Here is V.B. Price's weekly column.
Why Is Voting Under Attack
The all-out war over voting going on in our country at the moment has a paradoxically profound and inspirational message. What it’s telling us is that voting is still the single most important public act in American culture.
If it wasn’t, the Republican party would not be turning its death ray against it, risking everything, even the party’s honor, dignity and good name to undermine the foundational right and duty that empowers all Americans.
Winning the vote is everything. In the messy grind of the daily news cycle, many of us overlook the enormity of this truth.
Even a would-be tyrant with a well-oiled Big Lie propaganda machine, who owned the Justice Department and all its means of intimidation, who had both houses of Congress in his pocket, as well as many state governments, and a majority on the Supreme Court, could still be voted out of office in America. We are not a totalitarian nation quite yet. And the GOP doesn’t like it one little bit.
That’s why Associate Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito would debase himself in support of bald-faced, racist anti-voting election laws in Arizona, just to diminish the demographic advantage Democrats have over Republicans — some 49% to 40% — according to the Gallup Poll, the largest in nearly a decade.
When Alito wrote the majority opinion supporting new voting laws in Arizona that forbid the collection of absentee ballots by any one or group other than a voter’s relatives and caregivers, he was sanctioning a direct attack on the voting rights of rural Native Americans across the country, especially those on large reservations, such as the Blackfeet in Montana and the Navajo in northern Arizona. Voters there often have to travel many miles to find a mailbox or a post office — much farther than most urban dwellers. They prefer to pool their signed and sealed ballots and let a third party deliver them in a batch to be mailed, saving perhaps thousands of voters from having to drive long distances. Republicans say they think this increases the opportunities for voter fraud, indirectly accusing Democrats of tampering somehow with the ballots.
Alito’s majority opinion supporting such a rule went like this, according to NPR's Nina Totenberg: “Just because voting may be ‘inconvenient for some,’ Alito wrote, doesn’t mean that access to voting is unequal.”
If access to voting is convenient for some but inconvenient for others — by rule of law — I’d say that represents a fundamental and unconstitutional inequality.
To make voting legally more difficult for people who live far away from postal services is penalizing them for geographical and cultural circumstances beyond their control. That this is directed largely at rural Native Americans makes such a law a form of racist hate crime against a cultural class of voters. And of course the GOP would do that now that New Mexico’s Deb Haaland — a member of Laguna Pueblo and a Native American rights activist — is President Biden’s Secretary of the Interior, in charge of Bureau of Indian Affair (BIA).
Diminishing the number of Democratic voters is so important to Republicans that they shamelessly brand themselves as haters of Native Americans who they imply are more prone to committing election fraud that non-Native Americans.
The Republican Party has detached itself from the moral core of the Constitution that’s carved in stone over the entrance to U.S. Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.” It’s not the fault of rural Native Americans that many of them live prohibitive distances from a post office. It’s the fault of the federal government that there’s not enough post offices on reservation land.
So the “inconvenience” suffered by some in voting is not only unequal to the “conveniences” of others, it's an inconvenience imposed by government policy. That’s about as far away from fairness and equality as you can get.
The attack on voting by political interests that tend to lose big elections because they are not in the majority has been going on for decades. And it hasn’t all been about Jim Crow, though that’s still the most egregious and disgusting. After the Goldwater defeat in 1964, for instance — a loss describedas the most crushing presidential defeat in American history — the notion that voting really wasn’t very important started seeping into the national dialogue, almost part and parcel with the rise of economist Milton Friedman’s free market fundamentalism and his class-based denigration of the wisdom of the “lesser classes” known as the “general public.” Voting was considered the privilege of the advantaged few, not of the disadvantaged multitude.
That piece of propaganda is an early conservative Big Lie directed at young people in particular. Voting was portrayed as a useless waste of time. After all, it’s only one vote, so why should you bother, the argument went. A general feeling of disempowerment seeped across the country through the counterculture and the left. Then, the 2000 election came along and the so-called uselessness of voting was reinforced when the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court actually decided the election in favor of the loser, George W. Bush. In doing so, the Court might also have signed the death warrant for an inhabitable climate around the world by sending into political oblivion one of the most effective anti-climate change crusaders, Vice President Al Gore.
Then eight years ago, a five-vote conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court all but eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by absurdly ruling that its prime provision — making previously notorious Jim Crow states get federal approval before passing new voting laws — was no longer needed because racism had been solved in America.
Soon we’ll see again, in the wake of the 2020 census, how successful the attack on voting has been when conservatives in various state legislatures work furiously to fiddle with party proportions in election districts so that they give themselves an artificial advantage that their actual numbers do not warrant.
There’s only one sure way to end this attack on the right to vote. Vote the attackers out of office.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image from Get Out the Vote Campaign poster by Angie Cibis)
"When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck." - Paul Virilio
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