Part 3 of a multi-part series–you can read Parts 1 and 2 here

Virtually every fundamentalism begins with or rises out of a text.  Democracy’s is the Constitution.  And the foundation of the Constitution is democracy, represented most fundamentally by the right to vote.  It’s become fashionable on the authoritarian right to smugly assert that, you know, the right to vote doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the Constitution (subtext: be grateful some of you have the “privilege”).  Frankly, at this point the gaslighting and rewriting of American history by right-wing “semi-fascists” has actually become worse with respect to the American Revolution than for the Civil War, and it follows a similar playbook, one well-documented by The Merchants of Doubt:

• Find tiny fragments that support your revision–e.g. the one and only time any founder ever uttered the words “tyranny of the majority,”
  • Or worse, create those fragments from whole cloth, like the many anti-democratic sayings falsely attributed to Jefferson.
• Take whatever you find out of context
• Use weasel wordery (e.g. the fact that judicial review was “discussed by seven of the thirteen states as they considered adopting the Constitution” does not mean they agreed with it, let alone in the form it has taken)
• Glue them together into a Big Lie
• Repeat said Big Lie endlessly like a mantra to make it true.

More broadly and generally, just as the doubt merchants have consistently used the rigor, vigor, and natural course of science against it, the right has used the Founders’ all-too natural ‘buyer’s remorse,’ their inevitable concern, having ‘caught the bus’ in bringing to fruition what they all wanted and thought they’d never be able to achieve–democracy, that what they wanted might work too well ¹.  A case of political jitters as natural as knee-jerk academic devil’s advocacy in the ivory tower, which has allowed the authoritarians to extract and harvest, a la scattered contrarian papers in scientific journals, resultant stray late 18th century remarks and sparks, like Adams’ “tyranny of the majority” quaver, to convince Americans representative democracy was never the Founders fundamental blueprint.

The reality, which is apparent to the vast majority of historians with any knowledge of the period, is there’s not a single founder, not even Hamilton, who would look at what’s happened to us and to their creation and think it was the result of “too much democracy” or any system of government that represented the will of the people at all.  American historians didn’t become–against any reasonable expectation of a profession resolutely looking backward into the past–one of the most liberal branches of academe in a vacuum.

Nevertheless, in lock-step with the neo-confederates, who have succeeded in convincing a sizable minority of our fellow citizens that the “lost cause” of the Civil War was not slavery, but “states rights” (despite voluminous, shameless evidence to the contrary), the neo-authoritarians have convinced tens of millions more that our founders never fought and died for the right to vote or representative democracy, and that “the wisdom of the Founders” can best be found in every anti-majoritarian perversion of said founders’ vision that serves their goals.

In this, they’ve been unwittingly aided by the bitterness of some on the left, in particular 1619ers who actually believe our revolution was fought on behalf of slavery, or pretend to do so in furtherance of a broader agenda that they’re actually undermining with this propaganda.² As Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, has herself argued in the brilliant essay with which that initiative was introduced, America wasn’t the democracy it promised our people–and the world–until Black Americans made it one.³ But to do so required the moral high ground the nation’s ideals provided: if the purpose of the Revolution was actually something other than what it declared, particularly it were really motivated by an ideavil like slavery that’s widely recognized as fundamentally immoral, world-weary “anything goes” cynicism would’ve settled on us like miasmic fog many decades ago, as it has since time immemorial in so many other countries.

Instead, the venal strata of chattelism are merely piled high on our horizon, colliding and colluding to violent pyrotechnic effect. Such is the power of authoritarianism that those with ears to hear have been able to detect the rumble and grumble of its approach from so far away that, like other surprisingly nimble nimbic storm forms, it’s been able to successfully create the illusion that it will never actually arrive, fooling even many who should know better, even those who know–viscerally–that its icy, oily condensate will, at a minimum, leave stains and scars, and that when its crown is first visible, even at the greatest of distances, it’s also imminent.

In other words, while Dr. Hannah-Jones is absolutely correct when she declares that without Black Americans, “our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all,” absent the promise of democracy–taxation with representation, the morale-generating moral dimension (per Napoleon) we deployed vs. the top army and navy in the world, there almost certainly would never have been a democracy in any form to begin with.  A war on behalf of slavery?  As the South would demonstrate nearly a century later, that’s a sure-fire loser, in no small part because the weak magnetic draw of its moral compass divided even the South against itself, whereas democracy has, understandably, united huge majorities time and again in dozens of countries in every part of the world.  Even that quintessential scholar of power, Machiavelli, recognized it as the genie the prince would not be able to put back in the bottle.

The Big Fundamental

But let’s take the original(ist) offenders on their own terms.  They claim the Constitution never mentions the right to vote. As is so often and increasingly the case, to an astonishing degree (it seems like they aren’t even trying (to be truthful anymore), this is a bald-faced false or misleading statement-–the right to vote appears in no less than five places in our founding document, more often than any other right, and five times more often than the right to bear arms, for example.

Naturally, might-makes-rightists try to move the goalposts: well, they say dodgingly, but it doesn’t appear in the original Constitution–but of course, neither does anything in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, states rights, and much else they hold dear–and no, the Bill of Rights isn’t a “special case” without which the Constitution would never have passed; that’s yet another lie.⁴  And in any case, the process and consequence of amending the Constitution is specified in the original document, and every amendment went through that process; therefore, by definition, every amendment is originalist, as originalist as the original document itself.

Moreover, any even cursory and superficial review of history would recognize their smug anti-democratic sophistry as a straight-up silly argument–the American Revolution was fought over representation, and every founder speaks of voting voluminously; it was so fundamental, it was assumed.  There wasn’t any need to spell it out, any more than the right to breathe; it is the archetypical example of the kind of idea/ideal Samuel Alito would have to call “deeply embedded in our nation’s history and traditions”–indeed, given that it’s all over our birth certificate, our Declaration of Independence as a nation, there can be no ideal deeper, and therefore, even according to Alito, no right in less need of Constitutional enumeration–yet the Constitution does so anyway, five times.

Of course, as the fundamentalists they themselves are, right-wingers’ “originalism” tends to be tightly focused on the text, on the words, not their context.  Unfortunately for these starrs in their own firmament, that’s a game we’re especially happy to play.  We’re big believers in the sweet science of boxing, of letting or getting the opposition to lead with its chin, of using the jab to set up the knockout blow.  We hope you enjoy watching a predator play with its prey, because that’s what we’re about to do. So as to get some primal enjoyment out of their evisceration, we’d encourage our right-wing friends to think of it as just another gauzy iteration of one of their formative childhood learning experiences: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others.  As in that little game, once so popular on the Upper West Side, Harlem, Alphabet City, Queens, and beyond, below are four amendments to the Constitution. Take a look:

Before we get to the key difference that distinguishes one from the rest, we’d like to focus first on their fundamental similarity, because the similarity in the construction of all four decimates one of the key ways Trumpists try to wriggle out of delivering what three of the four promise.

Specifically, when you bring up the 15th, 19th, or 26th amendments–especially the 15th and the 26th–and claim that a state or other entity is in violation of the Constitution because its policies make it disproportionately more difficult for voters of color (15th), women (19th), or young Americans (26th) to exercise their most fundamental right, what you’ll hear back is that regardless of whether their policies on these constituencies have such an effect, they aren’t stopping people from voting because they’re Black, brown, young, or female, and therefore they aren’t in violation of the Constitution at all (this is often also the basis of claiming there’s no “positive right to vote” in our founding document, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean).  Both technically and literally, they are right (provided you overlook one little clause we’ll discuss below): there is no law in any state that specifically blocks any one from any of these groups from voting, and there weren’t any such laws during the Jim Crow era either, not even in Texas.

Of course, increasingly large bipartisan majorities understood this was a particularly noxious bit of sophistry, hence the Voting Rights Act of 1965, most recently reauthorized in 2006 by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate.⁵ Still, when they’re Right, they’re right… as long as the same reasoning applies to their favorite right, the right to bear arms, which is much more explicit about its limitations. As shown below, when you apply the same finesse they use (to slip the bonds of the franchise) to all four amendments, not just those focused on voting, pure eifrigstoren ensues:

As the late Ross Perot was fond of saying, “it’s real simple”–logic 101 of the elementary school mathematical variety. If you can take away our right to vote, we can take away your guns.  No right to vote, no right to bear arms; a syllogism that’s a much better example, in our opinion, of the “wisdom of the founders” than the Electoral College. As for that pesky little question we appended, here’s the definition of “regulated” from the Founders’ dictionary, Webster’s inaugural 1828 edition:

In the immortal word of Rick Perry: oops. And I say that as a staunch defender of the Second. Moreover, if that’s the official definition of “regulated,” what would well-regulated be, and who would be doing the regulatin’?  Isn’t this what our libertarian friends believe separates government from the so-called free market?  Isn’t it the literal definition of a governor?

But we digress.  In truth, the parallel structure we’ve just presented notwithstanding, there is a key difference between the Right’s beloved Second and the multiple amendments protecting the right to vote. According to the founders and their successors, the right to vote is protected from abridgement, whereas the right to bear arms is only protected from infringement.  Cracking open the 1828 Webster’s again (and waiting for the dust to settle), it’s clear that a prohibition on abridgement is much broader and sweeping than a protection against infringement:

And in fact, this difference in scope and power was well-understood by the Founders themselves. Which means the “well-regulated=subjected to rules and conditions” right to bear arms can’t even claim equal protection with the right to vote.

Those are our (punishing) jabs (ali bombaye), now for our knockout blow.  But before we launch it, we need to address a cold damp exhalation we know is, at a minimum, already in the back of your mind. A little voice telling you to watch your six, alongside explications like “Sure, this makes perfect sense, it could even be considered logic porn, but all this fancy footwork doesn’t mean squat to Trump supporters and other right-wingers.  They talk a good game about the Constitution,  but only when and where it’s convenient; they couldn’t care less whether logic and lexicography proves the right to vote is the sine qua non of American life, and always has been.”  To this, we have a simple response:

This. Piece. Is. Not. For. Them. It’s for you.

Fundamentalists preach, especially to the choir.  And they particularly derive their power from The Word, in our case via a far more contemporaneous document than the Torah, Bible, or Koran. The purpose of a piece like this is to give all proponents of democracy the absolute level of conviction of the righteousness of our cause required to prevail, leaving absolutely no room for anything but “this shall not stand” outrage, not a quark of doubt, not so much as a nanosecond of consideration that the authoritarians have so much as a shred of a legitimate argument to make, drawn from anything they claim to hold dear, in favor of anything that strays so much as a nanometer from pure representative democracy.

Because by the end of this little virtual pamphlet, we will have power-washed and polished the foundation of their own house and home field, originalism, removing two hundred plus years of accumulated, obscuring grime they’ve secreted and accreted upon the real original vision to reveal that what the Founders thought and wrote into the document we share is, in fact, not merely ambiguous enough to cast doubt on their anti-democratic cant (as weak-kneed intellectual snowflakes incessantly complain), but contradicts it in every particular.  We’ll be accomplishing this by not merely bringing authoritarian claims into question, but pulverizing them into sub-sub atomic detritus.  At times it may feel like overkill, but there’s no such thing when what you’re trying to kill not only badly needs killing, but has proven to be undead, as authoritarianism has throughout our history.

Hard-core Trump supporters may indeed be immune to logic, facts, and evidence, but you aren’t–logic, facts, and evidence are your faith.  We know your political bible has to be nothing but same, including the “and”s and “the”s, for you to reach the level of vidvaga of the Ukrainians in 2004, 2014, and today–and our founders 246+ years ago. If not by the time you finish this series, then when you reread and reread it (because faith must be practiced) and/or, if that’s too immodest an expectation on our part, when you read the corpus that underlies it, our goal is to give each and every defender and paladin of the democratic faith the power to literally de-moralize the authoritarians as they realize, like the Russian army today, like Yanukovich and Kuchma before it, that theirs is a lost cause because our will and moral certainty are impregnable, indomitable, unbreakable.

That we will accept nothing but total victory and unconditional surrender where democracy (and only democracy) is concerned.  That each time they bluster and threaten, what they’ll see in our eyes, not just on our lips, is “Enough talk. And this time, no monuments.  Bring it on, and we’ll bury you at sea as the traitors you’ll be to our shared collective forefathers and ancestors.”  If that kind of talk alarms you, as it should, know this: many more of your fellow citizens who supported Trump are actually open to logic, facts, and evidence than the pot-stirring corporate media would have you believe.⁶. Click here or here to see or read what just a few of them have to say.

Returning to the ring and calling our shot, here’s our one inch knockout, Section II of the Fourteenth Amendment:

Anyone claiming this isn’t really part of the Constitution (and is willing to give up all other amendments to make their point) needs to grab a copy of the 1828 Webster’s themselves.  When they do, they’ll find “amendment” defined thusly:

Indeed.  And, in fact, subsequent amendments, in particular the 15th, 19th, and 26th, went on to correct the obvious limitations of the Fourteenth, which therefore should really read like this:

Now, based on the complete disconnect between what this amendment says and actual practice on the part of the judicial and legislative branches, we found ourselves wondering what its remaining sections say, expecting to find something like “just kidding” written in elegant legalese.  But no, unhappily for Trump dead-enders and other authoritarians, the next section focuses exclusively upon “rebellion” and “insurrection,” letting we, the people, know in no uncertain terms that not only do rebels and insurrectionists forfeit their right to vote, they can’t hold office either. 

We think the section following probably originally began with the words “And another thing,” before informing the Lost Causes’ rebels and insurrectionists that every ha’penny we spent on putting down their rebellion is debt that, in those days, was expected to be paid back, that they shouldn’t expect to receive so much as a farthing in reimbursement for the costs they themselves incurred and, oh, by the way, speaking of reimbursements, they shouldn’t hold their breath expecting compensation of any kind for the Black Americans they previously claimed ownership of (said offer having been pulled when Lincoln concluded–as we have in the present day–that a higher moral authority was required to win the war, just before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation). 

Take a moment to read section II (the excerpt above) again…slowly… savoring every word…it’s been simmering, steeping, and marinating in the dark for more than one hundred and fifty years.  It’s time to bring it out into the light, to take in the sweet tangy aroma of freedom, before we throw down and extinguish every red state authoritarian barbecue in the nation.

Deploying the handiwork of 19th century English mathematician John Venn, we’ve found an almost complete overlap between the set of American authoritarians and the set of Americans who tell new immigrants to our country to SPEAK ENGLISH, thus commandeering even the many “furinners” whose command of English grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary–not to mention their understanding of our nation and its values–already exceed their own.

Take a moment, before continuing, to practice bellowing “READ ENGLISH!” balefully with all the barkalounger menace you’ve heard echoed on the street.

The Constitution turns the tables on them–because there’s no accent on its flat parchment to ridicule, and furthermore, this particular clause is–READ ENGLISH–uniquely highly and finely detailed, specific, and plainspoken. It not only says the right to vote–READ ENGLISH–must not be denied but–READ ENGLISH–separately, and therefore distinctly–it must not be “abridged,” which means merely not prohibiting a class of people from voting (the dodge suppressionists have always used to evade the enfranchisement amendments) does not discharge the obligation. AND not only must it not be abridged, which we already know is a much broader and deeper protection than the right to bear arms is supposed to enjoy, the amendment adds, for emphasis–READ ENGLISH–that it must not be abridged “in any way,” meaning, in both English and legalese, that no matter how and what you try to creatively spin or evade it, the standard and its associated obligation still applies. This cannot be read by anyone who claims to speak and read English in any other way than as a blanket prohibition on all voter suppression, including anything that can possibly be considered suppressive.

For further emphasis, and very unusually for the Constitution–READ ENGLISH–it specifies the penalty that’s to be levied on any state that violates this commandment, directly or indirectly (ie. by failing to enforce it in full), and it’s a very “eye for an eye” Old Testament penalty at that.^6a  It’s so strong, and so clear–READ ENGLISH–that the Voting Rights Act actually weakens it, not only in its particulars, but by virtue of its redundancy.  Had we been simply enforcing the Constitution as written, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today–either our elections would be truly free and fair, or the entire Deep South and, increasingly, parts of the Great Midwest, would have little to no representation in the House, Senate, or Electoral College.

It has been argued that the original language of the amendment, as clear as it is, is irrelevant because the Supreme Court has gaslit it out of existence, Congress has never enforced it (the last clause “The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” might well seem to give authoritarians a little hocus pocus to work with, i.e. “Congress hasn’t used this power, therefore, abracadabra, the whole amendment disappears”), and therefore it’s beyond “relitigation.”  “Relitigation” these days seems to have acquired a very specific definition, applying to any attempt to right a wrong after the public has fully realized its existence, nature, and/or scope, as if the guilty parties should be rewarded with some kind of statute of limitations if they succeed in hiding the truth long enough, even if the normal rationale for such statutes is completely inapplicable.

And yet even here, as usual, this defense is nothing but a lie.  Because in fact, in the years just before and after the 14th became the law of the land, the US Congress deployed a model we’d argue should be much more broadly applied, repeatedly striking down and overruling the Court’s attempts to (literally) whitewash the emancipation amendments.  As Harvard Law School professors Nikolaus Bowie and Daphna Renan recount:

Through the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed, the politically dominant Republicans in Congress enacted legislation to build a multiracial democracy in the United States for the first time. Some of these laws boldly overruled the Court, including statutes in 1862 and 1866 that began the abolition of slavery and recognized the citizenship of Black people. Others prevented the Court from retaliating against Congress’s interpretation of the Constitution, such as legislation stripping the Court of jurisdiction over certain matters. Still others enlisted the Court in the project of enforcing Congress’s constitutional judgments. Acts in 1870 and 1871 instructed federal courts to enforce the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments against recalcitrant state officials, while acts in 1870 and 1875 tasked judges with banning voting restrictions, lynch mobs, and racial discrimination.

In short, it’s abundantly clear that both those who wrote the amendment, and those charged with enforcing it, fully intended this power to be used, with extreme prejudice if necessary, that this clause could–and probably should have–included a “PS. Supreme Court? Butt. Out.”  In fact, in reviewing the vigor with which the so-called Radical Republicans attempted to defend the Constitution in this regard before they lost power, we find ourselves compelled to pause here in memory of the GOP, who began as the most radical and progressive major party in our nation’s history–the Democrats of their day, but with cojones, if not ovarios.

Censusure

It’s often said, particularly in election years, that “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”  This aphorism is, appropriately, often attributed to Joseph Stalin.  Or perhaps it was Napoleon. Or Boss Tweed.  Or [insert autocrat here].  Here in America, the authoritarians, always looking for every edge–which they’ll need to take and keep us down–have realized that the people who count the people can be important too, given the potential impact on representation in both the House and the Electoral College.

And as a result, not surprisingly, they’re trying to do to the census clause in the Constitution what they’ve largely succeeded–so far–in doing to the most fundamental right in our founding document, allowing us to originalistically trace their strategy back to its gaseous gaslit big bang moment.  For all real originalists, here’s what the actual Constitution has to say about the Census:

If we use the Founders’ dictionary definition of amendment to update this clause/language to the present day (the end of slavery, as codified in lucky amendment #13, having eliminated the need for both the “free” modifying adjective and the reference to “three fifths of all other persons,” while a combination of the Dawes Act of 1877 and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 eventually insured the only untaxed Indian was a dead Indian), it refreshes to:

It’s crystal clear what it says must be done, right?  Not only does it clearly dictate how the Census is to be conducted (the intent and spirit of which we’ve translated into modern realities in the previous post in this series) and establish the principle of “one person, one vote,” (about which we’ll have a LOT more to say in Parts V, VI, and VII), but it’s even more clear–it couldn’t be clearer, in fact–about who is to be included. And yet, there are those–all on the right, as usual–including those who even claim to be lawyers and Constitutional scholars, who have been willing to argue, before the Supreme Court, no less, that the meaning of “whole persons” is “ambiguous” (unlike the concept of “three-fifths of a person,” apparently)  Perhaps, they argue, “whole persons” was never meant to apply to “illegal aliens,” for example, who just happen to typically multiply the representation traditionally left-leaning populations are entitled to (with limited exceptions, when people find the Constitution unclear, it’s a pretty good tell it’s actually perfectly clear and they just don’t like what it says).

Never mind that at the time the Constitution was written, no one was considered to be here “illegally,” that indeed, the Father of our Country, George Washington, famously observed (though apparently not famously enough) “the bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions” (one wonders what Stephen Miller would have had to say if that had been inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty).  In fact, a real originalist would have to give serious consideration to not only counting the undocumented in the Census, but restoring–that’s right, we said restoring—their right to vote, which they held from the founding of the nation until, in at least some states, 1976, and still do in some state and local elections.⁷ But we digress.

It really wouldn’t surprise us if the postmodern ‘semi-fascists’ thought they could consider the undocumented to be what the founders meant by “untaxed Indians,” outrageously sophistical as this might be, but as usual they are hoist by their own petard or, in this case, by their own Tax Foundation, which faithfully makes sure we all know, every year, that income taxes are hardly the only ones we pay, taxes we all pay.  Furthermore, the undocumented actually do pay income taxes, forking over billions for programs they can’t benefit from, and pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than our wealthiest citizens.  And a true originalist wouldn’t make this argument to begin with, given that income taxes didn’t exist when this clause was written, and therefore can’t have been how the founders intended us to determine who was taxed and wasn’t.  In truth, many of the undocumented, e.g. those whose employers hold their passports as the ransom of admission, much more closely resemble those “bound to Service for a Term of Years,” which, again again, as the Constitution couldn’t make clearer, means, emphatically, they are to be counted.

Of course, there are some cases–and the 14th is apparently one–where the authoritarians realize there really is no spin they can put on the words to make them say something other than what they plainly mean.  In such cases, the go-to strategy is to just completely ignore what our founding document says, in the expectation that the rest of us are too lazy, cowardly, and/or stupid to call them on it.

A great recent example of this was a guest editorial in the “liberal” Washington Post by John Yoo, who, without any reference to the actual words of the Constitution or any of the history above, simply asserts that Congress has no right to overrule the actions of the Supremes (because the Supremes themselves so decided in 1995), that–trust him, you little people–the Constitution belongs to them and only they get to decide what it says and means.  Displaying a Marshalesque savvy (or Franceian satirical bent), he deploys this argument to claim, amid the uproar over Lindsey Graham’s proposed national anti-abortion bill, that the Republicans have no right to make abortion nationally illegal ⁸, but it quickly becomes apparent his real aim is to deconstruct your right to vote as protected by the 14th, trumpeting baldly that “the power to determine rights under the 14th Amendment rests in the hands of the Supreme Court, not Congress.”

Hopefully, having gotten this far, you don’t need to be told Yoo was born under an authoritarian regime we pretended was a democracy, and best known for writing a series of memos arguing that torture was and is consistent with our Constitution, not to mention the Geneva Convention (“cruel and unusual punishment” being another one of those many “ambiguous” phrases in the document with surprisingly wide grey borders for some), in order to realize, the appeal of the takedown of Graham notwithstanding, how intellectually and morally bankrupt–yet appealingly slick–this argument is in toto.  Added up, the hominem is no hominem at all.

Yet just as most jokes in advertising are deliberately not funny, Yoo’s aim isn’t ultimately to convince you that Congress has no right to blowback the Court–that’s not the goal of such pious and imperious hand-waving–but rather to demoralize you into believing that if such rancid intoning in the guise of argument can appear in a “liberal” mouthpiece like the Post, all hope for fundamental change is lost, and/or goad you into cathartically tuckering yourself out in the comments section beating up on him and the Post, for the torture memos and providing him a forum, respectively.

Suppression By Many Other Names

The authoritarians place such articles all over the media every day these days–more on this in Part V.  But such grand assertions, based on nothing but manufactured and claimed authority, are also signs of hysteria, weakness, and fear on their part, and we should be looking to drive 1776-wheelers through the Potemkin walls they so love to construct.  Our goal, our minimum goal, should be to eliminate all voter suppression, or, as we prefer to call it:

…voter repression, voter oppression, voter denial, voter deception, voter obstruction, voter obfuscation, voter constriction, voter restriction, voter abuse, voter intimidation, voter coercion, voter aversion, voter subjugation, voter deprivation, voter nullification, voter cancellation, voter abridgement (for a Constitutional touch), voter expropriation, voter defilement, voter harassment, voter discrimination, voter rooking, screwing, duping, deluding, bamboozling, swindling or defrauding (to cover the various forms of “suppression” that violate the cardinal principle of one person, one vote). Voter hampering, voter hindering, voter bullying, voter profiling, voter robbery, voter abduction, voter assault, voter battery. How about calling it vote theft or ballot burning? Because that’s what it is, by any reasonable definition. ALL OF THE ABOVE…

Eliminate it in any form, anywhere and everywhere. And why should this be our minimum goal?  Because voter suppression didn’t end with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, it didn’t start with the passage of Georgia’s SB 202 last year, and it’s what we call an ixodid problem:

In other words, if we don’t get rid of it all, or at least dig deep to rip it up by the roots, we could only end up making the problem worse.

A classic and demoralizing case of this that’s been seen by activists for years: voting registration and turnout drives that result in long lines at the polls in areas that lack the resources to process the resulting flood of new voters efficiently, resources made unavailable either deliberately or because years/decades of suppression have made it seem as if they’ll never be necessary, and therefore have been applied elsewhere.

These long lines are often cheered by the media as “proof the system works” or even that “voter suppression always backfires” thanks to good old American gumption.  The truth?  Long lines are such a negative experience that they depress turnout for subsequent elections.  In other words, if you don’t eliminate the suppressing problem of unequal access to the polls in your effort to overcome suppression, your efforts, while successful in the short-term, can make the problem worse over time as suppression becomes increasingly resistant to your enfranchisement antibiotics because you didn’t kill it completely the first time.

Another classic example can be seen in last year’s ballyhooed Virginia’s governor’s election, after which the “liberal” New York Times crowed that Democrats could no longer claim that voter suppression was the cause of its woes or that they’d inevitably win any election in which turnout was high because, after all, in 2020 and 2021, Virginia had passed sweeping voter rights bills, the governor’s race had seen record turnout, and yet the Democrats had lost.

We’ve already demolished the general logic behind this argument here and here, but VA 2021 is a particularly good example of why it’s not only incorrect, but bass ackward–it’s almost as if the state had conducted an experiment to prove our point.  If you want to argue the outcome was the result of the combination of a particularly bad Democratic candidate (FOB Chairman Terry McAuliffe) on his last political legs, and a Republican who was especially adept at keeping the Trump albatross at a distance from his governorship without losing his fans⁹, points taken–as a partial explanation in this increasingly blue state (a number of downstream Democrats not named McAuliffe lost to Republicans not named Youngkin as well).

But don’t take that weak “suppression is a myth” BT to the rack unless you want it smacked right back into your face. Yes, Virginia’s new voting law made voting easier, but for who?  The fact of the matter is that Virginia’s reforms made it a lot easier for some to vote, but as the Library of Virginia outlined in 2020 and the Campaign Legal Center expounded in voluminous detail in 2021:

• • VA’s voter registration process still suffers from a lack of accessible locations, insufficient Internet access, and restrictions on registration hours (same day registration was not yet available in 2021, but will be for this fall’s elections)
  • Absentee, early, mail-in, and in-person voting opportunities remain unequal
  • Long lines at polling places, which, as we indicated above, have been proven to depress future turnout, continue to be a problem in under-resourced communities
  • Inadequate translation services and voter identification laws continue to present barriers
  • Polling locations in Virginia are only open from 6 a.m. until 7 p.m, when many have to work, including those providing child or elder care
  • While Election Day was made a state holiday, many businesses may remain open, and not all businesses allow leave time for voting
  • Transportation to the polls continues to be an access issue
  • Virginia holds its gubernatorial election in an off-year, which has been proven to depress turnout (which was apparently the point)
  • Inappropriate, inaccurate, and discriminatory voter purges from the registration rolls continue to be a problem
  • Virginia remains one of only three states that permanently disenfranchises ex-felons (though the governor can restore their rights one by one, which Youngkin seems highly unlikely to do, except in the unlikely event they’re Republicans)
  • Minority and student voters continue to be subject to illegal–but unpunished–intimidation, misinformation, and disinformation campaigns
  • Etc. etc. etc. ¹⁰

The conventional wisdom is that Youngkin won by persuading large number of swing Biden voters to switch sides, thus rejecting Bidenism for a new Republican narrative.  The truth? Buoyed by the voting reforms that all but eliminated the few barriers they faced, white Republicans turned out in droves (exceeding, in many cases, their performance in the 2020 presidential election), while turnout in Democratic strongholds, where one or more of the above barriers still applied to many voters (especially voters of color, students, and the poor) fell precipitously.

The GOP seems to have taken the corporate media’s gullibility(?) on this matter to heart and has already begun to use it as cover for its unconstitutional tactics. In the wake of the Georgia primaries, Republican officials touted, in the “liberal” Washington Post–without challenge–record turnout as proof that its massive voter suppression bill was not suppressive at all.  What they failed to mention, of course, is that those records were set entirely on their side of the ledger, as shown below:

Granted, the marquee races were all on the Republican side, so it would only be natural turnout would be higher there, even in a state as apparently evenly divided as GA (though it should be noted that none of the Republican races actually turned out to be competitive, whereas two of the five Democratic contests required runoffs).  But certainly these results and this performance don’t show at all that a voter suppression bill aimed exclusively at Democratic constituencies hasn’t had any effect on turnout.  Meanwhile Texas Republicans, perennially less honest and more cynical, have actually had the temerity to claim their magnum suppressus is actually intended to increase turnout, because it expands early voting and the number of polling places.  They don’t mention, of course, that these statutory expansions occur solely in rural GOP strongholds.

More troublingly, journos like the Post’s David Byler seem to be doing their best to codify and normalize these tactics.  In a recent article no doubt intended to puncture Democratic “complacency” (more on that in Part IV), for example, he points out and charts what he sees as a key indicator/predictor for midterm elections–the percentage of the primary vote going to each party.  It’s true that Republicans had the greater share of primary votes this year, and the party with the greater share has won the last four midterms, but the primary margins in favor of either party in those prior elections have ranged from +8-12 points, whereas this year, the GOP margin is only +4, which is not only a gap that’d normally be considered within the margin of error (if the overall N were smaller), but, more importantly, is well within the margin we’ve seen can be accounted for as a consequence of suppression tactics.  Yet by deploying it as a legitimate predictor, Byler is helping to ensure that a GOP victory obtained via such unconstitutional tactics is considered legitimate as well.  Another example of this phenomenon is the alleged seismic swing of the Hispanic/Latino/a vote to the Republicans, about which we’ll have more to say in Part V of this series.

What do we, should we consider to be suppression?  We’ve previously developed a list and description, but it’s broader than that. We are the creators, the “beacon,” and the “arsenal” of modern democracy. The Founders and Framers very deliberately set out to create a new form of government, a confection that no less than the normally cautious and reserved George Washington declared “the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.” Hamilton urged his fellow Americans to “disdain to be the instruments of European greatness” and instead “concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!”   Jefferson expected nothing less than that “the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.”  Madison declared they had achieved a revolution with “no parallel in the annals of human society,” and created “fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe,” which it is “incumbent” on us “to improve and perpetuate.”

In their lifetimes, they would declare it the model for the entire hemisphere, look on as it inspired the French Revolution, which, in turn, inspired others, and see it become the standard-bearer of democracy for the world.  Certainly there’s what might be called a natural friction working against voting–or any other activity, for that matter–the only country ever to achieve 100% participation was Somalia in 1984 and even there, the participation was really only 99.9%, and the country at the time was a one-party dictatorship.  But at the very least our participation rate should be the highest in the world, not the 137th.

And with that as premise, anything, literally anything that causes people not to vote should be considered some combination of voter suppression, repression, oppression, denial, deception, obstruction, obfuscation, restriction, abuse,  intimidation, coercion, aversion, subjugation, deprivation, nullification,  cancellation, abridgement, expropriation, defilement, harassment, discrimination, voter rooking, screwing, duping, deluding, bamboozling, swindling or defrauding, voter hampering, hindering, bullying, profiling, robbery, abduction, assault, battery, theft, ballot burning–the real voter fraud.

And by anything, we really do mean anything.  If people don’t vote because they’re physically unable or lack the financial means to do so, that’s voter suppression, especially if, as is the case, such health care problems are not evenly distributed. We have founders from Adams to Jefferson behind us on this, btw, who all agreed that radical egalitarianism–bordering on communism in modern eyes–would be required for democracy to be sustained.  E.g. Adams wrote, in 1776:

The balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society, to make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government.

In 1785, Jefferson wrote:

“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.  The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on…legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property…”

Here’s Franklin, among the wealthiest of the Founders:

“… the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents & all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity & the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man for the Conservation of the Individual & the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who by their Laws have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms … can have no right to the Benefits of Society who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.”

The next generation, sometimes taken even more seriously by originalists (when it suits them), the likes of Jackson, Van Buren, and Lincoln, were, if anything, even more radical on these matters. And ignorance, particularly when imposed by inequality, is suppression, too–if people don’t vote because they can’t read or write, or because they don’t have a clue how or when, they’ve been robbed of their birthright. Again, the Founders, most famously Thomas Jefferson, would agree:

“An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens… If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

And here’s Madison:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives…”

Transposing these beliefs to the additional related contexts piled on by post-industrial modernity, if people don’t vote because they’re acutely or chronically depressed, or because they’ve become helplessly cynical, that’s unconstitutional and un-originalist as well, especially if it’s the result of a vicious cycle of suppression and self-suppression, in which just enough of their candidates’ votes have been suppressed to prevent them from ever winning enough elections to pass and implement the policies that motivated them to vote, which increasingly leads to the conclusion that voting is pointless, which allows the suppressors to enact more suppressive measures, which discourages voting even more.

To those supporters of the biggest whiner and man-baby in human history who un-empathetically disagree, we offer this preview from the next column in our polling series:

The franchiseless, non-voters, [are] scolded and ridiculed by people who have driver’s licenses and well-fixed addresses, who can easily take time off from work whenever they want to, without fear of reprisal of any kind, who don’t face five, ten, even 13 hours waiting in line to vote (in many cases on an empty stomach), who haven’t been deluged with misinformation and disinformation about how, where, and who to vote for, who haven’t been systematically targeted by “election security”/voter intimidation campaigns, who haven’t had to scrabble at the edges of the law to get by and therefore have no reason to be concerned when confronted by a phalanx of cops, or individuals of unknown provenance taking their pictures at the polling place, whose ballots are unlikely to be spoiled, whose right to vote is unlikely to be challenged and provisional ballot tossed out into the far packets of the aether, etc., etc., etc.

We also say this: No party or its supporters that sought to win an election by killing hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens–let alone, unbelievably, continues to do so (butbrutus moments aside, the exceptions that prove the rule), no party that forced millions of Americans to literally risk their lives to exercise their most fundamental American right, ever, ever, gets to claim the moral high ground or sit in judgment of non-voters ever, ever again.  Nor do they get to cry “all’s fair!” or “relitigation!” when we call them on fooling us with their disinformation and lies–for centuries, we’ve poured e pluribus unum into the lifeblood of our economy, not caveat emptor.

Where To Start

Best Practices

At the end of the day, our bottom line is this: when voting is treated as a test of character or fortitude in the slightest, in any way, it’s not being treated or acknowledged as a right, which it is, as the founders and Constitution have made abundantly clear.  Our Declaration of Independence says we all have a “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”–do we have to stand in long lines, fill out forms, risk getting fired or retaliated against, spend money or lose income in order to breathe?  If we make a mistake on said forms or don’t have the right documentation to complete them, are we told to hold our breath, indefinitely?

Oh, but such an analogy is unfair, a straw man, howl the authoritarians, voting is different.  It certainly is–in the United States of America.  While the scope of what needs correction and change to restore our democracy can seem overwhelming, because/thanks to that very level of anti-democratic atrocity, there’s a very clear, very solid, very evidence-based place to start–simply adopting the practices of other democracies worldwide; the best practices, since we’re supposed to be the leader of the democratic world.

Comparing breathing to voting isn’t a straw man or false analogy in much of the rest of our shared planet. For example, 90%+ of the countries in our hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and Oceania that hold elections either do so on weekends and/or have made election day a national holiday.  If voting is really the right the Constitution says it is–over and over, what’s our excuse for not doing the same?  What could it be, other than to prevent people from exercising their most fundamental right as Americans?  What’s that? There are too many holidays already for the most productive workforce in the world at scale to have another?  Fine, so take one away and replace it with Election Day.  Take Presidents’ Day and move it, for example–one thing we can be damned sure of is that both Washington and Lincoln would approve.

Is sloth the greatest barrier to voting for the workforce whose combination of productivity and hours/week of work is unrivaled? Is apathy the greatest barrier for the nation that, even now, would still have to be considered the most optimistic this side of Ukraine (because everyone else’s expectations have fallen even faster than ours)?  No, while armed vigilantes outside polling places and other such outrages are getting all the press love these days, the barrier of barriers very clearly something much more humble, assumed to the point of hardening into an “is what it is,” and unremarked-on: voter registration.

In the 2020 election, 66.8% of eligible Americans 18 years or older voted, 154.6 million in all.  According to the Census Bureau, 168.3 million Americans were registered to vote.  Assuming that said 154.6 million tally included only those whose votes counted, and that no one was allowed to cast a valid ballot without either having registered before the election, on the day of, or (far less frequently) in arrears, this means turnout among registered voters was at least 92% (91.9), which would rank our country in the top 10-15 in the world—where we belong–ahead of every Western democracy except Belgium (and tied with Australia), instead of 130-something.¹¹

120+ countries have compulsory voter registration; typically taken care of for its citizens by the state; among those that don’t, some don’t require registration at all.  All of these countries have technical and financial resources inferior to ours, yet they’re using population records, police records of residence, applications for government services, they’re conducting publicly–financed door to door registration campaigns, letting their people register via mail or online, deploying mobile registrars.  Meanwhile, our United States is one of the few democracies that puts the entire burden of registration on its prospective voters, keeping company with the likes of the Bahamas, Belize, and Burundi.

Is it necessary to observe this burden doesn’t fall equally on all Americans?  Take my home state of Wisconsin, which has one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country.  Like many states with strict voter ID requirements for registration, Wisconsin makes a “free” state ID available to anyone who can come up with documentation (which is often decidedly not free, and for some, like the homeless, impossible).   Where can you get this ID?  From your local Department of Motor Vehicles office–and the DMV only.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider this.  The vast majority of Americans required to produce a photo ID for any purpose use a driver’s license, and as long as it’s not expired, this suffices.  Which means there’s almost certainly one thing everyone in Wisconsin who needs a state ID has in common: they don’t have driver’s licenses.  Yet the only place the state makes these IDs available is…the DMV. A place that’s typically situated in a location that, understandably, assumes access via private transportation.

And chances are, if those who need IDs don’t have driver’s licenses, they don’t have a car or access to one either, which is where the map below kicks in:

As you look at this map, you’re probably wondering what distinguishes a “real DMV” office to us from the rest.  For people who don’t have cars, and might be working multiple jobs with inflexible hours, the answer is pretty simple: it’s reliably open, not necessarily every workday (though you’d think an office being used for this purpose would be), but certainly more than two days a week.  In Wisconsin, nearly two thirds of DMV offices (65.1%) are open two days a week or fewer, more than 10% are open one day a month or less, and nearly 10% are open only one day per quarter.

And let’s be gaffey, for someone with no car, even “real” DMV access isn’t great–there’s only one “real” DMV office for every 736 square miles in the state.  You might think, especially if you live on “the coast,” that, well…isn’t almost all of Wisconsin empty anyway?  I’ll grant that it does look pretty empty from cruising altitude. But if the goal of Wisconsin’s voter ID law was solely to insure only the truly eligible get to vote, there can be no question–as you can see for yourself–that the DMV is by far the worst of many reasonable locations where the state could have made these IDs available.  It would even have been a nod to the franchise, in both senses, if they were made available at Culver’s (home of the ButterBurger), a chain largely unknown outside the Dairy State.

The key skill set required, after all–the capability and capacity to validate identification–is hardly limited to the DMV.  Payday lenders have to verify IDs all the time.  So do post offices, pharmacies, banks, and even liquor stores.  On Election Day, by virtue of the self-same voter ID law, IDs are verified (albeit in cursory fashion) at K-12 schools (one every 10.9 square miles) and churches (one every 10.8 square miles) all over the state.  Of course, schools and churches can’t be expected to be open for ID verification (or voting) every day, but this would be a far more effective riposte coming from a state that wasn’t expecting some portion of its citizens to get their IDs from offices open only once a quarter.  Surely every school could match & support that level of service (by state or local designees) in after-school evenings or on weekends–school buildings are already widely used as community hubs for a variety of purposes–if the goal was really only to ensure the eligibility of every voter.

The Roberts Court, the Rehnquist Court before it, and their retrograde ancestors throughout our history, tend to weigh the merits of such schemes based on whether, in their view, they “place an undue burden” on the voter. To which we say: what part of shall not be “denied…or abridged, in any way” do these dimwitted, incompetent–or un-American and traitorous (take your pick–the authoritarians say far, far worse about the rest of us) so-called justices and unelected bureaucrats not understand? The Constitution is clear, crystal.  The burden voters are due is none at all.  Automatic registration for the people is what’s due.  So let’s see if we can put ourselves out there like that financial & economic juggernaut, Estonia, and give the people what they’re due.

Where To Start, Too

Where The Suppressors Do

Northern Illinois University has made a name for itself in recent years by creating a Cost Of Voting Index (COVI)–which, of course, constitutionally should be zero–for every state (but isn’t). Going into 2020 election, here’s a map illustrating which states they found the hardest and easiest to vote in (the darker, the harder), with the states divided into groups of ten for the purpose of making any patterns more obvious when we color-coded them:

See anything looking like a pattern here?  Yes? No? Let’s narrow our focus…

See now?  The thirteen states we’ve highlighted are the states considered to be swing, the states that decide our major elections, thanks to the Electoral College and how closely contested they typically are.

Given that they play this pivotal role, whether we’re a democracy, a representative democracy, a republic, or a constitutional republic–doesn’t matter–how can it be anything less than both scandalous and deliberate that:

• No swing was in the “easy to vote” (light green) end of the spectrum in our most recent electoral contest?
• Eight of the 13 were in the bottom half of the rankings, with two others, Wisconsin (25th “easiest”) and Iowa (24th) on the cusp of joining them?
• Three of the five hardest states to vote in were swing states as well, including the very bottom of the barrel, #49 (Georgia) and #50 (Texas), dead last in facilitating the franchise?

Not surprisingly, while the average non-swing state’s ranking is 23.4 (23rd of 50 in ease of voting), the average swing stumbles in at 31.4 (31st out of 50). And it’s more than a little damning, too, to see swing-state New Hampshire, in the first map, as a little island of near-black in a sea of light green all around it, and to espy swings Pennsylvania and Ohio keeping company with the Deep South.

In light of this, it’s really not surprising that there was grave concern about our democracy after the election, is it?  Any real originalist following in the footsteps of the founders would be heavily focused on the obvious challenges to “taxation with representation,” especially in the swing states.

And by going through a substantial portion of the subsequent bills proposed and advanced in state legislatures (and flagged by the Brennan Center), we’ve been able to confirm that, indeed, election reform was top of mind across the nation.  Just not in the way one might expect, as illustrated by the next map below:

What you’re looking at is not the number of suppression bills proposed, but rather the number of specific restrictions envisioned by each state, since some clearly tried to mask and obscure what they were doing by stuffing dozens of restrictions into lone omnibus bills.  And when we focus in on the “decider” states, as the authoritarians clearly did, we see this:

That’s right, in 11 of the 13 swing states, 20 or more new/additional voting restrictions were proposed.  And perhaps even more tellingly, of the fourteen states whose legislatures exhibited the highest level of enthusiasm for increased suppression (i.e. 20+ restrictions proposed), all but three were swings.

Looking at 2020 and the legislative reaction to it side-by-side can make one feel particularly apocaleptic at the appallogic involved…

That’s right, the unoriginalists, displaying typical authoritarian lack of imagination, decided the problem with the 2020 election was that states already defined as among the hardest in the nation to vote in weren’t hard enough.  Name a founder who wouldn’t find this to be utter and unspeakably egregious BT.  Name one.

But before your blood boileth over, we should show you a map of the restrictions actually enacted, focused on the swing states, where the suppressors are:

The good news is that in a number of states, few if any of the proposed restrictions in some key states have made their way through the big muddy into law.  What all of the states that (more or less) held the line in favor of democracy have in common is governors who reject Trumpism and, good news again, not all of those governors are Democrats–at least two of them, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, are what we call “real Republicans” (as opposed to the real RINOs from the POT who hold the governorships of Florida, Georgia, Texas, Iowa, and Arizona).

The bad news is that nearly all these champions of the real American way are up for re-election this year, and the one who isn’t, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, has a radical right-wing legislature that’s already stripped him of powers, and is sloshing up against the supermajorities it needs in both houses to override his vetoes.

Fortunately, like the Ukrainians, rather than being overwhelmed, it looks like pro-democracy forces will be able to pick their spots.  According to 538:

• Ohio governor DeWine leads by more than 19 points, New Hampshire governor Sununu leads by nearly 16, and their Democratic opponents are, of course, pro-democracy too
• Pennsylvania Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro has nearly a 9 point lead on his Christian nationalist January 6th insurrectionist (I’m sure I’m not the only one finding some of these candidates call to mind the Monty Python Election Special)
• Minnesota governor Tim Walz has an 8 point lead on his opponent (though a recent poll by a Republican-leaning group with a strong track record in recent elections actually has the Republican up by 1)
• Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has a 5+ point lead on her election-denying Trumpist opponent (this is down from an 11 point lead two weeks ago, and a 30+ point lead in July, but still, it’s hard to see a governor whose favorability is 5-6 points in the black losing to an opponent who is 10 points underwater)
• The Nevada governor’s race is a dead heat, with Republican Lombardo leading incumbent Democrat Steve Sisolak by less than a point.  But unlike the other states above, Democrats currently control all the branches of power in NV, and while they may lose the state Senate along with the governorship, it’s doubtful they’ll lose all three.

Which brings us to Wisconsin, with nearly double the electoral votes of Nevada, where incumbent Democratic governor Tony Evers holds less than a 1 point lead on Tim Michels, his Republican opponent.  So far, we’ve uncovered 50+ anti-democratic restrictive measures idling in wait in the WI legislature, and this is certainly a significant undercount, based on the nastiness and pettiness of some of the ones we know about (such as making it a felony for the staff of residential facilities to “influence” or assist their charges in voting in any way).  As in North Carolina, Wisconsin Republicans have heavily gerrymandered the state and stripped the governor of powers when they lost control of that office.

If you’re a regular donor to Democratic candidates, you know that a lot of that money is wasted, mainly on poorly made television ads (because consultants get a cut of every media buy) that nobody watches.  In 2020, Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, crushed Trump on television spending like an incumbent thrashing a sacrificial lamb, with very little, if anything, to show for it.  Where Trump dwarfed both Clinton and Biden was in his spending on digital and social media, inarguably to much greater effect, given how uncompetitive he could and should have been, both as a candidate and an incumbent, how much smaller the digital buys were, and how badly he was outspent overall.

In light of all the above, we can’t help but urge you to make Madison, Wisconsin your Kherson and put your money and time in the hands of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, whose head, Ben Wikler, is arguably the best political organizer this side of Stacey Abrams.  Under his direction, Wisconsin Democrats have ousted anti-democrat Scott Walker from power, knocked back Republican efforts to achieve veto-proof supermajorities in the legislature, scored a Wisconsin landslide upset in the most recent state Supreme Court election (via the first challenger to unseat an incumbent justice in decades) under extraordinarily challenging, GOP-manufactured circumstances, and, of course, delivered the state for Joe Biden in 2020.

More fundamentally, because of his years of prior experience working for Avaaz, Change.org, and Moveon.org, Wikler is the rare Democrat who understands that the Internet is good for something other than fundraising to buy more TV ads.  That indeed, the Net is a uniquely powerful blended/hybrid political medium that combines ground game community-building with air war distribution, a combination he further deftly remixes with more traditional ground game and air war tactics.

He also understands that there’s no better place than online to put your ear to the ground or take the pulse of the electorate, which is why he’s always multiple steps ahead of the latest political trends and never seems to get caught flat-footed.  We may all regret some things on November 9th, but we’re confident you won’t regret spending the home stretch with Ben and the Wisconsin Dems.

A Likely Story

At the end of the day, whether in Wisconsin or elsewhere, and despite our best efforts, any election in the current climate is going to be far from perfect.  But that does not mean we have to–or should–accept all outcomes as legitimate, even as legitimacy must become a word with concrete meaning–and illegitimacy, concrete consequences. Which raises a couple of obvious questions: where should democracy fundamentalists draw the line separating constitutional legitimacy from its opposite?  Will suppression beyond the pale, like obscenity, be something we “know when we see it?” And in any case, how, in its amorphousness, will we see it; how will we know our line has been crossed?

The spiritual descendents of our forefathers, aka the Ukrainians, had a simple answer to these questions in 2004, at the dawn of their democracy.  When the official results diverged from the exit polls, they refused to accept the validity of the election, hit the street for weeks (not just for a showmarch or two–those who have lived under dictators know better than that) and forced it to be re-run, this time with international monitoring and oversight.¹²

More generally, while polling is–and should be–primarily a tool for politicians and political professionals, it can also play a critical role for we, the people, in a democracy: as an independent test and validation of the free fairness of our elections, without which our system of government is a sham.

To some, this may seem risible, given the supposed string of wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in recent years. We’ve written extensively about the trials, tribulations, and twists of random-digit-dial life over the course of the last 20+ years. In the case of the most recent presidential election, we’ve shown a moderate-to-strong correlation (for social science data, at least) between how difficult it is to vote in a state and the extent to which the polls in that state overestimated Democratic support, as shown on the map below (positive [+] numbers reference overestimates of Democratic support, negative [-] numbers underestimates).

If you can’t zoom in enough to read the measures, and you want to, and you should, here’s a link to the full list in all its ingloriousness.

• The squares that are the color of dried blood represent suppression measures that have passed and been signed into law.
• Bright red squares represent measures that have been proposed in states where Republicans control all three branches of government, but haven’t yet been able to turn into law, likely because there are/were still enough real Republicans holding seats who hadn’t or haven’t yet been primaried out of existence by Trumpist RINOs–we can expect many of these measures to become law in the 2022-23 legislative session as a result of Trumpist purges that have decimated the real Republican ranks throughout the course of this election season.
• Rose-colored squares represent measures that have been proposed in states where government is divided between Republicans and Democrats, with Democrats holding the governorship in most cases, while Republicans control the legislature. They’re rose-colored because a certain degree of myopic optimism is required to expect this state of affairs to continue indefinitely, especially given that there are states like North Carolina and Wisconsin where the GOP could realistically achieve supermajorities in both houses of the legislature that would allow them to override all gubernatorial vetoes.
• And light pink squares represent, for now, states where Democrats control all three branches of government, which should mean that the chances for any suppression measure to pass are less than zero, but as you can see, Democrats being Democrats, meaning too often committed to bipartisanship and compromise at all costs (and, in some cases, not being fully committed to full democracy themselves, at least not the point where they’re willing to own who they are against the slings and arrows of Republican labels), there have been suppressive measures passed in Democratic-dominated states like Nevada, New Jersey, and New York.

A few other important notes:

• We can expect this list to expand dramatically over the next two years, if for no other reason than because many Republican legislators in many states all belong to ALEC, through which they share ideas.  For example, early last spring, only one state had thought of passing a law prohibiting counties from accepting any election assistance for any purpose from any private sources, profit or non-profit (or even, in some cases, the federal government)–only from the state government, which then would be able to control with pursestrings what local governments can and can’t do: now there are five states with such laws on the books, and another seven where these restrictions have been proposed.
• It’s more than possible, given the volume of what we’ve processed, that there are cases where something has been attributed to the wrong state or the restriction itself hasn’t been fully properly construed.  Frankly, given the full scope of what’s going on, any such errors can only be considered quibbles akin to complaining about a leaf being out of place in a landscape–and what a landscape it is.  If there are any measures on the list you think are actually reasonable, please tell us in comments so we can explain to you why they aren’t.
• Many of these measures are merely formal codifications of what the GOP is already doing in practice via various combinations of intimidation and disinformation tactics and campaigns, meaning the fact that they haven’t formally become law should not provide much comfort.  It might even be better for democracy if they did–if we were willing to fully enforce the 14th amendment, that is.

The pettiness, meanspiritness, and malice of a number of these proposals is often breathtaking–most of you have probably heard of the prohibition against providing food or water to those standing in long lines waiting to vote, and there are many others, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania leading the way in gratuitous nastiness.  But we should be aware of the possibility that these are intended mainly as distractions, shiny objects for us to chase while ignoring other measures that are quietly being deployed to wreak much more havoc.

Stacey Abrams has this to say about one such measure in Georgia, for example, which allows poll watchers to challenge the eligibility of multiple voters:

“…There is now a provision in state law that allows for unlimited challenges to a person’s voter registration. Here’s what that means in practice. White supremacist groups have already come into Georgia, and in the 2021 election, they lodged 364,000 challenges. This time they’ve done 64,000 challenges. What happens is they file these challenges against a voter, and in many cases voters get this ominous letter saying, Your registration has been challenged. You must appear at this hearing to prove you have the right to vote. For low-propensity voters, people who don’t have lawyers or aren’t lawyers themselves, this can be a gut-wrenching letter that makes you think, Oh my God, I don’t know what this is, but I’m not getting involved. So you’ve stopped people from voting. Just this week we had more than 1,000 people challenged in one county; they were disproportionately Black, disproportionately students. It was intentionally designed to knock them off the rolls in one of the counties that flipped in the last few elections…”

On the whole, it’s hard to look at this list, and all that’s come before it, without considering it to be the dictionary definition of another word that, like “integrity,” authoritarians like to throw around without apparently knowing what it means, or just out of knee-jerk projectionism:

Tellingly, we couldn’t get this definition out of the Founders dictionary because this sort of behavior would have been completely foreign and beyond the pale to them.  But determining the results of elections before the campaigning, let alone the voting, even starts, is authoritarianism 101, and no doubt the latest techniques are regularly shared at Autocrats, Inc.

And of course, when the authoritarians talk about “election integrity,” they aren’t talking about voter suppression; their concern is rather “voter fraud,” which they define as people voting who shouldn’t rather than people prevented from voting at all.  In other words, the conditions that seed their outrage are when elections are potentially more than whole (not less than “entire”) and insufficiently impaired. Yet study after study after study has shown–even those conducted by rabid partisans seeking to prove such fraud is widespread–that voter suppression is at least a one hundred thousand times greater threat to the integrity of elections:

In neither 2016 nor 2020 did the Russians have the level of motive and motivation to hack into voting machines, software, and/or critical locales that they have right now. And every day now, Republican leaders are spouting some version of “Russia, if you’re listening” and/or this message is being dutifully repeated and amplified by the “liberal” media, just in case Putin isn’t getting it in his bunker.