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.

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.

In Harris County yesterday, lines of voters were long and the wait was up to 5 hours.  Why?  There are two primary reasons:

• Since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act Texas has closed 542 polling places, most in historically black and Latino areas.  If you include 2012 closings, that number rises to 750.
• In Harris County at least, the Republican party refused to allow a joint primary with Dems.  What that meant was that the voting machines were divided in 2, half for Repubs, half for Dems.  Since Trump essentially had no opponent, turnout in the GOP primary was very low so HALF of voting machines remained essentially unused.

Both of these moves by Republicans made it harder for Texans to vote, which has been their goal for over 20 years as demographics started moving against them.  I got to experience their strategy yesterday since my polling place was one of those closed.  It took me three attempts at two different polling places to finally cast my vote, and I had to drive 15 minutes from one polling place to another to accomplish that.  After discovering my polling place was closed, I drove to my old polling place only to find the line out the door and down the block. I went to have some lunch and returned about an hour later to find the line almost as long.  A nice young poll worker for Ben Rose had information on other polling places, so I drove all the way out to Buffalo Speedway to vote at a church there.  The line there was about half an hour (and it was air-conditioned) so I waited it out.  When I got into the polling place, HALF of the voting machines were being unused while Republican poll workers twiddled their thumbs.  On the other side, Dems were forced to wait in multiple lines to access the other half.  Total time not including lunch was about two hours of waiting and a lot of driving just to vote in a goddam primary.

It’s shameful that the Republican party has been allowed to continuously and increasingly restrict access to the Constitutional right to vote.  Their rationale, of course, is based on lies since their actual goal is voter suppression not “election integrity” which is one of their standard lies.  Texas Republicans are perfectly happy to make the lives of their fellow Texans miserable simply for political gain.  This reason alone should be enough to vote the bastards out.

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.

In a moment of bag of horse manure stupid, 97 year old Lila Cockrell, former mayor of San Antonio, was turned away by officials from the polls for the mayoral runoff last Thursday because she didn’t have the proper ID.  Texas has one of the most idiotic voter ID suppression laws in the country.  For example, you can vote with your gun license, but can’t vote with your University of Texas ID.  The law is an incredible burden for the elderly and economically disadvantaged, as Republicans have made voter fraud suppression a key plank in their platform power grab.  Shockingly, the courts have often gone along (or delayed decision until it’s too late) over voter suppression and radical gerrymandering.

To make this story even more enraging, Bexar County voting official Jacque Callanen said (in his most Nazi-like apologist voice), “It was uncomfortable for the election officials to tell her, ‘No.’ Obviously, they knew who she was,” Callanen said. “But the law is the law. The election officials did what they’re supposed to do.”  Hey, Jacque – when the law turns away a qualified voter who everyone in the place knows is qualified over “the law”, the goddam law is wrong and needs to be struck down.  If Ray Charles were alive today, even he could see that, dumbass.

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the head of Trump’s so-called Voter Fraud Commission has made a request of every state’s voter file so he can give it to the Russians.  Okay, okay, I just made up that last part.

“The chair of President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission has penned a letter to all 50 states requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state.”

He says he’s going to make all this information available to the public.

I don’t know how they do it in other states, but in Texas, we don’t have to give our social security number to register to vote.  In Texas, voting records are public information, but you need certain information to access them.  Here’s how my county does it.  And Texas has laws about how that information can be used.

I’m gonna try real hard to think of a way this information would be important to anyone in the federal government except for voter suppression.

Nope, can’t do it.

Now, close your eyes for a minute and ask yourself what would happen if all registered firearms lists had to be released to the public.  Yeah, that’s the sound of hell breaking.