Who needs to count votes when you’re a Republican?
by David Atkins
How little respect for democracy do Republicans have? Well, in North Carolina when a vote on energy policy didn’t go their way, they simply decided to go to voice vote and pretend they won:
Yep — in its desperate attempts to get rid of North Carolina’s renewable energy program, the legislature has given up the radical, liberal, lamestream, obviously subjective “science” of, um, actually counting votes. You see, when the votes were actually counted, the bill that would have removed the renewables program (and said that wind, among other things, was not renewable) died in the state house, failing to emerge from committee by an 18-13 vote.
Okay, hmm … you’re Republican legislator Mike Hager, you hate the renewables program, and your bill has just been defeated by an indisputable margin of five votes. What to do … what to do? Easy. You reintroduce the bill. And when it next comes up in committee, this time in the state senate? You have a voice vote — and have your finance committee chair, Republican Bill Rabon, refuse to count the actual votes. In a voice vote so close that both sides claim they would have won if the votes had been counted, Rabon declares that the bill has passed and runs off.
No, I wish I were, but I am not making this up. We have given up counting votes in North Carolina. The Reign of Error rules supreme here.
It’s not just that Republicans have no compunction about cheating to get their way. It’s that fundamentally they don’t respect democracy. They view most actual voters as parasites and squishes, they think they know what should really be done, and the process of democratic governance is mostly a painful roadblock.
As far as Republicans are concerned, government should only be in the business of protecting national borders and private property; corporations should run most day-to-day affairs, and the family and church should try to take care of whatever else people might need. That such a system works for no one but the very wealthy, some church leaders and a bunch of patriarchal male heads-of-household doesn’t bother them. They know most people won’t go along with that dystopian vision, so votes are superfluous to governance. Suppression and anti-democratic shenanigans are the right thing to do in the service of the greater cause.
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