Voter Suppression

Voter Suppression and Republicans

It's Racists

Voter suppression is no longer billy clubs and hoses and dogs. It's administrative rules. It's bureaucratic barriers.It's precincts that seem to close the dead of night. -Stacey Abrams


According to a report last year from Reuters, 1200 precincts in the south closed. "The report comes as Republican-led states impose a range of other restrictions, from shorter voting hours to photo-ID requirements. As turnout has surged in recent elections, voters in cities like Phoenix, Arizona and Atlanta, Georgia, have endured hours-long waits to cast their ballots." Seven counties in Georgia now have only one precinct.


The Guardian reported that places where black and Latino population is growing by the largest numbers in Texas experienced the majority of closures and could benefit Republicans.


Now Republicans are after voting by mail claiming rampant fraud. Trump admitted the real reason. In April, president Trump admitted why he and many Republicans oppose the expansion of voting by mail. In an article by Adam Russell Taylor for Sojourners, he quoted Trump, "Republicans should fit very hard when it comes to state-wide mail-in voting. For whatever reason, doesn't work out well for Republicans." Taylor pointed out Trump does not want to make it easier for people to vote, even amid a pandemic, because it disadvantages Republicans.

It Gets Worse

Propublica reports the falsehoods run rampant on Social Media.
“Outright Lies”: Voting Misinformation Flourishes on Facebook

While the social media giant says it opposes voter suppression, the data shows a stark picture: Nearly half of all top-performing posts that mentioned voting by mail were false or misleading.

Trump’s false attacks on voting by mail had a total of 3.8 million interactions on Facebook. Among them, a Trump post that falsely claimed Nevada had illegally sent out ballots had the most interactions of any post that has mentioned vote by mail in the last 12 months in the U.S. Trump’s false claim that California is sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there” drew the third most interactions of any post that mentioned voting over the same period, ranking behind a post from Obama and a pro-Trump meme.

In recent months, Trump has also claimed on Facebook that “mail-in ballots will lead to a “RIGGED ELECTION!” and falsely said they are “substantially fraudulent”; he made false statements about the legality of actions taken by election officials in Michigan and Nevada; and he misrepresented his own power to deny funding to states that expand vote by mail. Trump continued those false claims last week, arguing a debunked distinction between mail-in voting and absentee voting.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla says. “What is frustrating is that Trump can post or tweet whatever he wants without the proper checks and balances.” “What keeps me up at night is that he’s clearly setting the stage to question election results that he might not like in November.”

According to Propublica, for now, misinformation may be difficult to stop before it goes viral. On July 13, conservatives on Facebook pounced on a video in which an unidentified Trump supporter said she was denied the right to vote, apparently in Louisiana. Many of these pages framed it as evidence of voter fraud and a Democratic plot to steal the election. By the time the post was deemed false by PolitiFact, a Facebook fact-checking partner, it had received more than 3.7 million views and been shared more than 170,000 times.