Dancing in the Streets

When the networks finally finally got around to officially declaring Joe Biden the president elect, our first reaction was to scream with joy. We threw open our window and yelled (in French, naturally) Joe Biden won! Joe Biden won! Four or five French people who were outside came running up and began hooting and screaming with us. We weren’t (yet) dancing in the streets like the denizens of Philadelphia and New York, but we were feeling it.

It only struck me later how interesting it was that our French neighbors were at one with us in our celebration. Everyone in our progressive little village here has contempt for Macron, which I confess I do not understand, and if a new president of France were elected I somehow doubt I would be screaming with joy alongside my French friends.

Someone on Twitter explained it to me: the French lived under Nazi occupation. They know their history. And obviously they know the danger that Trump represents to the world. The celebrations across the United States and the rest of the globe recognized that a dictator had been overthrown. I guess my sense of outrage hasn’t been completely obliterated by the nonstop barrage of corruption and lies we have endured for the past four years, because it still shocks me when I realize how undemocratic, fascistic and totalitarian, trump’s actions and impulses have been. This is not a guy who likes or respects our democracy, to put it mildly.

I read progressives and rightwingers alike on Twitter declaiming loudly that there have been shenanigans, cheating, underhandedness in this election. I do not know enough about software or hacking to hypothesize how large-scale cheating could’ve taken place, although I laugh at the thought of Republicans believing Democrats cheated in this election and yet somehow let Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham get reelected. The few instances of actual voter fraud that I read about were simply  Republicans voting twice, and in case you haven’t yet seen the statistics, voter fraud is so vanishingly rare that it is a decimal point followed by six or seven zeros and then a six or seven. Like this: .0000006. That’s how much voter fraud takes place. I mean come on people, even in this year of record turnout there were at least 90 million Americans who could’ve voted who chose not to. We can’t even get people to vote once, let alone twice. And please stop with the 60-year-old bullshit about dead people voting. You might see dead people, but they never vote.

I’m about as far from a conspiracy theorist as one can get, but I was troubled in 2016 when Trump won by less than 1% in the three battleground states that would give him the election. And some of the math from Florida did not seem probable. But that’s not my area of expertise and apparently no one thought it worth pursuing. So I am by temperament inclined to dismiss allegations of broad cheating during the election.

What many people seem to overlook is the massive amount of cheating that went on BEFORE the election. Gerrymandering, of course, an evil that has been with us for a long time and that I hope we can address sooner rather than later. The subverting of the post office to cause delay and failure to deliver ballots. Trump’s specious attacks on mail-in ballots and the electoral process itself. But let’s not overlook the modern-day poll tax the Supreme Court approved in Florida after that state’s Republican Legislature pissed on the referendum their citizens approved to allow ex-felons to vote. These lovely bigots announced that the newly un-incarcerated could only cast their vote once they paid off any fines and fees they still owed. Mind you, no one in the state had any idea of the specific amounts each of these ex felons owed, making it impossible for them to clear the slate and enter the voting booth. That same Supreme Court cursed us with dark money in Citizen’s v United, and gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, giving immediate rise to a slew of voter ID and other voter suppression actions in red states, including drastically slashing the number of polling places in largely black or otherwise democratic-leaning counties. In Texas, republicans yanked away drop-off ballot boxes just weeks before the election to make it harder for people to safely drop off their ballots. The courts approved this as well, including having only one ballot box in Harris County, home to almost 5 million people. Navajos had to fight for many months to be allowed to vote because many people on reservations don’t have specific street addresses. (It was Navajos who flipped Arizona to Biden, by the way. They were smart enough to give more than 90% of their ballots to him.) And Republicans have long cheated when they hold power over elections in their state by coming up with ways to purge the rolls, getting hundreds of thousands of people thrown off the voting rolls before an election. This, more than hanging chads, butterfly ballots and a Republican Supreme Court, is what actually gave Florida to George W. Bush in 2000. Fuck you, Katherine  Harrison.

Fuck you too, Brian Kemp. Now presiding as governor of Georgia, Kemp served as secretary of state in the months leading up to his gubanatorial battle with Stacey Abrams. On a single day in 2017, Kemp removed 560,000 people from the voting rolls, people flagged because they had skipped one too many elections. An investigation revealed that 107,000 of those voters should have been eligible to vote in the 2018 election. Kemp “won” the election by a margin of 55,000 votes.

At this point I feel like going on a rant about the antiquated, rooted-in-slavery electoral college that has fucked us so thoroughly. Maybe another time.

We currently have a Supreme Court dominated by rightwingers chosen by presidents who did not win the popular vote. This means that we are being ruled by a minority, which is not how democracies are supposed to work.

Without cheating, without voter suppression, which is just another form of cheating, our history would be different. It would be better and more progressive. Al Gore would’ve tackled climate change 20 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people would still be alive. Children would not have been put in cages, their families destroyed. I’m screaming and dancing in the street right now, but I’m also angry and sad that this shit has gone down in my America. I’m even angrier and sadder that 70 million Americans are ignorant about this or are okay with this.

Sent from my iWalkieTalkie