One evil enemy will burn its own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes—Sun Tzu
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities—Voltaire
The one year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection has come, but it hasn’t gone. Even if the insurrection hadn’t occurred, its root causes are still here and, if anything, have become even more ubiquitous. And the people in charge who enabled and encouraged that event are moving on to more productive methods to take over our democracy.
The purpose of the insurrection was to overturn the results of the 2020 election and, in the process, disenfranchise 80 million voters. So why do so many people believe that the presidential election was stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary? That evidence included multiple recounts in multiple states with no findings of wide-spread voter fraud. In fact, Christopher Krebs, appointed by Trump to head the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency which oversees elections, said “The November 3 election was the most secure in American history.” Trump fired him two weeks later. Even with the enticement of one million dollars, offered in $25,000 increments by the Lt. Governor of Texas for finders of voter fraud, it wasn’t until October 2021 that the first payout was collected. The Dallas Morning News reported that the Lt. Governor finally gave out his first, and to date, only reward—to a Democratic poll worker who discovered a registered Republican had cast a second vote in his son’s name. And then there are the four examples of voter fraud here in The Villages. In the few cases of documented voter fraud, none would have come close to changing the election outcome in any voting precinct, let alone any state.
How do we know this? Bloomberg News canvassed every state for election fraud data since 2018 and, with all but three states responding, officials reported about 200 fraud prosecutions nationwide. Twenty three states were unable to point to any criminal voting fraud prosecutions since the November mid-term elections in 2018. Bloomberg also consulted a voter data base maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation to assure the examination was as thorough as possible. Widespread voter fraud does not exist. That is a fact.
And yet, according to polls conducted by the Associated Press, Marist, and Reuters/Ipsos, among others, a majority of Republicans (61 percent according to Reuters/Ipsos), believe the election was “rigged” or “stolen.” The Big Lie, aka The Big Con, has had its intended effect. But why is it that so many Americans continue to believe Trump won the election? One answer is that months before the election, Trump primed the pump of suspicion and division. NPR developed a timeline of statements from Trump designed to create distrust in the voting process. The primary focus of his ire was mail-in ballots. In April, seven months before the first vote was cast, he said “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters…they’re fraudulent in many cases.” He must not have believed his own hype, since he, in fact, voted by mail. But the chorus soon followed. On June 25, A.G. William Barr questioned the possibility of counterfeiting mail-in ballots, even as he told NPR his concern had no basis in fact but that “it’s obvious.” In July, Trump told Fox News that “mail-in voting is going to rig the election.” Fox continued the mantra. On and on it still goes. This fits right in to Steve Bannon’s master plan to “deconstruct the administrative state” by building distrust in institutions that serve as the basis for democracy—and nothing fits that description better than free and fair elections.
In certain key states, the Republican Party has introduced two new methods to suppress Democratic votes and hold on to power.
Using imaginary voter fraud as a pretext, states have introduced or enacted more than 250 laws making it more difficult for certain people to vote, or as Senator Raphael Warnock so aptly put it, “Some people don’t want some people to vote.”
These laws attack voting rights coming and going. On the front end, voter suppression tactics are designed to reduce the number of voters by making the process more difficult. Most obvious are attempts to drastically reduce the number of polling places and drop-boxes for mail-in ballots. In Georgia, Lincoln County is seeking to cut the number of polling places from seven to one. It should come as no surprise that Lincoln County is majority Black. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 214 precincts have shuttered across the state since 2012, even as the population served has increased.
If you can’t control who votes and you don’t like the results, they can be fiddled with after the fact by taking over the process and mechanisms of voting. The Brennan Center reports the trend of “illegitimate partisan reviews of election results in several key states.” After the 2020 elections, several state legislatures gave themselves the power to remove and replace election officials with partisan operatives and seven states actually introduced legislation to give elected officials the power to overturn an election. Florida is one of five states that prefiled a bill to allow partisan reviews of election results. Ari Berman, who wrote the definitive book on voting rights, calls the process “insurrection by other means.”
There is nothing more fundamental to a functioning democracy than free and fair elections. Everything follows from that. But it is the insidious stripping away of voting rights that could accomplish what Jan. 6 did not.
For those hell-bent on remaking America in Trump’s image, that is enough. It will also be the death knell for American democracy. And if that isn’t the goal, it will surely be the consequence.
Marsha Shearer is a resident of The Villages and the author of “America in Crisis: Essays on the Failed Presidency of Donald J. Trump.”