The final statement on who will be the president of the United States of America will not come for a couple of days. It is unlikely that the Democratic Party will be able to gain control of the Senate. In the next days and weeks and years, a lot will be written about how much more outreach Democratic officials should have and could have done in various areas to marginalized communities across the country. Those pieces will be right. More Americans need to be a part of the democratic process that directs so many of not only our lives, but the world’s lives.
But let us not forget that the Democratic Party, for all of its faults, will once again come away with a majority victory in virtually every branch of our government. But somehow the party will not have control over those supposedly democratically representative legislative and judicial bodies. Let’s also not forget that even after Joe Biden has proven he’s won the Electoral College on top of the popular vote, that every state the traditional media classifies as “red” has suppressed and defrauded the votes of millions of Americans who have voted, who wanted to vote, and who continue to try and participate in our constitutionally protected right to vote.
Lest we forget, a group of around 200 American citizens in Graham, North Carolina, were literally pepper-sprayed by law enforcement as they marched down to vote a few days ago. The citizens were predominantly Black.
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Calling out voter suppression is not a new thing in progressive circles. But it is something that cannot be written about or talked about enough. We see the numbers in Texas and Florida, and there are things the Democratic Party could have done better: outreach to Latino/Latinx/Latina communities being a glaring one. But let’s not forget that Texas, with an anti-democratically packed court, was hampered by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s Saddam Husseinian move to limit counties to one mail-in drop-off location in each county. This move serves only one purpose: to make it that much more difficult for people to vote.
Republicans’ promotion of the myth of widespread “voter fraud” does reveal a kernel of truth. There is widespread constitutional fraud in our country and it has been perpetrated by the Republican Party and their wealthy, elite, and sometimes shadowy backers. The biggest fraudsters have been covered on this site and elsewhere, people like former Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach of Kansas, who has stolen away thousands of votes, almost entirely from communities of color.
In Pennsylvania, as the days pass, Republicans will push to defraud the American citizens of the Quaker state by trying to negate the counting of hundreds of thousands of votes. In Georgia, a state where the GOP stole the governor’s race away from Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams in 2018, the Republican then-Secretary of State and now-Governor Brian Kemp has “purged” somewhere approaching 1,000,000 registered voters over the last 3 years. The majority of those registered voters were and are Black.
The voter suppression perpetrated by the Republican Party in Georgia has been so blatant that there is a House Oversight Committee report that highlights how much of a fraud was perpetrated on the American people under Kemp and friends.
As of Nov. 4, 2020, here’s a breakdown of completed ballots, mailed in time, that have not been “processed” by Trump and the Republican party’s hampered USPS.
Only one of those areas is considered “white.” It also has a population of around 1,000 people, versus say … Atlanta that has a population 500 times larger. Why is that? You know exactly why and it’s racist and it’s the definition of white supremacy and it’s by design. There are still over 300,000 mail-in ballots still unaccounted for, and the confusion and anxiety that the federal government has produced over the past few months—with Trump-appointee postmaster general Louis DeJoy’s dismantling of our postal infrastructure—is its own form of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. And while there is evidence that the USPS hasn’t specifically lost these votes as was earlier reported, the fact that the postal service under this incompetent Republican donor continues to defy a judge’s order to sweep facilities to make sure every vote is accounted for, is bullshit.
Even now, after all the resources and energy the Republican Party and Donald Trump have spent on thwarting the democratic process in our country, Trump continues trying to transparently steal the election. The time and energy put in on both the federal level and the local level by these officials could have been used to say, control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in our country. It could have been used to begin something resembling an infrastructure plan. It could have been used for almost any of the myriad nation-building projects that even the Republican Party pretends to care about.
But it wasn’t. Instead, along with packing the courts, deregulating banks and doing away with consumer protections, the Republican Party gave an enormous tax break to the wealthiest in our country, and spent the rest of the time working to solidify their very unpopular positions.
Americans, even against all of these odds, came out to vote in record numbers this election, hoping to throw as much Democracy against the wall in the hopes that enough would stick in the name of justice. It remains to be seen how much we are able to salvage, but a lot did stick, and Americans and people of color are not going away. We are living in an oligarchy and it will be an uphill battle for Americans to take back their country.