Thom Hartman, "the Hartman Report"
Will America Have a Free & Fair Vote or a Government Chosen Through Violence?
No democracy in the world can work if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately counted: This lie that started in 1964 is now a harpoon pointed at the heart of our democracy
Nations have to figure out how they are to be governed. Most of recorded history tells the story of kings, popes, priests, lords, and barons who ruled through violence and imposed themselves on their people rather than the people selecting them.
Ultimately, as we all learned in high school civics, you can have a government chosen democratically with a free and fair vote or you can have a government chosen through brute force and violence. There really aren’t any other choices.
That was the great American experiment. Replacing a violent hereditary warlord king with a president and congress elected by the people. Democracy.
But democracy only functions properly when the people trust that its essential mechanism — voting — is honest and true.
And that dependence on trust in elections — that vulnerability of all democracies — is exactly what Donald Trump and his fascist followers are aiming their weapons of mass deception at.
Our country is also experiencing this deep crisis of democracy because, in large part, the media hasn’t been doing their job about this issue of faith in the security of our vote. There’s a hell of a history here.
Republicans have been attacking the heart of our democracy right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.”
No other developed country in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s been nonexistent in most modern democracies. It’s not a thing anywhere except in the United States, and now Brazil. And it’s only a thing here because of this strategy that was developed in 1964.
Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote.
If you’re a citizen, you vote. You show up with your ID and vote at any polling location you choose; in many countries because you’re a citizen they simply mail you the ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody gets one.
After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What possible payoff is there to that? And the one time somebody tries to do it at scale — like the Republican
scheme a few years ago in North Carolina to buy a few dozen mail-in ballots from low income people in a trailer park — it gets exposed because it’s almost impossible to cover things like that up for any period of time. After all, it would take thousands of votes in most places, sometimes tens of thousands, to alter election outcomes.
In all the intervening years since Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack claiming that this “voter fraud” was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.
Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the 60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: they’re part of a larger program the GOP has used to suppress the vote — to suppress democracy — for sixty years now.
Probably to keep from offending their white audience, and also to prevent Republicans squeals of “liberal media bias,” America’s news media has historically treated those long lines and other barriers to voting that conservatives have thrown up as if they were simply a bizarre force of nature.
“Who could imagine why this is?” they seem to say, sometimes noting that the poll workers in Black districts are also themselves usually Black — even though they have no say over how many voting machines or polling places their precincts get from the white-controlled state.
The media’s message over the past 60 years has been clear:
“Black people, apparently, can’t even figure out how to vote right.”
This assault on the democratic system at the heart of our republic has a long history, stretching back to the era when the Republican Party first began trying to cater to the white racist vote.
The GOP made this transition after LBJ and his Democrats passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act just five months before that year’s November election.
In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater — who was running for President on the Republican ticket — openly opposed the Civil Rights Act that President Johnson had just pushed through Congress. He was doubly opposed to the Voting Rights Act that Johnson had teed up for 1965 if he was re-elected.
At the time:
- 35.5 percent of the citizens of Mississippi were Black but only 4.3 percent were able to register to vote.
- Alabama was 26% Black: 7% could vote.
- South Carolina was nearly one-third Black (29.2%) but only 9% of that state’s African Americans could successfully register to vote.
These were not accidents: from poll taxes to jellybean counting to constitution-interpreting requirements, most Southern states had erected massive barriers to Black people voting.
These elections where only white people were allowed to vote in large numbers were — by definition — naked attacks on democracy.
After all, it’s not really democracy when a “free and fair” election was held but, in fact, large numbers of people who legally qualified and wanted to vote weren’t allowed their voice.
How can that not be a crisis for a nation that calls itself a democratic republic?
By 1964 people across the country were starting to agree with that assessment, which is why the Civil Rights Act was passed, producing a lot of angry and disaffected Dixiecrats.
Republicans decided it was a great time to pry the southern racist vote away from the Democrats. Their rallying cry would be that Black people were engaging in “voter fraud!!!”
But don’t bother looking through newspaper archives to see if the American media exposed this new GOP invention as a fraud itself: they rarely raised the question until the past year or two.
I worked in radio news back in the later 1960s and 1970s and don’t recall a single major-story mention of Goldwater’s racist vote-suppressing positions and the GOP’s sudden use of the phrase “voter fraud” during that era (and I was paying attention: my Dad was an enthusiastic Republican who’d corralled me into going door-to-door with him for Goldwater when I was 13).
Reported on or not, back in 1964 Goldwater and his Republicans wanted to keep Black people from voting. And the media was fine going along with them: after all, this was a time when the only Black faces on TV were portrayed as criminals, minstrels, or buffoons. The advertising money that paid the salaries of television executives was only interested in a white audience.
But Republican efforts in 1964 were complicated by the Civil Rights movement and its leaders like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. African Americans and their allies were marching across the country for their right to vote, and had acquired a strong affinity for and loyalty to the Democratic Party that had just put civil rights into law.
Panicked, consultants on Goldwater’s team realized they needed a justification for an ongoing and even amped-up campaign to block the Black and Hispanic vote.
So they came up with a story that they started selling during the 1964 election through op-eds and letters to the editor, in political speeches, and on rightwing radio and TV programs
This 1964 story was simple:
There was massive “voter fraud” going on, exclusively in America’s cities, where mostly Black people were voting more than once in different polling places and doing so under different names, often, as Donald Trump said in 2019, “
by the busload” after Sunday church services.
In addition, the Republican story went, “illegal aliens” living in the United States were using stolen Social Security numbers to vote by the millions.
None of it was true, but it became the foundation of a nationwide voter suppression campaign that the GOP continues to use to this day: a campaign based on a lie of “voter fraud” that the media was more than happy to amplify. This lie to disenfranchise Black and brown people was the original sin that has brought us to today’s crisis.
Unfortunately this is what you are dealing with! It makes ya wanna laugh or cry, sometimes both at once.
