Democracy is holding on by a thread as Fascist Republicans create laws that suppress the votes and control elections.
tRump must have known that he would not win the 2020 election. Even before the election, he was screaming voter fraud. Voter fraud occurs when voters vote illegally. Tell me, why would someone vote twice or illegally when they could be arrested? This is what tRump is claiming. He sued 240 times since then trying to prove it—with no evidence. Every lawsuit was kicked out because they had nothing to back their claims. He called secretaries of state to find more votes for him. Does he really think that he could find seven million more votes from those who voted illegally? Of course not. He is now setting up the elections to steal in 2022 and 2024 with voter suppression bills. He is harassing poll workers who are Black since most Blacks are Democrats. They have gotten death threats. He is working to replace the secretaries of states who are responsible for the certification of the votes after the election.
Republican legislatures in several states have recently passed bills to make it more difficult to vote. It is also the election where we have redistricting in place. Republicans have found a way to gerrymander the districts to already claim the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022. In Arizona, we have nine representatives in Congress; currently, there are five Democrats and four Republicans. The gerrymander for congressional seats has now produced six Republican districts and three for Democrats. It is the same in many states. This is how they are taking back the House—cheating. Republicans are cutting both polling places and hours for voting in Democratic strongholds. Some voters had to wait 12 hours to vote where in affluent, white neighborhoods, voting time averaged 15 minutes. They want strict voter ID laws. Many poor people can’t afford to get new IDs which sometimes require driver’s licenses—many poor people do not drive. Some states require mail-in ballots to be notarized. These same states have also purged voters from the voter lists—notoriously, the Democrats. When Brain Kemp was Georgia’s Secretary of State, he purged well over 100,000 votes to win the governorship against Stacy Abrams; he only won by 55,000 votes. The Republicans even have gone so far as to give state Republican legislatures the power to change the results of an election if they don’t like the outcome. This is why the Democrats want laws to oversee this suppression. When the election is rigged with a voter suppression bill, it is election fraud.
Adrian Fontes was the Maricopa County recorder for the 2018 and 2020 elections. Both elections went smoothly. More people voted in 2020 than any election in Maricopa County history. Fontes made it easy for everyone to vote, and the Republicans hated it. Before Fontes, Helen Purcell held the office for many years. She cut polling places and made a mess of the elections, making it hard to organize the election and difficult to vote for many Maricopa County voters. Fontes cleaned up the election process and added safeguards to eliminate any possibility of fraud. Then came the “fraudit” audit, because tRump thought he should have won Arizona. He didn’t. He claims there was voter fraud. There wasn’t. The auditors couldn’t find anything. And the voters turned Arizona blue at the federal level since we have sent two Democratic senators and 5 Democratic representatives to the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, the Republicans won the state elections. So, that is more proof that the election was not rigged. Even Democrat Adrian Fontes lost his election to Steven Richer, a Republican. Arizona is fortunate that he is an honest Republican; he even commented on how fair and smoothly the 2020 election was run in Arizona. He called the fraudit a mockery of our elections.
It is the responsibility of the states to run their own elections however, the U.S. Constitution says that if Congress finds that elections are not fair, they must step in. The Democrats in Congress are pushing to pass voter laws to make it harder for Republicans to suppress our votes. They are dealing with the filibuster to get these bills passed. Even though the Democrats have a majority of the Senate, if the filibuster is called—and it can be called anonymously by any senator—they will need 60 votes to pass the bill. It will never happen; Republicans fall in line again. Democrats need 50 votes to change the filibuster rule, so 60 votes will not be required to pass a bill. It’s an old Jim Crow relic. The filibuster could have been blocked or the rules could have been changed. Not one Republicans voted to do this and unfortunately, neither did Democratic senators Manchin and Sinema. If the Republicans succeed at stopping these bills from being passed, Democrats will have it even harder in 2022 and probably for good. We will no longer be a Democracy. The voter suppression bills will make it almost impossible for Democrats to win ever again. President Biden really thought he could get the support of the Republicans whom he has been friends with for 50 years. He knew how much Sinema and Manchin refused to do their job and change the filibuster in order to get a simple majority on the voting bills. The Republican Senators told their friend President Biden they would get primaried if they voted to change the filibuster. It failed. They all put themselves ahead of the country. Will President Biden find a way around this to save Democracy?