Rigged Elections
We see it on social media all the time: “the election system is ‘rigged’”!! And we read the President’s continual tweets:
“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday. “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.”
While real examples of election fraud in the United States are few (the most recent an absentee ballot fraud scheme in North Carolina by Republicans), it has been the President’s claim that election fraud is rampant, and supports Democrats. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he considers any reform that makes voting easier, in fact makes Democrats more likely to be elected. That means they must be cheating.
Georgia
But the real election-cheating going on is by Republicans who control the elections in several states. The most recent example happened yesterday, when the Georgia primary election was a disaster. Absentee ballot requests weren’t honored, forcing even those who requested them to vote in person. New voting machines broke down, forcing long waits at polling places. Provisional ballots that could be completed by hand were unavailable. And, in this COVID-19 world, there was a lack of qualified poll workers.
In spite of the pandemic, people in Georgia came out to vote. In the Democratic Primary, with the nomination already secured by Joe Biden, more than 666,500 votes have been counted. Perhaps 100,000 more absentee votes and an untold number of provisional votes are yet to be tallied. In 2016, in the thick of the Clinton/Sanders battle, 761,218 voted, so it’s likely that even more Georgia Democrats came out yesterday.
Georgia wasn’t ready. Georgia’s Republican controlled election process failed. After the failures of the 2018 election, where Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, running for Governor, refused to remove himself from electoral decision-making, we thought maybe Georgia had learned a lesson. Now Governor Kemp should have instructed his Secretary of State, civil engineer and businessman Brad Rafensperger, to solve the problems.
And voters in Georgia’s Republican counties didn’t have a voting problem yesterday. The problems were in the largely minority counties, that also happen to be the largely Democratic counties. Folks waited in lines for up to five hours. Some reached the actual polls, only to find that their application for absentee ballots that were never sent disqualified them from voting in person. Others couldn’t wait that long. Work, children, life, and exposure to COVID-19 risking crowds required some to fail to vote.
Legal Cheating
The President is correct. There is massive voter cheating in the United States. It is led by some of the Republican state’s electoral leadership, and supported by the Republican voter suppression program throughout the United States. Here in Ohio, the State House of Representatives passed a bill reducing the amount of time available to request absentee ballots, and preventing the Secretary of State (a Republican) from sending postage paid absentee ballot requests and ballots. The bill passed on a party line vote.
It’s not just about COVID-19. It is the policy of the Republican Party to make voting as difficult as possible. Mail-in voting restrictions, voter identification requirements, and limited polling place access in “minority” voting areas, all are ways of “restricting the vote,” another way of keeping Democratic voters from participating in the process.
President Donald Trump said that if the United States switched to all-mail voting, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
The GOP speaker of the House in Georgia said an all-mail election would be “extremely devastating to Republicans.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said universal mail voting would be “the end of our republic as we know it” (Chicago Tribune).
This week, polling shows Joe Biden running several points ahead of President Trump in national polling. More importantly, Biden is leading in Florida (+3.4%), Pennsylvania (+3.3%), Wisconsin (+3.4%), and in the latest Fox News Poll, even in Ohio (+2.0%) (RCP). It’s still five months until the election, but, just as in 2016, Trump needs “everything” to go his way to win re-election.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to find Republicans rigging the system. As Mr. Trump himself said in 2016:
“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD.”
Many polling places – run by Republicans.
