December 30, 2020
Pearl River What’s the saying, “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride….” The old Scottish nursing rhyme harkens to the days when the differences between the rich and poor might be a matter of transportation. The line came to me as I began reading a recent New York Times article that catalogued the total destruction of any remaining rationale being used to justify the host of impediments assembled to prevent access to the ballot in the name of election security. I wish….
The argument advanced in their story was that all of the various obstacles to citizens trying to vote had now in the Trump effort to undermine the 2020 election been assembled in a host of lawsuits before judges, often thought to be friendly and definitely Republican, and rejected as unproven, fabricated, and often just plain mistaken. For years, many of us have argued that all of these so-called efforts to protect election security with various forms of voter identifications, certifications by witnesses, purges, and more were little more than pretend solutions in search of a nonexistent problem. Yes, now that’s been proven in court all across the country and fully debunked and certified as hardly more than a conspiracy theory. In fact, it’s so clearly nothing more than a conspiracy theory that President Unelect Trump has been forced to tweet that voter fraud is “not a conspiracy theory,” pretty much proving that it’s a conspiracy theory. To me, it all sounds like Richard Nixon’s claim that “I am not a crook.”
The Voter Purge Project has been monitoring almost twenty state voter lists around the country to be able to determine the accuracy of purges, as our report has established, there are problems with almost all of them, some major and some minor. In the last fourteen months, errors of 40000 were found in Ohio and ten thousand or more in both Texas and Georgia based on faulty matching data in the last two cases. More will be found as a new wave of purges now begins with the election over.
Despite the complete debunking of voter fraud claims, red state legislatures from Michigan to Georgia are already preparing new restrictions on voting by all reports in order to expand IDs, make accessing mail ballots more difficult, and a host of other rocks in the road for voters. It’s past time to call it what it is, voter suppression with no sugar in the coffee. It’s not a question of Republican or Democrat, it a question now of whether or not we protect the pretense of being a democracy, where all voters are allowed to exercise their franchise, or say it’s all about power and party, the devil take the hindmost, and wait for the next wannabe authoritarian to take Trump’s place.