A major thrust of the Trump campaign and the Republican party strategy ahead of the 2020 election has been to prevent as many people as possible from voting by any means necessary.
Let us count the ways:
- The Trump Administration announced on August 7th that in the midst of a global pandemic, with an election months away, this was the perfect time to do a root and branch restructuring of the US Postal Service including closures of Post offices, the removal of working/functioning sorting machines, and the immediate prohibition on all overtime.
- In public appearances and in tweets, Trump has claimed hundreds of times that mail-in ballots are rife with fraud without ever producing any evidence that wasn’t secondhand Fox speculation. This has had the effect of motivating voters (the ones who believe Trump) to vote in person, even though they may be at elevated risk from coronavirus — or simply not to vote at all. Yes, this may very well be helpful for Democrats. I didn’t say the strategies made sense, I just said that they were all intended to depress voting.
- Republican governors and officials have done everything possible at the local level to gum up the voting machinery. For example, in Texas, Governor Abbott ordered that there can only be one ballot drop location for each county. The largest county in Texas is 7000 square miles, the most populous has 5 million people. In Florida, voters approved a measure with 62% in 2018 which gave ex-convicts the right to vote, but this year the Republicans passed a law which prevented former prisoners from voting until they jump through multiple administrative hoops which will conveniently prevent most from having a say in the 2020 election.
The sanctimonious wailing by GOP governors about the dangers of voter fraud is too rich to believe. These hucksters continue to support a President who completely ignored proven widespread Russian government interference with the 2016 American election, and who has prevented — through his snarling hostility to truth — even being briefed about all of the Russian government interference in American elections ever since, up to and including the present day. But they’re worried that an ex-con who owes 50 bucks in court fees is going to destroy the American experiment? Clowns and stooges.
So what does this now overt and widespread behavior by the Republican party remind us of?
Republicans are no longer the party of Lincoln. That party died when the southern wing of the Democratic Party moved en masse to the GOP from the 1960s to the early 90s. Republicans are now the racist voter suppression party.