Letter to the Editor: Republicans Eye Voter Suppression to Win in 2020

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Outlines of the Trump Republican election strategy for 2020 were made more clear by two recent statements. The first, by Donald Trump, speculated that “if more people vote, Republicans might never win another election.”

The second comment by Mitch McConnell that Senate Republicans are not going to authorize a “blue state bailout” is laughable considering his state of Kentucky, a red state, receives billions more from the federal treasury than it contributes, while New York, a blue-state, sends billions more to Washington, D.C. than it receives back. It is also a tacit admission by McConnell that the COVID-19 pandemic is sickening and killing many more Democrats than Republicans. 

Older urban white people, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities are heavily Democratic voters. A hundred thousand less of them in November could help Trump win in close, key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. His zeal to “liberate” their economies without any containment of the virus is little more than cold-blooded Electoral College math. 

Death or the threat of death is a fairly common method of voter suppression in American history, especially in the Jim Crow-era (1877 to 1965) American South and in 19th and 20th century periods of anti-immigration hysteria. Forcing voters to go to the polls in a pandemic rather than allowing a vote by mail, Wisconsin’s Trump Republicans dusted off the old ways of intimidation in their April primary. 

It is the modern, genteel version of a head on a pike. Fifty-two poll workers and voters got coronavirus from that primary-day encounter. 

Trump continually lies, saying that voting by mail is riddled with fraud. There is not a smidgeon of real evidence to prove that. According to Washington’s own Secretary of State and chief elections official, Republican Kim Wyman, all the evidence shows voting by mail to be very safe and reliable. Predictably, Trump and McConnell now threaten to shut down the U.S. Postal Service. Like any aspiring dictator, Trump will do anything to hold on to power. 



Any foreign country that wishes to meddle in our election on his behalf will be welcome. He will employ every possible method of voter suppression. He will “liberate” the formerly “beautiful economy” without a coordinated national testing and tracing program that could box in COVID-19 and get the country and our economy to a safe harbor. If he loses the election he will cry “voter fraud” and try to incite his swastika- and Confederate flag-waving minions to a race war. When the tinderbox he created ignites, he can declare martial law and “postpone” leaving office. 

In his 1861 first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln summoned the “better angels of our nature” and the “mystic chords of memory” to invoke our common heritage, trying in vain to prevent the outbreak of a civil war. In 2020, Donald Trump summons the fallen angels of our nature and the feral chords of memory to run salt in our political and social divisions for his profit alone. 

 

Marty Ansley

Cinebar