Politics: On Voter Fraud and Voter Suppression

Honestly, this post was going to have a different name at one point, but then I realized that it might not work based on what I knew about things in the end. I was going to call it the myth of voter fraud and reality of voter suppression. But voter fraud is not a myth. It just isn’t the type of huge problem that the Republicans would have you think, at least with how they feel about Democrats and how they think it is their fault alone.

First, let’s start with voter fraud. We hear from Republicans often enough about all of the ways they seek to suppress the vote by supposedly protecting it from fraud. They do this by forcing those who want to vote to have ids or making people jump through hoops in order to vote. They are convinced that without these hurdles, people will do radical things like voting more than once or voting when they aren’t otherwise able to.

There are some truths to voting fraud. But it’s not the truth that they want us to know. What we do know is that in Illinois, there were less than 20 non-citizens who voted in an election based on a glitch in an Illinois law that passed unanimously. Only one of those people voted more than once. I do not know yet if the result was changed as a result of these votes.

Every time I think of the idea of someone voting more than once, I have to think that this is the least effective way to commit voter fraud. There are far better methods out there. Why not make it so that certain ballots aren’t accepted if you know that they won’t likely be in your favor? Why not make it so that you can’t pull the lever of one candidate, but can for the other? Why not make just enough confusion and delay to cast doubts on whether the real eventual result is never accepted or not? Why not kill the candidate who is likely to win so that they are stricken from the ballot? If you are already committing crimes, why not make murder one?

Now I don’t buy into conspiracy theories, but only brought up the murder one simply because it seems like it could have happened to one Paul Wellstone. It was close enough to the election that there were already votes cast for him absentee. He was likely to win, but now couldn’t since the state he was senator of, Minnesota, strikes any and every dead person off of the ballots. With a last minute Democrat put on the ballot in his place, a Republican wound up winning the election and didn’t have to face a special election like a Democrat who would have won did. I do not think that Paul was actually killed and certainly don’t want people to do this.

Harvesting ballots has already been proven as a way to commit fraud. They would make such a thing disappear like mail-in ballots disappear in order to boost their chances of winning. And this happened in a North Carolina congressional race for the US House. It was a Republican that was running whose campaign did this. Don’t believe me? Here’s a link. This happened a mere two years ago in 2018 and already the Republicans have forgotten about it. They wouldn’t be saying that only Democrats benefit from mail-in voting or that it would be fraud for them if they remembered that this was a Republican race committing fraud.

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felony-charges-that-allege-ballot-fraud

Now we get to the side of voter suppression. The first instance that I remember it happening in the US was related to Jim Crow and laws of that era preventing black people from voting. Sadly, America has never gotten past that. I firmly believe that Trump is not against people voting, be it by mail or other ways, provided that they are voting for himself. Otherwise, he doesn’t want black people to vote since they won’t vote for him. He said so himself.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-told-civil-rights-leaders-it-was-great-many-black-people-didn-t-vote-in-2016-according-to-leaked-recording/ar-BB18ePP6?li=BB141NW3&ocid=mailsignout

The sabotage with the mail right now that is causing the delays is illegal. If you mess with mail, you are committing a federal crime. Messing with mail-in ballots is a crime and a form of voter suppression. Will the problems magically go away after the election? Hopefully, we won’t have to wait that long. Some people simply can’t vote any other way. Does Trump really want to put those in the military at a disadvantage? The Republicans should be more upset about this as you’d think that more of their supporters would donate via check and use the mail for it.

The pandemic has made things even worse with voter suppression. The Republicans are even using or planning to use intimidation tactics as well in order to do what it takes to win. We are seeing polls close. We are seeing people forced to vote during a pandemic. We have seen a lot of missing absentee ballots that never get to their planned recipients and alternatives had to be done at the last minute, if they happened at all.

I’m going to end the post here with this paragraph as I don’t know what else there is to say in this post. I hope that I covered all the important bases in this and don’t know if I missed anything important. We’ll see how this world changes and we can only hope that it changes for the better by fixing both of the problems mentioned in this post.