Salon: Vote suppression is what Republicans do best -- but 2020 is their masterwork [View all]

[TomCADem]

This is why I think all the attention to polling is misdirected. The question is not really whether the polls accurately reflect who a person would vote for. I think they are accurate in that regard. The problem is that polls do not really measure whether a registered voter who wants to vote for Biden will actually be successful in casting their ballot, particularly if they are in an urban area where the USPS has been slow walking the mail near election day or where a Republican governor has cut back on polling sites and ballot drop off locations.

In other words, if registered voters could actually cast their ballots and get them counted, I think Biden would easily win. However, Republicans know this, which is why they are going all in on trying to sabotage the election through voter suppression. On this front, Republicans have been pretty successful in putting their thumbs on the scale.

https://news.yahoo.com/vote-suppression-republicans-best-2020-125950771.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADL4nftCn-BugPBh2FkgBRd8at1N61-Fl-Q_ykmVTct3ZpmBfLKe-NNNhyI1lh_MFV4TDupMnoh5IPacRTq8Lri4hZhl9VSl6mentTq5XFVINIfLh1bb7ro3r7CX7h6mnmCO-FX_H_mpfvUA2hedTagiO5OzJCvZKuneYxZ5GvVA

Nonetheless, I must at least agree that throughout these last few decades of challenges to voting rights, Republicans have always at least upheld the pretense that they were operating in good faith. It was never believable, but the charade of concern about voter fraud or illegal immigrants voting was the tribute o hypocrisy that vice paid to virtue. They acknowledged, however spuriously, that vote suppression for the express purpose of stealing elections was undemocratic.

As with everything else in the Trump era, such adherence to old-fashioned notions of right and wrong are no longer operative. In this election we are seeing a vote suppression effort of unprecedented scale, with no serious attempt to justify it other than an exercise of sheer partisan power.

The Republican standard-bearer has such a big mouth and is so crudely dishonest that they really have little choice in the matter. He openly declared that if he loses it can only be because the election was rigged by the Democrats and he seized upon mail-in voting during the pandemic as the method by which they would do it. Of course he said the same thing in 2016 without even that much explanation, so it's clear that this is just his all-purpose excuse for any possible defeat. Donald Trump can't lose, according to him; he can only be cheated out of his win. The effect of this self-serving propaganda has been to make Republicans hold out for Election Day while Democrats have been voting early in large numbers, many of them by mail.

The Republican lawyers and operatives who have fanned out to all the swing states are following Trump's lead. As Chris Hayes spelled out on MSNBC on Thursday night, they are filing hundreds of lawsuits, challenging voting laws and procedures all over the country to restrict the ability to vote and disqualify legal ballots based upon a variety of contrived rationales.