Behold,
the real face of voter fraud in America — a white woman from
Iowa who wants Trump to win so badly that she voted for him twice.
This
is the game that Trump is playing in the 2016 election. He is
muddying up the process with vague, flimsy and unsubstantiated claims
of a rigged election — no facts, just a suggestion of
corruption will do. All the while, the GOP presidential nominee
ignores the culprits of voter fraud in his own party.
*Black
College Students Have a Message for Trump’s Poll Watchers: See
you on Nov. 8
Meet
Exhibit A: Terri
Rote,
who was arrested for voter fraud for attempting to vote at two
polling places in Des Moines. Rote has the distinction of becoming
the first person charged with voter fraud this campaign season, in an
election marked by Trump’s mantra that the election is rigged.
And
it matters not that there is no proof, and he has no evidence of a
rigged election, the way Trump claimed he had a team of experts
looking into questions over the authenticity of President
Obama’s birth certificate.
Of course, the underpinnings of the Birther movement that Trump
helped to build are about as sincere as a man who places a dead
weasel on his head and expects you to believe that is his own hair.
After all, if you repeat an outright lie often enough, people start
to believe it, especially if they are gullible, untrained and racist.
*Granddaughter
of Slave to Cast Electoral College Vote to Elect Next President
Trump
knows he can rely on his army of the unstable, sometimes violent, to
heed his call and go into the inner city polling places — you
know, where the people have “nothing to lose” —
root out imaginary cases of a manufactured crisis of voter fraud, and
scare the black folks in the process. Because of the Ku Klux Klan,
that’s why.
White
supremacists have been stealing and blocking the African-American
vote since black people have voted in America. And 2016 is no
exception, as Trump has promoted the idea that his “crooked”
Democratic rival Hillary
Clinton
has rigged the election with the help of the “dishonest and
distorted media.”
*Former
Bernie Sanders Supporter Aims to Get Blacks to Vote Republican
Throughout
the campaign, Trump has warned of the potential for “shenanigans,”
of “these horror shows” he claims he has heard about, and
has urged his people to “go around and watch
other polling places”
to “make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is
not taken away from us.”
And
we know what he means by the “other” in those other
polling places.
“But
take a look at Philadelphia, what’s been going on, take a look
at Chicago, take a look at St. Louis. Take a look at some of these
cities, where you see things happening that are horrendous,”
Trump said, fanning the flames of distrust and heightening fears of
voter intimidation in communities of color.
And
there is a website
run by “professional dirty trickster” Roger Stone to
mobilize Trump supporters to run
exit polls of minority voters
and monitor the polls in key states for so-called voter fraud. Their
plan is to send poll watchers to Democratic-leaning cities, including
Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Fort
Lauderdale, Charlotte, Richmond and Fayetteville.
It
matters little that the voter
fraud that Republicans decry is nonexistent,
because that is not the point. The whole point is to suppress the
black and women votes, according
to Trump advisers,
in a strategy reportedly led by white supremacist Breitbart
chief Steve Bannon.
And
if anyone is committing fraud or attempting to steal the election, it
is the GOP. And the election
rigging is against black voters
— in Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and throughout
the country.
For
example, the NAACP
has sued the state of North Carolina,
alleging voter suppression, the reduction of early voting, and the
cancellation of thousands of disproportionately black voter
registrations by the state Republican Party. North Carolina
Republicans even purged the vote of a 100-year
old black woman
named Grace Bell Hardison. Moreover, the Democratic
Party has filed lawsuits against Trump’s campaign
and the Republican Parties of Ohio, Arizona, Nevada, and
Pennsylvania. The suits accuse Trump, Stone, and the Republicans of
violating the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 by
“conspiring to threaten, intimidate, and thereby prevent
minority voters in urban neighborhoods from voting in the 2016
election.”
A
federal appeals court just found that the purging
of millions of infrequent voters
by Ohio’s
Republican Secretary of State
was illegal. In Indiana
— home of Trump running mate Gov. Mike Pence — the state
police raided the offices of the Indiana Voter Registration Project
(IVRP), which registered 45,000 people to vote in Indianapolis and
the Chicago suburbs. The state’s Republican secretary of state
accused the voter participation group of being a “nefarious
operation.”
Meanwhile,
it takes little imagination to conclude that things could turn ugly
when armed racists, encouraged and emboldened by Trump’s voter
fraud narrative, take matters in their own hands. Already, armed
Trump supporters
menaced a Democratic campaign office in Virginia in October.
The
Trump campaign operates in the gutter, as we would expect of dirty
rats. So, if there is any voter fraud going on, then Trump and his
Republican enablers are the ones committing it against
African-Americans. Then and now, the Klan can’t win unless
black folks can’t vote.
This
commentary originally appeared in The Grio
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