You’ve heard fear has a smell? It also has a sound. It sounds like this:
The sound is terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, and furthermore terrible.
It is the sound of a man who mistakes himself for a king, a would-be king who fears the voice of the governed, who sees the law not as a vehicle for justice but as a weapon to smite his enemies. Over 93 million Americans voted in this election to date, hoping their voices will be heard by politicians like him who prefer hearing only their own voices.
The New York Times Editorial Board observes that, in New York City alone, a “decrepit, incompetent, self-dealing board of elections” has long made having their voices heard a challenge there. Yes, there is a “but”:
But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.
The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade, redrawing district lines to keep themselves in power even when they lose a majority of the statewide vote. (Democrats gerrymander when they can, too, but the most egregious examples of the past decade have been by Republicans.)
The Times offers more examples and adds:
Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field — and will not even try.
Ya think? Sunday night, election law expert Rick Hasen began a list of ways Republicans have work against making voting easier and safer during this election. He was up to 16 the last I looked. There is almost no end to ways the G.O.P. works to suppress the vote and/or ensure Democratic voters do not see representation proportional to their votes. I recently counted 20 tactics. Ari Berman counts 29.
To borrow an expression, this is not a voting accident!
Amidst a deadly pandemic Trump refuses to tackle, with already 230,000 dead and no end in sight so long as he occupies the Oval Office, Americans— real-American Real Americans — have had enough (Washington Post):
Millions of Americans have also wanted to be heard. In a year when the act of voting felt more precarious than ever, more than 93 million had voted in the 2020 election by Sunday, casting their ballots early or by mail in record numbers in virtually every state in the nation. Tens of millions more will don masks, and in many places warm clothes, to vote the old-fashioned way — in person, on Election Day. They’ll do it despite — and in many cases, because of — the isolation and obstacles of this unusual year.
Those who have voted have lost jobs or loved ones to the pandemic or have battled the coronavirus themselves. They have withstood rain and heat and lines that lasted from morning until dark to register their electoral choices, risked exposure to the virus and navigated dizzying rule changes about signature requirements and drop boxes and ballot envelopes. They have been inundated with unsubstantiated attacks by President Trump on the integrity of the election.
Bitterly ironic, isn’t it, coming from a man who has none?
The Post credits the “unseen labor of thousands of state and county election administrators” who organize and oversee our elections with dedication and integrity. Local Republicans and Democrats alike, with little power of their own, do this work because they believe deeply in the democratic process whether or not they approve the outcome. Few know who they are or appreciate the work they do. Certainly not Donald Trump who has declared their work criminal if what he hears displeases him.
What I wrote after the Super Tuesday primaries bears repeating before Election Day 2020 tomorrow:
There were six peopIe working my little precinct on March 3. There are 80 precincts in Buncombe County. In North Carolina there are 2,670 precincts spread among 100 counties, plus the staffs and county boards in each and the state Board of Elections team in the capitol. That’s an army division mobilized for one day to make democracy possible — in one state of which there are 50. Plus the territories and the District of Columbia. And 3,142 counties and county equivalents in the 50 states.
You don’t have to do the math. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has done it for you. “During the 2016 elections,” the EAC website reports, “local election officials operated 116,990 polling places, including 8,616 early voting locations, across the country. These polling sites were operated by 917,694 poll workers.” That’s about 75% the size of the U.S. Army in 2016 mobilized for a single day, yet invisible to the typical voter. They see the same handful of retirees each election day and give no thought to the massive logistical effort behind them.
Republicans in leadership and Dear Leader himself have no respect for that if election workers will not bend the results to their liking. Those who would lead the world’s longest-enduring democracy declare it openly.
The foul may cry foul but the people will be heard.