This is a personal choice, but I simply won’t take the risk of putting my ballot in the mail. Early voting is the best I can do at this point to vote and stay as safe as I can. It is a risk that I’ll just have to take. It is a risk that my septuagenarian mother is willing to take. It is a risk most of my family is willing to take — because the stakes are just too high. Understand, please, that I am not advocating anyone risking their life to vote. My sense of obligation is personal and has as much to do with an oath I took at induction to the Navy as my fear of what another four years of this Orange Mistake would mean.
Mail-in voting will probably be fine as long as the ballots are put in the mail early. The assault on the United States Postal Service (USPS) is real. This is not, nor should it ever be considered, a trivial thing. The postal service is older than the nation itself — one that the Constitution empowered Congress to create and maintain. I’m honestly puzzled at the Republican animus toward the USPS. The greatest assault on the service came at a time when it was, in fact, making money. I suppose that a government agency doing well and operating the way it was supposed to was too much to bear.
I’ve been a bit puzzled by this one. I doubt Republicans really want to kill the post office. Or, at least, they would also miss it when it’s gone. They’re not always so good at understanding the consequences of their actions.
Atrios — APRIL 10, 2013
It is an incredibly sad testament to the erosion of anything resembling American values that anyone must choose between exercising their right to vote and not contracting a deadly and debilitating virus. It is unconscionable that a government of the people, by the people and for the people can be ignored and threatened in such a way. It will be a long, long time before the United States has any clout on the world stage when arguing that another country has free and fair elections — something that has always been a challenge in this nation, but rarely so much as it is this year.
I have grown so incredibly frustrated (abandoning my spiritual center to nurture the outrage at every attack on democracy hurled forth so constantly) that I’ve gone an created a new blog to discuss and document my own spiritual and intellectual awakening that took my very far away from Republican conservatism into a political ideology that is solidly liberal and much more Gandhi than Reagan. Or from Southern Baptist to secular humanist — likely the same thing, if I’m honest.
I cannot advise anyone on the benefit and risk of voting in person as opposed to the benefit and risk of voting by mail. I can only relate my own feeling on the issue and say, unequivocally, that I will do whatever it take to ensure that my vote is counted. I live in a traditionally red state, but one that is and has been a swing state for a long time, too. There is no path to victory for Donald Trump that does not include North Carolina, so the stakes are higher than ever. Biden and Harris must win. They just must. Whether squeaker or blowout, the Democratic ticket has to win. Seventy-eight days of a lame duck Trump is a lot less horrifying than four years thereof.
North Carolinians cannot discount the critical importance of the Senate race either. Thom Tillis has to go. Cal Cunningham is a moderate, only slightly left of center, and has a good chance of winning this race, but it is too early to tell — but that shouldn’t matter. People in the cities have to vote. We just have to. I have to vote in person, too, because Trump has proved that he has near-total control over the US Postal Service and I cannot trust that my ballot will be postmarked or delivered, either timely or at all.
Election fraud is exceedingly rare, but that doesn’t stop many Republicans from crying foul and undermining faith in the election — the bedrock of American democracy. Ironically, it seems that the notion that fraud using absentee or mail-in ballots is too prone to corruption is totally false. I think there is a belief that it’s easier to cheat that way, but the mechanisms and scrutiny that such ballots receive proves false the idea that these attempts are often successful. They’re not.
Voter suppression is the only way that Republicans can win majorities anymore. Purging rolls, enacting onerous voter ID laws and gerrymandering are GOP stock in trade to maintain a majority caucus. A free and fair election is tantamount to an assured legislative minority. They’ve admitted as much. But there’s a catch: when all is said and done, when all the restrictive, oppressive and suppressive measures have been enacted and the Democrat wins — they win boldly.
Republicans continue to make in-person voting unassailable. Sure, they can keep harping on already debunked claims of voter fraud, but like a rattling refrigerator, most folks have tuned that noise out and decided what they believe. The chorus of “we lost because they cheated” is a case of “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” It rings hollow. It isn’t that Republican candidates won’t piss and moan when they lose, it’s just that they’ve taken the wind out of their own sails.
Beyond this election, there is much more work to do. The modern Republican party must be brought to heel. Just because I’m not on that team doesn’t mean that I don’t have a say in the direction it goes. I don’t have female genitalia, but I have a right and responsibility to support every woman’s right to physical autonomy. I have an obligation as a human being to fight against oppression, though I am not at all oppressed by virtue of my skin color or gender identity. So then, why would I not have a vested interest in directing the course of an ideological opponent? This is why I vote in Republican primaries more than Democratic. I’ll vote for the Democratic candidate in the general election and hope for the best, but in the interim, I can do my part to push the Republicans in a better direction.
So then, here’s what I am going to do: I’m going to go to the polling place and vote. I will do whatever I can to ensure that democracy is safe from the corruption and destruction of the Republican abomination. Beyond that, I have made it a mission to reform the Republican party — if not bring it down completely, just as the Republican party replaced the Whigs so long ago. In my opinion, too, the desperate machinations of Republicans everywhere are but the rage against the dying of the light. Perhaps it’s just time to pull the plug and grab the shovel.
Finally, just vote. However you do it, cast your ballot.