated from the Heritage Foundation, the same people that brought us the Project 2025 blueprint for taking over the country.
Kris Kobach, one of the Heritage Fellows and Kansas Secretary of State, was one who claimed there were millions of illegal alients voting. He had the right to arrest illegal alien voters and tried hard but couldn't find even one (but did succeed in blocking 36,000 legal voters from voting). They did find some in Texas - three in 12 years.
Back in 2012 Florida removed 172,000 allegedly alien voters. They only found one person to charge, a Republican supporter from Austria, but managed to prevent thousands of mostly Hispanic voters from voting because their names matched those of deported aliens.
In his February 25 post, Thom Hartmann encourages the Democratic states to follow the "new rules" and use the same election rigging techniques that the Republicans have used so successfully for decades. This will temporarily level the playing field, and in the long run might catch the notice of the Republicans and cause them to agree to some sorely needed bipartisan election reform.
We can only hope.
For the
complete story I recommend Thom Hartmann’s book The Hidden History of the War on Voting.
Living in
Canada, where I have been voting for over 50 years, I have taken free and fair
elections for granted. Federal elections here are run by Elections Canada, an independent
non-partisan organization. There is a little bit of gerrymandering but they don't get away with much. Election boundary changes are reviewed and must be
approved well ahead of the election. Every eligible voter is mailed a card
prior to the election showing where to vote. I just shake my head at the uncivilized
election procedures south of the border.
Sources:
https://hartmannreport.com/p/scotus-republicans-legalized-election-be4
https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-c6f
https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-trump-and-the-gop-fixed-the-2026-c8a
https://www.amazon.ca/Hidden-History-War-Voting-Stole/dp/1523087781
No comments:
Post a Comment