The Republicans not the Russians are the biggest threat to American democracy
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Forget Robert Mueller and Russiagate. The biggest threat to American democracy, and to the legitimacy of US elections, comes not from Kremlin hackers but from Republican Party politicians.
Think I’m exaggerating? Take a look at Randolph County in Georgia. Population: 7,000. Sixty-one per cent black; 31 per cent poor. Ahead of a tight gubernatorial election in November, in which the Democrats have nominated a black populist named Stacey Abrams, local GOP election officials are planning on closing seven of Randolph County’s nine polling stations.
Yes, all but two of them! How is this not a political, legal and moral scandal of the highest order? It is a brazen attempt at voter suppression. In a scathing letter to the Randolph County Board of Elections and Registration on 14 August, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) slammed the proposal to shutter three-quarters of the county’s polling stations as “discriminatory”, “suspicious”, “unjustifiable” and a “violation” of both the Voting Rights Act and the US constitution.
The ACLU noted that “the eliminated polling place with the highest registered voter population, Cuthbert Middle School, serves a 96.7 per cent black population” which would lead “a reasonable observer to wonder whether the real motive behind these closures is indeed to make it harder for African-Americans to cast a ballot”.
“There is nothing worse in a democracy than preventing people from voting,” Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, tells me. “That’s what’s been going on in the past few elections.”
How did this happen? Well, the United States has a long and shameful history of repressing and disenfranchising African-American communities. However, contemporary efforts at voter suppression date from November 2000, when George W Bush’s razor-thin victory over Al Gore in the key swing state of Florida gained him the White House. Some black voters in the Sunshine State were purged from the electoral rolls ahead of election day; others were prevented from reaching polling stations by police roadblocks. A study by the US Commission on Civil Rights later found that the “disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of African-American voters” with black voters “nearly ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected” in 2000.
It was a light-bulb moment for Republicans, who realised that they could win elections by preventing people from voting in them – specifically, people of colour.
In 2010, after the GOP gained a record 680 state legislative seats and took control of 26 state legislatures, its voter suppression efforts intensified. Victorious Republican politicians set about trying to undermine Barack Obama’s election-winning coalition of progressive whites and African-Americans by disenfranchising the latter.
Citing the imaginary problem of “voter fraud”, more than a dozen states passed a variety of laws, ranging from stringent photo ID requirements, to restricting early voting, to denying the vote to anyone convicted of a felony, even after completing their sentence. All of these laws disproportionately affected poorer, non-white voters.
In 2013, conservatives on the Supreme Court voted to gut a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act that required (mostly Southern) states with a history of discrimination to request federal approval before making changes to their voting laws. The court did so on the spurious grounds that “blatant” or “widespread” racial discrimination in elections was a thing of the past.
If only. In 2016, a federal court accused Republican politicians in North Carolina of targeting African-American voters “with almost surgical precision” with a voter ID law. In 2017, another federal court ruled that GOP legislators in Texas had passed a voter ID law with “discriminatory intent” towards black and Hispanic voters (in the Lone Star State, gun licences can be used as identification for voting, but student IDs can’t). Meanwhile, thanks to laws that disenfranchise convicted felons for life, one in 13 black adults in the United States now lacks a vote, compared to one in 56 white adults. In Florida, a whopping 23 per cent of the African-American community is disenfranchised.
This is a travesty. Americans like to lecture the rest of the world on the importance of voting and elections. Perhaps they should start looking closer to home. How can the US, as Ari Berman points out, be considered “a functioning democracy as long as voter suppression is running rampant”? “We pay lip service to the importance of voting,” he tells me, “but not to voting itself.”
And if Donald Trump’s shock victory doesn’t force the Democrats – and the media – to take the issue of voter suppression more seriously, then nothing will. It was “a major contributing factor” to Trump’s narrow win in November 2016, argues Berman, because “it is clear that voter suppression reduced votes for Hillary Clinton in a number of key states”.
Take Wisconsin. A September 2017 study by the University of Wisconsin found between 17,000 and 23,000 people, a disproportionate number of whom were black, were either “deterred” or “prevented” from voting by the state’s strict voter ID law. Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes. For the Republican Party, then, voter suppression is a winning strategy.
To be clear: this is a war against black and Hispanic voters and, by extension, against democracy. Who needs the Russians to subvert US elections when the Republicans are already doing such a fine job of it?
Article is LOCKED by author/seeder
Who is online
646 visitors
[deleted]
[deleted]
So, what you are saying, in essence, is that minorities are too poor and/or dumb, to obtain a picture ID, or vote early, since most areas have these options, plus voting by mail.
You're making up a problem that does not exist. I don't what the Democrats have done for minorities later, but if people really want to vote, no one is stopping them.
[deleted]
Anybody that feels they have to use bold and oversize print to try to force their points across strikes me as akin to a toddler having a temper tantrum when they cannot get what they want...
Georgia Election Results - Randolph County, Nov. 8, 2016
For the 2016 election there were 3,914 registered voters in Randolph County and 2,922 ballots cast in 9 precincts. Voter turnout was 74.66 pct. That averages to 324.7 votes per precinct. No doubt some precincts had more voters than other precincts.
Randolph County, GA, encompasses 431 square miles which means the county is about 20 miles wide and 20 miles tall. The county seat is Cuthbert with a population of about 3,700 (about 53 pct of the county's population). The second largest city in the county is Shellman with a population of about 1,200 (about 17 pct of the county's population). That means 70 pct of the county's population live in these two cities.
Randolph County, GA, is experiencing the same problem as other sparsely populated rural counties. It becomes more difficult to operate polling stations throughout the county because there aren't enough volunteer election officials and there aren't enough voters to justify the polling station.
Big city political hucksters have no clue about the problems that rural counties must deal with. And those big city hucksters really don't care.
[deleted]
Big city ideas don't work in rural counties. The real problem highlighted by the seeded article is big city ignorance.
I bet all those big cities would gripe if they had to operate a separate polling station for every 300 voters. Using the argument from the seed, all those big cities are deliberately disenfranchising voters by not providing enough polling stations.
If that is true-- do you think that the following statement is true-- or false?
Rural political hucksters have no clue about the problems that big cities must deal with. And those rural hucksters really don't care.
Correct, rural politicians can also be hucksters and they generally aren't concerned about big cities, either. The problem is that it is becoming more difficult to find rural politicians; so rural areas don't even receive representation by hucksters in Congress.
I join with those who founded this nation in opposing democracies with all I have and am.
Firstly, America is not a democracy. It is not, never was, nor ever was intended to be a democracy. And for very good reason. Democracy--dēmocratía ("power/rule by the people")--is a horrible system of government. It is maintained by violence, mob rule, and a pernicious envy--an envy that arises when one of its citizens rises too far above the others, an envy that drives that democracy to rip them down. The rights of the individual are always supplanted by "the will of the people".
Democracies, even in a “Representative Democracy” are evil and a threat to liberty
It is time we put an end to this misconception about democracy. America is a republic.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”
— John Adams (1797-1801) Second President of the United States and Patriot
"Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine percent."
— Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, 3rd President of the U. S.
"In democracy … there are commonly tumults and disorders … Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.”
— Noah Webster (1758-1843) Father of the Dictionary & American Patriot
“All such men are, or ought to be, agreed, that simple governments are despotisms; and of all despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent.”
— Fisher Ames (1758-1808) Founding Father and framer of the First Amendment to the Constitution
“Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.”
— George Washington (1732-1799) Father of the Country, 1st President of the United States
"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
— Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, 3rd President of the U. S.
“The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be, liberty.”
— Fisher Ames (1758-1808) Founding Father and framer of the First Amendment to the Constitution
“But between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
— John Marshall (1755-1835) House Member, Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
"Democracy is the most vile form of government...Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
— James Madison (1751-1836) Father of the Constitution, 4th President of the United States
“It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.”
— James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American historical novelist
LMAO. This is what the left is running with? I guess they are also too stupid to know we aren't a democracy.
Probably the most effective issue the Dems have this election cycle is healthcare.
(That's the main issue the more political savy Democratic candidates are going to run on).
But when you look at the trasvesty their healthcare bill turned out to be, I'm surprised they are still running on it.
[delete]
From the way the democrats have been acting it is they and not the Republicans that are a threat to democracy. They still haven't accepted the results of the 2016 election. Their own queen said a that not accepting the results were a threat to our democracy
Prove it, which you can. Making things up doesn't help your cause
...
...
Need more proof?
There is also this that should jog his memory
The actions of the democrat since the election have more than shown how they continue to fail to accept the results of the 2016 election.
Donnie's silence is deafening.