by Robert Fischer
The current controversy over voting is embarrassing and frightening: embarrassing because we were brought up thinking voting was only a problem in other countries, and frightening because there appears to be real and concerted efforts to suppress the vote in the 2020 election. For these reasons President Carter and international groups have supervised election results in Venezuela and elsewhere in the past. It’s not what happens here.
The battle over who and how people vote has always been an issue since the founding of the Republic. Starting with the Federalist Party through the Jacksonian era, partisan politicians worked to keep the votes of their adversaries down. And of course Black people were disenfranchised long after legally gaining the vote, while women needed the 19th amendment to legally vote. So all the shenanigans over voting should not surprise us.
What should surprise us is that this is happening to us now and that it is being pursued so relentlessly by the president and his party. On a personal level, our generation is experiencing these problems at a time when we should’ve gotten past such abominable tactics. After all, we’ve experienced the civil rights and voting acts, embraced racial justice, lowered the voting age to 18 years, and allowed women to vote since 1920. You would think we should have learned something.
Here in Georgia the suppression of votes has never been completely addressed. Just recently in the last gubernatorial campaign Stacey Abrams, the Black Democratic candidate, lost a terribly contested election to the Republican secretary of state who oversaw the election. Everyone except the winner and his supporters are convinced that the election was fraudulent.
Presently, we have a president who has from the beginning complained about fraud on the part of his opponents even before the ballots have been cast. He continually goes about the nation making unsubstantiated claims about voting: who gets to vote, how they vote, and where they are voting. When contested about his claims, he has no answers other than to repeat them. The only way he can lose, he says, is if fraud is committed.
In Texas, which always is boasting about its size, from 1000 miles east to west, Republican authorities have limited only one ballot drop box in each county. In other states there here have been numerous actions to limit votes by closing precincts, making casting ballots tedious and confusing, and reducing the number of voting days. There is also the case of redistricting nationwide which is a story for another occasion.
Perhaps most blatantly we see the president’s supporters showing up at polling places, many dressed in camo and armed with military-style assault rifles. This all has the bouquet of a Trump skunk.