The-Ave.US

“Elijah Dominic McDotcom spews:

“Thursday, 5/19/22 at 7:57 am

“It’s easy enough to point out how utterly insane, and potentially criminal the Pennsylvania Republican governor nominee is.

“But it’s also helpful and probably a lot more practical and useful to voters to describe precisely what he would do if elected, based upon the powers of that office.

“Mastriano has said he would appoint a friend of his with no prior experience in election administration to run Pennsylvania elections. This is a friend who agrees with him still that Trump won in 2020 and who has spent the last year accompanying Mastriano in his journey through the courts losing fraudulent election challenges, and carrying out fake election ‘audits’.

“Together the two propose to cancel all voter registrations in Pennsylvania immediately upon taking office in order to force all voters to renew their registration. They say they would do this so they can systematically challenge and prevent the registration of Black and Latino voters.

“Mastriano would also use his statutory authority as governor to remove all automated voting equipment from polling places located in Black and Latino area in Pennsylvania in order to slow down voting, forcing those voters to wait in long lines at night in terrible weather to fill out manual paper ballots by hand.

“Mastriano would use his authority as governor to shift state funding away from counties with high numbers of Black and Latino voters in order to force the closure of more polling places and to limit hours of operation.

“Mastriano along with his hand-picked Secretary of State would intervene to withhold reporting of results from counties with large populations of Black and Latino voters until those results can be challenged in the courts and ‘audited’ by his own hand-picked teams of election challengers.

“If prevented from doing any of these things by any court or by the state legislature Mastriano would then instruct his hand-picked Secretary of State to refuse to certify the results of that election.

“As governor in PA, by state statute, Mastriano would be legally empowered to do all of these things. And because he would have that power, and because he has promised to do these things, a large majority of Republican primary voters want him to be governor. It may be important in some ways to understand why and how Republican primary voters have shifted their attitudes in such overtly racist and undemocratic ways. But in the near term it is more important that they be stopped.

“It can’t be overstated how important this will be to Republicans in this midterm. Given what Mastriano has promised to do, his election would represent a once-in-a-generation opportunity for older, white racists to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino voters, and install their preferred candidates in every election going forward. Mastriano promises them institutional apartheid placing white voters above all other voters for as long as he could remain in power.

“Sad though it may be, that promise will produce a huge turnout among those older white voters. It may also energize a bump in turnout among some younger, lower-income, less educated, white voters. Sold as ‘populism’ this is an even more overt and blatantly racist appeal than Trump’s ‘Build the Wall’. Mastriano is promising to build an institutional wall between Black and Latino voters and the ballot. White voters will either rally to that promise, or recoil from it. But how much and to what extent some white voters recoil will ultimately depend on messaging and how Mastriano’s promises are conveyed and perceived.

“Media will be very reluctant to describe these campaign pledges for what they are. They will bend over backwards to show ‘both sides’. And they will pretend credibility towards claims about “election integrity” and other code phrases used to implement bigotry into the election processes of Pennsylvania. So the burden to tell the truth will once again fall to Democrats.”

(Cross-posted from HorsesAss.org, Thursday, 5/19/22, Comment #71; use link above to see original.)

While some of this might not come to pass if Mastriano wins in November, why risk it by voting for him or his party? He excludes reporters from his campaign events (which resemble religious revival meetings), so you can be sure his voter suppression machinations, whatever they are, will be hidden from public view. The disdain for democracy is obvious, the racism overt, so why would any decent person vote for him?

But while Mastriano may be an extreme example, you can’t trust any Republican to respect the law, or your voting rights. The entire GOP is attacking voting rights and elections. This isn’t your grandfather’s Republican Party. It’s a movement to eliminate democracy and restore apartheid in America.

Related story: Pennsylvania GOP party officials are panicking over Mastriano’s primary victory. Read story here.