Slate "Does Anyone Really Want to Do This After Every Election for the Rest of Our Lives?"
Last edited Wed Nov 18, 2020, 06:03 PM - Edit history (1)
By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY
NOV 18, 20203:34
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/michigan-voters-defeat-republican-election-overturning-effort-by-being-mad.html
Are we done yet?
On Monday night in Michigan, two Republican members of the four-member, bipartisan Wayne County Board of Canvassers briefly shoved a ten-foot metal pole into the gears of the electoral process, moving to exclude Detroit’s votes from certification. In Pennsylvania, Rudy Giuliani is asking a judge to throw out all of the state’s votes. In Nevada, other lawyers are making the same demand. In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is being harassed by local and national Republicans, up to and including the president and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because he won’t disqualify votes on the basis of unsupported claims that Democrats committed fraud.
Judges are expected to dismiss the lawsuits and Raffensperger is standing his ground. In Wayne County, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two Republicans on the canvassing board, agreed to certify the country’s full results after two hours of withering criticism during a public comment period and a promise that the state will conduct an audit of some tiny, routine precinct-level counting inconsistencies. (Most of these inconsistencies involve between one to four votes, according to a reporter who’s been following the issue.)
Palmer, the board chair, made something of a misstep by trying to block Detroit’s votes but not those tallied in nearby Livonia, which has a much whiter population, even after it had been noted during the meeting that Livonia’s numbers included the same kinds of small inconsistencies that were purportedly at issue. The differential treatment made it explicit that Palmer’s objective, like that of Republicans pushing to throw out votes in Philadelphia and Milwaukee but not their Joe Biden–friendly suburbs, was racially discriminatory.
Palmer’s position was the logical culmination of the conservative white Midwest’s response to the civil rights era, which was to box Black populations into struggling cities whose struggles were then taken as evidence that their residents were unable to govern themselves, predisposed by culture or genetics towards criminality and drug use (and, by extension, election-rigging). The MAGA supporters who rallied outside Detroit’s TCF Center after the election may well truly believe that Detroit’s Democrats perpetrated a fraud, but that’s just a manifestation of a deeper, long-standing problem. For his part, Republican canvassing board member William Hartmann has spent the last decade-plus filling his Facebook account with images of Barack Obama caricatured as a toothless, cigarette-smoking bum and hustler.
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A movement that’s willing to engage in the straightforward racial disenfranchisement of an entire city and risk the failure of government in order to overturn an election will probably not be beaten back by making its supporters feel guilty. Perhaps the only solution is to promise the kind of mutually assured frustration that the residents of Wayne County delivered—a level of pushback, outrage, vigilance, and friction that makes the process exhausting on both sides. Maybe Monica Palmer and William Hartmann just got scared of how they’d be perceived nationally and tired of getting yelled at and threatened with lawsuits themselves; if so, good. That’s how they should feel. They should feel like they are outnumbered, and that everyone else is tired of their shit, because it’s true.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'd love to read the whole article.
