By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com, editor@news-photos-features.com
Republicans are purging voter rolls less than 30 days before the election – violating the federal 90-day voting rights law - giving no opportunity to contest or reinstate; South Carolina is illegally purging from lists those who registered to vote at 17 because they would be 18 on election day, violating state law. Two states have sued to block votes from military and Americans overseas. They are sending fewer machines and ballots and forcing people to wait on lines that stretch for hours, while making it illegal to provide food or water. They are illegally blocking college students from voting, shutting polling on campuses and setting up polling in hard-to-reach places to cut into young people’s votes.
They are delaying mail delivery, removing or moving ballot boxes in Democratic-leaning districts, while some domestic terrorists have even tried to incinerate ballots in boxes. They are sending out false information about who can vote, when and where, while lying about “millions” of illegal aliens being imported into the country to vote illegally. They are sending thugs (election monitors) to intimidate voters. And even before voting has begun, Republicans have filed nearly 200 lawsuits to block the count and certification in order to create enough chaos as to enable Republican governors, legislators, Republican Congress members or Trump’s Supreme Court justices to choose their own slate of Electors.
And just as in the 2016 election, when Trump was decrying a “rigged election” even before the first votes were cast and continued to lie about Biden’s 2020 win up to today – fomenting violence against election workers, officials, candidates and voters, actually paying millions to fund the January 6 insurrection and mounting more than 60 lawsuits, and each and every day – has been saying over and over again that the only way he can lose in 2024 is by Democrats cheating.
“The only way I can lose is if they cheat,” Trump says repeatedly, in yet another instance of his accusation being a confession. “We’re leading in the polls, we’re leading by a lot, we’re leading in every single state” he declares as if fact.
Trump is laying groundwork, creating a sense of inevitability, so if he actually loses, the election must have been rigged. Trump told evangelists to” just vote this one time” and they won’t need to vote ever again. He meant that their WhiteChristoFascist project would be completed.
In fact, it is Kamala Harris whose election should be inevitable. Here’s why:
There is hardly a demographic or constituency that Trump doesn’t hate and hasn’t harmed, with the exception of billionaires. He told a Big Oil group to just pony up $1 billion in donations and he will sweep Biden’s climate actions away. Women (more than half the population and the electorate), immigrants, people of color, tribal people, non-conforming genders, people in non-heterosexual relationships, workers especially union members, teachers, librarians, federal workers, people who fear climate change, gun violence, loss of voting rights, loss of the right to read, learn, assemble, protest, people in fear of the next deadly pandemic, people who believe health care is a right not a privilege, people who want affordable housing, safe schools, clean air and water, who want their government to protect them from crypto currency, stock scams, and wanton gun violence, polluted air and water and poisoned food, who advocate for peace, diplomacy, alliances, justice and democracy in the world, who believe in the Rule of Law and uphold international treaties, who believe in supporting allies and standing up to tyrants. (have I left anybody out except the billionaires and White Christo Fascists?)
Add to these the Republicans — including dozens of those who worked closest with him, four-star generals, Ambassadors, cabinet officials, his own chief of staff, Republican Congressmen, mayors, his own vice president, progeny of former Republican presidents (Ford and Bush) — who have declared they will vote for Harris or withhold their vote for Trump who they deem unfit, a Fascist, a wannabe dictator, let alone a convicted felon still being prosecuted for inciting an insurrection, conspiring to overturn the election, stealing classified secrets and obstructing justice.
It is mathematically impossible for Trump to win the popular vote but what I worry about is that the election will be stolen from Harris by stealing the election in the 7 so-called “battleground” states.
The multi-pronged Steal the Vote campaign is underway, involving voter suppression, voter intimidation, political threats and violence of voters and election workers and even media; election subversion, court packing intended to undermine the accurate counting and certification of votes; foreign influence, propaganda and disinformation, and outsized and possibly illegal campaign funding. And if all that fails, they are sowing the seeds, fueling anger and rage, for another January 6 insurrection.
The brainwashing, propaganda, misinformation continues with foreign actors (especially Russians, who are spending millions to finance trolls, just like in 2016) as well as home-grown ones , especially with Trump’s bromance with oligarch Elon Musk, the richest person in the world (and, as it turns out, an illegal immigrant who lied to become a US citizen), who has turned his social media mega-platform, X, into a political propaganda trolling machine and is very comfortable violating campaign finance laws because he knows that he, like Trump, is above any law.
At the same time Trump is promoting trolls and propagandists, he is threatening the media, reviving his “enemy of the people” and “fake news” attacks and threatening to shut down news organizations that reports adversely about him, or positively about his opponents. He is threatening journalists with his brand of “retribution” – prosecution or tax audits. They have reason to fear because these are the same weapons Trump used in his first term and to turn Republicans who know better into traitors to their oath of office to defend against enemies foreign and domestic, when arguably, there were “guardrails” to hold him back from his most dangerous demands (shooting protesters and migrants; prosecuting political opponents).
The Brennan Center reported some 40 percent of election workers have reported being harassed and threatened. For this election, offices have set up bulletproof glass; panic buttons; snipers protecting tabulation center; mail-in ballots counted in a special center; heavy law enforcement presence – gates, fences with barbed wire, multiple check points. One election official said he moved his family away from their home during the election.
Campaign buttons aren’t allowed at polling places but 33 states allow guns, which means votersand election workers can be threatened, intimidated, coerced in casting orcounting votes.
With political threats and violence, Trump has already forced out honorable election workers and commissioners and replaced them with operatives who will question ballots, delay counts and then certification beyond the December 16 cut-off, so that their state’s electoral votes can be omitted from the 270 majority, House Republicans on January 6 can again create chaos (despite changes to the Electoral Count Act exploited in 2021) so that either Republican states get to select the winner instead of the popular vote, or the Trump Supremes can anoint the next president, as they did in 2000. (If the supreme Court had not stopped the recount, mandated by Florida constitution, it would have been shown that Al Gore, not George W.Bush, won the state and the Electoral College; there would not have been a 9/11 or the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the US would have been much further along in addressing the existential threat of climate change.)
In addition to suppressing votes by illegally purging voters and dropping new requirements like Ohio’s Secretary of State requiring proof of citizenship (in violation of 2006 law), the MAGA army has another weapon: intimidating voters and those who register them, and justifying their assault by lying about illegal immigrants voting by the millions, invited to invade the country by Democrats.
In Florida, threats of prison terms if paperwork wasn’t handed in on time caused the League of Women Voters to stop registering voters altogether; similarly Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Texas have toughened voter registration rules and threatened hefty penalties for violations. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (still under indictment for his own crimes) raided homes of prominent Latino political leaders in South Texas under the guise of “election integrity investigation” aimed at intimidating voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbott boasted of having purged 1 million from voter rolls, and in the last election, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent goons to intimidate ex-convicts who had gained back their right to vote, while ignoring the Trump voters who fraudulently voted more than once.
Trump’s foment and promotion of political violence on one hand, and his abuse of the pardon power on the other sends a message not to cross him, but if you commit crimes for him (insurrection, vote tampering, election interference), he will pardon you (already has, like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn) - and promises to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists “on Day 1”.
He’s already riling up his base, has put into place the judges (including on the Supreme Court), the legislators, the governors, the election officials who will do whatever it takes to hand him the presidency.
This is on top of the systemic anti-democratic factors that make “one-person, one vote” a mockery. – the fact that a Wyoming voter’s ballot counts 5x more than a Californian’s, that Washington DC voters (more populous than Wyoming) get no say in the Electoral College, the entire Electoral College – put into place to give slave-states more power than anti-slave states – which means that elections are determined by 7 “swing states” while their Congressmembers are largely determined by gerrymandering; the fact that the WhiteChristoFascist Imperial Supremes have nullified voting rights while sanctioning partisan gerrymandering and have demonstrated their willingness to dismiss the will of the voters in favor of anointing their favored candidate.
The difference from 2020 is that Biden, not Trump, is president and commander in chief, Merrick Garland not Bill Barr is Attorney General, and Democrats are wiser to the threats and tactics Trump is deploying.
But I worry that the Trump army has had four years to prepare and come up with new ways to steal the election, helped along with complicit officials and judges who have replaced those who put country over party. And I worry that Trump, like in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, has basically trapped Democrats into vouching that American elections are “fair and free” so they won’t challenge the steals that take place in local districts, enough to garner the 44,000 votes across three states that delivered 2016 to Trump when Hillary got 3 million more popular votes.
This election underscores the lie of American “democracy” and the systemic, patently undemocratic elements: campaign finance laws that enable billionaires to spend hundreds of millions of dollars; the Electoral College that gives Wyoming voters 5x the voting power per vote as a Californian, rural voters more voting power than urbanites and the shenanigans wrought by gerrymandered state legislatures, while the ChristoFascist Supreme Court majority has been dismantling the 1965 Voting Rights Act protections and making a mockery of the “one person, one vote” ideal.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that effectively opens the door to the richest individuals and corporations (“Cash is speech.” “Corporations are people”!!!) to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (the equivalent of a few thousand dollars to average voters) to elect or defeat candidates, enact or derail policy and law and appoint administrators and ambassadors when average voters are limited to a few thousand dollars per cycle, while individuals are limited to spend a few thousand per election cycle.
The fact is it is the Democrats have delivered the strongest economy in the world and the progressive policies that people want. Moreover, the demographics are working against Republicans - that’s why they are shutting down public education, banning books, demonizing liberals and immigrants, and why they can only win by cheating, lying and literally stealing elections.
It isn’t at all fair for a country that prides itself as being a “democracy” in which all are supposedly equal, but it is necessary to vote for Kamala Harris and Democrats up and down the ballot in numbers “too big to rig, too real to steal.”
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