Lying about the last election

Have we already forgotten the last election? The one just past? To many it may seem that we have. When I wrote a few weeks ago about the fraud that was easily observable in several states, someone asked where and when? Do I need to go back through the discussion of seeing poll workers tape up poster board over windows so they could not be observed? Were they embarrassed because they were being “so fair?” How many of us listened to the various hearings that were held in the states where poll workers from all walks of life described in detail what they observed? But, you see, it matters what “news” you watch.

We still have conservatives supporting Fox News that refused to allow its on-air talent to question the election! Hello? Newsmax? In the last few weeks, Fox news ratings are starting to climb, and Rupert’s son declared, with confidence, that their ratings would “recover.” You know, we have a say in that! Will they? We have all the power in the world when we act as one – 74 million Americans! And we are absolutely powerless when we refuse to act. For years now, we have continued to refuse to act. Sadly, Rupert’s son may well be right.

So, I have digressed a bit with the previous paragraph. But, it just makes me crazy when I see “conservatives” acting in ways that hurt the cause. Anyway, to get back on point, you might be amazed at how the last election is being portrayed out there in communities that do not watch conservative news. Let me give you an example from Vann Newkirk of the Atlantic titled American Democracy Is Only 55 Years Old - And Hanging by a Thread .

“Republicans in North Carolina moved that same week to implement a voter-ID law that activists argued would create a special burden on voters of color. A ruling by a federal appeals court held that the North Carolina law targeted voters like you with “almost surgical precision.” “Once the bonds of Section 5 were released,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me recently, “the rest of the country learned from the South how to engage in voter suppression. A torrent of voter-ID laws, gerrymanders, and other election changes would steadily erode the Voting Rights Act over the next few years in states both within and beyond the South, including Indiana, Kansas, and Wisconsin. The Republican Party adopted a facsimile of the white-supremacist strategy that had ruled Mississippi. Then it was 2016 and, well, you know what happened in 2016.”

So, you see, when you read the “proper” news magazine, you begin to realize how bad the black voter has had it through the years. (Oh, and don’t you love the line about gerrymandering? That was the Democrats’ favorite tool to use against conservatives until Barack Obama lost so many state houses the Democrats lost control of it. Now, it’s bad.) In reality, black participation has gone up where voter ID laws were put in place. Now, stop and think about how hard it would be to get by in this modern world without a photo ID? Most of the states that implemented voter ID did so with money available to help get IDs for people that didn’t have one. But, none of that is mentioned in this article. Do you see the lies by omission? Do you still wonder why black people think Republicans are out to get them after reading this? But, let’s continue and see how they describe the race that just occurred, using Ron Brownstein’s article from the same magazine.

“In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic created obstacles to safely voting that the country had never before faced in a presidential-election year, and yet more people voted than ever. Turnout was higher than it had been in at least a century, and extraordinary levels of black turnout in particular gave Democrats control of the White House and the Senate. Democratic voters overcame so many barriers to voting and, at the presidential level, achieved such a powerful victory that, to some, it might feel alarmist to worry about voting rights. But complacency would be a mistake.”

Another quote from Brownstein:

“Record turnout in 2020 was the fruit of the immense investment by voting-rights organizations in participation, something that is not sustainable and will likely falter in less pivotal elections. More important, conspiracy theories among Trump’s camp about widespread fraud and cheating were animated primarily by voting in places with a large black population, and fueled an insurrection in January, when hundreds of rioters overran the United States Capitol, waved the Confederate battle flag in its halls, and disrupted the congressional electoral count by force. Opposition to black electoral power propels an antidemocratic front that will not likely dissipate with Trump gone. In fact, conservative lawmakers are currently targeting the very changes that helped more citizens vote in 2020.

To wit, in Georgia, where Joe Biden won on the strength of absentee ballots and where senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won, riding a record wave of black votes, Republicans have vowed to pass legislation making absentee voting more difficult, including potentially ending at-will absentee voting and eliminating ballot drop boxes. Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan face GOP-led efforts to limit mail-in voting. Even in the middle of an emergency expansion of ballot access necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, a handful of red states actually tried to make it harder to vote.

“This is a project to chip away at the Voting Rights Act,” Sherrilyn Ifill told me. “It is one of the most effective pieces of civil-rights legislation ever, and it goes to the heart of challenging white supremacy and white political power. We’ve always known that it’s in the crosshairs. Today, even with Trump out of the White House, the VRA is in immediate danger. Politicians who want to constrain the electorate will benefit from his efforts. They will find the legal framework of voting rights to be fragile and contingent. The federal judiciary, as reshaped by Trump, is a machine that has been purpose-built for many things, among them rolling back the right to vote. And there will be no shortage of opportunities for that machine to do its damage.”

So, you see, there was no fraud in 2020, only record participation by minority voters. And any attempt to prevent the same voting systems use in the future is obviously an attempt to depress minority vote and turnout. Do you begin to see how serious our problem is here in the USA? People in power spin fabulous lies to create something that bears no resemblance to what really happened. And you and I are caught unaware! Until next week!