'One would think Hillary Clinton & Dems would be Howling about Voter Suppression of Non-Whites - One would be wrong'
/As many a protest sign has said since Election Day, he's not my president. He's no one's president. As of this writing, Trump is losing the popular vote by about 2 million votes. You might have missed that in the mainstream media, which is too busy reporting about the surprising, even shocking, nature of the Trump victory — which was not a victory.
The Electoral College is extremely undemocratic and should be immediately tossed on the trash heap of history where it belongs.
I suppose we're fortunate that this time around there were all of a dozen states that actually mattered, as opposed to 2000 and 2004, when only one to three states mattered. In 2000, Al Gore beat George W. Bush by 540,520 votes, but we got eight disastrous years of George W. Bush. And now this. One person, one vote, simply doesn't exist, and it never will with the Electoral College.
It's even worse than that. According to Democracy Now, fully half of the 538 electors are not bound by their states' election results. In other words, a few hundred people elect the president of a nation of 325 million. Obviously that is not democracy.
The Electoral College is defended as a means to make small states relevant, but it does the exact opposite. The four most important Electoral College states are the third, sixth, seventh and ninth biggest states by population: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina.
Meanwhile numbers one, two, four, five, and eight — California, Texas, New York, Illinois and Georgia — are all thrown under the bus. Of those states, Texas got one or two Hillary drive-bys and that's about it. The most populous state in the country got no attention whatsoever. That's democracy?
Only 12 states were visited by either candidate — only 12 states mattered. There was not one candidate visit in the remaining 38 states.
The Electoral Integrity Project ranks the U.S. last among western industrialized countries for election integrity. Dead last. We rank behind such towering paragons of election integrity as Mongolia, Tunisia, Rwanda and Brazil.
But the problems with our elections don't end with the Electoral College. Not even close.
Silence of The Vote Scams Again. It's called voter suppression, and it's widespread, very widespread. Trump was right: The election was rigged. But it was rigged in his favor, by his own party.
It all comes down to demographics. The non-white population is growing faster than the white population, and young people coming of voting age are more tolerant of just about everything — race, religion, ethnicity, gays, lesbians, marriage equality, transgender rights, pot, drugs in general — things Republicans are largely opposed to. The older, less tolerant population is simply dying off. Republicans know this, and they know that the only way they can win against this demographics tsunami is through voter suppression.
There's voter caging, in which Republicans send cards to registered voters, and if the cards are returned as undeliverable, the voters are simply tossed off voter rolls. There's no appeal. They're not even notified. Goodbye.
This was banned under the Civil Rights Act, which the then Republican Supreme Court tossed out on the grounds that our election system is now just peachy and no longer needs the act's voter protections. Right.
In Texas, Republicans have made it so hard to conduct voter registration drives that many groups have given up on it, under threat of state criminal charges. (Meanwhile Oregon, a solid blue state, automatically registers all who get driver licenses.)
We are the only country in the world that votes on a workday. So black churches in some states have “Souls to the Polls” early voting Sundays. Republican secretaries of state have fought tooth and nail to stop this, but have failed in the courts, so in the key swing state of Ohio, Republican Secretary of State John Husted — one man — ordered there be only one Souls to the Polls Sunday polling station per county. There are 400,000 blacks in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) — one polling station.
Husted also ordered turned off security devices that photograph every electronic ballot cast — and this was upheld by, yes, a Republican judge.
Then there's the mother of all voter suppression techniques: Crosscheck. Thirty states participate in this ballot thuggery. With Crosscheck, Republicans scour voter rolls for Asian, Latino and common African-American names, match them to similar — not even necessarily identical — names in other states, and then toss duplicates from the rolls. They don't even use middle names. Again, no appeal, no notification. There are 32,000 Maria Garcias in the United States. Good luck voting, Maria.
About one million voters were rejected by Crosscheck. That's more than five times Trump's total, combined victory margin in Florida and Pennsylvania, two states that would have, together, spelled a Clinton victory.
One would think Hillary Clinton and the national Democratic Party would be howling about all this. One would be wrong. Not a peep from Hillary, who is too busy blaming FBI Director James Comey.
Nor was there a peep from Al Gore or John Kerry when their presidencies were stolen in 2000 and 2004. [Kerry in photo sipping Arabic coffee in old Damascus on Saturday, Jan. 8, 2005, the day after the election challenge by a small band of House Democrats who challenged voting irregularities in Ohio - He did not participate even though they needed at least one senator to temporarily stop the process and force the House and Senate to formally debate their complaint. For his own presidency.]
Here we see the true colors of these three Democratic nominees. In 2004, John Kerry said he wouldn't give up until every Ohio vote was counted, and then a few hours later, in the wee hours, he dispatched his vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, to throw in the towel — well before the last Ohio vote was in fact counted.
Ultimately none of these three Democratic nominees cared a whit about Maria Garcia's right to vote. All that mattered to them was their election, their presidency, and protecting the facade of the rotting, withering corpse of U.S. democracy. The moment they were declared the loser, they tucked their tails between their legs and limped off the stage, leaving the Maria Garcias of the world to live and deal with the train wreck that is our elections system.
Rigged. Rigged. Rigged.
Lawrence Reichard is a first-place Maine Press Association winner, freelance writer and activist. He lives in Belfast.
