Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Without Free and Fair Elections, There Is No America
October 7, 2020
The 2020 Women’s March in Washington DC (risingthermals)
By Thom Hartmann
The polls all show that Joe Biden is winning the presidential race in a landslide, but Americans are worried that Donald Trump will nonetheless steal this election.
Americans have been told to tolerate the fact that a man who lost an election by 3 million votes sits in the White House.
It’s astonishing that we treat as normal the possibility that massive voter suppression in a couple of states can lead to the loser of an election becoming president.
It’s bizarre how little value our news media assigns to democracy itself.
Americans tolerate the Republican Party engaging in voter caging, throwing people off the voting rolls because they didn’t send back a postcard.
Americans tolerate the Republican Party making the very process of voting long, tortured, and difficult, particularly for working people paid by the hour.
Americans tolerate the Republican Party sending armed gunmen with swastikas and Confederate flags to intimidate people at polling places.
Americans tolerate an administration that has destroyed over 600 multi-million-dollar high-speed mail sorting machines so mail-in ballots won’t arrive in time to be counted.
The Trump administration and the Republican Party have committed a number of horrible acts.
They’ve put refugee children in cages, and kept them there for years. They’ve minimized an infectious disease that has killed over 200,000 Americans. They’ve gutted funding for the environment and and worker safety. They’re destroying our national parks and selling off our public lands to frackers, drillers, and miners. The list goes on and on.
But none of this is as destructive to this nation as ripping apart our elections.
The Republicans on the Supreme Court just made it much harder for mail-in ballots to be counted in South Carolina. In Texas, the governor has ordered that there can only be one, single ballot drop box for a city of over 4 million people. And Trump is constantly telling us that the election is rigged and the vote can’t be trusted, a naked attempt to demoralize voters and diminish faith in America.
We live in a democratic republic. For such a form of government to work, elections must be fair and accurate.
The GOP’s Jim Crow efforts to suppress the vote in dozens of Republican-controlled states from Florida to South Carolina to Wisconsin to Texas are all, in actuality, efforts to suppress democracy.
Trump’s Republican party today is threatening the very core of American values and the American way of life.
Without a functioning democracy, nations inevitably spiral downwards into autocracy and authoritarianism, and eventually into tyranny. We’ve seen this in country after country, as strongman dictators rise around the globe to destroy democracies.
This year, it’s not just Republicans, Democrats and third parties on the ballot. It’s the fate and future of democracy and a republican form of government itself.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
Follow BuzzFlash on @twitter
Continue the conversation at the BuzzFlash Nation group on Facebook