Republican Politicians And Voter Suppression
Let’s start with this, voting machines are utter bullshit. Those things are easy to hack, contain no paper trail, and are basically reliant upon the good will of people running for office. After the 2004 Presidential Election, people were convicted of vote tampering in states won by George W. Bush — most infamously Ohio.
With that noted, is it any surprise Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the President, makes voting machines? China even granted her a trademark for them just a few days before the very close gubernatorial election in Georgia. Why do I mention this? Because Georgia, now under the leadership of Brain Kemp, is making sure to install as many of them as possible before the 2020 election.
Republicans are currently fighting vote by mail. They act like it’s some new thing that we can not trust because of how easy it is to commit election fraud. Meanwhile, five states already run elections entirely on vote by mail — one of them being Utah, not exactly a progressive bastion.
National Review found that voter fraud with vote by mail is literally less one in a million:
As for fraud, signature-matching is a proven method of deterrence and detection. Careful signature-matching procedures should accompany voting by mail and drive-through voting. But we shouldn’t exaggerate the risk: Oregon has mailed out about 100 million ballots since 2000, with only about 12 cases of proven fraud.
That means there’s a 0.000012% chance of voter fraud happening at all.
Yet, this is ignored by Republicans, usually in swing states by the way, who are either so paranoid about a nonexistent issue they can’t think straight, or are pretending to be paranoid about this nonexistent issue so they can get support from people who can’t think straight.
When Nevada sent out absentee ballots for it’s 6/9/2020 primary, President Trump tweeted the following:
State of Nevada ‘thinks’ that they can send out illegal vote by mail ballots, creating a great Voter Fraud scenario for the State and the U.S. They can’t! If they do, ‘I think’ I can hold up funds to the State. Sorry, but you must not cheat in elections.
Nevada is a swing state that votes with the winner just under 80% of the time. It did not go with President Trump in 2016, however. Oh, and under the tenth amendment states control elections, meaning Nevada is allowed to send out mail ballots.
The fact is, there is no evidence that vote by mail makes elections unsafe. National Review specifically mentioned Oregon, and while that state has voted for every Democrat since 2000, they also went for Michael Dukakis in 1988 (making them one of ten states to do so) and for Bill Clinton both in 1992 and 1996.
Republicans are attacking vote by mail, not because its unsafe, but because they do not want people to vote. Republicans tend to win in areas with low voter turnout, and that voter turnout is usually made low by Republicans. In Texas, you can use a concealed carry permit as a Voter ID, however, you are not allowed to use Student ID. Could that be because gun owners tend to vote Republican and students tend to vote Democrat? Yes, in fact, they sometimes admit to that.
In 2017, the Supreme Court said North Carolina’s voter ID laws were made to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” State Republicans had gone so far as to ban the use of ID’s that African-Americans tend to use and shut down polling places African-Americans usually go to.
This is why I’m against voter ID laws, until evidence can be provided that election fraud is taking place, at which point I’ll talk about it, making it harder to vote is about rigging, not securing. Politicians are a much bigger threat to our elections than some black guy voting without an ID.
