Lots of fireworks going off after 9 PM. The City of Orange prohibits sales and use of any fireworks. The fireworks shows have all been cancelled due to the Coronavirus. But right now it doesn’t seem like any of that is true, fireworks are going off all over the town. Big fireworks! Boom! Boom! Pop, pop! Boom! For hours.
VOTER FRAUD AND RACISM OF THE MOST PERNICIOUS KIND
This Yahoo article digs deeper into this subject.
https://news.yahoo.com/what-is-voter-fraud-yahoo-news-explains-191816016.html
Here are quotes from the beginning:
<< For two decades, Americans have argued about voter fraud — often in simplified terms. Republican lawmakers tend to argue that voter fraud is a major problem that undermines democracy. Democrats, meanwhile, counter that real instances of voter fraud are vanishingly rare, and that Republican remedies such as voter ID laws are just thinly veiled attempts at discouraging turnout, particularly among minorities. >>
<< Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights pioneer who was beaten nearly to death by Alabama state police in 1965, once described voter ID laws as “a cure where there is no sickness.”>>
My thoughts are very similar. But I began to associate the term Institutionalized Racism with another pernicious problem.
In the 1960s there was widespread bipartisan support in Congress for the VRA, the Voter Rights Act. This support was reaffirmed at various times since then by Congress. Some states had laws requiring voter ID, and they were found to be in violation of the VRA and they had to be monitored by federal authorities to prevent these violations. A link to a source is:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
Another quote from this Yahoo article
<< Most experts say that voter ID requirements have likely done more to prevent Americans from voting than they have to stop fraud. Poor Americans are most likely to lack a driver’s license or other forms of valid ID, and often do not have access to documents needed to obtain valid ID, such as a birth certificate. In some states as well, DMVs have strictly limited the times when they are open or register voters. >>
Then the VRA world was turned upside down when the SCOTUS handed down the Citizens United Decision, among others. More history later.
The BLM Black Lives Matter movement has been in the news because of the many protests that have taken place after the death of George Floyd in the hands of four Minneapolis policemen. In these protests in the news I have seen signs that say “Silence = (something)” the (something) could be consent, racism, death, or other terms.
The Republicans see minority voters as the biggest threat to their maintaining a majority in Congress because the Right knows that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the minority voters. It is in the Republicans’ best interests to reduce the minority voters’ participation in voting. Since there is no incentive to cast their vote, and there is no penalty for not casting their vote, these minor issues like preventing voters from voting by mail are effective at reducing the number of votes cast, mostly by minorities.
Then the districts have been gerrymandered to make the minority votes as least effective as possible. How, you say? Say you have a five areas, each with its share of minorities, and these areas have to be apportioned into five districts. The politicians make one district ‘gerrymander’ through all five areas, concentrating all the minorities into this district, which is going to have a representative elected by the minorities. But the other four districts have no minority areas and they have four representatives who are not elected by those minorities. And these four representatives give no representation at all to minorities. That’s institutionalized racism.
Back to voter turnout. The Republicans are saying that voting by mail-in ballot is allowing voter fraud and they are doing everything in their power to stop states from sending out mail-in ballots. The mail-in ballots allow those poor, disabled and minority people who are usually unable to go to the polls to cast their ballots easily by mail. The Republicans believe this gives an advantage to the democrats because more poor, disabled and minority people are Democrats. So by suppressing voting by mail-in ballots they are gaining an advantage over democrats. In doing this, they are practicing institutionalized racism, especially in the inner cities.
There have been all these BLM Black Lives Matter protests. The complaints are against institutionalized racism within the police departments in cities. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are ten times as much institutionalized racism within the federal government due to the voter suppression I have explained above. Those protesters should not be tearing down statues of Civil War generals. They should be tearing down the institutionalized racism that is preventing them from voting and getting their fair share of representatives in *all* levels of state and federal governments. Until this institutionalized racism is remedied there will always be unfairness for the poor and minorities.
