Too many people got their shorts in a knot over the NYT poll showing Biden losing to The Angry Inch, but the same newspaper that has pounded on the issue of Biden’s age—with the not-so-subtle implication that he’s somehow mentally unfit for the job of President—for months also published, to much less fanfare, a solidly reported piece on Republican’s organized and concerted efforts to harass voters and prevent them from exercising their rights.
The poll story—which, of course, ran wild across the media landscape—was the second high-profile cheap shot the Times has taken at Biden in recent weeks (“cheap” in the moral sense; that poll must have cost a pretty penny). They earlier ignored 300 pages of exonerating report on Biden’s handling of classified documents to focus on a comment by the highly partisan right-wing author about Biden’s mental state, including devoting most of their op-ed pages to going after him.
Among the people crying foul was their former public editor (the paper has since eliminated that post) Margaret Sullivan.
When faced with criticism over their gross over-reaction, publisher A.G. Sulzberger responded with the paper’s trademark dismissive condescension:
“We are going to continue to report fully and fairly, not just on Donald Trump but also on President Joe Biden. He is a historically unpopular incumbent and the oldest man to ever hold this office. We’ve reported on both of those realities extensively, and the White House has been extremely upset about it.”
I’ll just leave it there. I’ve written several times about the media’s obsession with The Inch and their unfair treatment of Joe Biden. I’ll also postpone a commentary on what I suspect is the racist underpinning to the attention paid to Biden’s age and the un-stated fear/hatred of Kamala Harris becoming president. I need to get to the business at-hand.
“I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
― Paul Weyrich
Republicans have been waging a multi-pronged attack on voting ever since the early 1960s, when they decided that appealing to white racism was their ticket to future electoral success.
That campaign was given new vigor after George Bush the Younger took office. One of his henchmen, Karl Rove, went to work making (non-existent) vote fraud an issue, and John Roberts, who played a behind-the-scenes role in the legal battle over the Florida recount that made Bush the winner and was rewarded with the Chief Justice’s chair, dutifully eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.
Shelby County released a wave of voter suppression laws across red states, clearly aimed at Democratic voters, especially Black voters.
These various efforts have been working. For example, the Brennan Center just the other day released a study showing the gap between Black and White voter turnout has grown larger. The authors posited that, “In 2020, if the gap had not existed, 9 million more ballots would have been cast.”
Right-wingers didn’t stop at legislation. They started in with character assassination and threats of violence.
In 2016, The Inch urged his followers to go “watch other communities.” One MAGAT was quoted:
“I’ll look for . . . well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”
In the chaos after the 2020 election, The Inch’s consigliere, Rudy Guiliani, sicced the hounds of hell on two Georgia election workers, lying that they had cheated and scanned ballots several times to help Biden. Those claims were proven false, and Guiliani ended up on the losing end of a defamation lawsuit to the tune of $148 million. But the two election workers endured years of harassment, including death threats, and other workers across the country have reported similar threats against them.
Now, eight months before an election that may decide the fate of our representative democracy, a well-organized network of right-wingers is kicking it into high gear.
The Times piece (any bets it doesn’t run on A1?) describes in detail how these self-described “election investigators” are pushing local officials in Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada to purge voting rolls.
Repeating a truth we’ve known for years, the writers state that claims of fraud have “no grounding in fact . . . Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Elections officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.” (They don’t get into the fact that the majority of fraud that does occur seems to be perpetrated by Republicans.)
But even if the challenges fail, they help accomplish a larger purpose: they disenfranchise voters.
“In some states, a challenge alone is enough to limit a voter’s access to a mail ballot, or to require additional documentation at the polls. Privately, activists have said they consider that a victory.”
These challenges also lay the groundwork for another round of lawsuits like the ones we saw in 2020. FOX and the other right-wing propaganda outlets trumpet even the suggestion of fraud essentially as fact, eroding faith in the system and whipping up the MAGATs further. This, in turn, casts a pall over the results before the voting has even started.
Even the unctuous Mitch McConnell, hardly democracy’s friend warned about these consequences when members of his caucus were considering challenging the results of the 2020 election:
“If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept the election again,” McConnell said.
The right is clearly and unalterably committed to jimmying the vote, however they might be able. They see the opportunity they’ve been working towards for decades—the establishment of what amounts to a dictatorship, no matter how you want to characterize it—within their reach. They’ve seized the media narrative on Biden himself, wounding him and driving down his polls, just as they did with Hillary Clinton. They will be flooding the process with perhaps billions of dollars (another John Roberts legacy). And, by God, if they can, they’re going to disrupt the vote, deny people their franchise where they can, and create chaos if they again come up on the losing end.
Later,
Scaypgrayce 