“Don’t allow Republicans to cripple voting rights!”
“How do I do that?”
“Vote for Democrats!”
“How do I do that when Republicans have made it so I can’t vote or my vote doesn’t really count?”
“Um…”
No. That’s as demonstrably untrue as saying there is no difference between Biden and Trump
Because this is not true. This has not happened. The Republicans have done plenty of crippling of voter rights. They have absolutely not made it impossible for a every democratic vote to count (reminder: Texas is a swing state)
That’s is as logical as saying you shouldn’t vote Democrat because the Democrats are running secret child cannibalism rings.
My point is that someone like Trump could run at any time, so theoretically, we could always be just one election away from fascism. Hence it’s an ongoing fight, and one we can never let up.
Because this is not true. This has not happened. The Republicans have done plenty of crippling of voter rights. They have absolutely not made it impossible for a every democratic vote to count
Edit: Bolding mine.
Yeah, this is just flat out untrue. Harris County, a county with 5 MILLION people and greater in landmass than the state or Rhode Island, only has one ballot dropbox per county, giving it the same number of ballot dropboxes as Loving County, with fewer than 100 people.
Texas Republicans recently proposed that statewide elections be decided by who wins a majority of counties.
Republicans have intentionally not given enough ballots to blue counties for elections.
Are we just going to forget about how Republicans tried to kneecap the USPS to prevent mail-in ballots from counting in 2020?
Moderating: Please don’t change text when quoting other posters, not even bolding part of what they wrote. If you do so, make it clear with a statement like “Bolding Mine”.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
That’s not what I said. Can they make a vote not count? Not only can they, they do so all the time. See the documentary Rigged if you haven’t yet (it’s available online for free) and you can see someone actually doing it for real in real time. The Republicans have set up systems in places where a person can disqualify a vote and do it over and over again. Yes, that disenfranchised person can restore their vote if they are informed and have the opportunity to do so and can do it in time for the next vote but that doesn’t always happen.
And your vote can be gerrymandered into one where it doesn’t have the impact that it should. These are not new tactics but they’ve been embraced by the right in an organized nationwide effort as Project REDMAP.
As that article points out, it’s not even a secret; Karl Rove laid it out publicly a long time ago in the WSJ. It’s not even illegal (though it should be).
You don’t need to eliminate all the votes. Just enough to win. Trump knows that, that’s why he tried to extort a specific number of votes out of Georgia Republicans in his infamous phone call.
Ummm you just proved my point. As shown by the text above Republicans have successfully done some crippling of voters rights in Texas and elsewhere. But they have absolutely NOT made it impossible Democrats to vote either in Texas or anywhere else.
The most effective way to stop the US becoming a fascist dictatorship, whether you live in Texas or not, is to vote Democrat, WHICH YOU CAN DO AND YOUR VOTE WILL COUNT, and help others to do so (all the more so as the GOP has made it harder).
A pretty effective way you can increase the chance of the US fascist dictatorship (where everyone’s vote will absolutely not count) is to convince people that their vote will not count so it doesn’t matter if they vote against fascist dictatorship or not.
Republicans don’t have to make it impossible to vote. They just have to make it hard enough so people will decide not to bother.
No offense, but you come off as really naive when you say “Your vote will count”. Republicans can and do throw away votes they don’t like.
Thanks to the efforts of many Democrats, the Republicans have not yet achieved this.
@griffin1977 Note also that I’m somewhat snarkily referring to the OP in that if taken to the extreme, I’m not sure what the point is. If for some reason votes on a large scale didn’t count then what are people supposed to do?
The REDMAP stuff isn’t likely to do more than change the outcome of elections that are probably going to be super close anyway. It’s not actually going to lead to fascism. It’s one tool they can use to try to get as close as possible.
The country isn’t going to be a fascist one regardless of how this election goes, but if Biden wins it will push it further away and if Trump wins it brings it a lot closer. So it matters a lot.
You said:
Again saying that, as a potential Democrat voter, is a really good way to make a fascist dictatorship more likely.
Your vote in the 2024 general election absolutely does count.
Unless it doesn’t. I mean, in a completely literal sense, your individual vote could be made not to count. This is factual.
This isn’t saying that voting in general is useless (on the contrary, it is by far the most powerful tool we have) but sometimes your vote doesn’t count. It depends on your jurisdiction and what the local laws are.
Here’s just one tiny example.
Voting rights groups file lawsuit to prevent some mail-in ballots from being disqualified
We need more awareness about this so that we can get some damn national laws that prevent it. It’s ridiculous that we don’t. Ironically, it would probably take getting a full majority in both houses of Congress to do it (and then the political pressure to get them to act).
This is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to inform people of the dirty tricks Republicans use to make voting as hard as possible, or to make votes not count.
For what it’s worth, you’re coming across to me as saying “why bother voting, it won’t count anyway.”
I don’t think so. If Obama had lost to McCain, America wouldn’t have turned fascist; McCain was a totally sensible guy. Ditto if Clinton had lost to Dole or Bush Sr., or if Obama had lost to Romney.
It seems oxymoronic that the best and probably only way to ensure that voting has integrity is to vote in the people who will fix the problem, because raising the issue can make it sound like voting doesn’t matter.
It’s twisted and that’s by design. It’s a snowball effect where disenfranchising people makes it easier for the people who are doing the disenfranchising to stay in power and keep disenfranchising people. That’s why it’s important to vote for as long as voting works.
When they get to the point where voting is meaningless, as it is in those nations that have truly rigged voting systems where it’s all a formality, that’s when we are a fascist country.
I still believe it will take time for that to happen but it’s possible which is terrifying.
Yeah, that’s how I understood what you were saying: not that every election has had a fascist candidate, but that every election could have had.
Or to put it another way, “The next election could be the one that sends us toward fascism” doesn’t always make sense to say a month or two before an election, but it does always make sense to say a year or two before an election.
How? If they control a state legally, then what would you have Democrats do, exactly?
To add to your point, if a side can cunningly convince its opponents that the elections make no difference and that the outcome were rigged, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A cunning approach would not try to debunk it’s opponents claims that an election is stolen - rather, it would lean into them. By saying, “Yes, the elections are rigged, what are you going to do about it?” it would have twofold benefit: 1) it would bait the opposing side into rage and violence, which would further discredit them, and 2) it would discourage the opposing side from voting, since “votes don’t matter.”