Trump’s and Pompeo’s Lies Aren’t Important. Voter Suppression in GA Senate Elections Is.
A lot of people are focusing on Trump and Pompeo’s lies and their refusal to accept that Biden won the election. That would be fine if those people were treating the ridiculous claims as what they are — disinformation designed to get Right Wingers to distrust the electoral system, and to get them to believe the election was stolen from Trump.
It would be fine to make efforts to spread truth to the target audiences of the lies — Right Wing media consumers and Trump supporters. But that’s not what people focusing on Trump and Pompeo’s absurd claims are doing. They’re preaching to the choir about what an outrage this is. I don’t disagree that it’s an outrage. I just think time and energy would be better spent elsewhere.
For these four years of Trump, media and social media have showered attention on Trump and his administration. Exhausted reporters have debunked thousands of lies over and over — to the choir, not to the people being targeted with those lies — not to the people who believe the lies.
It would be a challenging long term project to reach Right Wing voters, so I don’t blame anyone not wanting to undertake it. But preaching to the choir seldom has constructive impact. In this case, it had the impact of causing the choir to become more depressed, anxious and distracted from what is important politically. In other words, those who focused on every single unimportant lie the Trump administration and campaign told, ended up unintentionally helping Trump have the impact he wanted to have. We don’t need any more of that.
Here’s what’s important to save democracy: the January Georgia Senate elections.
A Right Wing publication, the Federalist, has published an essay advising the Georgia legislature to ban mail-in voting in Georgia’s Senate elections in January—elections which will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the Senate. The stakes are super high here.
If mail-in voting is banned, it will force everyone to use Ballot Marking Devices at the polls. BMD’s can be used by those in control of voting machines to fraudulently change votes. In addition, without mail-in voting, vulnerable people, if they want to vote, will have to leave their houses and go to the polls during a pandemic.
Many people seem to think electronic voting equipment is safe and can be trusted. Here is an article about that, for your information.
Even if mail-in voting is allowed, Trump’s appointee DeJoy, who is Postmaster General, sure seems to be trying to destroy the USPS. There were reports that he delayed a lot of ballots mailed in from Blue zip codes for the November 3rd election. He could do it again.
Here’s a tweet with a quote from a Washington Post article on what DeJoy has done with mail delivery in different states.
Once DeJoy was threatened with being held in contempt of court, suddenly he has been reporting only small numbers of ballots were being delayed. But can we trust this Trump administration official to tell us the truth about unethical actions or crimes he may have committed? Trump administration officials do often commit crimes right out in the open, if they suffer no consequences. But DeJoy is at risk of suffering consequences for his actions now.
Here’s an article about Republicans’ desire to destroy the mail in voting system that, unlike voting machines, used to be unhackable — before DeJoy was put in charge of USPS.
The safest way to vote in Georgia is likely to request an absentee ballot as soon as possible, and then to put it in the nearest drop box to your home. Here’s where to request an absentee ballot for the January election.
Georgia has a long history of voter suppression and appearances of likely vote manipulation through electronic voting equipment. Here is some information from Georgia’s 2017 election history.
Some of this information, plus more on problems with computerized elections in the U.S. as a whole, is detailed in the book CODE RED: Computerized Elections and The War on American Democracy: Election 2020 Edition.
Regarding the issues of suppressing minority votes and keeping those votes from counting, here’s an article about that issue during the 2018 midterm elections.
There’s a long history of voter suppression in many other states too. For example, Kentucky — the state that keeps re-electing Mitch McConnell.
Here is a very long Twitter thread about voting conditions and other issues in Kentucky, for those who have particular interest in that.
That’s our biggest issue now. If the vote continues to be suppressed, it will greatly decrease Democratic politicians’ chances of ever having enough representation in Congress to pass progressive legislation. So decreasing gun violence, enacting legislation to deal with climate change etc. could end up being impossible. No matter what your policy preferences are, we’ll be less likely to get them done unless we stop the massive voter suppression that is going on in many U.S. states. When a lot of people can’t vote, Republicans win.
Those of us who don’t live in the affected states can donate, phone bank and write postcards to help. If we can bring back full voting rights and defeat the massive efforts by the GOP to stop people from voting, and to stop their votes from counting, then we will have the key to everything else liberals and progressives want.
I know, it’s more fun to focus on policies that are dear to your heart. But let’s not be like the guy who was looking for his wallet under the street lamp. Someone comes up & asks him what he’s doing and he tells them.
“Is that where you lost it?” he is asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you looking for it there?”
“Because the light is better here.’
Dems have lost many elections because of voter suppression and other voting issues. Let’s go back and find the way to win more often — in the same place where we lost it. Then we might find the sky is the limit to what we can achieve.
