Count Our Votes

From Slavery to Jim Crow to The Southern Strategy

Voter suppression is nothing new. Threatening and acts of violence to prevent people in this country from invoking their right to vote is not new. 

This continuing suppression of the vote was spawned by Jim Crow laws and continued through the southern strategy of the Republican party and embraced by white southern evangelicals and Trumpians. 

Through gerrymandering and a conservative court, barriers to voting by certain groups of US citizens have been put in place In the past ten years. Several states, north and south, have passed legislation restricting the right to vote.

I found this on the History Channel. 

The 15th Amendment granting African-American men the right to vote was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, by the late 1870s discriminatory practices were used to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and local levels if they denied African-Americans their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.

Is history repeating itself? Maybe not. Perhaps, the issue has never been resolved. The deeply-seated racism that feeds voter suppression has been there all along.

Now Trump supporters are turning to threats and potential acts of violence. 

"Two armed Virginia men who were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center were "coming to deliver a truck full of fake ballots" to the city, CNN affiliate KYW reported, citing prosecutors.

The center is one of the places where election workers have been counting votes from the 2020 general election, which includes the race for president."

True leaders are calling for calm. Let the process play out, please!