“How to steal an election: ‘Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.'”
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 27, 2021
“As Paul’s tweet helpfully noted, all of these efforts were perfectly legitimate,” Huffington Post noted in a story here.
The story continues, “But proof of fraud is not the point of this claim or any other Paul, Trump and various Republicans have made …. As Paul’s tweet stated more clearly than Republicans typically do, their claims about voter fraud, stolen elections and ‘election integrity’ are merely euphemisms for the GOP’s actual belief that ‘people voting for Democrats’ [makes] an election entirely illegitimate.”
Well, it’s pretty clear from Republican voter suppression efforts that they don’t believe in democracy. You also could infer that from the January 6 insurrection. The Huffington Post article describes some of the laws GOP legislatures have been passing “to restrict voting rights and asserting new levels of partisan control over local and state election systems.”
The article also notes that “Republicans and their conservative allies have also targeted election officials and offices in key states, purging or stripping power from those who made it too easy to vote or refused to go along with Trump’s election gambit, part of a broader effort to bend the 2024 election to their liking ― or try to overturn the result if they need to.” That refers to schemes to allow legislatures to replace the presidential electors chosen by voters.
Democrat vs. Republican elections are no longer about policy disputes such as more or less government, higher or lower taxes, or economy vs. environment. There’s only one issue in American politics that matters today: Whether the people will get to elect their leaders.
The GOP is no longer a limited-government, pro-business party. Under Trump it has morphed into a fascist party. It’s not unreasonable for voters to assume that if our country is stripped of free elections, their other freedoms won’t last much longer.
Whatever your frustrations with Democrats are, under current circumstances, you simply can’t vote for Republicans. If they get in, and seize control of the election machinery and bend it to their partisan interests, it may not be possible to ever get them out.