Nearly a year after the 2016 election, it emerged that Virginia was among a score of states whose voting systems had been assailed by Russian hackers. The Commonwealth emerged from this unscathed. That was the good news. The bad news in my view was that the Russians represented the least of the concerns about voting going forward. This letter to The Richmond Free Press responds to this news and briefly catalogues the GOP’s efforts not just to discourage eligible voters from pulling the lever but also to excise segments from the electorate with surgical position. Some of the news from that time now seems prophetic, especially the poll suggesting that half of GOP voters would accept suspension of the 2020 election if The Fabulist in Chief falsely declared that fraudulent voting would make a fair election impossible.
Ronald E. Carrington, “Voting Systems in Va., 20 Other States Targeted Hackers in 2016,” The Richmond Free Press, 28-30 September 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/sep/29/voting-systems-va-20-other-states-targeted-hackers/).
The good news reported by Mr. Carrington – failure by probable Russian hackers to affect Virginia’s 2016 election results – should not blind the Commonwealth’s voters to the perhaps more insidious threat to the ballot box from within, conservative efforts to disenfranchise segments of the electorate.
President Trump’s narcissistic, delusional assertion that millions of “illegal” voters deprived him victory in the popular vote last November spurred his empanelment of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, its very name a paragon of Orwellian doublespeak. Mr. Trump placed at its head Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a man whose name is synonymous with voter suppression and who in 2016, in dogged pursuit of the voter-fraud unicorn, tossed triple the number of ballots in Kansas as in demographically similar states (The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 September 2017). Mr. Kobach, moreover, champions the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a project ostensibly aimed to improve accuracy of voter rolls but believed to target minority voters disproportionately.
Fear that Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s electoral “vision” will spread nationwide is not unfounded as the notion of carving demographic slices from the electorate gains traction in conservative circles. The loathsome Ann Coulter’s call to rescind the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and raise the voting age to thirty seems less like fringe lunacy when considered in the context of an August poll in which more than half of GOP voters would support, at Mr. Trump’s behest, suspension of the 2020 election because of his false claim of widespread illegal voting (Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” The Washington Post, 10 August 2017 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/]).
The backdrop to Mr. Trump and Mr. Kobach’s undercutting of confidence in elections is the effort in many GOP-controlled states to discourage participation by traditionally Democratic constituencies – minorities, the young, the poor – by restricting early voting, imposing needless voter-identification requirements, and providing inadequate voting equipment for urban precincts. The GOP, furthermore, strives to make Democratic votes worth less through partisan gerrymandering unprecedented in scope and efficacy, an abuse now under review by the US Supreme Court. These antidemocratic measures threaten to overwhelm commendable attempts to expand the electorate, such as Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of the franchise to ex-felons, a restriction at its inception largely conceived to constrain minority voting.
The ballot box remains the best avenue toward social and economic justice. A vigilant and aggressive defense of voting is now especially urgent.