Over four days, the Democratic National Convention
emphasized the importance of voting and making a plan to ensure one’s ballot is
counted. Now Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has testified that
he has no intention of bringing back removed mail sorting machines and
mailboxes that slowed delivery of letters and packages and could damage efforts
to vote by mail.»
Trump v American democracy: the real battle on
the ballot this November
US voter
suppression
The president has claimed the only way he can lose is
if the vote is rigged – setting the stage for bitter conflict after election
day
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Sun 23 Aug
2020 09.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/23/donald-trump-v-democracy-us-election
The soaring
oratory had been replaced by visible anguish. Barack Obama stood in
Philadelphia, where the signing of the constitution laid the foundation stone
of American democracy, and warned that his successor is ready to tear it all
down to cling to power.
Last week’s
unprecedented attack by a former president on an incumbent at the virtual
Democratic national convention crystalised fears that Trump poses a more severe
danger to the 244-year-old American experiment than any foreign adversary.
Whereas in
2016 Vladimir Putin’s Russia meddled in an election, now it is the current
occupant of the White House who seems hellbent on subverting an American
election.
“The
greatest threat facing the nation was an insider threat and still is,” Frank
Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, told the
MSNBC network this week. “The insider threat is sitting in the Oval Office.”
Trump will
this week be nominated by the Republican party for a second term as president.
He will give his acceptance speech from the White House, a break from tradition
that signals the formidable tools of incumbency at his disposal. This time,
critics say, Trump is running two campaigns.
One is a
brutally partisan attempt to demonize his opponent Joe Biden and his running
mate Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour on a major party ticket, whom he
has already dubbed “mean”, “nasty” and “a mad woman”. The other is an insidious
and potentially catastrophic campaign against the integrity of the election
itself.
The
boundary-pushing president has spent four years eroding the rule of law,
upending constitutional norms and slandering the intelligence community. In
recent months, faced with dismal polls that show him losing, he has worked to
spread disinformation, sow distrust in democratic institutions and plant doubts
over whether the election will be a free and fair capture of the popular will.
Trump has
floated the idea of postponing the election because of the coronavirus
pandemic, though he has no power to do so. He has repeatedly refused to say
whether he will accept the result, prompting a once unthinkable debate over how
he might be physically removed from the White House. At a campaign stop in
Wisconsin last week, he warned baldly: “The only way we’re going to lose this
election is if the election is rigged.”
He has also
targeted the postal service. With the pandemic making physical distancing
imperative, a record number of mail-in ballots is expected, meaning that the
outcome is unlikely to be known on election night. Trump recently admitted that
he was blocking money sought by Democrats for the postal service so he could
stop people voting by mail.
His
allergic reaction to mail-in voting is based on the false premise that it is
riddled with fraud, an assertion debunked by numerous factcheckers and academic
studies Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah – already
carry out elections almost entirely by mail.
Mail boxes
sit in the parking lot of a post office in the Bronx, New York, earlier this
month, amid reports that many had been removed from service.
Democrats
claim that the president’s true motive is to disenfranchise millions of their
voters; surveys show significantly more Republicans than Democrats say they
would feel safe showing up to vote in person.
Antjuan
Seawright, a Democratic strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said:
“This is an attempt to do election interference 2.0. This time it’s done by
this administration and not a foreign adversary. Not only is Trump trying to
undermine the integrity of the election, he’s trying to strike fear and chaos
into our election.
“We should
not be trying to cripple the post office or eliminate what I view as part of
the nerve centre of every community. My mother, when I was a child, worked at
the postal service so I know what it means for people of colour. What they’re
doing to dismantle the postal service has double, sometimes triple impact on
communities that have already been left out and left behind by other factors.”
Amid a
national uproar, the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor, announced
this week that he would suspend cuts to the service until after the election to
“avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail”. Democrats called it
a necessary but insufficient first step in ending Trump’s “election sabotage
campaign” – which has once again succeeded in dominating the media agenda, a
potential self-fulfilling prophecy.
The assault
demonstrates that Republicans belong to “the party of voter suppression”,
Seawright added. “I’m black and so all of my life, including my sharecropper
grandparents’ lives, they have been trying to do everything they can to limit
our participation in the election process. This just elevates my concern going
into this election. The playbook is pretty much the same.
“It’s just
different players implementing the strategy, and the strategy has been
recalibrated this time as vote by mail. Keep in mind we’re still in the middle
of a pandemic where showing up to vote in person could mean life or death for
some people. But black people have put their lives on the line to vote before and,
if we keep going down this road, I think we are willing and able to do it again
because this election is just that important.”
This week a
bipartisan Senate intelligence report revealed the extent of contacts between
the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. It found that Paul
Manafort, the former campaign chairman, worked closely with “Russian
intelligence officer” Konstantin Kilimnik. US intelligence has warned that
Russia is already interfering in the 2020 election with the aim of getting
Trump re-elected.
But such
threats currently appear less fundamental than that posed by a president gone
rogue – a man who this week welcomed the support of believers in a baseless
righting conspiracy theory that holds the world is run by a shadowy cabal of
Satan-worshipping paedophiles.
Charlie
Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, asked: “Who needs Vladimir Putin
when we have Donald Trump? If you were Vladimir Putin and you wanted to disrupt
this election, what would you do? You’d spread disinformation. You’d make
people doubt the legitimacy of the vote. You’d peddle conspiracy theories and
you might want to mess with mail-in voting. That’s all happening without him.
Our president is doing that.”
Sykes,
founder and editor-at-large of the Bulwark website, warned of a “very ugly” post-election
period. “It’s very clear that Trump will use every lever of governmental power
to stay in office. There’ll be many mail-in votes and the mail-in votes will be
very different than the same-day votes.
“What he
will do – and it will be very much on brand for Donald Trump – is declare
victory on election night and then, as the mail-in votes are counted, he will
insist that that they are not legitimate, that the election is being stolen
from him, and I think that has the potential to create massive doubt and
chaos.”
Such a
scenario promises to dwarf the acrimony, chaos and confusion of the disputed
2000 election between Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore, which went
all the way to the supreme court.
Bob Shrum,
a Democratic strategist who was an adviser to Gore, said: “I’m not worried that
it won’t be held and I’m not worried that we won’t get, in the end, an accurate
result, assuming that we can straighten out this post office thing or just be
patient as the votes are counted.
“I am worried
that what Trump is doing means that afterwards, if he loses, we will have a
bitterly divided country with about 30% of the population angry, alienated,
perhaps in the streets, something we’ve never seen here before. If Trump loses,
he’s not gonna be Al Gore who believed he won the election but who, after the
supreme court decision, conceded for the good of the country.”
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