HEARING IS TOMORROW MORNING AT 10:30 AM.

If you live in Harris County, Texas, and cast your vote in a drive through location this election, your vote, along with almost 130,000 other votes, is in jeopardy.  Radical Republican operatives have filed yet another lawsuit against drive through voting, this time in an effort to actually invalidate all of those votes.  The Texas Supreme Court dismissed a similar suit a couple of weeks ago, but this one, filed in federal court, is before Andrew Hanen, a GWB appointee, who is known as one of the most ultra-conservative judges in the federal system.  The threat of almost 130,000 Harris County residents losing their vote is real.  If this lawsuit succeeds, it will throw the Texas elections into chaos.

Larry Veselka, a well known Houston attorney, is intervening in the case tomorrow and will represent any Harris County voter who cast their vote in a drive through location.  He has provided a Google Doc intervenor form (link below).  If you voted in a drive through location in Harris County, please fill out this form to make your voice heard.

Drive-Through Voter and Intervenor Sign-Up and Consent.

OK, kids, the game plan is now as obvious as my pointy toed cowboy boots on the beach.  The Texas GOP’s voter suppression efforts are now in overdrive, throwing up lawsuit after lawsuit (led by Abbott and Paxton) to stop drive-in voting, and eliminate thousands of mail in ballot drop boxes around the state.  And, this is happening all over the country.  Why, you ask?  Here’s why.

It’s become clear that Republicans have now realized that, even with their usual voter suppression tactics (removing polling locations, strict ID laws, complex and confusing mail-in ballot procedures, shifting times and places for early voting, etc.) are not going to be enough to eek out a win.  Turnout in 2018, and now in 2020 is unprecedented.  There well over 1 million more voter registrations this year than in 2016.  Biden is leading nationally by double digits and in all of the battleground states, though by only a few points in NC and FL.  The normal point shaving that is a trademark Republican tactic won’t be enough.

So, the new tactic?  Attempting to invalidate millions of votes.  It started last June when Trump’s new Postmaster General started sabotaging the Post Office by eliminating overtime, removing hundreds of mail sorting machines from primarily Democratic districts, and issuing ominous warnings to states that the Post Office my not be able to deliver mail-in ballots on time.  It’s now moved to the courts, starting with Abbott’s order to eliminate all but one mail-in ballot dropbox per county.  That order is now winding through the courts with Paxton leading the way.  NOW, Republicans have sued counties that have implemented drive through voting, calling all votes obtained with that method as “illegal”.

So here’s how it’s going to go – because of the huge turnout, Biden has a chance to win Texas by a narrow margin.  That win will be challenged by Republicans claiming that votes delivered to drop boxes and votes through drive in voting locations are “illegal” and therefore invalid.  They will seek to invalidate MILLIONS of votes to keep Texas in the red column for Trump.  Why?  Texas has 38 electoral votes.  If Biden wins Texas, it’s game over for Trump, and that could happen on election night.

That is what Republicans are trying to stop.  Even though I’m eligible to vote by mail, I’m going to drag my happy ass down to a polling location to vote in person.  I’ll do that with a big middle finger to Abbott and the rest of the criminals enabling him.

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats have desperately tried to get vote by mail passed in states that don’t have it in time for the November presidential election.  It’s a non-starter with Republicans lead by Trump.  At the same time, the Postal Service is losing $2 billion per month with reduced volumes of mail.  Democrats tried to put a $15 billion bailout in the relief bill, but Trump threatened to veto the entire multi-trillion dollar bill if it included any money for the Post Office.  The bill finally got passed with a $10 billion loan, by Mnuchin is holding it up in Treasury, and Trump fired the IG assigned to oversee the distribution of funds from the relief bill last week.

Republicans have been trying to kill the US Postal Service for decades, trying to privatize it and hand it over to some of their largest donors.  In 2006, the Republican controlled Congress passed a law that required the Postal Service prefund 75 YEARS of anticipated pensions, totaling $72 billion.  They then diverted that money to paying down federal debt caused by GWB’s slashing tax cuts.  Even though the Postal Service is no longer a full federal agency the Congress still controls its budget, continuously starving it for funding.

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has caused mail volume to plummet,  Republicans, lead by Trump, have stonewalled any support to keep the service alive, and without funding, it will run out of cash in September.  At the same time, Democrats are trying to introduce voting reforms that allow vote by mail for the November elections.  Of course, Republicans are also stonewalling that.  About 20 states already allow voting by mail.  Why in the world would Republicans want to kill the Postal Service?  That answer is now crystal clear – no Post Office?  No voting by mail.  Trump’s plummet in the polls can be offset by making it almost impossible to vote during the pandemic.

Yep, Republicans figured out many years ago that reducing turnout through voter suppression, as well as radical gerrymandering, improves their chances of hanging on to power.  This effort is that strategy on steroids actually taking away Americans’ Constitutional right to vote.

All the numbers and demographics are moving against Republicans and have for years.  They have clung to power by tilting the field in their favor with gerrymandering and voter suppression using harsh voter ID laws, moving and closing polling locations, shortening early voting periods, making ballots confusing, and sending out deceptive campaign materials that are designed to keep voters off balance.  Recently Trump has taken use of the mass voter rally and raised it to an art form; those rallies are dutifully covered by the media that always amplify it to make it look bigger than it is.  The Republicans have always out maneuvered Democrats on virtually every front, legal and illegal.

So, think about what could be an equalizer that could blunt most of these tactics.  Something that would threaten not just one side, but both sides, something that doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or Republican, Social Democrat or Trumpist.  Enter the Coronavirus that is rapidly becoming a global pandemic and growing very quickly in the US accelerated by Trump’s incompetent and incoherent early response to the threat.  The resulting condition called COVID-19 is life threatening to some and contagious, passed by human to human exposure.  One of the greatest tools that we have now to fight it is social distancing. Add to that the fact that development of a distributable vaccine will not occur until AFTER the election.  So, as we go deeper into the year, the threat is growing, not getting better.

What does all this mean?  It means that it’s very likely that there will be no in person campaigning, no rallies, no in person voting including early voting.  It means that, in order to have an election, the entire country must use remote voting online or by mail.  By far the safest is online, and the next best is mail in ballot.  Three states vote exclusively by mail, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.  Republicans HATE remote voting because that vote is much more difficult to suppress, so only states that have balanced or Democratic government control are the ones that have converted to remote voting.  Online makes the most sense and can be secured; today I bank online, shop for groceries online, even buy our tea and coffee online.  I can send money almost anywhere in the world online.  Surely, we can develop a secure way to vote online.  Short of that, though, voting by mail works and is being used today.

So, for the first time, Republicans are facing the exact same obstacle to voting that Democrats are facing.  The Coronavirus can’t tell who you support for President and doesn’t care.  In the face of a national election where their candidate is weak (and nuts), they know that the election is very tight or even a loser for them; that’s why they’ve refused to improve voter security and continued to restrict access to voting.  Suddenly, THEY are facing a voter suppression threat that they didn’t create and can’t control.  Will the Coronavirus threat to Republicans finally be the tipping point where they will be forced to make voting more fair and by mail or online?  I can only hope so, and they better get off their asses and get to work on it.

Short of Trump trying to cancel or delay the election, remote voting is the only answer to make the election happen on time and according to the Constitution.  Could it actually be a global health threat that helps repair a broken system?  The irony would be sweet.

Anyone who bases their judgment on facts knew they were lying from the start.  In fact their entire strategy is based on massive lying.  What am I talking about? Voting.  Republicans figured out a long time ago that their demographic (old, white, angry) is shrinking.  Historically, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, started when the GOP went nuts after Goldwater lost in ’64.  Ultra conservative voices began rising during that time, really more Libertarian and Bircher, and when Reagan beat Carter, the calcification of the party really set in.  From those days to today, the GOP has pushed the entire country farther and farther to the right, pushing everyone not white, not old, not nuts out of the tent.  Trump’s takeover of the party has completed the calcification, adding white supremacy as just another adjective to describe the base.

The GOP base is so demographically narrow that it simply cannot fairly win anymore.  As the country becomes more diverse, our population is moving away from the radicalism and obvious insanity that is now the party.  So, how can they win on a national scale?  It’s two pronged: by keeping the base continuously whipped up and raging about dark-skinned people, and, of course, by cheating.  A lot.

That cheating comes in the form of radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  Gerrymandering is a fact of life and several cases have been consolidated at the SCOTUS, but, unless Roberts has a sudden fit of rationality, I don’t have much hope.  Voter suppression, though, is just as insidious; keeping Americans from being represented in the Congress, the very basis of our republic.  Voter ID laws have been pushed now for twenty years, based on the lie that there is massive voter fraud occurring during our elections (by dark skinned people) that simply doesn’t exist.  Trump used that same blatant lie to explain away him losing the popular vote in 2016 by 3 million votes.

One of the Republicans pushing this lie is Chris Kobach, a white nationalist (who won’t admit it) and former Kansas Secretary of State.  Kobach was behind faked voter fraud studies in Kansas, and pushed anti-Muslim policies as well as strict voter ID laws.  After he lost the election for governor in 2017, he became an advisor to Trump, bringing his radical ideology to the WH.  And it’s not good.  In 2017 he lead Trump’s bogus voter integrity committee that quietly folded in 2018 after it couldn’t find one shred of evidence of massive voter fraud and being stopped by the states in amassing private data about voters.

One of the tactics Kobach pushed to Trump was adding a citizenship question to the US Census questionnaire.  Sounds benign, right?  Hardly.  The question is specifically designed to scare people who may have members of the family who are not citizens, have a green card, or are undocumented.  Why?  To undercount these populations and disproportionally increase representation to the GOP base (old and white).  Seats in state houses and in the US House are at stake.  Trump and crew have been lying about the reason for adding this question from the very first moment.  Their problem though, is that they’ve now been caught lying to Congress about it.

It turns out that Kobach pushed the citizenship question to the Trump campaign in 2016, long before Wilbur Ross claimed it was introduced in early 2017.  Yesterday, Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Oversight and Reform committee, disclosed details of a closed door interview with Kobach last Monday where he revealed this new detail.  Now we know why Trump has desperately been trying to expand executive privilege over even those who don’t actually work for him, but who just talked to him.  That effort failed and the administration is caught now in yet another lie.

So, Kobach lied until last Monday.  Wilbur Ross lied and stonewalled the House, likely earning a contempt of Congress vote just like Bill Barr did for refusing to testify.  This episode is yet another page in the encyclopedia of lies told by this administration.  Hopefully we can use this lie to shut down another of the GOP’s efforts to win by cheating.