Stealing Elections

January 23, 2020

Republicans are screaming that the Democrats are trying to overturn the 2016 election, and trying to steal the 2020 election. That is rich. Impeachment is about correcting electoral mistakes. It is a constitutional process. You may not like or agree with it, but it is not stealing. And who again was trying to extort a foreign country to steal the 2020 election?

The reason this discussion is important is that there is only one party that has been trying to steal elections, and that is the Republican Party. Their two-pronged attack involves gerrymandering and voter suppression.

After the 2010 census, the GOP effectively gerrymandered election districts in Republican-controlled states. In 2016, voters preferred Hillary Clinton by 3,00,000 votes, but the GOP retained control of both houses of Congress. It took an 8,000,000 vote advantage for the Democrats in 2018 to take back control of the House. Many gerrymandering schemes have been ruled illegal by the courts, but it continues.

The GOP has also been guilty of attempting to suppress the vote ever since the Supreme Court overturned the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There are approximately 18, Republican-leaning states with ongoing voting rights litigation. These states attempted to reinstate voter ID laws, reduce the number of polling stations, reduce the number of days to vote, reduce early voting, restrict voting by mail, require proofs of citizenship, purge voter roles, and more. All of these actions were designed to make it more difficult for minorities to vote.

So who is really guilty of trying to steal elections?