Historical Perspective on the Tsunami of Voting Measures Post 2020 Election Cycle

Historical Perspective on the Tsunami of Voting Measures
Post-2020 Election Cycle

By Thomas Coffin

As we all know by now, Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election in November 2020. As we also know, he didn’t take it well, claimed he was robbed, filed 60 lawsuits and lost all of them because he had no evidence to prove his false claims of fraud, and then tried to seize power by overthrowing the legitimate government through means of a violent insurrection.

After losing Civil War II in one infamous day, he sulks in his latter-day Elba Island and plots a Napoleonic return from exile.

Reality is that he lost the popular vote by a landslide—over 7,000,000 votes. The People spoke emphatically. The Party of Trump (once known as the Republican Party but now alienated from the principles of Lincoln) got the message: It cannot win elections with a platform that embraces authoritarianism, white supremacy, overt racism, bigotry, and rejects equality and the rule of law. Thus, post-election Trump legislators throughout the States they control are busily trying to enact stricter voting requirement measures designed to make it harder for certain categories of voters to exercise their sacred right to vote.

To put these measures in proper context, we must cut through the pseudo-rationale of alleged widespread fraud in the 2020 election (there wasn’t any, and even the Trump legal team that aggressively pushed that phony theme are abandoning it and now saying no one should have taken their assertions as anything but political ballyhoo). So the fallback position seems to be that enough people believed the ginned up fraud allegations that we need to satisfy their concerns going forward.

In other words, dear voters, you are guilty of appearing guilty, and now you must prove you are innocent, honest citizens.

Rubbish! The system doesn’t work that way, certainly not in a free democracy. The Trump Party is flipping the equation. The burden must rest with them to prove the allegations of fraud that justify making voting more burdensome, not vice versa.

Part of the context driving these voting obstacles is that the Party realizes that it cannot win the popular vote in a nation that is becoming increasingly diverse such as the United States. This has been acknowledged by the late Rush Limbaugh, who squarely blamed Trump’s loss in 2020 on the African-American vote and admitted that the conservative right would never be able to capture that demographic. He went so far as to suggest that so-called Red States join together to secede from the Union.

Moreover, the leader of the Party, Trump himself, famously said his party would never win another election if it made it easier for citizens to cast their votes.

And, in a very recent article entitled Why not Fewer Voters, published in conservative National Review (4/6/21), author Kevin D. Williamson stated: “The fact is that voters got us into this mess. Maybe the answer isn’t more voters,” and “I’m not convinced that having more voters is a good thing...” nationalreview.com/2021/04/why-not-fewer-voters/

There is nothing new under the sun. In the post- Reconstruction Era, the defeated Confederacy was loath to accept the new African-American citizens and voting rights, to which they were entitled by the trilogy of 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. So the Southern States fashioned a literacy test which “all voters” had to pass, except “all” didn’t include “white” voters who were exempted from the requirement by a grandfather clause or a showing of “good moral character.” Thus, the literacy test essentially applied only to African-Americans, who had never been eligible for an education in a school setting while enslaved and consigned to inferior segregated educational institutions thereafter. Beyond those barriers were the tactics of violence and intimidation that persisted well into the 1960s. Those were the “Fewer Voters” of those times and are the same “Fewer Voters” desired and targeted by the measures touted by the conservative politicians of today. Jim Crow laws never really died; they were napping.

Another mortal threat to our democracy is the practice of gerrymandering. This tactic involves drawing district lines which determine elections to allocate representatives in State legislatures in a manner that disproportionately weights the votes of Whites over those of African-Americans. For a hypothetical example, lines might be drawn which put 10,000 African-Americans in a single district which sends one legislator to the Legislature but splits 10,000 White voters into two districts which thus send two legislators to the Legislature, doubling the weight of their vote and their representation.

It is no coincidence that the same Red states that are seeking to downsize the number of voters (the target being the African-American bloc) are also seeking to legislate changes to the Electoral College vote protocol to authorize the legislators in their States to overrule the popular vote and cast the electoral votes for the losing candidate. In short, gerrymandering puts the minority in the majority in the State Legislature and would also put the minority in the “majority” in electing our President.

This is not democracy. It is the antithesis of democracy. It is elitist, and it is racist in the extreme. This is a return to the era of discrimination and inequality, white patriarchal rule, and rejection of the diversity that defines our nation in the present day. It represents nostalgia that is atavistic and denies basic civil rights to all citizens. We the People must become informed of the truth behind the measures being promoted, their anti-democracy purpose, and work to defeat them as well as advance pro-democracy measures such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Civil rights and freedom are values that can never be taken for granted. And they are not partisan values but rather core principles that define our Constitution and Nation. Without them, we are simply not the United States of America.

posted 4.14.2021