Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobo Fett
Well sure, I get that. I guess I'm just surprised, or disappointed, how this seems to be taken as standard operating procedure by everyone. Not that people aren't upset about a lot of things I mentioned, but the way the elections are run doesn't seem to be questioned a lot of the time - at least that's the way it appears to me, as someone on the outside looking in.
As an example, earlier today I watched Don Lemon on CNN criticizing the Florida recount process - but it was mostly about the counties themselves. Obviously they look pretty incompetent, and they certainly should be criticized - I'm just surprised that he (and others) seem to be fine with the letting the state itself slide. I mean, as we all know, this **** goes back to all the hanging chad crap from 18 (!) years ago, and they still can't get their **** together??
The system is broken. Really, really broken. And too many people seem to just accept it.
And it's not like I can't relate or am pointing an LOLUSA finger, because there's ****ed up things here with government and elections that are very difficult to change and thus are just accepted, so I get that's why it happens a lot of the time. I'm also happy to see that some initiatives to fix redistricting passed, so it's not like nothing is changing. But JFC, this has to be super frustrating for a lot of people.
Also, I don't just look at Republicans - I find it hard to believe Democrats don't take advantage of a lot of this stupid **** when and where they can. But it does seem the most repugnant stuff like voter suppression is happening mostly, if not entirely, on the Republican side. And to hear Trump keep parading out his millions of fraudulent votes crap over and over again...ugh. Yeah, I know, playing to his base.
Eagerly waiting for the pendulum to swing back on how divided the US is becoming, but I'm starting to wonder how that will happen.
Voting is fine and all but don't forget a lot of the important things most people cherish about our political system weren't quite voted on, didn't come from first through statutory changes, or those laws were way downstream from the application of popular will to other parts of the system first. That is, the culture changes, the zeitgeist changed, circumstances changed, and then public pressure erupted, wars were fought, or courts ruled, whatever -- and then the votes followed and the laws changed.
The obvious example for most people is the civil rights movement, which you can trace back to Reconstruction and Jim Crow, or maybe WWII, certainly Brown v Board in 1954, and it's still 10 years after intense public struggle (Montgomery bus boycott, school desegregation battles, sit-ins, Freedom Riders, the Albany Movement, the March on Washington, bombings of black churches, the Freedom Summer) -- and it's only then, after like an incredibly difficult 10 years of activist struggle against entrenched white supremacy do you get the Voting Rights Act. It wasn't the other way around, the VRA didn't precipitate the Civil Rights Movement, it was like one of its final achievements.
And so: your anxiety is well founded but this sort of chicanery and manipulation of the voting system has a lot of historical precedent.
Which is to say, we should get comfortable with the idea that change will come from elsewhere and outside first and dismantling voter suppression schemes will follow.
Last edited by DVaut1; 11-16-2018 at 06:25 AM.