If there’s one thing this election proved, it’s that Billionaire Capitalism and the Republican Party are determined to eliminate free and fair elections.
There was systemic voter suppression across the board. For example, although Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to restore voting rights to felons in 2018, the legislature effectively prevented many ex-offenders from voting by requiring in 2019 they pay all court-related fees, affecting possibly 775,000 voters, which is over twice the 370,000 vote margin of Trump’s victory in Florida.
But in addition to merely suppressing the vote, the Republican state government apparently played an even more insidious game, by not providing local election officials the names of ineligible felons so they could be purged from the voter rolls—-until after voting had already begun.
This was a sophisticated multi-tiered voter suppression strategy. By requiring felons to pay all their court-related fees, Florida Republicans imposed a twenty-first century poll tax, and then they failed to enforce that requirement until some people had already voted. Most felons, hearing of the requirement, probably either paid their fees or gave up on voting—but some may have registered to vote after the referendum in 2018 and before the Legislature effectively barred them in 2019 from voting.
By by failing to purge felons from the rolls until voting began in 2020, the state of Florida created a “poison pill” which could have been the basis for a legal challenge in case Biden carried the state.
This could have resulted in a do-over election. You might argue that this was all coincidental, but the delay in purging ex-offenders who hadn’t paid court fees until voting began is telling.
Another example of voter suppression is the coordinated efforts of the USPS to slow down the mail while the Pennsylvania legislature set a deadline for the arrival of mailed ballots that would have resulted in perhaps tens of thousands of ballots being disqualified. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended the deadline for receiving ballots three days to compensate for the slowdown in USPS deliveries, its decision was roundly condemned by Justice Alito, who acted as if deliberately slowing down the mail to rig an election was exactly what Madison and Washington had in mind. (See Legitimacy, Federalism and the Election).
I was personally affected by the USPS slowdown. I live in a state where voting by mail is the norm; everyone gets a mailed ballot. if you want to fill out your ballot at the county courthouse on Election Day, there’s a room set aside for that. But most people receive and return their ballot by mail.
This year, my ballot was mailed on October 9, from a county courthouse 18 miles from my home. (I was able to track it online.) On October 23, I still hadn’t received it; I requested a new ballot and picked it up at the county courthouse the same day. I filled it out and dropped my ballot off at a county office on October 24, a Saturday. Online, I tracked its progress; it was received on October 26 and accepted on the 28th.
On October 30 I received my original ballot. It had taken three weeks to travel eighteen miles. I ripped it up and threw it away. This is why federal judges required postal inspectors across the country to sweep sorting facilities for “lost” ballots. There is no knowing how effective Louis DeJoy’s efforts at voter suppression were. In an election with record-breaking turnout, a million or two lost ballots might not be noticed. Did this provide Trump with the margin of victory in North Carolina, for example?
Could ballots lost by the USPS account for part of the polling error we saw in the election?
But let’s pivot and look beyond direct voter suppression. On November 11 there was an extraordinary event in Georgia:
Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia called on the state’s GOP secretary of state to resign on Monday, citing “failures” in the election process but not providing any specific evidence to support their claims.
“There have been too many failures in Georgia elections this year and the most recent election has shined a national light on the problems,” Loeffler and Perdue said in a joint statement. “The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections. He has failed the people of Georgia, and he should step down immediately.”
The Georgia Republicans will both face runoff elections on Jan. 5. Loeffler, who beat back an intra-party challenge from Rep. Doug Collins, will go up against Rev. Raphael Warnock, while Perdue will go up against Jon Ossoff.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/09/loeffler-perdue-georgia-secretary-state-resign-435484
The key accusation the senators make against Raffensperger is that he “failed to deliver honest…elections,” which is extremely harsh—there’s nothing worse you could say about a Secretary of State. In his defense, however, he oversaw an election delivered Georgia to Joe Biden, even though he personally favored Trump; this is not the act of a dishonest man.
But when Perdue and Loeffler use the word “dishonest” they mean that Raffensperger failed to suppress the Democratic vote enough to allow them to avoid the inconvenience of a runoff.
What do they expect to accomplish by demanding that Raffensperger resign? Of course, they might have thought he would actually resign and be replaced by a Republican who do a more “honest” job of suppressing the Democratic vote by reducing the number of voting machines, disqualifying as many ballots as possible from Democratic-leaning precincts, deleting registered Democrats from the voting rolls—the usual bag of tricks.
Or they may have thought they could intimidate him into being more “honest” in the runoff elections.
Either way, their demands feed into the Trump Victimization Narrative that the election was stolen from Trump and the Republican Party. In terms of court challenges, this narrative is doing poorly, because there is no evidence of “illegal” votes being cast—or at least any more often than two-headed calves are born. And demonizing the Democrats isn’t working that well, because the Democrats always push back with good legal arguments and investigative journalism. And online misinformation campaigns are triggering significant pushback from social media companies, especially Twitter; it seems Putin ruined it for everyone.
But scapegoating a lower-ranking Republican official for their own lack of appeal at the ballot box? That might work since it doesn’t involve a judge asking for evidence or fighting Democrats.
But no. Raffensperger has shown some fight himself:
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger responded in a statement Monday saying he would not resign, and defended his office’s handling of the election. He said the election was a “resounding success” from an administration perspective. He highlighted his office’s briefings and updates to argue that they had conducted the process with transparency.
“I know emotions are running high. Politics are involved in everything right now,” Raffensperger said. “If I was Senator Perdue, I’d be irritated I was in a runoff. And both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President. But I am the duly elected Secretary of State. One of my duties involves helping to run elections for all Georgia voters. I have taken that oath, and I will execute that duty and follow Georgia law.”
Raffensperger said the process for reporting results in the state was orderly and followed the law. And he added that while he was “sure” there were illegal votes cast, it was “unlikely” that their total rose to the “numbers or margin necessary to change the outcome” of the election.
He also took a shot at Perdue and Loeffler for their criticism: “As a Republican, I am concerned about Republicans keeping the U.S. Senate. I recommend that Senators Loeffler and Perdue start focusing on that.”
Looking beyond Georgia, the extraordinary efforts made to intimidate, bribe, or unduly influence election officials and legislators in Michigan—especially in Wayne County—were without precedent.
But the effort to corrupt our elections goes beyond massive voter suppression and intimidation—even including the failed attempt to intimidate the Secretary of State of Georgia. Some of the corruption is systemic.
For example, campaign finance reform was gutted in Citizens United by five Republican judges, including the same Chief Justice Roberts who often claims there are no partisan judges. This not only allowed billionaires to self-fund their own campaigns, it also opened the door for dark money, where the sources of campaign funding are entirely secret. We have no idea whether the Russian Mafia or the Chinese PLA or the Saudis are contributing to our elections—-and shaping the issues that dominate our national dialogue.
The destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court falls into the same category, providing Southern racists the opportunity to intimidate rural black voters, a tactic that is part of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
And of course there’s the Electoral College, which should have been amended out of the Constitution long ago. But the rise of Billionaire Capitalism means is that it’s virtually impossible to amend the Constitution anymore.
But the biggest single factor in the corruption of American elections is disinformation; if people are intensely propagandized into believing falsehoods, their votes cannot be considered free. If you tell people a thousand times that cyanide is food and salad is poison, and then ask them to order lunch, a significant number of them will end up dead on the restaurant floor, human suggestibility being what it is.
What falsehoods are we talking about? The falsehood that climate change is a hoax, that Biden is suffering from dementia, that the pandemic will disappear “by magic,” that Obama is a Moslem who was born in Kenya, that Obamacare has harmed public health, that Republicans care about white working people, that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 elections, and that cutting taxes for billionaires helps everyone.
This is not an exhaustive list. If we want to go classic, we should note the myths that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that he had nuclear or biological weapons, that the stock market declined during Obama’s presidency, and that Hilary Clinton should be in prison for an IT mistake.
Of course when looking at Trump’s presidency the disinformation is on a different scale. It’s a falsehood that Biden has profited from his son’s business dealings; it’s a falsehood that American cities are in a state of anarchy. It’s an extreme falsehood that the vote counting was rigged in favor of the Democrats, or that significant numbers of illegal ballots were cast in either 2016 or 2020.
Lying to ordinary Republicans that the election was stolen—potentially getting people to commit acts of terrorism—-is inconceivably destructive.
But the biggest of all these falsehoods is the overall narrative that capitalism is itself a victim. Of what, you might ask? Of the need of our people for healthcare, jobs and education, for clean air and water and a stable climate, for fair elections and a tax system that doesn’t create an oligarchy? Yes, all that.
But capitalism is most particularly victimized by our desire not to be killed by capitalism, to merely survive it—for example by covid-19.
I am writing on December 13, 2020 at 6 am; I just poured a cup of coffee. In twenty minutes the coffee will be too cold for my taste, and by that time about 33 more Americans will have died from covid-19, and most of those deaths will have been avoidable. As my coffee grows cold, the heat drains from the bodies of those 33 Americans, who gasp out their last breath under the exhausted gaze of nurses and doctors.
The falsehood that the suffering capitalism causes is not real.
I could go on, but this is where Billionaire Capitalism has led us. The people would never support the concentration and wealth and power if they understood all the implications, so disinformation on a massive scale has always been a necessity for Billionaire Capitalism.
But when I say “disinformation” that’s an extreme understatement. What the right-wing media has created can only be compared to what Goebbels did by endlessly repeating the Big Lie that a Jewish conspiracy controlled Great Britain, the United States and the USSR, and that this conspiracy was using those countries in an effort to destroy Germany, and so destroying the Jewish population of occupied Europe was a legitimate act of self-defense.
In other words, Goebbels created an entire world-view and sold it to the German people through endless repetition; Fox News has done something quite similar.
If the comparison to Goebbels seems extreme, let’s take a deep breath and consider—-who undermines free elections and de-legitimizes them at every turn? People who want to end free elections, that’s who. They aren’t doing this out of some mysterious ethical lapse—they’re doing it because that’s the future they want.
In other words, we’re facing a totalitarian movement. As usual with Billionaire Capitalism, what you see is what you get—Republican silence or cooperation with Trump’s efforts to overturn a free election isn’t some melodramatic moral failure of individuals. It is instead perfectly logical, given their political goal of concentrating wealth and power into as few hands as possible; democracy was always an obstacle to achieving that goal. The ideology of Billionaire Capitalism is inherently hostile to democracy and free elections.
This point is “separable,” so to speak, from everything else I’ve written about socialism and capitalism—-that is, even if I’m all wet on everything else, I’m not wrong on this: the Republican Party is committed to destroying free elections in this country. Trump is not an anomaly, and the silence of most other Republicans on this issue isn’t cowardice—it’s agreement.
It’s one thing for Republicans to gerrymander, suppress voter turnout, pack the courts and blanket the nation with disinformation, both Russian and homegrown. But it’s been an open question whether, given their other advantages, they would actually attempt to overturn an election where the vote went decisively against them. They do have to maintain a fig-leaf of legitimacy, and some of them might shrink from such a loathsome deed.
But now we have the answer. The majority of Republican elected officials are willing to throw out any set of votes—whether from Detroit or Atlanta—that go against them, however ridiculous the pretext. If they lose an election by seven million votes, they will try to disenfranchise seven million and one voters. And they will incite violence against anyone who stands in their way, particularly other Republicans.
And at this point, violence is a key issue. Will we end up with a widespread domestic terror movement based on the myth that the election was stolen from Trump? This appears more likely than not, because the goal of billionaire capitalism is to destroy free elections covertly, without obviously doing so. And what could be better that to destroy free elections in the name of preserving them? This would be the apotheosis of billionaire capitalism’s campaign of disinformation, the point where the sun really does rise in the west and set in the east, because billionaires say so.
But an armed uprising—bombings, assassinations, mass shootings—would require several hundred or several thousand participants to be sustainable. A dozen or so domestic terrorists would be hunted down in a matter of days. But will ordinary Republicans be willing to “go McVey” in such numbers? Oh, they love to go online and make anonymous threats, but actual fighting and killing? I doubt many of them will go that far—but the ones that do might cause a lot of damage.
I am assuming of course that the military and police will not attempt to overthrow the Biden administration, which is a safe assumption; no general will risk his career, and no police chief will risk prison.
And if there is a persistent domestic terrorist movement that kills hundreds or thousands of Americans and disrupts American life for a few years, then what? There is a tendency in American politics to recoil from extremism, and that might be decisive.
But Billionaire Capitalism will continue trying to destabilize and discredit democracy. There’s an Iranian folk tale about a turtle and a scorpion trapped in a flood. They find themselves on an island about to disappear in rising waters. The scorpion begs the turtle to save his life, to carry him on his back to safety. The turtle is highly dubious: “you’ll sting me.” But the scorpion pleads desperately, saying “why would I hurt someone who is saving my life?” Finally the turtle agrees—aren’t we all living creatures, after all? They set off, and the scorpion tries repeatedly to sting the turtle in the head, but the turtle always manages to duck away.
They reach safety, and the turtle, outraged, demands an explanation.
And the scorpion says, “it’s just in my nature.”
And it’s the same with Billionaire Capitalism—-it can’t really co-exist with democracy for long, because sooner or later the people will vote to end a system that is clearly harmful to them.
Eventually, the turtle will leave the scorpion behind.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/09/loeffler-perdue-georgia-secretary-state-resign-435484
The Socialist Investor 