Super Tuesday and the recent decisions by the Supreme Court seem like a perfect backdrop to the ultimate question in a representative democracy. I can filibuster here, but the question is a fairly simple one to ask, but a very hard one to answer. Do we believe that we are better off with the people (all of the people) being able to have unfettered choices in who represents them? I would say it is pretty clear that the answer to that question has been a resounding no throughout our history.

In the beginning, only land owners could vote and even then they had to resort to the electoral college. African Americans and poor people didn’t get the vote for nearly a century. Women had to wait almost 50 years after that. Finally, younger people could work, pay taxes, and go to war, but they couldn’t vote until after the Vietnam War. Fast forward to the present time and the biggest battles of our times have been the methods used to keep certain people from voting.

The efforts in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois represented the other guard rail that we could place on our democracy. If you don’t want to restrict who can vote then you can restrict who they can vote for. The last nine years has been a circle jerk where each party or group has waited for the other to do the dirty work for them. The Republican party hoped that he would lose at the ballot box and go away. They also said it was the responsibility of the Justice department. The Justice department clearly slow rolled their prosecutions and hoped he would just go away. The cabinet could have used the 25th amendment. Congress could have voted to convict once if not twice. Mitch McConnell himself said it was a job for the courts. Now, the courts are saying it is a job for Congress.

I’m not sure whose failure is the most egregious. Each institution taken by itself could explain its actions. I found the use of the 14th amendment to be problematic at best. At some point some recognized court or institution has to come to an official stance that he participated in insurrection. The January 6th committee danced around it. Jack Smith has been dancing around it. We have been calling it out on cable television and the blogosphere, but there has been nothing definitive or official.

That lands us right back at the opening question. Do we absolutely trust the people to make this call? If the answer is no then it is time to do some hard soul searching. I’d argue that if we were really about letting the people choose their leaders in an unfettered way then he has been told no twice already. That’s a tiny consolation. If we still think it is way too dangerous to allow ordinary people to have the unchecked ability to choose their leaders then we have to seriously reevaluate who we are. I personally think a number of Americans are too stupid to vote and understand the gravity of it. They are easily led and vote against their interests too easily. I also have to acknowledge that the same exact arguments were used against women, African American, and young people voting. Do we bring back literacy tests? Do we bar people with red hats or stupid bumper stickers? Obviously, I speak in jest but if you decide that some people are incapable of doing it properly then you are fundamentally responsible for finding a way to cull the voter rolls in a fair and equitable way. Otherwise, we have to let it ride and fight like hell.

Those of you that have been reading these regularly have probably deciphered a pattern. I tend to hover around the same topics like a moth rushing to the flame. That means I hover between issues of faith, education, and issue framing. While I appreciate that not everyone wants to hear about faith, that issue is paramount to me in terms of reaching a bigger audience.

The simplest way to consider this is to consider it as a form of language. It’s more like a regional dialect. It’s like those raging debates about how “coke” is labeled in speech or how someone says “y’all.” In this case, it isn’t regional but spiritual (or not spiritual).

People speak in a particular way when they come from a Christian tradition. They speak in a certain way when they don’t. They also speak in a specific way when they used to be Christian and have decided to go in a different direction they speak in a specific way. A large part of keeping a big tent in politics is finding ways to communicate to a variety of groups. Those groups all have languages of their own.

The Democratic party has slowly developed an advantage over time of communicating with people of color. They have developed an advantage of communicating with women. They have developed an advantage of communicating with the LGTBQ+ community. They have developed an advantage in communicating with those that have shunned the church.

That leaves one group out. Those are the people that the party is having an increasingly difficult time reaching. Those are the people that many progressives are becoming increasingly hostile towards. These are the folks that share political values even when they are still members of the flock. They can be reached if you simply speak the language.

This concept is easy to understand when we look at the other side. Think of how many times we have watched a conservative think they are trying to reach disaffected groups of their own only to come off sounding more offensive. They belittle women. They somehow harbor racists and spew racist language even when they seem to be trying to be inclusive. It’s awe inspiring in a way.

It is all well and good not to be interested in the church itself, but it is paramount to understand the politics going on inside it. There is a divide throughout Christianity between what we might classify as the legalistic group of Christians and those that we might classify as the social justice group of Christians.

The Bible obviously can be split into various parts, but the two biggest dichotomies exist between all of the rules and regulations that people of faith are supposed to follow and the mission of Christ. That mission involves feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and healing the sick. That is the very heart of the progressive platform.

The problem comes when you insult believers. I understand it. Many believers are insulting themselves. They don’t respect non-believers and deride them unmercifully. We all get that. Yet, there are a group of good and decent believers that believe in our values that are there to be courted. I know because I’m one of them.

The current strategy forces those that we might label “the Christian left” to choose between Christian and left. When you force people to choose you never end up liking their choice. When you are forced to choose you usually choose against those forcing you to make the choice. Stop making them choose.

This morning on Fox Business, Rand Paul blurted out his concern about more people voting:

Rand Paul rails on how Georgia was supposedly stolen — “but probably most importantly” absentee ballot applications being sent out for the Senate runoffs.

“I’m very, very concerned that if you solicit votes from typically non-voters, that you will affect and change the outcome.” pic.twitter.com/J1TPaN02Us

— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) December 17, 2020

Heaven forbid we have more people voting – right?

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.